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> Wow, that self driving car is total crap if it can't pick up that obstacle. Not to nit-pick too much but 'that obstacle' is a person. A person that died beca
by Balgair 9y ago
> Wow, that self driving car is total crap if it can't pick up that obstacle.
Not to nit-pick too much but 'that obstacle' is a person. A person that died because engineering hubris. I think we should be careful in our language in this situation, as it may get away from us. She was not 'an obstacle' or a 'thing to avoid' or 'hobo', she was a living person.
- abiox 9y agoi'm not sure i follow what you're trying to communicate. what do you mean by "get away from us"? also, framing things as "obstacle" vs "living person" seems like a false dichotomy.
- Balgair 9y agoI mean that Uber, being a very shady company, has a large incentive to 'sterilize' the language. The person becomes an 'object', the person driving the car becomes a 'rouge employee', the cruddy software and cost cutting becomes an 'undiscovered malfunction', the burden of safety on the AV manufacturer becomes a 'shared breakdown'. Responsibility and humanity start to get stripped away via the word choices used.
- brokenmachine 9y agoI 100% agree, however arguing about semantics is not productive. I deliberately chose the word "obstacle" to hammer home the point that the car did not even need to identify that the object in front of it was a person. If that obstacle had happened to be a fallen tree, it would be the car's passengers that would be dead instead. Literally all it needed to do was stop, or at the very least slow down. In this case, I believe the car performed much worse than an average human driver would have, and this video shows without any doubt that these cars are not safe to be on the road in their current state.
- Balgair 9y agoI agree, the car is not even close to prime-time
- cbg0 9y ago> A person that died because engineering hubris. While the system should have reacted better, I'd definitely say she died because she crossed the road in a very unsafe manner. I wouldn't attempt to make that crossing without a reflective vest, front and tail light, and even then I'd still be very anxious.
- adam-_- 9y agoIt has to be the driver (or computers') responsibility to spot and react in situations like this as it is the dangerous machinery that can cause injury and death.
- cbg0 9y agoAll parties have a responsibility when travelling in and around public roads. Using your logic, if I were to try to cross the railway line and got hit by a train, the conductor has a "responsibility to spot and react in situations like this as it is the dangerous machinery that can cause injury and death." While I agree with the conductor's share of the responsibility, I'd still say that I'm to blame for not crossing the railway lines more carefully.
- the_gastropod 9y agoWhile I get your point, I do think there's an important distinction: train lines are rare, usually far away from where people live, walk, bicycle, etc. Roads, on the other hand, occupy a significant portion of public land in our cities. It's not great that it's effectively a death sentence to be less-than-focused while walking home. You know the old saying "with great power comes great responsibility". The onus for being responsible is not on the pedestrian. It's on the person (or CPU) operating the multi-ton machine at speeds that can kill.
- madshiva 9y agoDon't know where you live, but in some country rail are include in the city... When I was Young I was using that track as shortcut and this was way too Dangerous. If you want live you use your brain and stop telling other to take responsibility from your own mistake. There's too many pedestrians involved in car crash, even if many country are agressive with speedup, most of the time these pedestrians was wrong. Same case apply for autonomous vehicule