5 ms·

Good riddance. But I think this is not enough to send a strong message to all those who want to put half baked tech out there in hopes of "disrupting" something

• ineedasername 9y ago
  Precisely. Disruption can be a wonderful force for change and innovation, but "minimum viable product" is an astronomically higher bar when injury & death are the default failure modes.
• sokoloff 9y ago
  It might surprise you that we were testing (selectively) autonomous cars on the autobahn in Germany in 1991 as part of the Prometheus project. Our tech was nowhere near as good as what's available now and so we compensated by having attentive drivers hovering over the E-stop button. I don't think that stopping testing over a single crash is warranted. Maybe suspend it for a short time while you look into it, but if we stopped medicine every time a patient died in a trial, society would be worse off.
  • buvanshak 9y ago
    I am not asking to stop it for all time. Just device proper tests that deem a self driving vehicle to be worthy/competent enough to be on the road with a normal average human being behind the wheel. And then have every single self driving vehicle to pass before it can be put on the road. Is that too much to ask? I am just asking for a driving test for self driving tech. Humans undergo driving tests. Why give machines a free pass? As we have seen here, having a human on stand by just won't cut it..
    • carlmr 9y ago
      So if the tech can pass a human driving test, is that ok? Because those are a very low bar in some countries (like the US).
      • buvanshak 9y ago
        >So if the tech can pass a human driving test, is that ok? That would be dumb, right? There should be separate tests designed for a self driving vehicle and every single one of the SDV should pass the tests consistently before being put on road... Until such laws and tests are devised, the all testing of SDVs on real roads should be suspended..
        • carlmr 9y ago
          Yes, that was my point. Driving tests for humans are awful, mostly because we expect humans to only become better with experience. But with a self driving system such an expectation would be misplaced. You'd need a driving test that has sufficiently many difficult situations, hopefully somewhat randomized (so that the cars aren't just trained for this cycle), and in various weather/environmental/situational conditions (snow, ice, rain, desert, dark/light, partially broken street lighting, oncoming traffic with broken headlights, etc.)
  • dahart 9y ago
    > if we stopped medicine every time a patient died in a trial, society would be worse off. What on earth do you mean? Clinical trials are stopped all the time when people have adverse reactions & die. And people who die in clinical medical trials are volunteers, consciously aware of their participation, and having signed a waiver. In the U.S., medications may not be sold or administered to the public before being approved via trials. If Uber had to meet the same standards as the medical industry, Elaine Herzberg would be alive, and we wouldn't see autonomous vehicles on the roads for several more years.
    • YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
      Also- a clinical trial (usually) can't get out on the streets and run someone over if it doesn't work as expected.
  • oldgradstudent 9y ago
    Drug trials are done on volunteers with informed consent. Testing on public roads is like kidnapping random people and forcing them to take the drug.