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There was a person at the wheel. That person wasn't paying full attention to the road. From the video of the crash, it looks like the woman at the wheel was lo

There was a person at the wheel. That person wasn't paying full attention to the road. From the video of the crash, it looks like the woman at the wheel was looking at their phone. Why is no one acknowledging that this woman was responsible for taking over the wheel if necessary for any reason. When I have cruise control on, I take my feet off of the pedals and rest them on the floor. But if, say, a homeless person with a bicycle walks out into the middle of the road at night with a black sweatshirt on in front of my car, then I step on the brakes. And why is no one acknowledging that a homeless person walked out into the middle of the street at night in a black sweatshirt. I definitely don't know whether I, even if I wasn't on my phone like the car operator was, would've seen the person in the road with enough time to slam on the brakes. I might've killed that person walking across the road by mistake, too. Like millions of other people on the road every single day, the car operator was on their smartphone while they were at the wheel. And like 3-5 million other people a year, the homeless person walking across the street was killed in a car accident. The woman walking across the street and the woman at the wheel of the car broke the law. Uber didn't break any laws as far as I can tell. They were as responsible as any other company building self-driving cars as far as I can tell, too. I don't think it's fair to put the fault on Uber here.

amelius 9y ago
Cruise control is different because you still have your hands on the wheel.
- ducktoller 9y ago
  A fully autonomous car is different, too. The person at the wheel when that woman was killed was responsible for stepping on the brakes if necessary. And when I have cruise control on, I'm also responsible for stepping on the brakes if necessary.
  - amelius 9y ago
    Yeah, but with cruise control, at least having your hands on the wheel forces you to pay attention. Really, I think Uber should have used tech to make sure the driver is alert. And test whether the driver can stay alert in a simulator. It's too easy to blame the driver.
    - pmyteh 9y ago
      It's even worse than that, sadly. The tech is called 'driver vigilance devices' and are common on the railways. Although they're better than nothing, it turns out that real drivers end up operating the device automatically, even if they're not alert. It may simply not be possible to engineer your way around.
salvar 9y ago
What is the significance of the person being homeless?
- ducktoller 9y ago
  It's a descriptor, the same way "man" or "woman" is a descriptor. Descriptors help you picture a situation more clearly.
  - salvar 9y ago
    Fair enough. It felt like a wholly unnecessary descriptor to me, intended to lessen the value of that person's life.
  - jmalicki 9y ago
    Nothing about whether or not the person involved happened to have a permanent place of residence is a relevant descriptor to the situation at hand.
    - brianwawok 9y ago
      Great, and neither does their hair color, their # of kids, their name, their birthplace, or any of the other 100 details we normally include. Would you prefer all news articles were: > Someone was walking and a car hit and killed them. And that is the end of the story?
- YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
  It's a masterstroke of reporting ingenuity. If you're the kind of person who thinks homeless people are useless garbage that deserves to be run over, you'll think the article is pointing this out to inform you that what happened was not a big deal and the person walking out in front of the car was at fault. If you're the kind of person who considers homelesness an affront to the dignity of human societies that tolerate it, you'll think that the article is pointing out the tragic angle of a woman already suffering from exclusion and poverty being run over by the malfunction of an extremely expensive piece of equipment that should be recalled at once. If you're somewhere in between, you'll still gravitate towards one of the extremes. In any case, mentioning that Elen Herzberg was homeless is only there as an appeal to emotion. By the way- Elen Herzberg's friends and family have said she was not homeless. I recall, I think, a stepdaughter, saying that she had "issues with homelessness" but had recently turned her life around and was starting a new job.
seren 9y ago
They are also responsible for the test setup, the behavior and training of their employees. If all their drivers, which ultimately are the latest safety when everything fails, are routinely not following the process that is an issue. Maybe you need to have 2 drivers, maybe you need to randomly monitor the behavior of the driver remotely, but you have to demonstrate some active measures your took, to demonstrate the safety of the test. You cannot just say "not my fault". I am not saying that Uber have not followed a rigorous procedure I don't know. But saying it is their fault or not seems a bit premature.
