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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 th

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.

deleted 9y ago
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Alex3917 9y ago
Why? It’s not a problem if Uber kills pedestrians, even in situations where it’s completely avoidable. It’s only (legally) a problem if they’re violating the rules of the road while doing so.
- wtetzner 9y ago
  > It’s only (legally) a problem if they’re violating the rules of the road while doing so. I doubt that's true, but even if it were, I believe the rules of the road are "always yield to pedestrians, even if you have the right-of-way".
  - sevensor 9y ago
    In general motorists are not held strongly accountable for killing pedestrians or cyclists. Juries in the U.S. are very reluctant to convict. I'm not sure Uber can rely on that, however. While juries are reluctant to convict drivers, driverless vehicles are another matter. As I said in another comment, they're going to have to invent a crime that puts cyclists and pedestrians positively at fault in these situations.
  - pc86 9y ago
    I think their (idiotically stated) point was that there are plenty of situation where you can kill someone on the road in an accident and not have any legal liability for it.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - Alex3917 9y ago
    People jump in front of the NYC subways multiple times per week in an attempt to commit suicide, how often do you read about the train engineers going to prison for that? Literally never. If someone tries to commit suicide by jumping in front of your car then you're generally not legally liable, as long as you're not intoxicated and you pull over immediately and phone it in.
    - wtetzner 9y ago
      First, I assume the rules for trains are different than for cars. Second, I expect that someone jumping in front of your car is different than running over a cyclist in a bike lane.
gaius 9y ago
The ancient Romans would have the civil engineer stand under the bridge they'd just built while a Legion marched over it. That's why Roman structures are still around today!
- jaclaz 9y ago
  >The ancient Romans would have the civil engineer stand under the bridge they'd just built while a Legion marched over it. That's why Roman structures are still around today! JFYI, it is most probably apocryphal: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/18558/were-roman-engineers-required-to-stand-beneath-their-bridges-as-they-were-tested https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/18558/were-roma... still it's a nice one, I have heard the same about engineers/architects in ancient Babylon and Egypt.
  - mseebach 9y ago
    Can't speak for the romans, but his seems legit enough, and predates the romans by quite a bit: Hammurabi's code: > If a builder builds a house for a man and does not make its construction firm, and the house which he has built collapses and causes the death of the owner of the house, that builder shall be put to death. > If it causes the death of the son of the owner of the house, they shall put to death a son of that builder. https://www.fs.blog/2017/11/hammurabis-code/ https://www.fs.blog/2017/11/hammurabis-code/ Heard about it on Econtalk's recent episode with Nassim Taleb.
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    A more verifiable story in a similar vein would be Frank Lloyd Wright standing under an exemplar of his "dendriform" columns, developed for the Johnson Wax Headquarters in Racine, laughing and whacking it with a cane as it was undergoing a loading test for the building code enforcement officers.
    - gowld 9y ago
      That was one of Wright's famous leaky-roof buildings. http://journaltimes.com/news/local/confronting-a-legacy-of-a-leaky-roof/article_d3988310-a36c-11df-b071-001cc4c03286.html http://journaltimes.com/news/local/confronting-a-legacy-of-a...
joering2 9y ago
Said that few times: how does any AI recognize whether object in front of me is just a white plastic bag rolling in the street, or a baby that rolled out of crib. AI cannot know and will never know. And we cannot have cars drive smoth in traffic if every self driven car will stop before hitting an empty plastic bag.
- darawk 9y ago
  What? AI can know in the exact same way you can know. What are you talking about?
- munk-a 9y ago
  I'm surprisingly okay with self-driving cars stopping for plastic bags in the near term. Self driving tech is up against the marketing arm of the auto-industry, they've got to be better than perfect to avoid public backlash. If they're a bit slower but far safer then I think they'll do well.
- trhway 9y ago
  actually i slow down for plastic bags. And not because i care for their safety.
  - jessaustin 9y ago
    Yeah at sufficient speed one can't differentiate plastic from some other object that could damage one's vehicle.
- bonesss 9y ago
