First death involving self-driving car

rslifkin said:

Titan4 said:

In reply to ebonyandivory :

I understand what you're saying but what about older people that just aren't up to driving any more?  The self-driving car seems like it would allow them to keep more of their independence without being as much of a threat to the rest of the world.  

That's a good use for autonomous cars.  The big thing that scares me about the tech is this: if autonomous cars are determined to be much safer than human-driven ones, one of 2 things will happen.  Insurance for human-driven cars will become unaffordably expensive or driving manually on public roads will just be made illegal.  And that would suck.  

Oh boy do I have news for you, Uber actually proposed a bill to ban human driven cars in the city. Looks like they're setting the way for exactly what you mentioned.

Regarding the article, it sounds like she ran across the road in front of the car. A autonomouly driven vehicle will always have better reflexes than a human and I see no reason to disbelieve the drivers account that there wasn't enough time. Too bad her carelessness could potentially slow down the develoment of such a vital technology

In reply to SivaSuryaKshatriya :

A human has one advantage over a computer in that situation: a human can see the person standing on the side of the road and feel "I don't trust them to stay put, I think they're gonna cross the road" while the computer will likely be left with "person is not moving and not in the road, not a threat" or be forced to be super conservative and slow way down for every person near the side of the road.  

kb58 said:

STM317 said:

For the last 150 years, we've had the ability to request a vehicle to come to your door, pick you up, and take you wherever you wish in exchange for money. How do autonomous vehicles solve that problem any better than a taxi?

Not paying.

Not dealing with a different person each time, a person you don't know.

Predictability, not getting in an unknown car with its various smells, stains, and dirt.

Convenience, "take me to the doctor", rather than waiting around who knows how long.

Provides a sense of control over one's life, at a time when such a thing is very important.

The vehicle has to be paid for upfront, and then maintained right? Insurance? Taxes? Don't fool yourself into thinking that they wouldn't have to pay for it one way or another. It might make more sense financially to pay per trip vs paying for the entire vehicle/maintenance/fuel or charging/etc.

Dealing with a different person each time might be an issue I suppose, but if they don't trust the cab driver, will they trust a computer?

Do you think that somebody seeking "more control" over their life would then trust their life in the hands of a computer? That seems unlikely to me.

SivaSuryaKshatriya said:

Regarding the article, it sounds like she ran across the road in front of the car. A autonomouly driven vehicle will always have better reflexes than a human and I see no reason to disbelieve the drivers account that there wasn't enough time. Too bad her carelessness could potentially slow down the develoment of such a vital technology

It's being reported that she was walking her bicycle at the time. That's not exactly a jogger bolting out of the blue in front of the car. There may not have been time to react, but a human being walking a bicycle along is a fairly large object to miss. Then again, a car coming down the road towards you at 40mph is a fairly large object for the victim to have missed too.

SivaSuryaKshatriya said:

Regarding the article, it sounds like she ran across the road in front of the car. A autonomouly driven vehicle will always have better reflexes than a human and I see no reason to disbelieve the drivers account that there wasn't enough time. Too bad her carelessness could potentially slow down the develoment of such a vital technology

To be clear- that's the "drivers" interpretation of what happened.  We will never hear the other side of the story to validate or refute the claim....

rslifkin said:

In reply to SivaSuryaKshatriya :

A human has one advantage over a computer in that situation: a human can see the person standing on the side of the road and feel "I don't trust them to stay put, I think they're gonna cross the road" while the computer will likely be left with "person is not moving and not in the road, not a threat" or be forced to be super conservative and slow way down for every person near the side of the road.  

Thank you.  That is an excellent point.

SivaSuryaKshatriya said

Oh boy do I have news for you, Uber actually proposed a bill to ban human driven cars in the city. Looks like they're setting the way for exactly what you mentioned.

 

I think everyone should take a minute and read that and let it sink in.  At some point, maybe sooner than you think, we'll be looking at a Federal ban on high-performance automobiles.  That ban could extend to automobiles that look "fast" or "sporty."

 "Why does an average citizen need a car that can do nearly 200 mph?" they'll say.  "Only a professional race car driver needs a car like that, it's just a tool for killing."

Oh, sure.  We'll be allowed to putter around in our Camry's and Tauruses for a little while, but they'll come for those too. 

