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Uber Not Criminally Liable in Death of Woman Hit by Self-Driving Car

215 points by abhisuri97 8y ago

rb808 8y ago
The law around this is so important. When your car hurts someone, who's fault is it? What about if its completely self driving like this one? What if there is a bugfix which you didn't apply? What if a software upgrade causes a crash? Lane assist caused you to swerve into something? So many grey areas.
- ams6110 8y ago
  > When your car hurts someone, who's fault is it? Fault is a loaded word. It's your liability. That's why you have insurance.
  - hcurtiss 8y ago
    It's not always the driver's liability. Sometimes the pedestrian is at fault.
    - fucking_tragedy 8y ago
      Sometimes the manufacturer is at fault, as well.
- dmix 8y ago
  It will always be a grey area.
  - WillPostForFood 8y ago
    It is only grey as long as the law allows grey. Like some states have enacted no-fault insurance, it would be straight forward to create a no-fault framework for self driving cars. May not be a good idea as it may create bad incentives, but could be done.
- MisterBastahrd 8y ago
  "How much money does the defendant have?" seems to be the prevailing factor in assigning blame in criminal cases.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- baroffoos 8y ago
  >When your car hurts someone, who's fault is it? If its anything like the current system it will be no ones fault unless rules were broken. Its fine to kill someone in your car as long as you weren't speeding or on drugs. I assume it will be the same with self driving cars unless there was some obvious rule violation.
anth_anm 8y ago
So a woman is dead because of a self driving car being tested on a public street but the company has no criminal liability. How many people does Uber have to kill before it becomes a problem?
NoPicklez 8y ago
Interesting reading the article, from a risk perspective I would think Uber would have assessed the risks associated with using an Uber self-driving solution. Particularly mitigating automated controls to stop the car in the event it detects an emergency, given it has this capability. But I agree with the verdict, it's just strange that the vehicle has the ability to detect a potential collision but cannot apply emergency braking to prevent it.
- mnm1 8y ago
  Of course, the prosecutor is judge and jury in this case because they are not pressing charges. I'm almost certain uber would be held liable by any jury who heard that they intentionally turned off the braking that could have saved this woman's life. Then again, it is Arizona so it's not surprising that this is not even being prosecuted. Uber must be bringing in a ton of money to the state there to get off so easily.
  - jcranmer 8y ago
    I'm not so sure. Uber's defense here amounts to blaming the safety driver for the crash. They can argue that their actions improved the safety of the self-driving car (by reducing erratic movements due to false positive) so long as the safety driver is performing their job properly. Absent a smoking gun email that says "yep, we know this is unsafe, we don't care" (basically the Ford Pinto scenario), I don't think a guilty verdict is near-certain.
jimktrains2 8y ago
> While the system identified that an emergency braking maneuver was needed to mitigate a collision, the system was set up to not activate emergency braking when under computer control. > Instead, the car's system relied on the human operator to intervene as needed. "The system is not designed to alert the operator," the report notes. How are the not negligent for this specifically?
- henryfjordan 8y ago
  The law doesn't require automatic brakes and alerts on cars. Think about how many clunkers those laws would make illegal. You can't hold Uber to different legal standards, but we can certainly say they were negligent from a moral standpoint
  - jimktrains2 8y ago
    > The law doesn't require automatic brakes and alerts on cars. The law isn't written for the case when the car is under its own control. The driver is assumed to be in control of the vehicle. However, if the car is also _a_ driver, neutering its ability stop, or even ask for assistance, in an emergency should be tantamount to disability the human driver's brakes.
- hcurtiss 8y ago
  A civil suit for negligence is still available, even when not criminally liable. Two different standards. See O.J.
- Rapzid 8y ago
  If I had to review criminal negligence and pick a reason I would say that a standard of reasonable care has not been established that requires a car to be configured in a way that would have prevented the accident.