  How do we recognize whether an object in front of a car is just a plastic bag in the wind or a baby? o At speed we're pretty ok with cars hitting things people drop on the road, examples of cars hitting wagons and babies are already plentiful o Visual recognition & rapidly updated multi-mode sensor data, backed by hard-core neural networks and multi-'brained' ML solutions, have every reason to be way better at this job than we are given sufficient time... those models will be working with aggregate crash data of every accident real and simulated experienced by their systems and highly accurate mathematical models custom made to chose the least-poor solution to dilemmas human drivers fail routinely o AIs have multiple vectors of possible improvement over human drivers in stressed situations. Assuming they will bluntly stop ignores how vital relative motion is to safe traffic, not to mention the car-to-car communication options available given a significant number of automated cars on the road -- arguably human drivers can never be as smooth as a fleet of automated cars, and "slamming the brakes" is how people handle uncertainty already Presently the tech is immature, but the potential for automated transport systems lies well beyond the realms of human capabilities.
Splines 9y ago
Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sr1ym96abkg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sr1ym96abkg
Johnny555 9y ago
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 maximizing braking power through threshold braking on all 4 wheels, but it won't be dramatically different) So even with perfect reaction times, it will still be possible for a self-driving car to hit a human who enters its path unexpectedly.
- pishpash 9y ago
  Then we should at least learn their capabilities by throwing jumping dummies at them. Call it the new dummy testing. It's the least we can do. Did Travis bro do this when he set the plan in motion?
  - yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
    We don't throw jumping dummies in front of human students before we let them drive; why should machines be different?
    - jjeaff 9y ago
      Because it's assumed human drivers will at least have a desire to stop. If a machine isn't properly programmed, it will plow right through a crowd and never look back.
    - adrianN 9y ago
      Because we have a pretty good idea of how humans react in traffic, but we're still a bit unsure about robots.
    - rlkf 9y ago
      Maybe not in the U.S., but in Norway, as part of getting the driver's license, you'll have to take an ice driving course, where, amongst other things, a dummy is swung at your car while driving on an oiled lane in 30 mph. (It is practically impossible to steer away from the dummy, which is the meaning of the exercise; to realize the folly of driving too fast on icy roads)
weinzierl 9y ago
My opinion is that we will come to a point where self-driving cars are demonstrably, but only marginally, safer road users than humans. From an ethical standpoint the interesting phase will only start then. It‘s one thing to bring a small fleet of high tech (e.g. having LIDAR) vehicles to the road. It‘s another to bring that technology to a saturated mass market which is primarily cost driven. Yes, I assume self-driving cars will eventually compete with human driven ones. Will we, as a society, accept some increase in traffic fatalities in return for considerable savings that self-driving cars will bring? Will you or me as an individual accept a slightly higher risk in exchange for tangible time savings?
- pishpash 9y ago
  We do all the time, and the answer to your question is, yes if marketed ingeniously. Humans are stupid.
  - weinzierl 9y ago
    Indeed, history gives us ample examples, but I would‘t call humanity stupid because of that. Each and every such example is a ethical question that we have to solve one way or the other. Burying our heads in the sand will not make technologically and expensive self-driving vehicles go away. Neither will it prevent cheap self-driving clunker.
- deleted 9y ago
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- smileysteve 9y ago
  > demonstrably, but only marginally, safer road users than humans. I believe the claim is 38 multitudes better than humans, significantly better than marginally. > accept some increase in traffic fatalities No. And the question is more about "some" than "some increase" > accept a slightly higher risk in exchange for tangible time savings? Texting while driving and even hands free talking were becoming laws in many states before smart phones -- and my experience is that many people readily accept this risk and the legal risk just to communicate faster. The same can be said for the risk of drunk driving -- it's a risk that thousands of Americans take all of the time.
rdlecler1 9y ago
There wouldn’t be many human drivers on the road if they had to pass this test as well.
TheGRS 9y ago
IIRC the people who programmed the first auto pilot for a major airliner were required to be on board the first test flight, so I have to think their testing methodology was pretty meticulous.
- Moter8 9y ago
  Auto Pilot is not a "Push a button and it goes from Airport A to Airport B". It only helps in a few cases.
  - amdavidson 9y ago
    It wasn't but it increasingly is getting to that point. You take off (with fly by wire adjustments from the computer) from Airport A and tell it to fly to Airport B and it can even automatically land there. Some airlines do not allow pilots to manually fly above 3k feet, nor allow first mates to land manually[0]. 0: https://www.wired.com/story/boeing-autonomous-plane-autopilot/ https://www.wired.com/story/boeing-autonomous-plane-autopilo...