There comes a time in every man's life when you need to take a stand, or the freedoms we take for granted will be seized from us.

We can always assume the magical, psychic human driver would have outperformed the AV - but the numbers show that these human drivers do in fact screw up on a regular basis. In reality, AVs only have to be slightly safer than human drivers ON AVERAGE to save hundreds and thousands of lives every year. We have to train every one of those human drivers from scratch and hope that they're functioning at their ideal all the time, wheras the AVs only have to be trained once and will always be paying attention. If some sort of weird situation pops up and there's a way to avoid it, then every single AV will learn that avoidance. They can't help but be safer!

Saying that a human driver will say "I don't trust this person to stay put" means that the human driver is reading body language. Like the twitch of the head referred to earlier. But why can't AVs do the same thing? And while a human driver is watching a jogger or a pedestrian on the side of the road and trying to judge their intentions, what else are they missing? Human eyeballs only point in one direction at a time.

The problem is that people will still get killed, but they'll be different people. We'll never know who was saved by an AV paying more attention than a meatsack or by having skills a human driver does not or the ability to look in all directions at once. The families of those who were not killed by human drivers will never know. We'll only know who was killed by an AV, and somehow a programmed machine making a mistake is worse than a tired or drunk or incompetent human doing the same.

You can bet this current situation will get studied out the wazoo. The programmers will learn and this specific situation will be covered for all AVs. If it were a human driver, then one driver would have learned.

In the future, we're going to look back at our current period and wonder why we thought letting highly fallible humans drive around in 400 hp, 4000 lb missiles was a good idea and why we accepted the massive death toll.

alfadriver said:

SivaSuryaKshatriya said:

Regarding the article, it sounds like she ran across the road in front of the car. A autonomouly driven vehicle will always have better reflexes than a human and I see no reason to disbelieve the drivers account that there wasn't enough time. Too bad her carelessness could potentially slow down the develoment of such a vital technology

To be clear- that's the "drivers" interpretation of what happened.  We will never hear the other side of the story to validate or refute the claim....

But we do have a raft of sensor data including cameras. So we'll know a lot more of the story - or more importantly, the people investigating will - than we normally would in a pedestrian death.

rslifkin said:

Titan4 said:

In reply to ebonyandivory :

I understand what you're saying but what about older people that just aren't up to driving any more?  The self-driving car seems like it would allow them to keep more of their independence without being as much of a threat to the rest of the world.  

That's a good use for autonomous cars.  The big thing that scares me about the tech is this: if autonomous cars are determined to be much safer than human-driven ones, one of 2 things will happen.  Insurance for human-driven cars will become unaffordably expensive or driving manually on public roads will just be made illegal.  And that would suck.  

Insurance for humans is already unafordably expensive. Insurance companies are just one of the many critical service suppliers who have crossed the line from symbiotic to parasitic over the last 20 years. What the insurance companies may or may not realize is that they have cut off their own roots. Kids are abandoning driving in huge numbers because insurance is just not affordable. Cars are NOT seen as the ride to personal freedom that we used to consider them, quite the opposite, just another financial shackle.

Despite all of my entreaties, my daughter is one of the defectors. I have a hard time faulting her as she seems to whistle up whatever she wants from food to transportation via that little electronic contraption that all kids carry now.

1988RedT2 said:

kb58 said:

Well zooming out and ignoring that the car was self-driving for a second, the person killed was at least half responsible if, as reported, she stepped into traffic mid-block to cross the street. Who does that and assumes the cars will stop? Yes I know it's premature to draw conclusions but I suspect the outcome would have been the same regardless what the car was. Sadly, said another way, if she'd been killed by a "normal" car, this wouldn't be news.

Aaaaand.... The rationalization begins.  So, how many accidental deaths by self-driving car are "acceptable?"  100?  100,000?  It was for the greater good.

Over 10 pedestrians are killed every single day by human drivers. (approx 4000-5000 per year). That's 15% of all traffic fatalities. And you want to say that one that was likely the pedestrian's fault is too many to accept? You obviously have no problem with 5000 killed every year by human action. But I'm sure you'll rationalize that one away, too.

