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

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

#931

Post by namelost » Tue, Mar 20, 2018, 1:58 AM UTC

curveship wrote: post #910

Here we go. We'll now have the first traffic fatality trial where it's not drivers-trying-drivers but people-trying-a-megacorp. (Disclaimer: I'm a bike advocate, so I may have a different perspective on some of this than most.) Our car-based transportation system is far and away the most dangerous thing any of us accept doing on a daily basis. 40,000 die a year. But when cases come to court, everyone on the jury has…

I agree. People wish not to avoid death, but to lessen their fear of death.

Arguments about how relatively safe self-driving cars will be are beside the point. A self-driving car is something that can kill you. The fact that death by self-driving vehicle is especially rare makes it especially scary.

A low accident rate is not a good thing, psychologically. Only when a risk is comfortably common can we comfortably begin to ignore it.

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

#932

Post by beedogs » Tue, Mar 20, 2018, 2:00 AM UTC

Funny how this story has been pushed off the front page of HN prematurely.

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

#933

Post by heedlessly2 » Tue, Mar 20, 2018, 2:04 AM UTC

JimboOmega wrote: post #850

rboyd wrote: post #847

FTA "Elaine Herzberg, 49, was walking her bicycle outside the crosswalk". The article says "as soon as she walked into the lane of traffic she was struck". The police sergeant also "said he believed Herzberg may have been homeless". These three things may together indicate that even a human driver might have struck and killed the lady if she entered into the roadway unsafely. I'm not sure how everyone (especially on…

Finding any tidbits on what actually did happen has been very difficult. I get that the investigation is of course ongoing, but that's what I want to know - did the tech actually make a mistake here? And a mistake in a broader sense - was it an avoidable accident? If it wasn't this barely feels like news, other than as a milestone. Also... I don't see how her being homeless has anything to do with it.

Homeless people tend to be in poor mental health and possibly under the influence of drugs/alcohol. All 3 of these things can contribute to bad judgement when she got hit.

It's unfortunate that this happened. But we do need take into context the situation and all factors involved.

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

#934

Post by DoreenMichele » Tue, Mar 20, 2018, 2:07 AM UTC

JimboOmega wrote: post #850

rboyd wrote: post #847

FTA "Elaine Herzberg, 49, was walking her bicycle outside the crosswalk". The article says "as soon as she walked into the lane of traffic she was struck". The police sergeant also "said he believed Herzberg may have been homeless". These three things may together indicate that even a human driver might have struck and killed the lady if she entered into the roadway unsafely. I'm not sure how everyone (especially on…

Finding any tidbits on what actually did happen has been very difficult. I get that the investigation is of course ongoing, but that's what I want to know - did the tech actually make a mistake here? And a mistake in a broader sense - was it an avoidable accident? If it wasn't this barely feels like news, other than as a milestone. Also... I don't see how her being homeless has anything to do with it.

Also... I don't see how her being homeless has anything to do with it.

I can think of a number of ways it may be relevant. In addition to what I said in this discussion, I left a comment about that here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16625242

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

#935

Post by beedogs » Tue, Mar 20, 2018, 2:09 AM UTC

orbitur wrote: post #421

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…

> 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…

I mean, maybe the self-driving car shouldn't exist if it's just going to run people over.

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

#936

Post by aanet » Tue, Mar 20, 2018, 2:09 AM UTC

I would hate to have been the (backup driver) in this sad situation. Regardless, the regulations couldn't come soon enough.

From SF Chronicle [1]:

The self-driving Volvo SUV was outfitted with at least two video cameras, one facing forward toward the street, the other focused inside the car on the driver, Moir said in an interview.

From viewing the videos, “it’s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode (autonomous or human-driven) based on how she came from the shadows right into the roadway,” Moir said. The police have not released the videos.

The incident happened within perhaps 100 yards of a crosswalk, Moir said. “It is dangerous to cross roadways in the evening hour when well-illuminated, managed crosswalks are available,” she said.

