6 ms·

If the woman suddenly walked in front of the car at the last minute, I don't see how the situation could have been avoided, no matter how fast a computer is abl

If the woman suddenly walked in front of the car at the last minute, I don't see how the situation could have been avoided, no matter how fast a computer is able to process the information from the sensors. There was also a driver behind the wheel, so it would suggest that humans are just as clueless.

setr 9y ago
But, ideally, the machinery should be much, much faster at becoming less clueless than the human driver; as the parent said, the ideal is that it should successfully identify, and fail to resolve, the impossible situation. It should not have no awareness it's in an impossible situation (because that implies it will have no awareness is similar, possible, situations)
Someone 9y ago
”If the woman suddenly walked in front of the car at the last minute, I don't see how the situation could have been avoided” Likely, but not necessarily. Depending (hugely!) on what actually happened, it might be that the car should have started slowing down before the woman changed course. As an extreme example, if you’re driving at 50 mph and come up behind a kid cycling at the side of the road with a foot separation between the extrapolated trajectories of the bike and your car, should it be OK to continue your course at full speed, or should drivers take into account that kids are kids, and may move erratically? Also (again purely hypothetical), if the car had already had several similar events on that road that resulted in near misses, should it have slowed down before it even entered the street, knowing the road segment to be particularly dangerous? I think human drivers, even though they are horrible at attending to the road for extended periods, get into accidents relatively rarely because they know when they really need to pay attention. Finally, I do not rule out that that “driver behind the wheel” reacted slower than would have happened if (s)he was actually driving the car. Disclaimer: I’m a layman, and haven’t seen the video ⇒ Let’s wait and see what the NTSB will say about this.
- Taniwha 9y ago
  or that at 50mph, a foot away, you're likely to blow the cyclist over ....
- qplex 9y ago
  There definitely exists a sort of pre-cognitive human quality to traffic. Sometimes you just slow down on a subconscious hunch without any information on that particular situation. Or you might be very conscious not to slow down if you're driving a motorcycle in Asia in heavy traffic trying to make a turn with a huge truck barreling behind you. There are massive differences in road cultures between countries, and it takes a while to adjust to local habits. Somebody who doesn't know these invisible rules is a very accident prone driver even if they can drive safely in another country.
  - heyyyouu 9y ago
    This is a really great point. I wonder if at some point self driving cars will be taught with these regional anomalies in mind. And will they be activated/changed depending on where the car is shipped/activated (Asia vs. America)?
    - InternetOfStuff 9y ago
      Apart from regional differences, there are a host of other, similar matters. Cruising through your city's bar district at 3am? I'm sure you'll drive more defensively and be prepared for erratic behaviour on the part of others. However, one thing that I haven't seen discussed anywhere, but that strikes me as a hard problem: by having a non-human driver, you're literally taking out the human element of communication. Everybody is taught about the importance of eye contact in driver's ed. What will we replace it with? I have no clue, and I doubt anyone else does. Yet it's a crucial technique we all use to negotiate traffic every day, regardless of our mode of transportation. This is a hard problem, and it's less technical than cultural. It will be a bitch to solve.
      - qplex 9y ago
        Eye contact is another thing that doesn't apply in some Asian countries where by default everyone has dark tinted windows making it virtually impossible to see inside other vehicles.
- mirimir 9y ago
  I have had vehicles blow by me on a bicycle at 50 mph, on fairly narrow county roads.
  - antoineMoPa 9y ago
    Same here during my road biking years (I switched to Jogging and unicycle). Even though I disliked the risk, I enjoyed the wind as it allowed me to ride faster.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
CodeWriter23 9y ago
I think the parent commenter to your comment was alluding to this kind of stuff, a lack of depth in fallback strategies and systems trained to focus on objects in motion over stationary ones. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/03/uber-self-driving-fatality-arizona/556001/?single_page=true https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/03/uber-...
sjg007 9y ago
If I was driving a car and saw the pedestrian ahead of time walking or trying to cross I would have slowed down and changed lanes away fro them or at least moved far right if safe. Same thing when you pass bicycles. Change lanes away if possible or at the very least give more buffer. You can never tell what someone may do so you should anticipate the unexpected.
- daodedickinson 9y ago
  Yep, after a friend had someone try to use her van to commit suicide I am paranoid and get ready to avoid every pedestrian. I don't know what I'd do if I lived somewhere with many pedestrians.