40,100 traffic deaths/yr. and I'd guess that a large percentage of that is due to distraction from personal electronics. Forgive me if I can't get too excited about  one Uber death. And I'm far from an apologist. I frequently criticize self-driving proponents as overly optimistic. But c'mon....

1988RedT2 said:

SivaSuryaKshatriya said

Oh boy do I have news for you, Uber actually proposed a bill to ban human driven cars in the city. Looks like they're setting the way for exactly what you mentioned.

 

I think everyone should take a minute and read that and let it sink in.  At some point, maybe sooner than you think, we'll be looking at a Federal ban on high-performance automobiles.  That ban could extend to automobiles that look "fast" or "sporty."

 "Why does an average citizen need a car that can do nearly 200 mph?" they'll say.  "Only a professional race car driver needs a car like that, it's just a tool for killing."

Oh, sure.  We'll be allowed to putter around in our Camry's and Tauruses for a little while, but they'll come for those too. 

There comes a time in every man's life when you need to take a stand, or the freedoms we take for granted will be seized from us.

A single, completely un-sourced claim on a message board is not enough for me to feel that I need to make a stand. I do not believe that uber has in any way "proposed a bill to ban human driven cars in the city" and from my very cursory google search it's not true. Maybe a little more evidence before it being some foundational principle we need to fight for would be in order.

alfadriver said:

SivaSuryaKshatriya said:

Regarding the article, it sounds like she ran across the road in front of the car. A autonomouly driven vehicle will always have better reflexes than a human and I see no reason to disbelieve the drivers account that there wasn't enough time. Too bad her carelessness could potentially slow down the develoment of such a vital technology

To be clear- that's the "drivers" interpretation of what happened.  We will never hear the other side of the story to validate or refute the claim....

I used to tell the flight crews all the time when they blamed the aircraft for hot started motors or "accomplished" a landing at 4g's+: "Someone here is wrong and it sure as E36 M3 isn't the dataloggers." That's going to be the real story teller.

Now it is possible the driver wasn't paying attention and some set of conditions caused the sensors/cameras not to "see" the pedestrian but the raw data needs to be vetted first. EDIT: By someone OTHER than Uber.

Keith Tanner said:

alfadriver said:

SivaSuryaKshatriya said:

Regarding the article, it sounds like she ran across the road in front of the car. A autonomouly driven vehicle will always have better reflexes than a human and I see no reason to disbelieve the drivers account that there wasn't enough time. Too bad her carelessness could potentially slow down the develoment of such a vital technology

To be clear- that's the "drivers" interpretation of what happened.  We will never hear the other side of the story to validate or refute the claim....

But we do have a raft of sensor data including cameras. So we'll know a lot more of the story - or more importantly, the people investigating will - than we normally would in a pedestrian death.

It may exist, but it will be interesting if we ever see it or not to judge for ourselves.  If we never see it, or see some of it, it would suggest that the driving system could be more at fault.  If it all comes out and shows a sudden move, then we could see all of it.  Whatever we see, there's a 100% chance that the owners and designers only want the public to see the parts that make autonomous vehicles not at blame.

Still, right NOW, all we have is the verbal report from the driver.  The company has the rest of the data, not the general public.  And it may take a court order to get that data to a prosecuting team.

Chris_V said:

1988RedT2 said:

kb58 said:

Well zooming out and ignoring that the car was self-driving for a second, the person killed was at least half responsible if, as reported, she stepped into traffic mid-block to cross the street. Who does that and assumes the cars will stop? Yes I know it's premature to draw conclusions but I suspect the outcome would have been the same regardless what the car was. Sadly, said another way, if she'd been killed by a "normal" car, this wouldn't be news.

Aaaaand.... The rationalization begins.  So, how many accidental deaths by self-driving car are "acceptable?"  100?  100,000?  It was for the greater good.

Over 10 pedestrians are killed every single day by human drivers. (approx 4000-5000 per year). That's 15% of all traffic fatalities. And you want to say that one that was likely the pedestrian's fault is too many to accept? You obviously have no problem with 5000 killed every year by human action. But I'm sure you'll rationalize that one away, too.

I’m ok with pedestrian deaths. Would make Darwin proud. But then again in a cold heartless bastard when it comes to society. 

