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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

#871

Post by Karrot_Kream »

larkeith wrote: post #829
jarjoura wrote: post #821

It's fascinating that so many brilliant people in this thread can talk so casually about any single loss of life for the tech built by the very same people in this thread. I would be devastated if I learned my code ended even one person's life. You're in a bubble if you think a world hyper connected to social media that's in the same world scared that autonomy is about to kill millions of jobs in one jab and would NO…

> Public opinion on human driving is doing just fine with human drivers right now There were over 40,000 motor vehicle deaths in 2016 in the US [1] - more than a hundred daily. While loss of human life is always a tragedy, individual fatalities are absolutely worth it if we can begin to reduce that count sooner than by proceeding with excessive caution. It would be morally unacceptable to delay development merely to…

https://mobile.twitter.com/BenRossTransit/status/97579157290... says:

> US has 1 traffic fatality per 85 million miles driven. Uber's self-driving cars have driven ~3 million miles & killed one person

> While loss of human life is always a tragedy, individual fatalities are absolutely worth it if we can begin to reduce that count sooner than by proceeding with excessive caution.

Wait, when did I agree to be a utilitarian with you? Did I vote utilitarianism into power?

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

#872

Post by mr_toad »

astrodust wrote: post #328
Johnny555 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Unlike humans who have limited vision, self-driving cars are generally able to observe all obstacles in all directions and compute, in real-time, the probability of a collision. If a car can't observe any potential hazards that might impact it using different threat models it should drive more slowly. Blowing down a narrow street with parked cars on both sides at precisely the speed limit is not a good plan.

You could do that, but how far do you take it? Do you program a car to slow to 10mph every time it passes a parked delivery van just in case? Would people find that acceptable?

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

#873

Post by adrianmonk »

coldtea wrote: post #662
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…

> So we will have overall a much smaller number of deaths caused by self driving cars Why? This is what the self-driving cars industry insists on, but has nowhere near been proven (only BS stats, under ideal conditions, no rain, no snow, selected roads, etc -- and those as reported by the companies itself). I can very well imagine a greater than average human driving AI. But I can also imagine being able to write it…

Well, one answer is either it will be positively demonstrated to be statistically safer, or the industry won't exist. So once you start talking about what the industry is going to look like, you can assume average safety higher than manual driving.

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

#874

Post by pooloo1 »

mindslight wrote: post #839
fudged71 wrote: post #766

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although it's comforting that this exact situation shouldn't happen again in an Uber autonomous car... there is no mechanism to share that learning with the other car companies. There seriously fucking needs to be a consortium for exactly this purpose: sharing system failures. Also my problem with this is that a human death is functionally treated as finding edge cases that are missing a unit test, and progressing th…

> We need to avoid treating deaths as progress in the pursuit of better things Au contraire. Go read building codes some time. There's a saying that they're "written in blood" - every bit, no matter how obvious or arbitrary seeming, was earned through some real-world failure. The death itself isn't progress, of course. But we owe it to the person to who died to learn from what happened.

Federal Aviation Administration's Joint Order 7110.65 is exactly what you are talking about. It is the manual that Air Traffic Controllers live by. To include situations that involve diverging aircraft or taxiing instructions and how to handle said situations. The entire manual was practically written from real-world experience.

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

#875

Post by more_corn »

icc97 wrote: post #713

One aspect that comes from this is that now car crashes can be treated more like aircraft crashes. Each self-driving car now has a black box in it with a ton of telemetary. So it's not just "don't drink and drive", knowing that they'll probably reoffend soon anyway. Every crash and especially fatality can be thoroughly investigated and should be prevented from ever happening again. Hopefully there's enough data in th…

Every lesson from aviation is earned in blood. This death wasn't necessary though. The Otto/Uber guys have been informed about their car's difficulty sensing and stopping for pedestrians. I know this because I informed them myself when one almost ran me down in a crosswalk in SF. Can't learn anything from your lessons unless you listen. Maybe they can pause and figure out how to actually listen to their reports of unsafe vehicle behavior.

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

#876

Post by gus_massa »

jarjoura wrote: post #821

It's fascinating that so many brilliant people in this thread can talk so casually about any single loss of life for the tech built by the very same people in this thread. I would be devastated if I learned my code ended even one person's life. You're in a bubble if you think a world hyper connected to social media that's in the same world scared that autonomy is about to kill millions of jobs in one jab and would NO…

> I would be devastated if I learned my code ended even one person's life.

I agree, but there is already a lot of software in a car that can kill people in case of an error. In particular the airbag have multiple sensors and a complex heuristic to decide when the have to open, which ones, full or partial strength, ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbag#Operation An airbag that doesn't open can kill someone. An airbag that open unnecessary can kill someone. From Wikipedia:

> From 1990 to 2000, the United States National Highway Traffic Safety Administration identified 175 fatalities caused by air bags. Most of these (104) have been children, while the rest were adults. About 3.3 million air bag deployments have occurred during that interval, and the agency estimates more than 6,377 lives saved and countless injuries prevented.

So, there is already a lot of programmers that have to be careful because an error can kill someone in the car (or the plane, or a medical machine, ...) I guess it's more easy to ignore the people killed by airbags because we are use to them and we imagine that they have a simple sensor (something like a light switch. So in case of a failure nobody is guilty.

With a self driving car, the first problem is that it is new and scary, and the second problem is that in an error that creates an accident we are use to blame the driver. But now we don't have anyone to blame (perhaps the programmer).

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

#877

Post by nothrabannosir »

rhizome wrote: post #860
jarjoura wrote: post #821

It's fascinating that so many brilliant people in this thread can talk so casually about any single loss of life for the tech built by the very same people in this thread. I would be devastated if I learned my code ended even one person's life. You're in a bubble if you think a world hyper connected to social media that's in the same world scared that autonomy is about to kill millions of jobs in one jab and would NO…

As someone said on Twitter, among software developers, "ethics" is seen as a hobby at best.

While pithy and edgy, this attitude is, unfortunately, also unconstructive and uninsightful. For those out there who do wish to put their money where their mouth is, do you have any advice besides “don’t work at Facebook”? (Or Uber…) Because that doesn’t seem to be cutting it.

At least doctors have the Hippocratic oath.

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

#879

Post by danso »

t0mbstone wrote: post #693
danso wrote: post #394

The Washington Post has an updated story with the victim's name: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr-gridlock/wp/2018/03/1... > Police said the vehicle was northbound on Curry Road when a woman, identified as 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg, crossing from the west side of street, was struck. She died at a hospital, the department said. No mention of her being a bicyclist. My gut instinct is to accept that the victim w…

The location of the crash (from what I can tell): https://www.google.com/maps/place/N+Mill+Ave+%26+E+Curry+Rd,...

Close. Going by the article photo [0], the location was in front of these double-left turn signs, and the Uber vehicle would have been facing the other direction, i.e. northbound:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/N+Mill+Ave+%26+E+Curry+Rd,...

[0] The caption for this photo says the crack in the road represents "burned out flares at the location where a woman pedestrian was struck and killed". Not sure if that is exactly where she was hit, or if that's where her body landed, or if the flares were just near the location.

http://s3.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20180319&t=2&...

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

#880

Post by thegabez »

raphaelj wrote: post #832

To put this accident in perspective, Uber self-driving cars totaled about 2 to 3 millions miles, while the fatality rate on US roads is approximately 1.18 deaths per 100 millions miles [1]. [1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/usdot-releases-2016-fat...

Knowing that makes this much more infuriating.
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