- obeattie 9y ago
  Waymo mentions this in their safety report, which I think is interesting, and relevant: > Advanced driver-assist technologies were one of the first technologies our teams explored. In 2012 we developed and tested a Level 3 system that would drive autonomously on the freeway in a single lane but would still require a driver to take over at a moment’s notice. During our internal testing, however, we found that human drivers over-trusted the technology and were not monitoring the roadway carefully enough to be able to safely take control when needed. > As driver-assist features become more advanced, drivers are often asked to transition from passenger to driver in a matter of seconds, often in challenging or complex situations with little context of the scene ahead. The more tasks the vehicle is responsible for, the more complicated and vulnerable this moment of transition becomes.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
pjc50 9y ago
Asserting that the person who was run over broke the law is victim-blaming of the highest order. The claim that the ""driver"" was texting suggests that they are at fault, but the whole "safety driver" concept is flawed; the less the driver has to intervene and take control, the less likely they are to remain alert and willing to jump in and take control. You almost need a "fault injection" system that gives back control once every 5-10 minutes just to keep them awake.
LogicalBorg 9y ago
I think it's incorrect to say that the woman was looking at her phone. She was looking down and to the right of the steering wheel, which is where Uber places a monitoring tablet (an iPad) in their self-driving vehicles (where the radio is). Here's an article that shows the sort of thing she would be looking at, an animation of road conditions: http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-driverless-car-interior-photos-2016-12 http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-driverless-car-interior-... If you actually examine her behavior, in the space of ten seconds, she manages to: * Look down at the tablet and watch the animation * Look up at the road * Scan the lane to the left (she was in the right lane) * Look forward again * Look down at the tablet again * Look up again just as the accident occurs She is systematically scanning her environment and appears to be alert and engaged. The problem is that there is only one test driver, who has to divide her attention between the tablet and the road. Often two drivers are used, and then one watches the tablet and the other watches the road. I think it is unfair to accuse her of inattention when she appears to be doing the job exactly as it is designed. The reason everyone says "she was looking at her phone!" is because they don't understand the setup of how Uber's self-driving car works. They are only familiar with being bored and looking at their phone while driving. They think the test driver's job is to just stare out of the window all day, which is not correct.
- tallanvor 9y ago
  The tablet in that article is in the back seat, not up front, and the photos they show of the driver area doesn't suggest any screens that would require the driver to be looking down like the person was doing in the video. I know that when I was taught to drive we were told to continually scan ahead of us, our side mirrors, and the rear view mirror and basically only take our eyes off the road to check our speed. --This is definitely NOT what the individual in the driver's seat was doing.
  - LogicalBorg 9y ago
    There are tablets in the front and back (https://cdn.geekwire.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Front-_-Rear-iPads_-On-trip-view-630x354.png https://cdn.geekwire.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Front-_-...). You were taught to drive manually, not in an Uber self-driving car. If you can find a video of an Uber driving who is driving as they were instructed to do, they would look exactly like her.
crispyporkbites 9y ago
> From the video of the crash, it looks like the woman at the wheel was looking at their phone. How do you know that? They could have been monitoring the car in another way. Also, it’s pretty obvious that if a car is fully automated, the driver isn’t going to pay attention. If that was you, or any other human the situation would have been the same. The car screwed up, it should have seen the pedestrian. The safety mechanism of having a driver behind the wheel didn’t work either, and we all know it doesn’t work.
michaelt 9y ago
