14 ms·

If Uber is not found legally at fault which seems likely given the circumstances and based on opinions from people with legal expertise in these cases, I highly

• CydeWeys 9y ago
  Self-driving cars have to be at least as safe as human-driven ones for them to ever become accepted and thus widespread. Realistically, they need to be many times safer than human-driven cars for acceptance. It doesn't matter who's technically at fault; they cannot cause more deaths than human drivers. Everyone makes mistakes and they don't deserve to be killed by an algorithm for it.
  • TheGRS 9y ago
    Probably the best point I've seen made by this. Humans are not computers and will do illogical things like jay walk across busy streets. Can't say I know the details for this particular situation, but many times a driver will see the telltale signs that someone is about to run across the street before it happens.
    • scaryclam 9y ago
      Hazard perception is actually a part of the driving test in the UK. They make candidates sit in front of a computer, watch clips of situations and click the mouse when they think there's a dangerous situation developing.
  • Rapzid 9y ago
    I don't think "deserves" belongs in the discussion. It's an unpopular opinion, but I believe the pedestrian caused this situation by putting themselves in a dangerous situation and not paying attention. That can get you killed in many situations regards less of if you deserve it or not. I agree mostly with what you are saying, just not the undertone that this infortunate accident is somehow evidence of AVs "causing" more deaths than human drivers.
    • bdcravens 9y ago
      > I believe the pedestrian caused this situation by putting themselves in a dangerous situation and not paying attention That's the thing - every driver has faced those situations, hundreds, thousands of times. Odds are very good a failure one of those times would have significant penalty for any driver, even if it wasn't their fault.
    • the_grue 9y ago
      > It's an unpopular opinion, but I believe the pedestrian caused this situation by putting themselves in a dangerous situation Interesting! What reasons do you have to think this is an unpopular opinion? To me, it sounds like an obvious conclusion.
      • CamperBob2 9y ago
        As you're noticing, you get modded down to goatse.cx territory on here for suggesting that it might actually not be a good idea for pedestrians to step into traffic without looking. You also get nastygrams from the admins for posting what they judge to be off-topic material or flamebait. I don't get it either, but HN is what it is. Yes, this should have been an easily-avoidable accident for any autonomous vehicle that's permitted to use public roadways. No, no one has a good excuse for what happened, including Uber, its engineers, or its attending driver. Yes, the pedestrian was either intoxicated or suicidally stupid. No, the vehicle shouldn't have hit her, and yes, it's very unfortunate that it did. Now let's find out why it hit her and fix it. Because several other people probably died in human-caused auto accidents while I was typing this post.
  • yerasame 9y ago
    I think in this particular incident, though, there was a human behind the wheel who also failed to react to the pedestiran.
    • CydeWeys 9y ago
      The "human safety driver" concept is inherently flawed and is incompatible with the way our minds are wired. You cannot have a person sitting still in bored inaction for hundreds of hours in a row and expect them to remain attentive enough for a split second reaction in an emergency situation. So yes, I am discounting the safety driver entirely. Autonomous cars need to drive themselves safely. That person was in the driver's seat as a scapegoat in reserve.
      • bkor 9y ago
        1) On average the Uber car had to be intervened every 20 km or so. That's every 20-30min. If it happens that often, the additional driver would have to be doing something regularly during the day. Not looking so often at the road is dangerous. Uber should've been monitoring for this as well, just like they do with train drivers. 2) The train drivers in Europe are specifically hired to do just that. The ones in Netherlands are tested yearly. They're put on suspension when they run a red sign. Every so often they have to go through a special test for their attention span training. Uber obviously didn't do any of that.
  • Consultant32452 9y ago
    I'm going to say something that I suspect many will quietly agree with but may not be willing to say out loud. I'm confident that self-driving cars will eventually be safer than human driven ones. I'm not confident that this can be realistically achieved without killing some unfortunate bystanders in the process of getting to that point. That doesn't mean we should accept these cars running amok killing people all over the place. It doesn't mean I think this specific case involving Uber is "reasonable" either. I just think, in a general sense, a realist has to be able to try to find some balance between short term lives lost and long term lives saved.
    • mcny 9y ago
      I absolutely agree that some lives will be lost in the name of progress. I also hate the NIMBY ism showing up in these threads. However, I don't care for Uber or its ambition. I'm more worried that Uber's negligence will set the whole industry back with a public backlash.