    - Piskvorrr 9y ago
      Which then gets you pilots frobbing the autoland selector, not getting the mode right - and now what, if you have zero practice, having scripted yourself out of it? Now you fly the plane into the runway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214 There is a (prevalent) happy path where autopilot and autoland can get you the whole illusion "but the plane flies itself" - but the whole system is built around humans catching and handling all and any exceptions.
  - masklinn 9y ago
    > Auto Pilot is not a "Push a button and it goes from Airport A to Airport B". It only helps in a few cases. A USAF C-54 made a complete transatlantic flight (takeoff and landing included) on autopilot back in 1947: https://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1947/1947%20-%201745.html https://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1947/1947%20-%2... Modern Cat IIIc (zero-zero) autopilots handle everything except taxiing and takeoff. And I think the takeoff thing is more political than technical.
tomswartz07 9y ago
> The people leading the development of these horse-drawn carriages should demonstrate that they can stop for pedestrians by jumping in front of them on a closed test dirt-path. If they're not able to demonstrate this, they shouldn't be putting them on public carriageways Sounds silly when compared against old tech. Accidents happen, best we can do is try to prevent them.
- GeorgeTirebiter 9y ago
  Imagine if we fully separated car traffic from foot traffic. Would this have happened then?
  - tomswartz07 9y ago
    I mean, you still have issues like wildlife on the roadway. It's impossible to fully remove the issue. Vehicles still need to react to and reduce accidents, but they will absolutely never eliminate them.
larrykwg 9y ago
very good point, I would not be surprised if Uber put those cars out with a barely working model to collect enough training data, the human operator to correct such errors was tired and didn't intervene. Some basic driving test for self driving cars or other mitigating factors need to be added IMMEDIATELY otherwise tons more will probably die or be injured. Train operators need to prove they are awake and with attention using some button presses, similar things need to be required for those research vehicle if you want to allow them at all.
rsync 9y ago
"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." Although the actual logistics of your proposal might be challenging (child comments point out that some speeds/distances might be impossible to solve) your instinct is a correct one: the people designing and deploying these solutions need to have skin in the game. I don't think truly autonomous cars are possible to deploy safely with our current level of technology but if I did ... I would want to see their family and their children driving in, and walking around, these cars before we consider wide adoption.
basura045478 9y ago
goes to show, sdv's have to be perfect in the eyes of the public. you wouldn't seriously recommend adding a test like that to a regular driving licence. also that testing does happen in the case of every av program i know of. closed obstacle courses with crap that pops out forcing the cars to react. look up gomentum station. † i did it for you. http://gomentumstation.net/ http://gomentumstation.net/
danso 9y ago
This isn't a good argument because it implies if these AVs have successfully not killed their CEOs during a closed (i.e. controlled) test, that they are safe on public roads. But it seems like the majority of AV accidents so far involve unpredictable and uncontrolled conditions. IOW, setting this up as some kind of quality standard gives unjustified cover ("Hey, our own CEO risked his life to prove the car was safe!") if AVs fail on the open road, because the requirements of open and closed tests are so different.
DennisAleynikov 9y ago
human driven cars are currently, as we speak running people over on the streets and they have human drivers who don't particularly want to run over other humans. It was inevitable that this happened, and no matter how many people self driving cars run over will be worth it, since it will still be less than what cars are currently doing in terms of death toll.
supertrope 9y ago
Bad idea. Even Uber corporate VPs shouldn't be exposed to unnecessary injury risk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_47utWAoupo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_47utWAoupo
artursapek 9y ago
This reminds me of a story I heard in college... an owner of a company that builds table saws demonstrated his saw's safety feature - a killswitch that pulls the blade down into the machine as soon as it detects flesh - by putting his hand on it while it was spinning.
- astura 9y ago
  Video: https://youtu.be/eiYoBbEZwlk https://youtu.be/eiYoBbEZwlk
megy 9y ago
This was a cyclist. So they should be on bikes. Just like they take the repair mechanics on the first test flight after a major repair of a big airplane.
deleted 9y ago
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Alex3917 9y ago