  - sulam 9y ago
    You should be paranoid about pedestrians it turns out, even if they aren’t suicidal. You are in a pedestrian-killing machine, after all. Being paranoid about this is no less reasonable than being sure to keep your chemicals and sharp knives out of the reach of toddlers if you have them both in your home.
- IncRnd 9y ago
  I haven't read the words "defensive driving" in any of the articles about this incident.
  - antoineMoPa 9y ago
    Yes, and they thought it was a good idea to make cars go at 38mph in a 30mph zone. Edit: The limit seems to be 35mph sorry, thank all of you for pointing that out. (38 is still over the limit, why allow a robot to do that?)
    - kristjansson 9y ago
      It was a 35 mph zone.
vamin 9y ago
The woman cannot go from being "not in path" to "in path" instantaneously unless you believe in teleportation. Supposing the woman got about 1 foot into the path of the car before being struck, the car would have had a minimum of 1 ft / <woman's speed in ft/s> seconds to react, assuming total blindness until the woman was "in path" (I can't think of a real world scenario where this assumption would be strictly true). Suppose a speed of 12 ft/s (~8mph), the car would have had a minimum of 8/100ths of a second to react. Supposing 3 ft of visibility before in path (about the distance from edge of car to lane), the car would have a minimum of ~1/3 second to react. That's assuming the woman was biking along at a good clip already, which is unlikely given that she was crossing a road. So, in all likelihood, the car had over 1/3 of a second to do something. That's just above the typical reaction time of a human (~1/4 second), but I don't think it's an unreasonable expectation for an autonomous vehicle.
- nemothekid 9y ago
  I don't see how this is at all accurate without taking to account the speed of that car. If human reaction time is 1/4th of a second, how time does that actually leave for the car move as well - the car can't teleport either.
  - sulam 9y ago
    We know the car was going roughly 40mph, so that puts some constraints on the minimum response time that was available. Unless this woman literally catapulted in front of the car, there were at least 4’ of lateral walking pace worth of 40mph time to react. You do need to make assumptions about how fast she was moving, of course, and as has been noted elsewhere in the thread you have to assume that the driver was in the left lane for this scenario to even be remotely plausible. Even in this sequence, the car should have been able to substantially decelerate but, looking at the pictures, that doesn’t seem to have happened.
bitcurious 9y ago
An accident might have been unavoidable, but fatality is the big question. The risk of pedestrian fatality jumps by ~4x between 30mph and 40mph.[0] So the question is - did the car start breaking as soon as possible? As an aside, that statistic is why I never speed in pedestrian zones. https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/relationship_between_speed_risk_fatal_injury_pedestrians_and_car_occupants_richards.pdf https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/relationship_between_speed_risk_...
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > did the car start breaking as soon as possible? “braking”; “breaking” is something else, and not a desirable response.
  - hndamien 9y ago
    "breaking" implies it was "working" in the first place.
    - hndamien 9y ago
      Wow, tough crowd. Is this on? `tap`, `tap`, `tap`
      - IncRnd 9y ago
        It's warm HN bottled, not on tap.
      - hndamien 9y ago
        So 3 HN readers walk into a bar. The first guy says "I'll have a larger". The second HN reader says, "You actually mean a "lager", "larger" would mean a bigger drink". The third HN reader sees the raging alcoholic and the grammar police and the comedy judges and says "Make sure you get a safe ride home, but not in an autonomous Uber, because apparently "Working" includes running over pedestrians. Alternatively, just stay here and sober up after your excessively large pint. It is comedy night tonight; but seriously the humour is F- at best."
hndamien 9y ago
The fact that in most cases the human has to do nothing means that it is unlikely that the human is anywhere close to being as vigilante as an actual human driver. The fact that the human is clueless isn't surprising at all. In fact this is the real danger with systems like Tesla's autopilot. You still ned to be vigilante, but you are so bored that it is hard to be. The safety humans here might as well be hood ornaments.
- toothbrush 9y ago
  The word you're looking for is "vigilant". "Vigilante" means "a member of a self-appointed group of citizens who undertake law enforcement in their community without legal authority, typically because the legal agencies are thought to be inadequate".
  - hndamien 9y ago
    Correct. I also meant “need” and not “ned”.
ubernostrum 9y ago
If the woman suddenly walked in front of the car at the last minute, I don't see how the situation could have been avoided From /r/roadcam yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYvKPMaz9rI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYvKPMaz9rI Human driver avoided hitting the pedestrian. There are lots of videos of human drivers successfully not hitting people who "suddenly" pop out "at the last minute". Self-driving cars should be able to match that. If they can't, they don't belong on public roads yet.

