Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street • Hacker News Board

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#601

Post by gscott » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 7:58 PM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #481

> You can't really get away from this without putting these cars on rails. We should just really build rails. Self driving cars are dumping billions of dollars onto a problem better solved by rails. Several cities already have self driving trains including London, Singapore and Kuala Lumpar, and they transport millions of people every day without incident: http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-sol.…

It would be easier to put a small transmitter in the middle of each lane run on solar power. This would keep the cars centered in the lane except for when they are executing some action.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#602

Post by mo1ok » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 7:59 PM UTC

downandout wrote: post #530

The title here should be amended to “...hits, kills jaywalking pedestrian...”. Let’s get the facts straight. This person was walking outside the crosswalk. The fact that a computer was behind the wheel is irrelevant. A human broke a law designed to prevent this exact scenario, and the result was both predictable and tragic. It’s terrible, but ultimately the person’s fault.

The law is that pedestrians always have right of way. Jaywalking is a fine, but not a jail sentence. Not coming to a full stop for jaywalking pedestrians, however, is how I failed my first driver's test.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#603

Post by Spooky23 » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 7:59 PM UTC

rocqua wrote: post #533

djsumdog wrote: post #481

> You can't really get away from this without putting these cars on rails. We should just really build rails. Self driving cars are dumping billions of dollars onto a problem better solved by rails. Several cities already have self driving trains including London, Singapore and Kuala Lumpar, and they transport millions of people every day without incident: http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-sol.…

Rails don't work for the last mile. The great thing about cars is that they don't suffer from the last mile problem. It seems like a much better plan is to separate drivers from other people more rigorously, and maybe mandate people drive the last-mile themselves (with AI help, obviously).

Roads aren’t free! With the technology available today, I bet a rail based solution could be more economical.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#604

Post by danso » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 8:00 PM UTC

rjvir wrote: post #221

w_t_payne wrote: post #51

To ensure that all automotive software incorporates lessons learned from such fatalities, it would be beneficial to develop a common data set of (mostly synthetic) data replicating accident and 'near miss' scenarios. As we understand more about the risks associated with autonomous driving, we should expand and enrich this data-set, and to ensure public safety, testing against such a dataset should be part of NHTSA /…

Why would Uber agree to such regulations? They were unwilling to legally obtain a self-driving license in California because they did not want to report "disengagements" (situations in which a human driver has to intervene). Uber would just set their self-driving cars free and eat whatever fine/punishment comes with it.

Uber ultimately backed down and applied for a California permit: http://fortune.com/2017/03/08/uber-permit-self-driving-cars-...

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#605

Post by anonu » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 8:01 PM UTC

IgorPartola wrote: post #390

This is what's going to happen. If you've ever seen a machine learning algorithm in action, this isn't surprising at all. Basically, they'll behave as expected some well known percentage of the time. But when they don't, the result will not be just a slight deviation from the normal algorithm, but a very unexpected one. So we will have overall a much smaller number of deaths caused by self driving cars, but ones that…

Totally agree on your premise that we can rationalize humans killing humans - but we cannot do so with machines killing humans.

If self-driving cars really are safer in the long-run for drivers and pedestrians - maybe what people need is a better grasp on probability and statistics? And self-driving car companies need to show and publicize the data that backs this claim up to win the trust of the population.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#606

Post by rocqua » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 8:01 PM UTC

annabellish wrote: post #12

_m8fo wrote: post #5

Obviously more information is needed, but I thought the entire point of having a driver behind the wheel is to manually intervene to prevent this very situation? I'm very curious to see how they'll investigate this and who will be determined to be at fault (person behind the wheel or Uber). It will likely set a precedent.

Human beings simply cannot switch between "not focussed" and "in charge of a car, taken out of autonomous mode, and actively avoiding collision" fast enough to avoid most accidents, unfortunately. Neither can humans maintain the focus required to be ready to do that when 99.9% of the time they're not required to do anything. Semi-autonomous cars have drawbacks.

How about autonomous on the highway, turnpikes, etc. And human-operated on streets where a car might ever need to yield to pedestrians or cyclists outside of red-lights.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#607

Post by dnautics » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 8:03 PM UTC

dfee wrote: post #582

djsumdog wrote: post #481

> You can't really get away from this without putting these cars on rails. We should just really build rails. Self driving cars are dumping billions of dollars onto a problem better solved by rails. Several cities already have self driving trains including London, Singapore and Kuala Lumpar, and they transport millions of people every day without incident: http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-sol.…

I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, but I then realized why your comment doesn’t make any sense - you’re effectively arguing “if I could master-plan society and the economy for a while, this is how I’d decree it to be.” Maybe some people don’t want to live in dense urban areas, maybe they don’t want to ride on a rail, maybe they want privacy. But looking out the window, I can say American society has soundly rej…

I wouldn't say society has rejected the rail in America, but rather that the political structure has rejected the rail. There's a dominant paradigm in public transport that it must be run by the government (which ironically is somewhat counter to the broader american ethos). Yet there are places like Singapore where the public transport is run via (in the past fully, but currently partially) for-profit, publically traded companies, where the QOS is far higher than the US, and the service is markedly cheaper, and I would say, generally more accessible than it is in the US.

There would be considerable US pushback against such a system, sadly.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#608

Post by Nomentatus » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 8:04 PM UTC

thecombjelly wrote: post #571

This seems like a good time to question if we really should have cars at all. Autonomous cars might be better in some ways but they are still tons of metal flying at high rates of speed. Accidents will happen and people and other animals will die on a regular basis. Cars also require tons of infrastructure that walking and biking don't. You also have the environmental destruction of GHG emissions and from the mining…

Paris has greatly reduced traffic, thinking along these lines.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#609

Post by thearn4 » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 8:04 PM UTC

IgorPartola wrote: post #390

This is what's going to happen. If you've ever seen a machine learning algorithm in action, this isn't surprising at all. Basically, they'll behave as expected some well known percentage of the time. But when they don't, the result will not be just a slight deviation from the normal algorithm, but a very unexpected one. So we will have overall a much smaller number of deaths caused by self driving cars, but ones that…

> Moreover, the human brain won't like processing these freak accidents.

I think this is really key. The ability to put the blame on something tangible, like the mistakes of another person, somehow allows for more closure than if it was a random technical failure.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#610

Post by derefr » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 8:05 PM UTC

IgorPartola wrote: post #390

This is what's going to happen. If you've ever seen a machine learning algorithm in action, this isn't surprising at all. Basically, they'll behave as expected some well known percentage of the time. But when they don't, the result will not be just a slight deviation from the normal algorithm, but a very unexpected one. So we will have overall a much smaller number of deaths caused by self driving cars, but ones that…

> These are "normal" reasons for bad accidents and we can not only rationalize them, but also rationalize how it wouldn't happen to us: "I don't drive near colleges where young kids are likely to drive drunk", "I don't text (much) while I drive", "I pay attention".

Tangent: is there a land vehicle designed for redundant control, the way planes are? I've always wondered how many accidents would have been prevented if there were classes of vehicles (e.g. large trucks) that required two drivers, where control could be transferred (either by push or pull) between the "pilot" and "copilot" of the vehicle. Like a driving-school car, but where both drivers are assumed equally fallible.