...

“I suspect preliminarily it appears that the Uber would likely not be at fault in this accident, either,” Moir said.

However, if Uber is found responsible, that could open a legal quagmire.

“I won’t rule out the potential to file charges against the (backup driver) in the Uber vehicle,” Moir said.

But if the robot car itself were found at fault? “This is really new ground we’re venturing into,” she said.

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Exclusive-Tempe...

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

#937

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » Tue, Mar 20, 2018, 2:12 AM UTC

dpark wrote: post #558

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Sounds like Uber's platform may not be up to that standard yet, which makes me wonder why they're on public roads. They're on public roads because they've decided that deploying their tech is more important than safety. I don't see any other explanation. We know that it's pretty much impossible to prove the safety of autonomous vehicles by driving them, so Uber (and almost everyone else) have decided that, well, t…

That report ends by saying essentially, "it may not be possible to prove the safety of self-driving cars". [1] So the value here is questionable and the same logic could apply to anything with a low frequency of occurrence. The value of air bags by this measure was not proven until they were already mandated. [1] "even with these methods, it may not be possible to establish the safety of autonomous vehicles prior to…

The difference, of course, is that an airbag can't take control of a car and run someone over.

More to the point, the report notes that new methods to determine the safety of self-driving cars are required.

Which the industry is not exactly falling head over heels trying to develop.

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

#938

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Mar 20, 2018, 2:32 AM UTC

daenz wrote: post #778

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…

>There seriously fucking needs to be a consortium for exactly this purpose: sharing system failures. This implies they're using the same systems and underlying models. If one model hit a pedestrian because of a weakness in training data plus a sub-optimal model hyperparameter, and therefore was classified a pedestrian in that specific pose as some trash on the street, how do you share that conclusion with other compa…

[deleted]

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

#939

Post by chriskanan » Tue, Mar 20, 2018, 2:42 AM UTC

>>The pedestrian was outside of the crosswalk. As soon as she walked into the lane of traffic she was struck.

>>Tempe Police Chief Sylvia Moir said that from viewing videos taken from the vehicle “it’s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode (autonomous or human-driven) based on how she came from the shadows right into the roadway.

A lot of comments on here are faulting machine learning for this or algorithmic flaws, but unless we see the video it is really hard to blame the algorithms. Based on the quote from the story, it sounds like someone stepped out into the street, not in the crosswalk, at night, directly in front of a car going 40 miles per hour. How could a human or any algorithm cope with that scenario?

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

#940

Post by 40four » Tue, Mar 20, 2018, 2:44 AM UTC

Look, this is a super sad story & it obviously illicits many emotions & thoughts from all of us. As a community of programmers, this is a topic very near & dear to or hearts.

But we have to be realistic here. Fatalities caused by automobiles are always going to be a problem. I don't care if 100% of vehicles are automated & they are all communicating to each other through the internet. There will still be fatalities. Errors will happen. We can't even program basic websites without some chance of errors & some chance of the whole thing come crashing to a halt.

Why would anyone think we could program cars to drive themselves without an error every now & then? I don't care if we knew that the AI driving tech was 100% perfect. There would STILL be fatalities. You can't teach a computer program to break the laws of physics. If an person or vehicle crosses in front of your path, & it is unreasonable to predict, by human brain or computer, you WILL collide with it.

Let's be real. We don't know what happened here & maybe never will. It's unfortunate & we all share our sympathies with those involved. But this isn't the 1st death that involved an automated vehicle & it won't be the last. I think the self driving tech we have is already amazing so let's not diminish it. As programmers we can't break the laws of physics. Freak accidents will always happen. (I'm not saying this is what happened, because I have no idea) but if a pedestrian or bicyclist falls in front of a vehicle at the last second,no human or computer driver can prevent that. Physics takes over.

These moments will be important, now & in the future. how about we stop fighting with each other, & figure out how to process tragedies like this & communicate to the public that automobile fatalities will never be solved with software?