      • scoggs 9y ago
        I think the most uncomfortable part that people won't bring up is the fact that cars are essentially high speed, high weight metal death machines on wheels. Just a quick Google search and the first results give me this info: >Nearly 1.3 million people die in road crashes each year, on average 3,287 deaths a day. An additional 20-50 million are injured or disabled. More than half of all road traffic deaths occur among young adults ages 15-44. From this page: http://asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road-users/road-safety-facts/road-crash-statistics http://asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road-users/road-safet... Of course unmanned driving tests will happen at a very, very small fraction of the amount compared with manned drivers we have to pull stats from but I don't think it will take long, if the unmanned tests persist enough to conjure up the required amount of data needed to make a legitimate comparison to prove that unmanned driving will be markedly safer.
        • selectodude 9y ago
          >Over 90% of all road fatalities occur in low and middle-income countries, which have less than half of the world's vehicles. The only person who died in a road fatality in phoenix that day was killed by a self driving car.
  • olalonde 9y ago
    It's hard to say for sure but the released video[0] makes it seem like most human drivers wouldn't have avoided the pedestrian in time. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pO9iRUx5wmM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pO9iRUx5wmM
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • sfifs 9y ago
      Human eye's dynamic range perception in the dark is far superior to the poor quality video camera that was released. The woman had crossed two lanes of the road before coming in front of the car - ie. fairly unrestricted range of view. A human driver paying attention would almost certainly have seen her and stopped or at least slowed down to a level where this would not have been a fatality.
      • bkor 9y ago
        Aside from that, the LIDAR did see the person. The system just didn't respond at all.
    • smileysteve 9y ago
      I regularly drive 50mph on unlit roads in a rural setting where a deer could walk out at anytime -- and I hope that I can swerve and brake to miss it -- or at least slow down. No excuse for a modern car at only 38mph.
  • Houshalter 9y ago
    The first cars killed way more people than horses and they didn't get banned.
    • sfifs 9y ago
      The governing system in the world at that time was not really universal democracy. It was mostly rule by the rich (who bought those cars) even in places which were ostensibly democratic.
      • majewsky 9y ago
        Soooo like today?
      • nugi 9y ago
        But this is untrue. Many regs were in play due to wagons, that applied even to the rich. Do you have a source, or just playing identity politics?
        • sfifs 9y ago
          Sure. In most of the Western world, Universal Suffrage came only after World War 1. Till then there were generally barriers of class, race or gender on who could vote. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_suffrage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_suffrage
          • Houshalter 9y ago
            That's not "rule by the rich". The middle class and even much of the poor still voted. You just had to own land, which isn't exactly a high barrier. The point was voting should be one vote per household, by the head of the family.
    • nicky0 9y ago
      The first cars had to have a man with a flag walk in front of them when passing through towns.
  • shafyy 9y ago
    Sure, but aren't they already if you look at the accident per total miles driven ratio? Of course, there will be accidents and people will die. People die every day in car accidents.
    • slavik81 9y ago
      No, Uber's self-driving vehicles are significantly more deadly on a per-mile basis. That's the whole problem.
      • shafyy 9y ago
        I'm not talking about Uber. I mean in total across companies (incl. Waymo).
        • slavik81 9y ago
          The human driver fatality rate is roughly 1 per 100M miles. There has been 1 fatality with less than 20M self-driving miles across all companies. So, if you group all the companies together, they are still more dangerous than human drivers. But frankly, I think grouping Uber together with more responsible companies does the whole industry a disservice.
  • lostlogin 9y ago
    > Self-driving cars have to be at least as safe as human-driven ones for them to ever become accepted and thus widespread. Do they? There are other technologies that started out less safe but were accepted and became safer after acceptance, further boosting their popularity. Planes and cars would be examples and mills in the industrial revolution, but there are undoubtably others.
    • stctgion 9y ago
      Both of those examples occurred at a time when human life held less value
      • lostlogin 9y ago
        Good point. I’m struggling to think of a recent example but maybe smart phones? How you would find stats on deaths due to smart phones though? Obviously lives have been saved with them too, but the number lost due to distraction must be considerable.
    • gambiting 9y ago
      Machines cannot have an operating mode where they can kill someone, even if in the grand scheme of things they are saving lives. Prime example: Therac radiotheraphy machines - it's without a doubt that these machines have saved countless lives, but they had a weird error state where instead of treating the patient, they would kill them instead. At that point we didn't go "oh well, a human operated radiotherapy machine would have killed more people because humans are inherently worse at this stuff" - we banned all of them until the problem could be found, rectified, the solution tested and implemented. It also contributed to much stronger industry testing standards for medical devices. I'd say an automonous car which can completely fail to react to a person in its path is firmly in the "therac-level of failure" category - even if on average they crash much less than humans do. They should all be taken off road and only allowed once we determine through rigorous industrial-level proof testing that it can't happen again.