Why is no one acknowledging that this woman was responsible for taking over the wheel if necessary for any reason. Nobody in the industry really believes safety drivers work, beyond the early point in testing where they're intervening regularly. It is widely known [1, 2, 3] that it's extremely difficult for humans to remain vigilant when monitoring systems for rare events. Airport baggage screening systems perform "threat image projection" where they show the operator knives and guns from time to time, just to break up the monotony and reward attentiveness. Beyond early testing, safety drivers are there to make the public/politicians feel safer, for situations where a slow response is better than none at all, and for more cynical companies, so you can use them as scapegoats in situations like this one. [1] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ece2/465ed2258585ebb8055fd76997cda6b606af.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ece2/465ed2258585ebb8055fd7... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5633607/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5633607/ [3] http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0018720813501550 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/001872081350155...
- dmix 9y ago
  Even regardless of her lack of full attention, from the video it seems quite obvious a human driver would have failed to see the woman in time even with full alertness. The only question here, and why Uber is under scrutiny, is why a Lidar system which can "see in the dark" wasn't able to detect her and react in time.
  - ceejayoz 9y ago
    > from the video it seems quite obvious a human driver would have failed to see the woman in time even with full alertness The video is massively - and I'll wager intentionally - misleading. There's no chance the car was making decisions from a $20 dashcam. Here's what a better camera (looks like a smartphone camera) sees in the same spot (at about 33 seconds - you can see the signs, lights, and terrain match the Uber video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XOVxSCG8u0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XOVxSCG8u0
    - whateversclever 9y ago
arkades 9y ago
>There was a person at the wheel. That person wasn't paying full attention to the road. From the video of the crash, it looks like the woman at the wheel was looking at their phone. >Why is no one acknowledging that this woman was responsible for taking over the wheel if necessary for any reason. The woman was part of their safety program, but ultimate responsibility for the effectiveness and failures of said program lies with them. For instance, Other driver assist programs (eg, Cadillac) have eye tracking and hand sensors in the wheel. If your eyes leave the road or hands leave the wheel escalating alarms are initiated until driver assist is deactivated. This is a technology that takes into account normal human behavior. Uber did not do this. Uber previously used two person teams, to minimize tedium and lapses in awareness that emerge when a single person as the job of staring out an uneventful window for hour(s) at a time. This is a policy that takes into account normal human behavior. They did not do this. Either or both of these could have prevented this death. Both of these decisions occur at a level above the proximal driver-pedestrian interaction.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  Those are level 1 or level 2 systems, not level 4 ones. In the former systems, the driver must and will intervene often, in the latter intervention is really really rare. It would get painfully boring very quickly in a level 4 system to have the driver on the wheel at all time but not do anything. The same problem arises in airplanes with modern autopilots.
YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
>> And why is no one acknowledging that a homeless person walked out into the middle of the street at night in a black sweatshirt. I'm guessing, because a lot of people wear black clothes and self-driving cars must be able to deal with that, too. If safety-critical systems can't react to a common real-world situation then they 're just not safe enough to operate in the real world. You might as well ask what was this woman doing crossing a road at night where even human drivers have reduced visibility. Well- people might cross roads at any time of day (legal issues aside- jaywalking is a very US-centric thing btw). Roads and cars must be designed so as to be safe under this assumption and drivers must be trained enough to deal with the situation. What is the alternative? Make everyone wear high-visibility vests, or carry special self-driving car beacons when they go outside? I've actually heard both of those ideas since Elen Herzberg was killed and they're both on the near side of the absurd (so I'm sure someone will come up with something even more out there). But, if tech that is supposed to make our lives easier is too dangerous, the answer is not to make our lives harder to accommodate it. That would defeate the purpose of the technology in the first place.
mtgx 9y ago
