Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

631–640 of 1001 posts

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

#631

Post by manmal »

LifeLiverTransp wrote: post #252
rjvir wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Very cynical but - if your self-driving is way behind of your competitors- wouldnt it help to have your lousy car in a accident - so that your competitors get hit with over-regulation and you thus kill a market- on which you cant compete?

I‘m quite sure this would backfire A LOT in terms of brand damage. Uber in a sense made history today and now has actual blood on their hands. And if such a strategy should EVER leak (Dieselgate anyone?), people are going to prison.

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

#632

Post by IgorPartola »

triviatise wrote: post #615
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.…

in my area, our rail proposal was 1 billion for 9 miles of trail. Good luck putting everything on rails. Ridesharing algorithms will 100% solve the problem of underutilised mass transit. Self driving isnt necessary. Imagine shuttles that hold 10 people using uber pool algorithms and funded by the city. People will be able to make their request and a nearby shuttle will pick all the people up in that area. The shuttle…

Ride sharing works for young professionals who aren't moving around with kids. I grew up in a public transit city. I then got a car in the US. The car is a strictly better experience, and only marginally more expensive. Ride sharing can reduce the problem, but "100% solve the problem" is off by about 95 percentage points.

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

#633

Post by ape4 »

remind_me_again wrote: post #116

What I don't get is that if this is a test car, how come the the driver did not take over the helm immediately. The driver in that car should be in full alert as if driving the vehicle himself and jump in as needed. Test should not mean to let loose an autonomous car.

It would be impossible to stay alert as a safety driver.

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

#634

Post by dang »

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.…

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16621507 since it has become its own separate discussion.

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

#635

Post by [deleted] »

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.…

[deleted]

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

#636

Post by stefan_ »

falcolas wrote: post #619
obastani wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very little of what goes into a current-generation self-driving car is based on machine learning [1]. The reason is exactly your point -- algorithmic approaches to self-driving are much safer and more predictable than a machine learning algorithms. Instead, LIDAR should exactly identify potential obstacles to the self-driving car on the road. The extent to which machine learning is used is to classify whether each ob…

Actually, because there's a severe shortage of LIDAR sensors (much like video cards & crypto currencies, self driving efforts have outstripped supply by a long shot), machine learning is being used quite broadly in concert with cameras to provide the model of the road ahead of the vehicle.

That is what the comment is saying. Of course the vision stuff is done with machine learning - that is after all the state of the art. But that is a tiny part of the self-driving problem. So you can recognize pedestrians, other cars, lanes, signs, maybe even infer velocity and direction from samples over time. But then the high-level planning phase isn't typically a machine learning model, and so if you record all the state (Uber better do or that's a billion dollar lawsuit right there) you can go back and determine if the high-level logic was faulty, the environment was incomplete etc.

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

#637

Post by saurik »

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.…

There was an episode of Darkwing Duck (which shared a couple characters and I presume a lot of writers with DuckTales) that serves as an amazing parable for why vehicles are usually better off adapting to the environment than the other way around. The episode is called "Extinct Possibility", and might (or might not) be watchable at the following URL.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uAqZ_jMmGAk

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

#638

Post by toomanyrichies »

jessaustin wrote: post #437
orbitur wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I won't be surprised if someone at some point wears a stripy outfit, and the car thinks they are a part of the road, and tries to explicitly chase them down until they are under the wheels. Or if the car suddenly decides that the road continues at a 90 degree angle off a bridge. Or that the splashes from a puddle in front is actually an oncoming car and it must swerve into the school kids crossing the perpendicular…

If that's bad, what happens when the robocars get hacked?

Confused by the downvote here. This is a perfectly legitimate question, and indeed it should be asked more, not less, often.

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

#639

Post by dgregd »

jonthepirate wrote: post #415

Former Lyft eng here. From my vantage point, as an industry, we're nowhere near where we should be on the safety side. The tech companies are developing driving tech privately instead of openly. Why can a private for profit company "test" their systems on the public roads? The public is at serious risk of getting run over by hacked and buggy guidance / decision system. Even when a human operator has his hands hoverin…

My old comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15076613

So much talk about LIDAR and other sensors. Why nobody talks about obvious idea of Road Object Message Bus? ROMB is a protocol where each road object (a traffic light, a sign, a car, a bicycle, etc.) transmits info about itself. A car could broadcast its direction vector, intention to turn, any non ROMB moving object it sees. A traffic light could broadcast current state and when it is going to change. That information would greatly enhance overall security, especially during rain and snow conditions, when even LIDAR fails.

Self-driving is such important (just after eliminating combustion engines) that we could upgrade existing cars with cheap ROMB boxes. Vehicle GPS tracking system costs about $30. ROMB box would cost about $60. Let's say that from 2027 all cars have to have a ROMB box to enter a downtown ...

Let's say your car ROMB received info about the white truck, while your car cameras and vision recognition systems see just a cloud and any truck in 100 m range.

ROMB purpose is not to replace cameras or LIDARs, but to extend gathered info.

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

#640

Post by dang »

dgregd wrote: post #639
jonthepirate wrote: post #415

Former Lyft eng here. From my vantage point, as an industry, we're nowhere near where we should be on the safety side. The tech companies are developing driving tech privately instead of openly. Why can a private for profit company "test" their systems on the public roads? The public is at serious risk of getting run over by hacked and buggy guidance / decision system. Even when a human operator has his hands hoverin…

My old comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15076613 So much talk about LIDAR and other sensors. Why nobody talks about obvious idea of Road Object Message Bus? ROMB is a protocol where each road object (a traffic light, a sign, a car, a bicycle, etc.) transmits info about itself. A car could broadcast its direction vector, intention to turn, any non ROMB moving object it sees. A traffic light could broa…

Please don't paste old comments into new conversations. Especially not twice in the same thread!
Post reply on HN