1988RedT2 said:

kb58 said:

Well zooming out and ignoring that the car was self-driving for a second, the person killed was at least half responsible if, as reported, she stepped into traffic mid-block to cross the street. Who does that and assumes the cars will stop? Yes I know it's premature to draw conclusions but I suspect the outcome would have been the same regardless what the car was. Sadly, said another way, if she'd been killed by a "normal" car, this wouldn't be news.

Aaaaand.... The rationalization begins.  So, how many accidental deaths by self-driving car are "acceptable?"  100?  100,000?  It was for the greater good.

Here's a better question.  At what point does the industry (all of it, including insurance) become willing to be responsible vs. keeping it on the individual driver?

That's the point when these kind of cars become more universal.  And I'm sure it's not just a 10% reduction in deaths- it will have to be closer to 90% for them to afford it.  It's a HUGE responsibility to take (so much easier to leave that to the individual driver).

In reply to dculberson :

C'mon, man!  I'm trying to stir the pot here!  Don't be muddling this up with facts!

Something that hasn't been considered is: maybe nothing was wrong with the car or its software. If someone walks out in front of a perfectly programed car and it hits its ABS brakes, it still takes X feet to stop. Depending when she stepped out, it may well have been impossible for any car - automated or not - to stop in time.

1988RedT2 said:

kb58 said:

Well zooming out and ignoring that the car was self-driving for a second, the person killed was at least half responsible if, as reported, she stepped into traffic mid-block to cross the street. Who does that and assumes the cars will stop? Yes I know it's premature to draw conclusions but I suspect the outcome would have been the same regardless what the car was. Sadly, said another way, if she'd been killed by a "normal" car, this wouldn't be news.

Aaaaand.... The rationalization begins.  So, how many accidental deaths by self-driving car are "acceptable?"  100?  100,000?  It was for the greater good.

I call it a rational balanced objective discussion, and give you props for your imaginative creativity.

kb58 said:

Something that hasn't been considered is: maybe nothing was wrong with the car or its software. If someone walks out in front of a perfectly programed car and it hits its ABS brakes, it still takes X feet to stop. Depending when she stepped out, it may well have been impossible for any car - automated or not - to stop in time.

This could be the first real world test of the AV trying to decide the lesser of several bad options.

Alfa is correct that the complete data set will be protected fairly ruthlessly, because it is the property of the car manufacturer at this point and they don't want to give away any edge they may have by displaying their methods in public (really to other manufacturers).

I wonder how pilots felt about the future of autopilot way back when...

stafford1500 said:

kb58 said:

Something that hasn't been considered is: maybe nothing was wrong with the car or its software. If someone walks out in front of a perfectly programed car and it hits its ABS brakes, it still takes X feet to stop. Depending when she stepped out, it may well have been impossible for any car - automated or not - to stop in time.

This could be the first real world test of the AV trying to decide the lesser of several bad options.

Alfa is correct that the complete data set will be protected fairly ruthlessly, because it is the property of the car manufacturer at this point and they don't want to give away any edge they may have by displaying their methods in public (really to other manufacturers).

That actually brings up an interesting point. Law enforcement is going to want to see that data as they know it exists. Uber, despite what they've tried previously, isn't going to be able to pull the proprietary data card against a lawful warrant to determine who is at fault.

So a lot of the lingering legal questions could be resolved sooner rather than later because of this incident.

ebonyandivory said:

I wonder how pilots felt about the future of autopilot way back when...

They never moved off the "human at the controls in case of emergency" thought line even now with UAV's on a preprogrammed path. These days the asset will circle a target for hours while the operator sits there and reads a book or browses through the VITs looking for an excuse to come home but they're there "just in case."

rslifkin said:

In reply to SivaSuryaKshatriya :

A human has one advantage over a computer in that situation: a human can see the person standing on the side of the road and feel "I don't trust them to stay put, I think they're gonna cross the road" while the computer will likely be left with "person is not moving and not in the road, not a threat" or be forced to be super conservative and slow way down for every person near the side of the road.  

Actually there's not much difference in thinking between the two. A human can infer from the body language of a stationary person standing near the side of the road that they're likely to try to cross, and a computer may not be programmed to look at human body language, but it could be. If a person who displays no such body language indications were to suddenly sprint into the road, then the human and computer would have equal time to react - but a computer can react far faster and spend more of that time braking.