411–420 of 1001 posts
If human driven cars kill 1000 people a year, and autonomous cars kill 100, will it be politically unacceptable to switch to autonomous? I suspect it will be.
If the autonomous cars kill 1100 per year, but autonomous car companies fund a bunch of studies saying the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, it'll be politically acceptable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main problem with self-driving cars is that they can't "read" humans' body language. A human driver can see pedestrians and cyclists (and other cars) and have a rough idea of what they're likely to do in the next few seconds, i.e. the pedestrian leaning out on the crosswalk curb is likely to step into the road soon. Even a reaction time of milliseconds can't make up for the (currently exclusive) human ability to…
They also fail to "write" human body language. Nobody else can predict what the autonomous vehicle will do. It gets worse when a person is sitting in what appears to be the driver's seat. If the car is stopped and that person is looking toward another passenger or down at a phone, nobody will expect the vehicle to begin moving. Making eye contact with the person in that seat is meaningless, but people will infer mean…
It's likely this was actually a bicyclist, not a pedestrian. The police are saying pedestrian walking outside the crosswalk but here's a picture of the crumpled bicycle: https://twitter.com/daiwaka/status/975767445859287042 You can see it's next to a sign. That sign lets us determine exactly where it happened on Google street view: https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4370667,-111.9430321,3a,75y,... It's exactly where the…
Isn't it reaching to see a picture of a bicycle near a sign and then conclude that the accident must have happened exactly next to or near the sign? Maybe the police/witnesses dragged the bicycle to that location?
I'm really shocked at the trend in comments here. Yes, we get it. Fatalities will happen sometimes, they are unavoidable sometimes, and what matters in the long run is if we can achieve a significant overall reduction in fatalities. But my god, a person was just killed by a computer. Can't we have some compassion and humility? Let's, as a community, set the standard for how we will react to these events. Let's make s…
> Can't we do better? no. there's a reason our community has the reputation of being heartless. it's because it's true.
I'm really shocked at the trend in comments here. Yes, we get it. Fatalities will happen sometimes, they are unavoidable sometimes, and what matters in the long run is if we can achieve a significant overall reduction in fatalities. But my god, a person was just killed by a computer. Can't we have some compassion and humility? Let's, as a community, set the standard for how we will react to these events. Let's make s…
People are being killed in accidents constantly. We aren't going to be in a constant state of mourning over it.
This is implicitly a discussion about autonomous vehicles, and the very currently relevant and heated topic of wether we want these things on our streets.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren't you basically just proposing that the NTSB analyze automobile telemetry, the same way they analyze aircraft telemetry data? Doesn't seem wildly outside the realm of possibility.
The NTSB could certainly do it. But they'd need to expand a lot in a world where self driving cars are an everyday reality, which again comes back to the question of funding.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main problem with self-driving cars is that they can't "read" humans' body language. A human driver can see pedestrians and cyclists (and other cars) and have a rough idea of what they're likely to do in the next few seconds, i.e. the pedestrian leaning out on the crosswalk curb is likely to step into the road soon. Even a reaction time of milliseconds can't make up for the (currently exclusive) human ability to…
They also fail to "write" human body language. Nobody else can predict what the autonomous vehicle will do. It gets worse when a person is sitting in what appears to be the driver's seat. If the car is stopped and that person is looking toward another passenger or down at a phone, nobody will expect the vehicle to begin moving. Making eye contact with the person in that seat is meaningless, but people will infer mean…
Can we please not overreact and send the whole self-driving research down the drain? What does the statistics say? How many miles have the self-driving cars driven, and how many deaths were they responsible for? How does it compare to a human driver? When a million humans drive a car for a mile, and 1 of them results in a death, it's easy to pinpoint the blame on a "random drunk/distracted driver". How'bout start thi…
Note that the statistics we have to work with are relatively terrible. For example: Waymo's favorite statistic is "x miles driven", which is a terrible/useless statistic, because it treats all miles equally, and fails to note that the most complex driving is often short distances (intersections, merges, etc.) and doesn't account for the fact that most of those miles were repeatedly driving on a very small number of r…
Also, if someone had posted a poll a day ago as to which company's self driving cars were likely to be the first to kill somebody, I think the vast majority of people would have predicted Uber. I don't think that's a coincidence.