Because Uber and possibly most other self-driving car makers aren't doing it right. First off, Waymo, Ford, and even Volvo (whose car was in the accident) have said that they want to skip Level 3 because expecting people to actually watch the road while they're "self-driven" is not reasonable. They saw from initial testing that the drivers were dosing off. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-17/ford-s-dozing-engineers-side-with-google-in-full-autonomy-push https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-17/ford-s-do... And I didn't know this until now, but it looks like Toyota is now thinking the same: http://www.motortrend.com/news/toyota-might-skip-level-3-autonomy/ http://www.motortrend.com/news/toyota-might-skip-level-3-aut... Second, if they were to at least attempt to do it right (like Tesla is doing now, but didn't do in the beginning either) is to force drivers to keep their hands on the wheel at all times. Also, Uber could have been watching its drivers with the cameras, and fired those that didn't stick with the program. And all of this doesn't even mention how Uber's self-driving system seems to be terrible. Lidar wasn't working, the car didn't brake, and they've had one intervention per 13 miles while Waymo has one per 5600 miles. So, my point is, Uber, the company, still seems to share most of the blame here, for all of those different reasons.
- Aspyre 9y ago
  You are making a lot of assumptions.
bryanlarsen 9y ago
Even if the driver and the woman crossing the street were both to blame, it doesn't mean that Uber was any less to blame. Accidents in critical situations are typically multi-system failures, and every failure needs to be addressed. There are four entities who could have and should have relatively straightforwardly avoided this death. 1. The woman shouldn't have crossed the street there and then. 2. The safety driver shouldn't have been looking at her phone (if that's indeed what she was doing). 3. Uber's automation should have caused the vehicle to brake much sooner. 4. That street should have been designed much safer. The design of a lit crosswalk on the median encourages people to cross there, so much stronger discouragement is required. Furthermore, a 35mph limit in an area with pedestrians is going to regularly cause pedestrian fatalities. That's a trade-off most people seem willing to make, but if you make that trade-off you have to own it. If the speed limit was 20mph that woman would be alive today. As far as I can see it, all 4 entities are 100% responsible for the death of the pedestrian. None of those 4 entities passed the "reasonable person" test with their actions, therefore all 4 are fully responsible. Sure you can argue all you want on whether one entity's misbehaviour is more egregious than the others. It doesn't matter; all 4 engaged in behaviour that regularly kills people at a rate much higher than acceptable.
- neffy 9y ago
  Sure, fine. But this is the world as it is. Badly designed roads everywhere - very, very occasionally with enough accidents one gets fixed. (Keep an eye on local news for that one). People crossing where they "shouldn't" - all the time. Wearing black clothes - hey try cycling at night, they're all over the bicycle paths like that - thank heaven for LED lights. This is what automated cars have to be able to solve. The real world is not a special case.
phyller 9y ago
This is not about legal or illegal. If the Uber program is unable to detect a large object like that in the middle of the road using lasers, they shouldn't be driving on public roads at lethal speeds. That's all there is to it. If autonomous cars mean that whenever a little kid runs out into the street after a ball and they aren't on a crosswalk, they get run down, or the cars smash full speed into any obstructions in the road, then I don't think they are ready for public testing, though I strongly suspect this is an Uber specific problem. And not only are they apparently incapable of handling the most basic emergency you can think of, but they are trying to spin it like it's not their fault instead of immediately identifying what went wrong. This makes it appear that not only are they incapable but untrustworthy too. These are dangerous machines going down public roads, they have at least as much responsility as the rest of us to not hit people with their cars. And I don't get to hit people with my car just because they are Jay walking, it's night, and I'm not paying attention. Half the people in NYC would be dead already. The autonomous car can't see what is ahead well enough to avoid a potential collision? Just like a human driver, it should slow down. Otherwise these things should still be getting refined on a private course.
w0utert 9y ago
>> And like 3-5 million other people a year, the homeless person walking across the street was killed in a car accident. 3-5 million people a year? Are you adding all road fatalities worldwide together here, including those in countries with fatality rates that are literally 100 times that of any developed country, and which are by causes completely unrelated to the kinds of problems autonomous cars try to solve? The number of road fatalities in all of the US is close to 40K last year. Still a lot, but almost over 100 times less than the figure you quoted. The number of non-vehicle deaths (like pedestrians) is measured in the hundreds [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

