51–60 of 402 posts
Could people start wearing small transmitters that nearby autonomous vehicles can read?
Please no. You should not be required to carry a beacon in order to be safe walking around a city or crossing a street.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure. 3 MPH would have made a difference. So would 3 MPH less after that, and 3MPH more... heck, if it had been going 2 MPH total she'd probably be fine! In the aftermath of a front collision it would always have been safer if the car had been going slightly slower, regardless of the speed limit. The strangest part of watching this story unfold has been discovering that some people have faith that speed limits are an…
According to the UK DOT the estimated pedestrian accident survival rate is 55% at 30mph and just 5% at 40mph (due to kinetic energy rather than reaction times) so 3mph in this range is not exactly an insignificant difference. The strangest thing about watching this story is that people who are apparently ignorant of this still feel sufficiently certain of the relative unimportance of speed differences in this range t…
However I can't imagine a car company accepting the legal liability of allowing their autonomous cars to go over posted speed limits to "match traffic".
In a trolley problem you have the option to refuse a decision. By participating in "speed matching" you become one of the trolleys and you have accepted the unsafe conditions.
> "It’s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode,” But it's made harder if you're speeding.
The nearest sign on the road it was on, for the direction it was traveling according to most reports, that it would have passed says that the speed limit is 45 mph [1]. That image is from July 2017.
For the other direction it is 35 mph [2].
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4350531,-111.941492,3a,75y,3...
[2] https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4371031,-111.9433154,3a,75y,...
I haven't seen anyone post this yet but I highly suspect the fact that she was pushing a bicycle impacted the machine learning driven AIs ability to determine she was a pedestrian. This reminds me of the kangaroos messing up the AV programs being tested in Australia. A human paying attention may have been wary of a person pushing a bike in the shadows but for all we know the algorithm thought that she was a bush or s…
ooo, there's video of the turkey wheelchair broom chase: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/video/2017/mar/16/goo...
I cannot imagine the detailed logging the engineers might have to do in such a system. When I code I wonder sometimes if I am logging unnecessary events at info level. This led to one more question. Do driverless cars have (or will have) a black box like that of aeroplane?
At the risk of sounding macabre, the engineers will be pouring over thousands of lines of logs and if Uber self driving cars ever do survive to make it onto the roads again, the circumstance of woman's death and the after analysis will mean it will never ever happen again. I expect that during the coming years we will analyse car crashes with the same scrutiny as airplane crashes with the hope to solve every single e…
Are these systems designed to honk?
It seems to me that this is exposing a few gaps in how we think about driverless cars currently:
- A framework for how cars should be making "moral" decisions (the trolley problem [0])
- A defined process for post car crash investigations - akin to the process in air crashes
[0] https://qz.com/1204395/self-driving-cars-trolley-problem-phi...