      • lostlogin 9y ago
  • xiphias 9y ago
    The main problem Uber has is that Waymo is already much safer driver than an average driver, and extending aggressively. It is an existential risk for Uber.
  • bambax 9y ago
    > Realistically, they need to be many times safer than human-driven cars for acceptance. Yes, many times yes. The promise of self-driving cars is that they are totally safe, that is, nothing will happen except in exceptional, unforeseeable circumstances. The reason for this is, in a self-driving car, nobody's in charge, and therefore, any incident (let alone, a fatal accident) is immensely more complicated than the same incident with a human driver. (It's obvious that a self-driving car with a safety driver at the wheel doesn't provide any benefit whatsoever and isn't, in fact, a self-driving car). A self-driving car needs to: - transport people who are unable to drive or are "irresponsible" in the legal sense (kids, seniors, drunk people, injured/sick people going to the hospital, etc.) - drive itself with absolutely nobody onboard The analogy with trains is flawed because trains have drivers that deal with problems when there is one. Even "autonomous" metro trains are monitored individually. In fact, save for special conditions like a closed network on a campus, etc., I'm less and less sure self-driving cars will ever be a thing.
    • kmonsen 9y ago
      It will be a thing, at least in the US where in many places public transport is close to non-existing. It could take a long time outside limited "safe" areas.
• lobotryas 9y ago
  I agree with you. The driverless car pedestrian strike is getting so much attention because it's new tech. I guess it's also getting attention because sone people think self driving tech is meant to be flawless instead of simply better than a human driver, on average.
  • underwater 9y ago
    It’s getting attention because Uber are a known for cutting corners, and it’s very likely their shitty code killed a person. You don’t get to hand wave away a death with the justification that the tech is better “on average”. The tech gets a pass when they demonstrate that they took reasonable steps to protect the public. That means not shipping half baked product with crossed fingers so they can try and increase their stock price.
    • scotty79 9y ago
      > Uber are a known for cutting corners, and it’s very likely their shitty code killed a person By that logic each time Uber driver kills someone you should be angry at Uber for cutting corners by hiring shitty drivers.
      • nugi 9y ago
        What makes you think we arent? I too, have a disdain for bad drivers, and even more for companies who pay bad drivers to be on the road. Real, or automated.
• KKKKkkkk1 9y ago
  I can totally see Dara Khosrowshahi shutting down the self-driving program, given the reports that he already considered this possibility right after he was hired.
• usrusr 9y ago
  > Further, we don't stop using trains, or buses when a pedestrian makes an error and gets killed because they "could have not been hit, maybe". That argument might be convincing if the car had detected the pedestrian, slammed the brakes and evaded, but still could not overcome physics in time to prevent fatal injuries. But that's not what happened. We could have built self-driving cars that mindlessly follow the road no matter what fifty years ago, but we didn't, because that kind of vehicle has no place on a public road. What changed now is not that the same danger is suddenly ok because it's 2018, what changed is that some self driving cars are supposedly much better now. Those that are not need to continue to be confined to the test track.
• petre 9y ago
  Even if Uber it's not legally at fault, they have acted irresponsibly (not limiting the vehicle's speed, disabling the vehicle's builtin safeguards), which resulted in a self-driving car hitting and killing a person. Doesnt't really matter who's at fault: a self driving car killed a person so the next thing you know there's going to be public backlash against self driving vehicles, just as it happened with nuclear energy. Automated transit is protected with platform screen doors, at least in Paris, France. This is a very good example of responsible automation. Also the EZ10 driverless bus which travels at 20 kmh and the Waymo driverless cars which also cruise at low speeds.
  • tajen 9y ago
    Even for humans: In France the Badinter law (1975) says in case of a collision between a car and a pedestrian, the car is guilty. Penalties can be nonexistent if the pedestrian threw himself towards the car, but the driver bears the theoretical responsibility. Which is quite good in pedagogy: You have something that can kill, in your hands, you get the responsibility of not committing damage.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
• panarky 9y ago
  > we don't stop using trains, or buses when a pedestrian makes an error and gets killed This isn't about autonomous cars as a general mode of transport, it's about Uber's autonomous cars specifically. If Uber's cars are more dangerous than human-driven cars, then Uber's cars shouldn't be on public roads. Waymo's cars can continue to operate since from all reports it appears they've been appropriately conservative when managing risk. And don't blame the pedestrian. There was plenty of time to stop or swerve to keep this woman alive, but Uber's systems and "safety driver" failed miserably.
