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Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

reuters.com

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

#641

Post by IgorPartola »

falcolas wrote: post #630
anonu wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If a human kills a human, we have someone in the direct chain of command that we can punish. If an algorithm kills a person... who do we punish? How do we punish them in a severe enough way to encourage making things better? Perhaps, similar to airline crashes, we should expect Uber to pay out to the family, plus a penalty fine. 1m per death? 2? What price to we put on a life?

It's not just about punishment though. It's about our brains being (mostly) good at saying "well they were unlucky, but I'd never find myself in that situation, so I'm OK." And with some brains wired for anxiety doing the opposite and instead only thinking about how they are the ones that would be in all those situations.

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

#644

Post by dang »

decacorn wrote: post #439
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…

The counterargument you propose is invalid because it would be DECADES until >90% of the entire current automotive market is converted to fully autonomous. MEANING cars currently on the road either being retrofitted or completely removed from road and replaced by an AV. So we are all in a lose-lose. I'm anticipating severe backlash from Congress this week, if not today.

Could you please not use allcaps for emphasis in HN comments? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

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

#645

Post by rebuilder »

anonu wrote: post #605
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.

I'd be surprised if you could educate this problem away just by publishing statistics. Generally, people don't seem to integrate statistics well on an emotional level, but do make decisions based on emotional considerations.

I mean, people play the lottery. That's a guaranteed loss, statistically speaking. In fact, it's my understanding that, where I live, you're more likely to get hit by a (human-operated) car on your way to get your lottery ticket than you are to win any significant amount of money. But still people brave death for a barely-existent chance at winning money!

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

#646

Post by rout39574 »

Johnny555 wrote: post #240
pcthrowaway wrote: post #65

The people leading the development should demonstrate that they can stop for pedestrians by personally jumping out in front of them on a closed test road. If they're not able to demonstrate this, they shouldn't be putting them on public roads.

Self driving cars are still subject to the laws of physics... unless you're going to dictate that self-driving cars never go above 15mph, I wouldn't advocate jumping in front of even a "perfect" self-driving car. Braking distance (without including any decision time) for a 15mph car is 11 ft, for a 30mph is 45 ft. Self driving cars won't change these limits. (well, they may be a little better than humans at maximizin…

So, there's a performance envelope expected. Sure, someone can bungee jump off an overpass and not be avoidable. :)

But they should be willing to walk in front of it in an in-spec performance regime. There's some really good Volvo commercials along that line, with engineers standing in front of a truck.

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

#647

Post by djsumdog »

Bluestrike2 wrote: post #612
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.…

You're right. There's a lot of research and experience that suggests a well-developed rail network would have all sorts of benefits. We could take it a few big steps further and point to other problems like suburban sprawl in America, dying small towns, etc. But there are a couple of really big, really massive problems. We have trillions in existing infrastructure and trillions more in existing property that's been d…

It didn't happen over night. The US had more passenger rail in the 1940s than Europe has now! Northern Indiana has the same population density of Scotland, so "too spread out" isn't the issue.

Cities only spread out over the past century. You start building rail again and it will get drawn back in. But the State has to fund that mode of transportation first.

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

#648

Post by basura045478 »

I see a lot of detailed analysis in this thread, which is impressive given that literally nobody has read anything more than the half dozen factoids that have been released. At best, some of you are looking at maps of the incident site to figure out potential failure cases.

Knowing that you don't know something is as important as having the facts. To harken back to Cheney, these aren't even unknown unknowns, you're basing opinions on known unknowns.

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

#649

Post by JoeAltmaier »

anonu wrote: post #605
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.

Hm, people are fine with folks getting mauled in an industrial accident, or killed misusing power equipment. So its not purely a machine thing.

Maybe because its unexpected - the victim is not involved until they are dead?

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

#650

Post by darkstar999 »

lettergram wrote: post #590

Given I've seen (just last year) an Uber self driving car run a red light in SF, nealy hitting several people - this is not at all supprising. I do think Uber should be charged if the car is found at fault. Not a civil case, criminal. We know machine learning algorithms fail all the time (like this). It shouldn't be alright to just ignore this.

> Not a civil case, criminal.

Has there ever been a case where a car manufacturer is charged with a crime for a defect that results in a death?

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