r00fus 8y ago
On one hand, I think Uber was reckless and wantonly created the conditions for this incident. On the other hand, I don't want this to be the death knell for autonomous driving experiments. On the gripping hand, it's possible that a large settlement might have been the best outcome from this tragedy for the family of the woman in question. They gain nothing from Uber's criminal liability. (edit: clarity)
- thecynicc 8y ago
  What do you mean they gain nothing? The death wouldn't have been in vain and we would immediatelly have the right precedent for reckless behaviour of self-driving providers. Quoting the report: In the six seconds before impact, the self-driving system classified the pedestrian as an unknown object, then as a vehicle, and then as a bicycle, a preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board explained. While the system identified that an emergency braking maneuver was needed to mitigate a collision, the system was set up to not activate emergency braking when under computer control. Instead, the car's system relied on the human operator to intervene as needed. "The system is not designed to alert the operator" The car knew something is terribly wrong. The company willingly set the system in a reckless manner. They did not make sure the tests were run properly. They did not set up the tested system in any way that verified the "emergency driver" was actually doing it's job By typical US corporate welfare, the verdict protects the reckless company from real consequences and instead throws the expendable min-wage scapegoat under the bus. Ironically, if the case can be used as a precedent (I don't really know common law that well), it's a death knell for real use of self driving cars. But in the meanwhile some "passengers" will get really hurt economically...
- dajohnson89 8y ago
  FTA: >Uber, which declined to comment for this story, could still be sued in civil court and be forced to pay damages. The government could also potentially pursue criminal charges against managers or employees of Uber.
- derekp7 8y ago
  I saw a post on Reddit at the time of this incident, from someone who claimed to be a former Uber backup driver. The claim was that Uber was too strict with regards to cell phones, and that if you were caught interacting with your phone while on the job you were immediately terminated. I'd like to know how true this is, and if there is a better source for this claim.
helthanatos 8y ago
Isn't most of the point of computers driving us so they can react to things we can't? I dont know why that bit would be turned off... Seems seriously problematic. Secondly, that looks like a really bad place to be pushing your bike at night.
- baroffoos 8y ago
  When you are traveling at 60km/h+ no amount of computers can save you when even reacting instantly is not enough to slow down enough. Cars, self driving or not are extremely unsafe. Sure its a bad place to be walking at night but its quite problematic that we accept that walking around without looking both ways at every step is punishable by instant death.
  - ylbss 8y ago
    We already accept this. You could also be looking both ways and be killed by a driver on their phone even with the right of way because drivers will not react in a predictable manner. We've accepted vehicles as being the #1 non-natural cause of death for years.
    - caf 8y ago
      The commenter you are replying to understands your point perfectly, and is simply saying that they find this acceptance for years to be problematic.
  - jimktrains2 8y ago
    60km/hr isn't that fast when you have multiple seconds of time to react. The reason cars are unsafe is because driver's think they're better than they are. How many times have I seen snow covered cars this week? Or excessive speeding on snow and ice covered roads? How often do people drive on the highway without anywhere near stopping distance between them and the car they're tailgating at 80mph? The actual car itself is actually an amazing reliable and safe machine. The people using them in extremely dangerous ways are largely just irresponsible.
  - 8y ago
vichu 8y ago
This is potentially precedent as a legal blocker for public adoption of self-driving cars. If I am to serve a 1 year prison sentence for faulty code or a deprecated LIDAR sensor, I don't see in what scenario I would be willing to leave my fate in the hands of a self-driving car manufacturer. Just as in the case of a chauffeur, if they are driving and commit vehicular manslaughter, I would not expect to be deemed guilty. It seems to me that it would be the benefit of self-driving car companies to own up to liability as it is to their benefit of achieving widespread adoption. For example, Volvo is in line with this idea and has publicly stated that they would accept full liability in fully autonomous operation modes[0]. In this case, I do think that some liability lies with the driver - as they were tasked specifically with prevent situations like this. What is not clear is whether or not this task is even humanly feasible given reaction times, and based off of this, whether or not Uber has been criminally negligible. Given this, I am surprised that the prosecutor seems to have absolved Uber of any blame. [0] https://www.media.volvocars.com/global/en-gb/media/pressreleases/167975/us-urged-to-establish-nationwide-federal-guidelines-for-autonomous-driving https://www.media.volvocars.com/global/en-gb/media/pressrele...
- Symmetry 8y ago
  I'd really like to see self-driving car liability treated the same way airline crashes are. Less "whose fault is this" and more "how can we prevent this same accident from ever happening again?" The second is the really important question and the one we need to keep answering to reduce the toll of driving deaths. This will mean the cars driving on our roads getting more and more regulated over time but I'm quite OK with that.
  - freddie_mercury 8y ago
    Airline crashes absolutely are treated as "whose fault is this". That's why airline crashes usually have lots of lawsuits, with millions of dollars of damages, filed after they happen. Every NTSB report has a "probable cause" section determining who or what was at fault. And then the FAA hands out fines and courts award additional damages largely based on that finding. It is true that the punishments aren't handled by the NTSB but that's more about separation of concerns & departmental remits than anything else. Is separating out "fault finding" from "punishments" a good idea? Maybe? I honestly don't know.
xutopia 8y ago
Blame the driver... of course the driver was told that the car drove itself... he was watching a show on his phone when it happened so Uber is putting the blame on him. I don't think the driver was trained properly to drive in that semi-automated driving system. Is the fault lying with him or is Uber just trying to lay the blame on him to avoid paying anything.
