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It is the case that even very good driverless cars of the future will cause fatalities now and then. Even if they're safer than human drivers. Don't conflate

It is the case that even very good driverless cars of the future will cause fatalities now and then. Even if they're safer than human drivers. Don't conflate that with Uber's screw-up here. This wasn't a situation where a fatality was unavoidable or where a very safe system had a once-in-a-blue-moon problem. It's one where they just drove around not-very-safe cars.

dubbel 8y ago
> It is the case that even very good driverless cars of the future will cause fatalities now and then. Even if they're safer than human drivers. And that is why I am so mad at Uber. They are compromising the public trust in autonomous cars with their reckless release policy. And thereby potentially endangering even more lives, as we have to convince the public of the advantages of this technology.
- sanderjd 8y ago
  I agree with all of this except the tense: haven't they shut the whole thing down at this point with no immediate plans to start it up again? Or am I mis-remembering that.
  - bagels 8y ago
    They were testing in three places: San Francisco, Arizona, and Pittsburgh. They didn't want to get a license from California (probably because they couldn't follow the safety regulations), so they threw a tantrum and moved to AZ. Then after this fatality, they shut the AZ program down and are just testing in Pittsburgh.
    - aetherson 8y ago
      That's not true. They shut down everywhere after this fatality. They just said that they'll shut down AZ permanently (not that AZ would probably let them do it anyway), and resume testing in Pittsburgh sometime soon, in a more limited way (which apparently the Pittsburgh mayor isn't wild about).
nkoren 8y ago
Agreed. Uber disabled a safety feature that would have prevented this fatality -- but that doesn't mean that the automation was therefore safe apart from Uber's mismanagement of it. It's entirely believable that had that safety feature been fully enabled, it would have also e-braked in 1,000 other situations which didn't result in a collision. And false-positive e-brake events are definitely worth avoiding: they can get you rear-ended and injure unbelted passengers. This doesn't mean that Uber therefore did the right thing in disabling the system; it probably means that the system shouldn't have been given control of the car in the first place. But my point is that there is no readiness level where driverless cars will ever be safe -- not in the same way that trains and planes are safe. The driving domain itself is intrinsically dangerous, and changing the vehicle control system doesn't change the nature of that domain. So if we actually care about safety, then we need to be changing the way that streets are designed and the rules by which they are used.

dubbel 8y ago

> It is the case that even very good driverless cars of the future will cause fatalities now and then. Even if they're safer than human drivers. And that is why I am so mad at Uber. They are compromising the public trust in autonomous cars with their reckless release policy. And thereby potentially endangering even more lives, as we have to convince the public of the advantages of this technology.

sanderjd 8y ago
I agree with all of this except the tense: haven't they shut the whole thing down at this point with no immediate plans to start it up again? Or am I mis-remembering that.
- bagels 8y ago
  They were testing in three places: San Francisco, Arizona, and Pittsburgh. They didn't want to get a license from California (probably because they couldn't follow the safety regulations), so they threw a tantrum and moved to AZ. Then after this fatality, they shut the AZ program down and are just testing in Pittsburgh.
  - aetherson 8y ago
    That's not true. They shut down everywhere after this fatality. They just said that they'll shut down AZ permanently (not that AZ would probably let them do it anyway), and resume testing in Pittsburgh sometime soon, in a more limited way (which apparently the Pittsburgh mayor isn't wild about).

nkoren 8y ago

Agreed. Uber disabled a safety feature that would have prevented this fatality -- but that doesn't mean that the automation was therefore safe apart from Uber's mismanagement of it. It's entirely believable that had that safety feature been fully enabled, it would have also e-braked in 1,000 other situations which didn't result in a collision. And false-positive e-brake events are definitely worth avoiding: they can get you rear-ended and injure unbelted passengers. This doesn't mean that Uber therefore did the right thing in disabling the system; it probably means that the system shouldn't have been given control of the car in the first place. But my point is that there is no readiness level where driverless cars will ever be safe -- not in the same way that trains and planes are safe. The driving domain itself is intrinsically dangerous, and changing the vehicle control system doesn't change the nature of that domain. So if we actually care about safety, then we need to be changing the way that streets are designed and the rules by which they are used.