setr 9y ago

But, ideally, the machinery should be much, much faster at becoming less clueless than the human driver; as the parent said, the ideal is that it should successfully identify, and fail to resolve, the impossible situation. It should not have no awareness it's in an impossible situation (because that implies it will have no awareness is similar, possible, situations)

Someone 9y ago

”If the woman suddenly walked in front of the car at the last minute, I don't see how the situation could have been avoided” Likely, but not necessarily. Depending (hugely!) on what actually happened, it might be that the car should have started slowing down before the woman changed course. As an extreme example, if you’re driving at 50 mph and come up behind a kid cycling at the side of the road with a foot separation between the extrapolated trajectories of the bike and your car, should it be OK to continue your course at full speed, or should drivers take into account that kids are kids, and may move erratically? Also (again purely hypothetical), if the car had already had several similar events on that road that resulted in near misses, should it have slowed down before it even entered the street, knowing the road segment to be particularly dangerous? I think human drivers, even though they are horrible at attending to the road for extended periods, get into accidents relatively rarely because they know when they really need to pay attention. Finally, I do not rule out that that “driver behind the wheel” reacted slower than would have happened if (s)he was actually driving the car. Disclaimer: I’m a layman, and haven’t seen the video ⇒ Let’s wait and see what the NTSB will say about this.

Taniwha 9y ago
or that at 50mph, a foot away, you're likely to blow the cyclist over ....
qplex 9y ago
There definitely exists a sort of pre-cognitive human quality to traffic. Sometimes you just slow down on a subconscious hunch without any information on that particular situation. Or you might be very conscious not to slow down if you're driving a motorcycle in Asia in heavy traffic trying to make a turn with a huge truck barreling behind you. There are massive differences in road cultures between countries, and it takes a while to adjust to local habits. Somebody who doesn't know these invisible rules is a very accident prone driver even if they can drive safely in another country.
- heyyyouu 9y ago
  This is a really great point. I wonder if at some point self driving cars will be taught with these regional anomalies in mind. And will they be activated/changed depending on where the car is shipped/activated (Asia vs. America)?
  - InternetOfStuff 9y ago
    Apart from regional differences, there are a host of other, similar matters. Cruising through your city's bar district at 3am? I'm sure you'll drive more defensively and be prepared for erratic behaviour on the part of others. However, one thing that I haven't seen discussed anywhere, but that strikes me as a hard problem: by having a non-human driver, you're literally taking out the human element of communication. Everybody is taught about the importance of eye contact in driver's ed. What will we replace it with? I have no clue, and I doubt anyone else does. Yet it's a crucial technique we all use to negotiate traffic every day, regardless of our mode of transportation. This is a hard problem, and it's less technical than cultural. It will be a bitch to solve.
    - qplex 9y ago
      Eye contact is another thing that doesn't apply in some Asian countries where by default everyone has dark tinted windows making it virtually impossible to see inside other vehicles.
mirimir 9y ago
I have had vehicles blow by me on a bicycle at 50 mph, on fairly narrow county roads.
- antoineMoPa 9y ago
  Same here during my road biking years (I switched to Jogging and unicycle). Even though I disliked the risk, I enjoyed the wind as it allowed me to ride faster.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

CodeWriter23 9y ago

I think the parent commenter to your comment was alluding to this kind of stuff, a lack of depth in fallback strategies and systems trained to focus on objects in motion over stationary ones. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/03/uber-self-driving-fatality-arizona/556001/?single_page=true https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/03/uber-...

sjg007 9y ago

If I was driving a car and saw the pedestrian ahead of time walking or trying to cross I would have slowed down and changed lanes away fro them or at least moved far right if safe. Same thing when you pass bicycles. Change lanes away if possible or at the very least give more buffer. You can never tell what someone may do so you should anticipate the unexpected.