- jimktrains2 8y ago
  Trains have had dead man's switches for nearly 50 years at least. You can't give people the job of paying attention if there is nothing to pay attention to 80%, 90% of the time. It's not reasonable to me to expect someone to be at peak alertness while doing nothing at all.
  - smileysteve 8y ago
    It is reasonable, however, that they not be watching a cell phone when they're being paid to be a backup driver. The optics for the driver were really bad. They weren't just not paying attention, they weren't "just" eating and drinking (something accepted in American driving for the last 60 years), they weren't staring blankly into the desert, they didn't fall asleep. No, they were doing the one thing that has received the most public messaging for the last decade.
    - jimktrains2 8y ago
      > The optics for the driver were really bad. Oh don't get me wrong. I don't feel like the driver is blameless. I just mean that people not paying attention when they don't have to do anything isn't a new problem or one without what seems to be an adequate solution.
  - WillPostForFood 8y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Philadelphia_train_derailment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Philadelphia_train_derail... dead man's switches don't activate when the engineer is simply distracted.
mnm1 8y ago
Unbelievable. I wonder how many other self driving cars are out there designed to not brake even when they clearly detect an object in their path. It's ridiculous to rely on a human to intervene in such situations. This was a completely preventable homicide, yet Uber gets away with it. As I've said before, the easiest way to get away with murder is to commit it under the protection of a corporation. True, this is manslaughter, but the principle still stands. I bet they will go after the driver now and try to place blame on her despite her having an impossible job that should simply not exist because it can't be carried out. So they get away with manslaughter and a precedent is set for other car companies that no matter how negligent your system and operations are, you can kill people and get away with it as long as you find a patsy to sit behind the wheel and take the blame. With this kind of attitude, I hope self driving cars never make it to market. I no longer think they will be safer than human drivers because there is no incentive for these companies to make them safe, let alone safer.
- zeroname 8y ago
  > I bet they will go after the driver now and try to place blame on her despite her having an impossible job What's impossible about watching the street and hitting the breaks if necessary, while testing a prototype self-driving car? I would say if you can't even do that, you shouldn't be in that seat. This isn't the case where just one person is responsible. The system shouldn't have been configured that way. The driver should've been alert. The woman shouldn't have crossed the road like that. Everyone was negligent.
  - cgidriver 8y ago
    It happened because one company was greedy, and negligent, - and has the money to pay the bill. The question is, will the jury really make them pay.
    - WillPostForFood 8y ago
      It happened just as much because one driver/monitor wasn't doing their job.
    - 8y ago
sneak 8y ago
I’m not a lawyer, so forgive my ignorance, but how can a corporation be criminally liable for anything ever? It’s not like you can charge a corporation with a crime or put a corporation in prison. Corporations can’t commit crimes because they cannot act; only humans can.
- snek 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood
- anateus 8y ago
  The Ltd or LLC after many company names refer to the Limited Liability that those forms of companies confer, that protect individuals within them from personal liability. Corporations were intentionally a lot like people even before Citizens United. There's also a concept called Piercing the Corporate Veil that is intended specifically for penetrating through these legal protections in certain cases.
  - sneak 8y ago
    That limited liability is a civil one. How would you even charge a corporation with a criminal act, eg murder? Corporations cannot act, regardless of their personhood. Piercing the corporate veil, again, is a civil issue.
- telchar 8y ago
  The supreme court says corporations are people and have the rights of people (e.g. free speech). If they're people then they are subject to the criminal codes that people are subject to. I don't know how you carry out such punishments, ask the 5 guys who decided to make that the case.
dana321 8y ago
I know its bad having a machine-controlled car killing someone, but.. it will happen and we must accept it and my guess is that it will happen far less than with human operators in the long-term.
- smallgovt 8y ago
  The problem is that deaths per mile driven are currently much higher for self driving cars than humans. We don't have to just accept it. Progress can be made while still being safe -- at least, safer than how the free market would act. > The NHTSA reports a fatality rate of 1.25 deaths per 100 million miles[2], twenty five times the [4 million miles] Uber has driven. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16620736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16620736
  - smileysteve 8y ago
    One of the issues is that the car's stock system was disabled;
    - JimmyAustin 8y ago
      Absolutely not an issue. The last thing you want when developing a prototype piece of software for a 1 ton chunk of metal is another bit of software plugged in that you dont control or understand.