amelius 9y ago

Cruise control is different because you still have your hands on the wheel.

ducktoller 9y ago
A fully autonomous car is different, too. The person at the wheel when that woman was killed was responsible for stepping on the brakes if necessary. And when I have cruise control on, I'm also responsible for stepping on the brakes if necessary.
- amelius 9y ago
  Yeah, but with cruise control, at least having your hands on the wheel forces you to pay attention. Really, I think Uber should have used tech to make sure the driver is alert. And test whether the driver can stay alert in a simulator. It's too easy to blame the driver.
  - pmyteh 9y ago
    It's even worse than that, sadly. The tech is called 'driver vigilance devices' and are common on the railways. Although they're better than nothing, it turns out that real drivers end up operating the device automatically, even if they're not alert. It may simply not be possible to engineer your way around.

salvar 9y ago

What is the significance of the person being homeless?

ducktoller 9y ago
It's a descriptor, the same way "man" or "woman" is a descriptor. Descriptors help you picture a situation more clearly.
- salvar 9y ago
  Fair enough. It felt like a wholly unnecessary descriptor to me, intended to lessen the value of that person's life.
- jmalicki 9y ago
  Nothing about whether or not the person involved happened to have a permanent place of residence is a relevant descriptor to the situation at hand.
  - brianwawok 9y ago
    Great, and neither does their hair color, their # of kids, their name, their birthplace, or any of the other 100 details we normally include. Would you prefer all news articles were: > Someone was walking and a car hit and killed them. And that is the end of the story?
YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
It's a masterstroke of reporting ingenuity. If you're the kind of person who thinks homeless people are useless garbage that deserves to be run over, you'll think the article is pointing this out to inform you that what happened was not a big deal and the person walking out in front of the car was at fault. If you're the kind of person who considers homelesness an affront to the dignity of human societies that tolerate it, you'll think that the article is pointing out the tragic angle of a woman already suffering from exclusion and poverty being run over by the malfunction of an extremely expensive piece of equipment that should be recalled at once. If you're somewhere in between, you'll still gravitate towards one of the extremes. In any case, mentioning that Elen Herzberg was homeless is only there as an appeal to emotion. By the way- Elen Herzberg's friends and family have said she was not homeless. I recall, I think, a stepdaughter, saying that she had "issues with homelessness" but had recently turned her life around and was starting a new job.

seren 9y ago

They are also responsible for the test setup, the behavior and training of their employees. If all their drivers, which ultimately are the latest safety when everything fails, are routinely not following the process that is an issue. Maybe you need to have 2 drivers, maybe you need to randomly monitor the behavior of the driver remotely, but you have to demonstrate some active measures your took, to demonstrate the safety of the test. You cannot just say "not my fault". I am not saying that Uber have not followed a rigorous procedure I don't know. But saying it is their fault or not seems a bit premature.

obeattie 9y ago
Waymo mentions this in their safety report, which I think is interesting, and relevant: > Advanced driver-assist technologies were one of the first technologies our teams explored. In 2012 we developed and tested a Level 3 system that would drive autonomously on the freeway in a single lane but would still require a driver to take over at a moment’s notice. During our internal testing, however, we found that human drivers over-trusted the technology and were not monitoring the roadway carefully enough to be able to safely take control when needed. > As driver-assist features become more advanced, drivers are often asked to transition from passenger to driver in a matter of seconds, often in challenging or complex situations with little context of the scene ahead. The more tasks the vehicle is responsible for, the more complicated and vulnerable this moment of transition becomes.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

pjc50 9y ago

Asserting that the person who was run over broke the law is victim-blaming of the highest order. The claim that the ""driver"" was texting suggests that they are at fault, but the whole "safety driver" concept is flawed; the less the driver has to intervene and take control, the less likely they are to remain alert and willing to jump in and take control. You almost need a "fault injection" system that gives back control once every 5-10 minutes just to keep them awake.

LogicalBorg 9y ago

I think it's incorrect to say that the woman was looking at her phone. She was looking down and to the right of the steering wheel, which is where Uber places a monitoring tablet (an iPad) in their self-driving vehicles (where the radio is). Here's an article that shows the sort of thing she would be looking at, an animation of road conditions: http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-driverless-car-interior-photos-2016-12 http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-driverless-car-interior-... If you actually examine her behavior, in the space of ten seconds, she manages to: * Look down at the tablet and watch the animation * Look up at the road * Scan the lane to the left (she was in the right lane) * Look forward again * Look down at the tablet again * Look up again just as the accident occurs She is systematically scanning her environment and appears to be alert and engaged. The problem is that there is only one test driver, who has to divide her attention between the tablet and the road. Often two drivers are used, and then one watches the tablet and the other watches the road. I think it is unfair to accuse her of inattention when she appears to be doing the job exactly as it is designed. The reason everyone says "she was looking at her phone!" is because they don't understand the setup of how Uber's self-driving car works. They are only familiar with being bored and looking at their phone while driving. They think the test driver's job is to just stare out of the window all day, which is not correct.

tallanvor 9y ago
The tablet in that article is in the back seat, not up front, and the photos they show of the driver area doesn't suggest any screens that would require the driver to be looking down like the person was doing in the video. I know that when I was taught to drive we were told to continually scan ahead of us, our side mirrors, and the rear view mirror and basically only take our eyes off the road to check our speed. --This is definitely NOT what the individual in the driver's seat was doing.
- LogicalBorg 9y ago
  There are tablets in the front and back (https://cdn.geekwire.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Front-_-Rear-iPads_-On-trip-view-630x354.png https://cdn.geekwire.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Front-_-...). You were taught to drive manually, not in an Uber self-driving car. If you can find a video of an Uber driving who is driving as they were instructed to do, they would look exactly like her.