daodedickinson 9y ago
Yep, after a friend had someone try to use her van to commit suicide I am paranoid and get ready to avoid every pedestrian. I don't know what I'd do if I lived somewhere with many pedestrians.
- sulam 9y ago
  You should be paranoid about pedestrians it turns out, even if they aren’t suicidal. You are in a pedestrian-killing machine, after all. Being paranoid about this is no less reasonable than being sure to keep your chemicals and sharp knives out of the reach of toddlers if you have them both in your home.
IncRnd 9y ago
I haven't read the words "defensive driving" in any of the articles about this incident.
- antoineMoPa 9y ago
  Yes, and they thought it was a good idea to make cars go at 38mph in a 30mph zone. Edit: The limit seems to be 35mph sorry, thank all of you for pointing that out. (38 is still over the limit, why allow a robot to do that?)
  - kristjansson 9y ago
    It was a 35 mph zone.

vamin 9y ago

The woman cannot go from being "not in path" to "in path" instantaneously unless you believe in teleportation. Supposing the woman got about 1 foot into the path of the car before being struck, the car would have had a minimum of 1 ft / <woman's speed in ft/s> seconds to react, assuming total blindness until the woman was "in path" (I can't think of a real world scenario where this assumption would be strictly true). Suppose a speed of 12 ft/s (~8mph), the car would have had a minimum of 8/100ths of a second to react. Supposing 3 ft of visibility before in path (about the distance from edge of car to lane), the car would have a minimum of ~1/3 second to react. That's assuming the woman was biking along at a good clip already, which is unlikely given that she was crossing a road. So, in all likelihood, the car had over 1/3 of a second to do something. That's just above the typical reaction time of a human (~1/4 second), but I don't think it's an unreasonable expectation for an autonomous vehicle.

nemothekid 9y ago
I don't see how this is at all accurate without taking to account the speed of that car. If human reaction time is 1/4th of a second, how time does that actually leave for the car move as well - the car can't teleport either.
- sulam 9y ago
  We know the car was going roughly 40mph, so that puts some constraints on the minimum response time that was available. Unless this woman literally catapulted in front of the car, there were at least 4’ of lateral walking pace worth of 40mph time to react. You do need to make assumptions about how fast she was moving, of course, and as has been noted elsewhere in the thread you have to assume that the driver was in the left lane for this scenario to even be remotely plausible. Even in this sequence, the car should have been able to substantially decelerate but, looking at the pictures, that doesn’t seem to have happened.

bitcurious 9y ago

An accident might have been unavoidable, but fatality is the big question. The risk of pedestrian fatality jumps by ~4x between 30mph and 40mph.[0] So the question is - did the car start breaking as soon as possible? As an aside, that statistic is why I never speed in pedestrian zones. https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/relationship_between_speed_risk_fatal_injury_pedestrians_and_car_occupants_richards.pdf https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/relationship_between_speed_risk_...

dragonwriter 9y ago
> did the car start breaking as soon as possible? “braking”; “breaking” is something else, and not a desirable response.
- hndamien 9y ago
  "breaking" implies it was "working" in the first place.
  - hndamien 9y ago
    Wow, tough crowd. Is this on? `tap`, `tap`, `tap`
    - IncRnd 9y ago
      It's warm HN bottled, not on tap.
    - hndamien 9y ago
      So 3 HN readers walk into a bar. The first guy says "I'll have a larger". The second HN reader says, "You actually mean a "lager", "larger" would mean a bigger drink". The third HN reader sees the raging alcoholic and the grammar police and the comedy judges and says "Make sure you get a safe ride home, but not in an autonomous Uber, because apparently "Working" includes running over pedestrians. Alternatively, just stay here and sober up after your excessively large pint. It is comedy night tonight; but seriously the humour is F- at best."

hndamien 9y ago

The fact that in most cases the human has to do nothing means that it is unlikely that the human is anywhere close to being as vigilante as an actual human driver. The fact that the human is clueless isn't surprising at all. In fact this is the real danger with systems like Tesla's autopilot. You still ned to be vigilante, but you are so bored that it is hard to be. The safety humans here might as well be hood ornaments.

toothbrush 9y ago
The word you're looking for is "vigilant". "Vigilante" means "a member of a self-appointed group of citizens who undertake law enforcement in their community without legal authority, typically because the legal agencies are thought to be inadequate".
- hndamien 9y ago
  Correct. I also meant “need” and not “ned”.

ubernostrum 9y ago

If the woman suddenly walked in front of the car at the last minute, I don't see how the situation could have been avoided From /r/roadcam yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYvKPMaz9rI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYvKPMaz9rI Human driver avoided hitting the pedestrian. There are lots of videos of human drivers successfully not hitting people who "suddenly" pop out "at the last minute". Self-driving cars should be able to match that. If they can't, they don't belong on public roads yet.