      - hopler 8y ago
        That's nonsense. The car had a human backup driver and human pedestrians, all not under the autonomous cars control. An automatic emergency brake doesn't prevent a computer or human driver from braking when it wants to. If the autonomous system can't even avoid interaction with emergency brake, the prototype belongs in a lab, not on a public road.
- steelframe 8y ago
  The problem is that people deeply care about the reason a bad thing happened, much more than they care that a bad thing happened.
aasasd 8y ago
Funny enough, this is about the fifth attempt to post this story to HN, with different links. It's getting barely any response.
- dajohnson89 8y ago
  Those previous attempts were successful. Perhaps you mean, "attempts to get upvoted to the front page"?
  - smallgovt 8y ago
    Yea, he's saying it's suspicious that this didn't get more upvotes. I agree.
    - dajohnson89 8y ago
      What's the angle exactly? A shadow force of HN mods, colluding with Uber, to prevent this story from getting upvotes?
wand3r 8y ago
Self-driving vehicle development has so many difficult problems to solve. The technology itself is extremely difficult to create and relies on this extremely complex compromise where vehicles are allowed (and are) operated by code but ultimately babysat by drivers. I think self-driving technology is worth the risk and worth the large amount of property damage and human injury that comes with it. However, this is a societal issue and there needs to be some sort of referendum on this. While many parallels can be drawn with space travel, those projects were tightly contained and included individuals who were specifically trained and informed of the potential dangers--there is no way to really do this at scale for self-driving tech which necessarily demands an expansive ecosystem that can't be tightly controlled nor can consent be inferred from the unknown number of people involved in this experiment.
- cgidriver 8y ago
  Indeed its worth the risk - but not at the cost of human life. And if the risk is being taken by a company, it has to pay for it - because it intends to reap the rewards? Not a woman or a negligent employee.
  - zeroname 8y ago
    > And if the risk is being taken by a company, it has to pay for it - because it intends to reap the rewards? Not a woman or a negligent employee. First of all, this is criminal liability. Uber may still be held financially liable in a civil court. Secondly, liability needs to be decided on a case by case basis. In this case, the woman (not "a woman") shouldn't have crossed the road and the operator should have been alert. Furthermore, why should a company be criminally liable for any negligent behavior of an employee? That's ridiculous.
    - cgidriver 8y ago
      > First of all, this is criminal liability. Uber may still be held financially liable in a civil court. I am waiting for the 10% of market value punishment for Uber. > Secondly, liability needs to be decided on a case by case basis. Agreed. > In this case, the woman (not "a women") shouldn't have crossed the road and the operator should have been alert. In this case, "the Uber" should have made sure it's sensors pick up the point cloud in 1/15th of the second and stop the car in time. >Furthermore, why should a company be criminally liable for >any negligent behavior of an employee? That's ridiculous. Indeed - I am just preaching for 10%. And only from the shareholders :).
userbinator 8y ago
After all these stories I strongly believe that "self-driving, except when it's not" is even worse than manually driving, because supervising a computer is not too far from a driving instructor supervising a student driver; most of the time it's OK, but you have to be extremely alert to catch the times when it makes a fatal mistake. On the other hand, if you're "manually" driving, you are fully in control of and can anticipate the situation, thinking ahead with what's next. A self-driving car, like a student driver, won't tell you what it's going to do and ask whether that's OK --- it just does and you have to be very alert to instantly take control to correct when things go wrong. Autopilots work in planes because the operators are extremely well-trained, and the reaction times needed are measured in seconds or even minutes. In a car, it's less than a second.