Why? It’s not a problem if Uber kills pedestrians, even in situations where it’s completely avoidable. It’s only (legally) a problem if they’re violating the rules of the road while doing so.

wtetzner 9y ago
> It’s only (legally) a problem if they’re violating the rules of the road while doing so. I doubt that's true, but even if it were, I believe the rules of the road are "always yield to pedestrians, even if you have the right-of-way".
- sevensor 9y ago
  In general motorists are not held strongly accountable for killing pedestrians or cyclists. Juries in the U.S. are very reluctant to convict. I'm not sure Uber can rely on that, however. While juries are reluctant to convict drivers, driverless vehicles are another matter. As I said in another comment, they're going to have to invent a crime that puts cyclists and pedestrians positively at fault in these situations.
- pc86 9y ago
  I think their (idiotically stated) point was that there are plenty of situation where you can kill someone on the road in an accident and not have any legal liability for it.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- Alex3917 9y ago
  People jump in front of the NYC subways multiple times per week in an attempt to commit suicide, how often do you read about the train engineers going to prison for that? Literally never. If someone tries to commit suicide by jumping in front of your car then you're generally not legally liable, as long as you're not intoxicated and you pull over immediately and phone it in.
  - wtetzner 9y ago
    First, I assume the rules for trains are different than for cars. Second, I expect that someone jumping in front of your car is different than running over a cyclist in a bike lane.

gaius 9y ago

The ancient Romans would have the civil engineer stand under the bridge they'd just built while a Legion marched over it. That's why Roman structures are still around today!

jaclaz 9y ago
>The ancient Romans would have the civil engineer stand under the bridge they'd just built while a Legion marched over it. That's why Roman structures are still around today! JFYI, it is most probably apocryphal: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/18558/were-roman-engineers-required-to-stand-beneath-their-bridges-as-they-were-tested https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/18558/were-roma... still it's a nice one, I have heard the same about engineers/architects in ancient Babylon and Egypt.
- mseebach 9y ago
  Can't speak for the romans, but his seems legit enough, and predates the romans by quite a bit: Hammurabi's code: > If a builder builds a house for a man and does not make its construction firm, and the house which he has built collapses and causes the death of the owner of the house, that builder shall be put to death. > If it causes the death of the son of the owner of the house, they shall put to death a son of that builder. https://www.fs.blog/2017/11/hammurabis-code/ https://www.fs.blog/2017/11/hammurabis-code/ Heard about it on Econtalk's recent episode with Nassim Taleb.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  A more verifiable story in a similar vein would be Frank Lloyd Wright standing under an exemplar of his "dendriform" columns, developed for the Johnson Wax Headquarters in Racine, laughing and whacking it with a cane as it was undergoing a loading test for the building code enforcement officers.
  - gowld 9y ago
    That was one of Wright's famous leaky-roof buildings. http://journaltimes.com/news/local/confronting-a-legacy-of-a-leaky-roof/article_d3988310-a36c-11df-b071-001cc4c03286.html http://journaltimes.com/news/local/confronting-a-legacy-of-a...

joering2 9y ago

Said that few times: how does any AI recognize whether object in front of me is just a white plastic bag rolling in the street, or a baby that rolled out of crib. AI cannot know and will never know. And we cannot have cars drive smoth in traffic if every self driven car will stop before hitting an empty plastic bag.