crispyporkbites 9y ago

> From the video of the crash, it looks like the woman at the wheel was looking at their phone. How do you know that? They could have been monitoring the car in another way. Also, it’s pretty obvious that if a car is fully automated, the driver isn’t going to pay attention. If that was you, or any other human the situation would have been the same. The car screwed up, it should have seen the pedestrian. The safety mechanism of having a driver behind the wheel didn’t work either, and we all know it doesn’t work.

michaelt 9y ago

Why is no one acknowledging that this woman was responsible for taking over the wheel if necessary for any reason. Nobody in the industry really believes safety drivers work, beyond the early point in testing where they're intervening regularly. It is widely known [1, 2, 3] that it's extremely difficult for humans to remain vigilant when monitoring systems for rare events. Airport baggage screening systems perform "threat image projection" where they show the operator knives and guns from time to time, just to break up the monotony and reward attentiveness. Beyond early testing, safety drivers are there to make the public/politicians feel safer, for situations where a slow response is better than none at all, and for more cynical companies, so you can use them as scapegoats in situations like this one. [1] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ece2/465ed2258585ebb8055fd76997cda6b606af.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ece2/465ed2258585ebb8055fd7... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5633607/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5633607/ [3] http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0018720813501550 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/001872081350155...

dmix 9y ago
Even regardless of her lack of full attention, from the video it seems quite obvious a human driver would have failed to see the woman in time even with full alertness. The only question here, and why Uber is under scrutiny, is why a Lidar system which can "see in the dark" wasn't able to detect her and react in time.
- ceejayoz 9y ago
  > from the video it seems quite obvious a human driver would have failed to see the woman in time even with full alertness The video is massively - and I'll wager intentionally - misleading. There's no chance the car was making decisions from a $20 dashcam. Here's what a better camera (looks like a smartphone camera) sees in the same spot (at about 33 seconds - you can see the signs, lights, and terrain match the Uber video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XOVxSCG8u0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XOVxSCG8u0
  - whateversclever 9y ago

arkades 9y ago

>There was a person at the wheel. That person wasn't paying full attention to the road. From the video of the crash, it looks like the woman at the wheel was looking at their phone. >Why is no one acknowledging that this woman was responsible for taking over the wheel if necessary for any reason. The woman was part of their safety program, but ultimate responsibility for the effectiveness and failures of said program lies with them. For instance, Other driver assist programs (eg, Cadillac) have eye tracking and hand sensors in the wheel. If your eyes leave the road or hands leave the wheel escalating alarms are initiated until driver assist is deactivated. This is a technology that takes into account normal human behavior. Uber did not do this. Uber previously used two person teams, to minimize tedium and lapses in awareness that emerge when a single person as the job of staring out an uneventful window for hour(s) at a time. This is a policy that takes into account normal human behavior. They did not do this. Either or both of these could have prevented this death. Both of these decisions occur at a level above the proximal driver-pedestrian interaction.

seanmcdirmid 9y ago
Those are level 1 or level 2 systems, not level 4 ones. In the former systems, the driver must and will intervene often, in the latter intervention is really really rare. It would get painfully boring very quickly in a level 4 system to have the driver on the wheel at all time but not do anything. The same problem arises in airplanes with modern autopilots.

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago

>> And why is no one acknowledging that a homeless person walked out into the middle of the street at night in a black sweatshirt. I'm guessing, because a lot of people wear black clothes and self-driving cars must be able to deal with that, too. If safety-critical systems can't react to a common real-world situation then they 're just not safe enough to operate in the real world. You might as well ask what was this woman doing crossing a road at night where even human drivers have reduced visibility. Well- people might cross roads at any time of day (legal issues aside- jaywalking is a very US-centric thing btw). Roads and cars must be designed so as to be safe under this assumption and drivers must be trained enough to deal with the situation. What is the alternative? Make everyone wear high-visibility vests, or carry special self-driving car beacons when they go outside? I've actually heard both of those ideas since Elen Herzberg was killed and they're both on the near side of the absurd (so I'm sure someone will come up with something even more out there). But, if tech that is supposed to make our lives easier is too dangerous, the answer is not to make our lives harder to accommodate it. That would defeate the purpose of the technology in the first place.