- Rebelgecko 8y ago
  I think there's actually some debate about how just the right amount of automation can be dangerous in planes. Automation works great in nominal conditions but can leave pilots unprepared to handle bad situations. There was a really interesting article I read about this regarding the Air France plane that crashed a few years ago (I think it was this: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-flight-447-crash https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-...). Similar things even came to play with the recent Lion Air crash, although there was also a lot of negligence and crappy maintenance.
smallgovt 8y ago
I wonder why Uber (and other self-driving car companies) don't have remote employees monitoring the road who can take over in case the appointed driver doesn't react quickly enough. The problem with these driver-assisted self driving cars is that the driver is unlikely to be paying attention at any given time since the system is 99% reliable. By adding remote monitoring, you could even have multiple people monitoring each car. It might be impossible to safely steer the car from a remote location, but they could surely activate the breaks and/or trigger other simple directives to drastically decrease a fatalistic collision. Given that the average driver reaction time in a car collision is 2.3s [1], I doubt network latency would pose much of a problem, and cost surely isn't an issue for these companies. A remote person could also use the car's cameras to gain a superior field of vision (especially at night time) when compared to the in-car driver. [1] https://copradar.com/redlight/factors/IEA2000_ABS51.pdf https://copradar.com/redlight/factors/IEA2000_ABS51.pdf
- rossdavidh 8y ago
  From what I've seen/read, the more people are responsible for monitoring something, the less likely each one is to monitor it, sometimes to the point where more monitors can get a worse rate of catching problems. Sort of like why the driver of a "self-driving" car is more likely to watch TV instead of paying attention to the road.
- userbinator 8y ago
  If someone sitting in the vehicle can lose attention, there is not much hope for someone watching from afar on a TV (even if you're streaming at something like 4k 120fps --- which would be an immense amount of bandwidth to handle for each car --- it's still not much more immersive than watching someone playing a driving game.)
  - smallgovt 8y ago
    Maybe they can make it more like a video game, where you're constantly saving cars from collisions, and you don't know which is a simulation and which is real. Give them bonuses based on what percentage of collisions they successfully deter.
deleted 8y ago
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edgartaor 8y ago
Let say that in the future every car it is a Self-Driving Car. Which are more reliable and accidents are reduced by 99%. How to deal with that 1%? Whose fault is it? The manufacturer? The developer?
- rhacker 8y ago
  There will plenty of money to pay for the 12500 people that die because of those systems. (WHO says there are currently 1.25M dead each year from road accidents, if that reduces by 99% we'll have 12500 dead). Even if that costs $20B per year in liability, a company like Alphabet/Waymo can pay for it by the amount of money they are making in the actual self-driving tech.
  - pmoriarty 8y ago
    "There will plenty of money to pay for the 12500 people that die because of those systems." How much is a life worth?
    - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
      > How much is a life worth? Value is relative. Nothing has intrinsic financial worth. “What is a life worth to the average person in a society” is a well-researched and answered question.
    - saltyshake 8y ago
      The monetary worth is a function of your citizenship, family connections and fame.. The worth of a 3rd world orphan living in the streets << Hillary
sfopdxnonstop 8y ago
"If I am to serve a 1 year prison sentence for faulty code or a deprecated LIDAR sensor" Found the guy who didn't read the article.
- dang 8y ago
  Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here?
8bitsrule 8y ago
A woman on a road was killed. By a car with no driver. There was a person sitting in the driver's seat, but that person was in no way engaged in maintaining safe operation. That person was hired by Uber. As the judge, therefore, I would certainly assign -most- liability to Uber for putting that screw-off behind the wheel in the first place. Uber's driverless car killed a woman. The charge would be negligent homicide.
- pkaye 8y ago
  > Uber, which declined to comment for this story, could still be sued in civil court and be forced to pay damages. The government could also potentially pursue criminal charges against managers or employees of Uber. Looks like they still have a lot to deal with.
  - 8bitsrule 8y ago
    Good. For Elaine's sake, and all other potential victims of overhyped tranport options, I hope that option will be pursued vigorously.
- WillPostForFood 8y ago
  How do you feel about the Amtrak engineer being charged in the Philadelphia derailment? Does Amtrak deserve most liability for putting the engineer in charge of the train, or does the engineer deserve the blame for failing the most basic duties of their job? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr-gridlock/wp/2018/02/06/criminal-charges-reinstated-against-engineer-in-deadly-2015-philadelphia-amtrak-crash/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr-gridlock/wp/2018/02/0...
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - 8bitsrule 8y ago
    I'm not familiar with the details there. IIRC, the engineer was going around a curve much faster than it was rated for. Whatever. Failing to detect that an employee is not fit to do a job which potentially jeopardizes many lives is a very serious failure. I might -want- to ask which executive the company will expect to do the time. Airlines and railroads seem to prefer to blame their operators, particularly when the operators are killed and unable to defend themselves. In this case, however, the vehicle had no operator to blame.
rayiner 8y ago
> In the six seconds before impact, the self-driving system classified the pedestrian as an unknown object, then as a vehicle, and then as a bicycle, a preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board explained. While the system identified that an emergency braking maneuver was needed to mitigate a collision, the system was set up to not activate emergency braking when under computer control. The prosecutor made the wrong call here. This part is absolutely criminal negligence. Putting a “self driving” car out there that doesn’t have emergency braking enabled (apparently because it creates too many false positives) is an unjustifiable risk. Working emergency braking should be the first thing perfected, before the computer gets to control the car.