darawk 9y ago
What? AI can know in the exact same way you can know. What are you talking about?
munk-a 9y ago
I'm surprisingly okay with self-driving cars stopping for plastic bags in the near term. Self driving tech is up against the marketing arm of the auto-industry, they've got to be better than perfect to avoid public backlash. If they're a bit slower but far safer then I think they'll do well.
trhway 9y ago
actually i slow down for plastic bags. And not because i care for their safety.
- jessaustin 9y ago
  Yeah at sufficient speed one can't differentiate plastic from some other object that could damage one's vehicle.
bonesss 9y ago
How do we recognize whether an object in front of a car is just a plastic bag in the wind or a baby? o At speed we're pretty ok with cars hitting things people drop on the road, examples of cars hitting wagons and babies are already plentiful o Visual recognition & rapidly updated multi-mode sensor data, backed by hard-core neural networks and multi-'brained' ML solutions, have every reason to be way better at this job than we are given sufficient time... those models will be working with aggregate crash data of every accident real and simulated experienced by their systems and highly accurate mathematical models custom made to chose the least-poor solution to dilemmas human drivers fail routinely o AIs have multiple vectors of possible improvement over human drivers in stressed situations. Assuming they will bluntly stop ignores how vital relative motion is to safe traffic, not to mention the car-to-car communication options available given a significant number of automated cars on the road -- arguably human drivers can never be as smooth as a fleet of automated cars, and "slamming the brakes" is how people handle uncertainty already Presently the tech is immature, but the potential for automated transport systems lies well beyond the realms of human capabilities.

Splines 9y ago

Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sr1ym96abkg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sr1ym96abkg

Johnny555 9y ago

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 maximizing braking power through threshold braking on all 4 wheels, but it won't be dramatically different) So even with perfect reaction times, it will still be possible for a self-driving car to hit a human who enters its path unexpectedly.

pishpash 9y ago
Then we should at least learn their capabilities by throwing jumping dummies at them. Call it the new dummy testing. It's the least we can do. Did Travis bro do this when he set the plan in motion?
- yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
  We don't throw jumping dummies in front of human students before we let them drive; why should machines be different?
  - jjeaff 9y ago
    Because it's assumed human drivers will at least have a desire to stop. If a machine isn't properly programmed, it will plow right through a crowd and never look back.
  - adrianN 9y ago
    Because we have a pretty good idea of how humans react in traffic, but we're still a bit unsure about robots.
  - rlkf 9y ago
    Maybe not in the U.S., but in Norway, as part of getting the driver's license, you'll have to take an ice driving course, where, amongst other things, a dummy is swung at your car while driving on an oiled lane in 30 mph. (It is practically impossible to steer away from the dummy, which is the meaning of the exercise; to realize the folly of driving too fast on icy roads)

weinzierl 9y ago

My opinion is that we will come to a point where self-driving cars are demonstrably, but only marginally, safer road users than humans. From an ethical standpoint the interesting phase will only start then. It‘s one thing to bring a small fleet of high tech (e.g. having LIDAR) vehicles to the road. It‘s another to bring that technology to a saturated mass market which is primarily cost driven. Yes, I assume self-driving cars will eventually compete with human driven ones. Will we, as a society, accept some increase in traffic fatalities in return for considerable savings that self-driving cars will bring? Will you or me as an individual accept a slightly higher risk in exchange for tangible time savings?

pishpash 9y ago
We do all the time, and the answer to your question is, yes if marketed ingeniously. Humans are stupid.
- weinzierl 9y ago
  Indeed, history gives us ample examples, but I would‘t call humanity stupid because of that. Each and every such example is a ethical question that we have to solve one way or the other. Burying our heads in the sand will not make technologically and expensive self-driving vehicles go away. Neither will it prevent cheap self-driving clunker.
deleted 9y ago
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smileysteve 9y ago
> demonstrably, but only marginally, safer road users than humans. I believe the claim is 38 multitudes better than humans, significantly better than marginally. > accept some increase in traffic fatalities No. And the question is more about "some" than "some increase" > accept a slightly higher risk in exchange for tangible time savings? Texting while driving and even hands free talking were becoming laws in many states before smart phones -- and my experience is that many people readily accept this risk and the legal risk just to communicate faster. The same can be said for the risk of drunk driving -- it's a risk that thousands of Americans take all of the time.

rdlecler1 9y ago

There wouldn’t be many human drivers on the road if they had to pass this test as well.

TheGRS 9y ago

IIRC the people who programmed the first auto pilot for a major airliner were required to be on board the first test flight, so I have to think their testing methodology was pretty meticulous.

