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The good news about self-driving car accidents is that improvements to the system will be eventually shared by all cars saving many lives. We can finally say t

The good news about self-driving car accidents is that improvements to the system will be eventually shared by all cars saving many lives. We can finally say this poor woman did not die in vain, which is a step in the right direction which may end up making cars safer than airplanes someday. The only serious mistake (misunderstanding) to come out of this is to believe the human behind the wheel is at fault. No human being can keep full attention on a road when a computer is driving the car for you.

buvanshak 9y ago
> The good news about self-driving car accidents is that improvements to the system will be eventually shared by all cars saving many lives. If this was true, how come the car was not trained for this pretty common/typical scenario. Did it take one human life to show that it is possible that a pedestrian can cross the road in front of the car? Are the people gone so blind with this obsession with new tech?
- ojosilva 9y ago
  The system is very early stage, I believe there's still a long way to go until the system is fully trained and has enough redundancy as to remediate for bugs in one component. I'm pretty sure the engineers foresaw that situation to an extent and that their design intention is to prevent or avoid running over pedestrians. The same happened in aviation throughout the years, until airliners got to a point where systems just don't fail... Or at least not without other 2 systems correcting it. There's human intervention behind every aspect of this accident, and again, like airliners, there will be many accidents (and hopefully not many deaths) until engineers can get it right. FAA and other agencies played a crucial role in exposing and recommending improvements across different manufacturers and airlines, hopefully government will assume that role here too to ensure improvements are mandatory before sending prototypes into the road.
  - buvanshak 9y ago
    >I believe there's still a long way to go until the system is fully trained and has enough redundancy as to remediate for bugs in one component... What sort of tests did these cars undergo before they were put on street? Have you seen them? Have these cars undergone tests where they are shown to reliably handle situations such as these? Have you cared to ask? Is there a legal ground work in place for self driving vehicles? It seems that none of them is in place and the reasons is that there is a human being behind the wheels. The whole "intellectual" technology wiz kids stood by and watched while the companies such as these weasel their way to doing something like this and no one cared to fucking ask "HAVE THE FUCKING THING EVER BEEN TESTED?" >The same happened in aviation throughout the years, until airliners got to a point where systems just don't fail... Or at least not without other 2 systems correcting it. You can choose not to be in an airliner. But very few can afford not to be on roads where there will be droves of these kind of vehicles running these kind of half baked tech...Right now, the only thing that assures me that the incoming vehicle does not run into me is that the human running it has the same incentive as myself for preventing it..With this tech that is gone.
bigiain 9y ago
Sadly, I suspect all three of those sentences have a fairly high chance of being incorrect. If Uber think they can gain some benefit from keeping part or all of what they learn here to themselves, I strongly suspect all that data will be wrapped up forever in trade secret claims... I certainly wouldn't want to be the one going to tell this woman's family that "she didn't die in vain, thanks to her and Uber, self driving cars will now be safer for everyone!" If they didn't punch me in the face and say "Fuck you! She died in vain, while Uber made the most profitable calculations and moves as they risked and callously ended human lives to increase their shareholder value!" then they've better people than me. The human behind the wheel was not sitting in a known-safe autonomous vehicle with a record of better-than-human road safety, they were at work doing the critical job of overseeing a prototype self driving car with a barely alpha-release software version controlling a machine which is well known as capable of killing people. It was their only job - to keep their full attention on the road.
zaarn 9y ago
I do not believe the human behind the wheel was at direct fault. I would find them guilty of (gross) negligence since they were supposed to pay attention. The problem here is that the car had superior systems to the human eye and no large lag between perception and action. It was fully capable of seeing the pedestrian and yet it didn't even attempt to break.

buvanshak 9y ago

> The good news about self-driving car accidents is that improvements to the system will be eventually shared by all cars saving many lives. If this was true, how come the car was not trained for this pretty common/typical scenario. Did it take one human life to show that it is possible that a pedestrian can cross the road in front of the car? Are the people gone so blind with this obsession with new tech?

ojosilva 9y ago
The system is very early stage, I believe there's still a long way to go until the system is fully trained and has enough redundancy as to remediate for bugs in one component. I'm pretty sure the engineers foresaw that situation to an extent and that their design intention is to prevent or avoid running over pedestrians. The same happened in aviation throughout the years, until airliners got to a point where systems just don't fail... Or at least not without other 2 systems correcting it. There's human intervention behind every aspect of this accident, and again, like airliners, there will be many accidents (and hopefully not many deaths) until engineers can get it right. FAA and other agencies played a crucial role in exposing and recommending improvements across different manufacturers and airlines, hopefully government will assume that role here too to ensure improvements are mandatory before sending prototypes into the road.
- buvanshak 9y ago
  >I believe there's still a long way to go until the system is fully trained and has enough redundancy as to remediate for bugs in one component... What sort of tests did these cars undergo before they were put on street? Have you seen them? Have these cars undergone tests where they are shown to reliably handle situations such as these? Have you cared to ask? Is there a legal ground work in place for self driving vehicles? It seems that none of them is in place and the reasons is that there is a human being behind the wheels. The whole "intellectual" technology wiz kids stood by and watched while the companies such as these weasel their way to doing something like this and no one cared to fucking ask "HAVE THE FUCKING THING EVER BEEN TESTED?" >The same happened in aviation throughout the years, until airliners got to a point where systems just don't fail... Or at least not without other 2 systems correcting it. You can choose not to be in an airliner. But very few can afford not to be on roads where there will be droves of these kind of vehicles running these kind of half baked tech...Right now, the only thing that assures me that the incoming vehicle does not run into me is that the human running it has the same incentive as myself for preventing it..With this tech that is gone.

bigiain 9y ago

Sadly, I suspect all three of those sentences have a fairly high chance of being incorrect. If Uber think they can gain some benefit from keeping part or all of what they learn here to themselves, I strongly suspect all that data will be wrapped up forever in trade secret claims... I certainly wouldn't want to be the one going to tell this woman's family that "she didn't die in vain, thanks to her and Uber, self driving cars will now be safer for everyone!" If they didn't punch me in the face and say "Fuck you! She died in vain, while Uber made the most profitable calculations and moves as they risked and callously ended human lives to increase their shareholder value!" then they've better people than me. The human behind the wheel was not sitting in a known-safe autonomous vehicle with a record of better-than-human road safety, they were at work doing the critical job of overseeing a prototype self driving car with a barely alpha-release software version controlling a machine which is well known as capable of killing people. It was their only job - to keep their full attention on the road.

zaarn 9y ago

I do not believe the human behind the wheel was at direct fault. I would find them guilty of (gross) negligence since they were supposed to pay attention. The problem here is that the car had superior systems to the human eye and no large lag between perception and action. It was fully capable of seeing the pedestrian and yet it didn't even attempt to break.