- roenxi 8y ago
  The prosecutor has no doubt thought long and hard, and there is no evidence of a bad call here. We don't even have the benefit of hindsight yet. The driver being criminally liable is a more powerful incentive. People will not buy & drive vehicles that have a reputation for getting their drivers criminally prosecuted. And the government can still regulate for high safety standards on self driving vehicles independent of criminal liability.
  - solveit 8y ago
    > The driver being criminally liable is a more powerful incentive. Too powerful. The driver should not be punished for correctly using a legally purchased vehicle. We don't apply that kind of standard anywhere else, and for good reason. Plus, people would refuse to buy self-driving cars even if they were on average safer than human-driven cars because 1. Everyone thinks they're an above average driver 2. Illusion of control So your proposal would cost lives in the future when self-driving cars actually are safer.
    - smilekzs 8y ago
      > for correctly using a legally purchased vehicle The eyes of the driver in this case were on the phone, not the road. That's hardly "correctly using".
pteredactyl 8y ago
My thoughts go out to her family. And the many many people who die every day because of reckless drivers and accidents. Driverless or not. Really sucks to lose someone due to no fault of their own (other than being there). To add, driverless or not, most who kill others using a car are not criminally liable. Often times not even liable beyond what the state minimum is. Unless the victim sues for personal assets. So in California, that's 100k. Which is one of the lowest in the USA.
- thoman23 8y ago
  > to lose someone due to no fault of their own ? She walked in front of a car on the expressway in the dark.
  - nkurz 8y ago
    You have a reasonable point that the victim probably bears some responsibility for crossing in the middle of a block in the dark, but I'm pretty sure that it was a divided city street with a 35 MPH speed limit rather than what is typically thought of as an expressway: "the preliminary police investigation determined that the car was speeding—going 38 mph in a 35 mph zone when the crash occurred" (https://www.curbed.com/transportation/2018/3/20/17142090/uber-fatal-crash-driverless-pedestrian-safety https://www.curbed.com/transportation/2018/3/20/17142090/ube...).
  - InclinedPlane 8y ago
    It was a well lit section of road (the dashcam video Uber released makes it look much darker than it really is, there is other video out there of the same section of road, you can find it on youtube) and it was a natural crossing point but a very poorly designed road/walk way. Almost any human driver who was paying attention would have spotted her from a big distance and avoided hitting her. Video of the section in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XOVxSCG8u0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XOVxSCG8u0
  - pteredactyl 8y ago
    I stand corrected.
deleted 8y ago
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npip99 8y ago
None of the top comments make any sense to me. I simply don't understand them. Anyway, here is my understanding of the subject: (1) Yes, Uber should have trained the driver better to look at the road. By trained, I mean there should have been a sticky note on the wheel saying "PAY ATTENTION OR YOU WILL KILL SOMEONE" (2) Yes, The driver absolutely should have to pay some penalty for this, if Uber told him that he should have been paying attention (Which they most certainly did). Watching a video while in a self-driving car is IDENTICAL to watching a video in a normal car. Modern self-driving cars are NOT fully autonomous, and they SHOULD be viewed as IDENTICAL to cruise control for all legal considerations, and thought experiments. Most of the top comments, which are blindly attacking self-driving cars, are not making this analysis. However, (1) and (2) do not justify the lack of logic displayed by most of the top comments here. There seems to be violations of (a) There is no logical difference between a person accidentally killing someone, and the self-driving car accidentally killing someone. Actually, because the car is already known to not be fully autonomous, this already is a case of the person accidentally killing someone. However, even if the car is fully autonomous, we MUST be considering the ODDS of an accident. None of the other comments are doing this. There is always an odds of an accident, so a specific accident means absolute bullshit. Literally nothing. This post doesn't even mean anything. What SHOULD be posted is "Self-driving cars with humans at the wheel kill X people per road-hour. Human-only cars kill Y people per road-hour". If X > Y, then yes we have a fking problem. But without that information, we literally have nothing to even think about, or process. (b) Disabling the safety feature of the car is not a fk'ing concern, at all. Almost no cars have these features - only expensive ones do. Turning an expensive car into a normal car is NOT something you can be sued for, or is even something anyone should