  • fapjacks 9y ago
    > There was plenty of time to stop or swerve to keep this woman alive You have never been in a serious car wreck. I've been in three in my life and I am telling you, any human being that wasn't a racecar driver in a state of flow would not have been able to stop the car before hitting that pedestrian. It's terrible, yes, and Uber's autonomous vehicle should have stopped, but it simply wouldn't be possible for a typical human being to take appropriate action in that window of time when the pedestrian came out of the shadow. One way or the other, whatever "action" you think someone could take in that particular moment would have resulted in an injured or killed pedestrian and/or an injured or killed driver. In this specific situation, Uber's autonomous vehicle was no more dangerous than a vehicle driven by a human being. People do this all the time with things like this. Car wrecks, combat, disasters, fights, emergencies. Everybody has the inside track on what the failures were and why they wouldn't have done it that way and why they wouldn't have failed in that situation.
    • jackvalentine 9y ago
      The pedestrian wasn’t in shadow, the terrible low-light performance dash cam only made it seem like she was. If the safety driver had been paying attention she would have seen her and been able to stop. If visibility really was that low then they shouldn’t have been driving that fast - drive to the conditions.
    • thomasz 9y ago
      Have you seen the video from the guy who drove the same route?[1] Streetlights do not produce a string of light dots surrounded by complete darkness. Either the footage has been darkened, or, more likely, the camera just has incredibly shitty dynamic range. Furthermore, the driver did not have his eyes on the road, he was looking at a display, or probably his phone. I'm not exactly sure, but it doesn't even look like he had his hands on the wheel. Which isn't surprising, like, at all. You cannot sit somebody into a car without anything to do for hours, and expect them to be able to step in fast enough. If you want those people to stay alert, you have to take the appropriate steps like driving in pairs and extremely frequent rests. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XOVxSCG8u0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XOVxSCG8u0
• PeterStuer 9y ago
  If train or bus operating companies were found to be criminally negligent, they would be in trouble as well. Your strawman about 'stop using ...' and your manipulative framing ('hating') are distasteful given the circumstances.
  • Rapzid 9y ago
    That's just, like, your opinion man.
• throwbacktictac 9y ago
  I don't understand why people say Uber is not at fault. 1.) The lidar system should have detected the woman with plenty of time to dodge her. The car could have manoeuvred to the empty lane to avoid the collision.
  • scotty79 9y ago
    I think it's too early to demand higher level of proactivity from driverless cars than could be provided by a person behind the wheel. We know that level of safety provided by a driver is possible. But higher level is for now just speculative, even though additional sensors exist. You'd be punishing developing technology for not achieving the perfection yet.
    • throwbacktictac 9y ago
      But I think we should at least expect it to perform as well as a sober driver. I'm sure the woman would be alive today if there were a human driving the car.
      • Rapzid 9y ago
        I'm mean, are you really sure or just saying that? I'd be shocked if you were really, literally sure of that alternate outcome in a system as complex as the universe by simply replacing the AI with a human. Humans don't "see" stuff just because the light is entering their eyeballs. A human driver could have been checking their mirrors, the radio, distracted by another pedestrian on the other side of the road, and or just plane not registered the person. The motorcycle safety course teaches you to not use eye contact as a means of determining that a driver "sees" you. That's right, an attentive driver actively looking for on coming traffic during daylight can "see" right through you. I'm really, literally sure she would not have been hit by that car had she not walked out in front of it..
        • throwbacktictac 9y ago
          Perhaps I drank too much of the LIDAR cool-aid. The woman was 2/3's the way across the high way - she didn't just materialize. What's the purpose of this 360 degree 3D map if the AI isn't using it to avoid a collision?
• justin66 9y ago
  > If Uber is not found legally at fault which seems likely given the circumstances and based on opinions from people with legal expertise in these cases It's possible somebody said that they won't be held criminally liable. I would find it quite a stretch for anyone to say they won't be open to a pretty devastating civil action.
• smileysteve 9y ago
  Jaywalking is not the same as walking on train tracks --- and the U.S. (and many other countries) heavily regulate how train tracks are divided and secured from pedestrians to prevent these deaths, and trespassing. There is a reason why yardmen have a reputation of beating homeless.