mtgx 9y ago

Because Uber and possibly most other self-driving car makers aren't doing it right. First off, Waymo, Ford, and even Volvo (whose car was in the accident) have said that they want to skip Level 3 because expecting people to actually watch the road while they're "self-driven" is not reasonable. They saw from initial testing that the drivers were dosing off. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-17/ford-s-dozing-engineers-side-with-google-in-full-autonomy-push https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-17/ford-s-do... And I didn't know this until now, but it looks like Toyota is now thinking the same: http://www.motortrend.com/news/toyota-might-skip-level-3-autonomy/ http://www.motortrend.com/news/toyota-might-skip-level-3-aut... Second, if they were to at least attempt to do it right (like Tesla is doing now, but didn't do in the beginning either) is to force drivers to keep their hands on the wheel at all times. Also, Uber could have been watching its drivers with the cameras, and fired those that didn't stick with the program. And all of this doesn't even mention how Uber's self-driving system seems to be terrible. Lidar wasn't working, the car didn't brake, and they've had one intervention per 13 miles while Waymo has one per 5600 miles. So, my point is, Uber, the company, still seems to share most of the blame here, for all of those different reasons.

Aspyre 9y ago
You are making a lot of assumptions.

bryanlarsen 9y ago

Even if the driver and the woman crossing the street were both to blame, it doesn't mean that Uber was any less to blame. Accidents in critical situations are typically multi-system failures, and every failure needs to be addressed. There are four entities who could have and should have relatively straightforwardly avoided this death. 1. The woman shouldn't have crossed the street there and then. 2. The safety driver shouldn't have been looking at her phone (if that's indeed what she was doing). 3. Uber's automation should have caused the vehicle to brake much sooner. 4. That street should have been designed much safer. The design of a lit crosswalk on the median encourages people to cross there, so much stronger discouragement is required. Furthermore, a 35mph limit in an area with pedestrians is going to regularly cause pedestrian fatalities. That's a trade-off most people seem willing to make, but if you make that trade-off you have to own it. If the speed limit was 20mph that woman would be alive today. As far as I can see it, all 4 entities are 100% responsible for the death of the pedestrian. None of those 4 entities passed the "reasonable person" test with their actions, therefore all 4 are fully responsible. Sure you can argue all you want on whether one entity's misbehaviour is more egregious than the others. It doesn't matter; all 4 engaged in behaviour that regularly kills people at a rate much higher than acceptable.

neffy 9y ago
Sure, fine. But this is the world as it is. Badly designed roads everywhere - very, very occasionally with enough accidents one gets fixed. (Keep an eye on local news for that one). People crossing where they "shouldn't" - all the time. Wearing black clothes - hey try cycling at night, they're all over the bicycle paths like that - thank heaven for LED lights. This is what automated cars have to be able to solve. The real world is not a special case.

phyller 9y ago

This is not about legal or illegal. If the Uber program is unable to detect a large object like that in the middle of the road using lasers, they shouldn't be driving on public roads at lethal speeds. That's all there is to it. If autonomous cars mean that whenever a little kid runs out into the street after a ball and they aren't on a crosswalk, they get run down, or the cars smash full speed into any obstructions in the road, then I don't think they are ready for public testing, though I strongly suspect this is an Uber specific problem. And not only are they apparently incapable of handling the most basic emergency you can think of, but they are trying to spin it like it's not their fault instead of immediately identifying what went wrong. This makes it appear that not only are they incapable but untrustworthy too. These are dangerous machines going down public roads, they have at least as much responsility as the rest of us to not hit people with their cars. And I don't get to hit people with my car just because they are Jay walking, it's night, and I'm not paying attention. Half the people in NYC would be dead already. The autonomous car can't see what is ahead well enough to avoid a potential collision? Just like a human driver, it should slow down. Otherwise these things should still be getting refined on a private course.

w0utert 9y ago

>> And like 3-5 million other people a year, the homeless person walking across the street was killed in a car accident. 3-5 million people a year? Are you adding all road fatalities worldwide together here, including those in countries with fatality rates that are literally 100 times that of any developed country, and which are by causes completely unrelated to the kinds of problems autonomous cars try to solve? The number of road fatalities in all of the US is close to 40K last year. Still a lot, but almost over 100 times less than the figure you quoted. The number of non-vehicle deaths (like pedestrians) is measured in the hundreds [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...