care about. Who is at blame for the situation is simply not dependent on this fact. I don't understand why people are discussing this aspect. (c) Do you see the image? Maybe it's not showing it all. But as far as I can see there isn't a light there. Wtf is she doing crossing the road if there's no light there, without waiting for the cars? As a citydweller that is constantly found in the middle of streets trying to cross parts of the road that don't have stop lights, I just can't fathom ever being in her position. Maybe my city has less considerate drivers than her city, but if I tried to cross roads without a red light blocking cars, and didn't consciously give right of way to the traffic, I would die sometime this week. (d) Many people seem to quote "self-driving system classified the pedestrian as an unknown object, then as a vehicle, and then as a bicycle" as "Oh this self-driving system is complete sh*t it's all Uber's fault". Makes no damn sense. As a side note, if you've ever worked with a neural net, especially with video as opposed to still photos, you already understand that the given sentence means nothing. That's just how they work, and there will always be milliseconds in-between frames where it reassigns the object's identification. But, anyway, this is not relevant. The self-driving part could have been completely off, or disabled. The car is SUPPOSED to be driven by the driver, and any deviation from that is the fault of either the driver, or Uber's training of the driver. Whether it's the former, or the latter, is exactly where and how suing should be directed and handled. Nothing else matters, despite most comments putting much emphasis on many other aspects of the situation.
perfunctory 8y ago
> The Arizona Republic has reported that the driver, 44-year-old Rafaela Vasquez, was streaming the television show The Voice in the vehicle in the minutes before the crash. I guess we shouldn't be surprised any more as even the drivers of the non-self-driving cars do the same sometimes. It's scary how often, when I look in the rear-view mirror, I see drives behind me looking down at their phones. This is one of the reasons I almost stopped driving.
gudok 8y ago
Interaction between humans and AI is far from perfect. It seems that it would be easier for the people to adapt to AI rather than the opposite. I feel that someday every traffic participant (including pedestrians) will be required to carry tracking device. These devices will communicate together and prohibit or allow actions, e.g. making a turn or crossing a road. Eventually they will make traffic rules as we know today, obsolete. No traffic lights, no road signs and no crossings anymore. Every action will controlled by the device. And, of course, they will automatically report and fine law-breakers. Is this the bright future of the humankind? Or is this a setting for a new dystopian book?
Quarrelsome 8y ago
and this ladies and gentlemen is a major reason why the US is the best place in the world to do business and specifically bleeding edge stuff.
tobyhinloopen 8y ago
UBER is not criminally liable, but THE DRIVER might be, since she was watching a TV show. Subtle but important detail. Looking at the comments, I suspect many comment without reading the article.
kbos87 8y ago
Let's take a look at some of the ingredients that led to this: 1) A pedestrian crossing the street likely expected an approaching driver to see them and slow down. Typical behavior on the part of the average pedestrian and the average driver, whether it's a misdemeanor or not. 2) An engineer at Uber made the decision to put tech on the road without emergency braking capabilities, likely using the justification that a safety driver would be there to intervene when needed. 3) A safety driver in an autonomous vehicle that behaves the right way 99% of the time grows complacent. The pedestrian may have been jaywalking and the safety driver may have been abdicating their duties. The safety driver especially isn't an innocent actor here. But the party who has the most responsibility is by far the engineers and managers at Uber. This set of circumstances was completely foreseeable, but they still decided to take the risk and put this technology out on the roads. I for one don't want to be a part of Uber, or anyone else's great experiments. Spend the money, spend the time, and figure this out in a controlled environment before subjecting the rest of us to the negative impacts of your selfish ambition. Someone at Uber deserves time in prison for this.
- mannykannot 8y ago
  While I agree that disabling the emergency braking was a foolish and irresponsible decision, and the most important single technical failure leading to this tragic outcome, I don't see prison time as a reasonable response, as I doubt that there was a malicious disregard for safety. If the persons most responsible for that decision still think they did no wrong, however... I'm not sure what the ideal response would be. Beyond that, I do not want to see an extension of the practice where low-level employees take all the blame for a corporate culture that encourages bad behavior.