Moter8 9y ago
Auto Pilot is not a "Push a button and it goes from Airport A to Airport B". It only helps in a few cases.
- amdavidson 9y ago
  It wasn't but it increasingly is getting to that point. You take off (with fly by wire adjustments from the computer) from Airport A and tell it to fly to Airport B and it can even automatically land there. Some airlines do not allow pilots to manually fly above 3k feet, nor allow first mates to land manually[0]. 0: https://www.wired.com/story/boeing-autonomous-plane-autopilot/ https://www.wired.com/story/boeing-autonomous-plane-autopilo...
  - Piskvorrr 9y ago
    Which then gets you pilots frobbing the autoland selector, not getting the mode right - and now what, if you have zero practice, having scripted yourself out of it? Now you fly the plane into the runway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214 There is a (prevalent) happy path where autopilot and autoland can get you the whole illusion "but the plane flies itself" - but the whole system is built around humans catching and handling all and any exceptions.
- masklinn 9y ago
  > Auto Pilot is not a "Push a button and it goes from Airport A to Airport B". It only helps in a few cases. A USAF C-54 made a complete transatlantic flight (takeoff and landing included) on autopilot back in 1947: https://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1947/1947%20-%201745.html https://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1947/1947%20-%2... Modern Cat IIIc (zero-zero) autopilots handle everything except taxiing and takeoff. And I think the takeoff thing is more political than technical.

tomswartz07 9y ago

> The people leading the development of these horse-drawn carriages should demonstrate that they can stop for pedestrians by jumping in front of them on a closed test dirt-path. If they're not able to demonstrate this, they shouldn't be putting them on public carriageways Sounds silly when compared against old tech. Accidents happen, best we can do is try to prevent them.

GeorgeTirebiter 9y ago
Imagine if we fully separated car traffic from foot traffic. Would this have happened then?
- tomswartz07 9y ago
  I mean, you still have issues like wildlife on the roadway. It's impossible to fully remove the issue. Vehicles still need to react to and reduce accidents, but they will absolutely never eliminate them.

larrykwg 9y ago

very good point, I would not be surprised if Uber put those cars out with a barely working model to collect enough training data, the human operator to correct such errors was tired and didn't intervene. Some basic driving test for self driving cars or other mitigating factors need to be added IMMEDIATELY otherwise tons more will probably die or be injured. Train operators need to prove they are awake and with attention using some button presses, similar things need to be required for those research vehicle if you want to allow them at all.

rsync 9y ago

"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." Although the actual logistics of your proposal might be challenging (child comments point out that some speeds/distances might be impossible to solve) your instinct is a correct one: the people designing and deploying these solutions need to have skin in the game. I don't think truly autonomous cars are possible to deploy safely with our current level of technology but if I did ... I would want to see their family and their children driving in, and walking around, these cars before we consider wide adoption.

basura045478 9y ago

goes to show, sdv's have to be perfect in the eyes of the public. you wouldn't seriously recommend adding a test like that to a regular driving licence. also that testing does happen in the case of every av program i know of. closed obstacle courses with crap that pops out forcing the cars to react. look up gomentum station. † i did it for you. http://gomentumstation.net/ http://gomentumstation.net/

danso 9y ago

This isn't a good argument because it implies if these AVs have successfully not killed their CEOs during a closed (i.e. controlled) test, that they are safe on public roads. But it seems like the majority of AV accidents so far involve unpredictable and uncontrolled conditions. IOW, setting this up as some kind of quality standard gives unjustified cover ("Hey, our own CEO risked his life to prove the car was safe!") if AVs fail on the open road, because the requirements of open and closed tests are so different.

DennisAleynikov 9y ago

human driven cars are currently, as we speak running people over on the streets and they have human drivers who don't particularly want to run over other humans. It was inevitable that this happened, and no matter how many people self driving cars run over will be worth it, since it will still be less than what cars are currently doing in terms of death toll.

supertrope 9y ago

Bad idea. Even Uber corporate VPs shouldn't be exposed to unnecessary injury risk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_47utWAoupo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_47utWAoupo

artursapek 9y ago

This reminds me of a story I heard in college... an owner of a company that builds table saws demonstrated his saw's safety feature - a killswitch that pulls the blade down into the machine as soon as it detects flesh - by putting his hand on it while it was spinning.

astura 9y ago
Video: https://youtu.be/eiYoBbEZwlk https://youtu.be/eiYoBbEZwlk

megy 9y ago

This was a cyclist. So they should be on bikes. Just like they take the repair mechanics on the first test flight after a major repair of a big airplane.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]