dkarl 8y ago
Most driving is done by humans. Humans are terrible at it and kill people unnecessarily all the time. That's the standard to beat. Speaking as someone who rides a bike on city streets, I really don't give a shit how many people Uber kills, as long as it's less than human drivers would. This whole thread smells like Monday morning quarterbacking and people throwing aside reason under stereotype threat. (Techies are in love with technology, techies are in thrall to startup narratives and oblivious to social responsibility. Everyone's anxious to disprove that.) In fact, the mistake Uber made here was relying on a human being to do a job that is routine and boring the vast bulk of the time but occasionally requires life-saving decisions that depend on attentive awareness of the surroundings. That's the same mistake our entire civilization makes a million times a day. The fact that the operator had fewer responsibilities than a normal driver probably magnified the problem, but it's the same problem that makes driving fundamentally dangerous. She thought she was doing a good enough job and then oops, guess not, somebody's dead. That happens every day without robot drivers involved. The standards we hold autonomous driving technology to should reflect this insane status quo.
true_tuna 8y ago
Those cars were nowhere near ready to be on the roads. And given how fast the program spun up there’s no way the drivers were properly trained and vetted. I personally had several run-ins with the Uber cars in San Francisco before they got their California registrations revoked. I worked on 3rd in soma and saw them out as I would walk to lunch. They didn’t even try to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks during right turn on red (when pedestrians clearly have right of way). I had more than one near miss. I shouted at the driver and he grabbed the wheel in panic. He went around the block to try again and the car did exactly the same thing. It was like they were blind to anything smaller than a car. Uber knew it too, because the failure to yield was reported to Uber in person at their garage on 3rd and Harrison. Uber (and anyone who behaves like that) has no business running a self-driving program. If they start the program back up I guarantee they will continue to kill pedestrians. If you see one coming get away quick. I speak from personal experience and I’m not joking even a little bit.

215 points by abhisuri97 8y ago

The law around this is so important. When your car hurts someone, who's fault is it? What about if its completely self driving like this one? What if there is a bugfix which you didn't apply? What if a software upgrade causes a crash? Lane assist caused you to swerve into something? So many grey areas.

ams6110 8y ago
> When your car hurts someone, who's fault is it? Fault is a loaded word. It's your liability. That's why you have insurance.
- hcurtiss 8y ago
  It's not always the driver's liability. Sometimes the pedestrian is at fault.
  - fucking_tragedy 8y ago
    Sometimes the manufacturer is at fault, as well.
dmix 8y ago
It will always be a grey area.
- WillPostForFood 8y ago
  It is only grey as long as the law allows grey. Like some states have enacted no-fault insurance, it would be straight forward to create a no-fault framework for self driving cars. May not be a good idea as it may create bad incentives, but could be done.
MisterBastahrd 8y ago
"How much money does the defendant have?" seems to be the prevailing factor in assigning blame in criminal cases.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
baroffoos 8y ago
>When your car hurts someone, who's fault is it? If its anything like the current system it will be no ones fault unless rules were broken. Its fine to kill someone in your car as long as you weren't speeding or on drugs. I assume it will be the same with self driving cars unless there was some obvious rule violation.

anth_anm 8y ago

So a woman is dead because of a self driving car being tested on a public street but the company has no criminal liability. How many people does Uber have to kill before it becomes a problem?

NoPicklez 8y ago

Interesting reading the article, from a risk perspective I would think Uber would have assessed the risks associated with using an Uber self-driving solution. Particularly mitigating automated controls to stop the car in the event it detects an emergency, given it has this capability. But I agree with the verdict, it's just strange that the vehicle has the ability to detect a potential collision but cannot apply emergency braking to prevent it.

mnm1 8y ago
Of course, the prosecutor is judge and jury in this case because they are not pressing charges. I'm almost certain uber would be held liable by any jury who heard that they intentionally turned off the braking that could have saved this woman's life. Then again, it is Arizona so it's not surprising that this is not even being prosecuted. Uber must be bringing in a ton of money to the state there to get off so easily.
- jcranmer 8y ago
  I'm not so sure. Uber's defense here amounts to blaming the safety driver for the crash. They can argue that their actions improved the safety of the self-driving car (by reducing erratic movements due to false positive) so long as the safety driver is performing their job properly. Absent a smoking gun email that says "yep, we know this is unsafe, we don't care" (basically the Ford Pinto scenario), I don't think a guilty verdict is near-certain.

jimktrains2 8y ago

> While the system identified that an emergency braking maneuver was needed to mitigate a collision, the system was set up to not activate emergency braking when under computer control. > Instead, the car's system relied on the human operator to intervene as needed. "The system is not designed to alert the operator," the report notes. How are the not negligent for this specifically?

henryfjordan 8y ago
The law doesn't require automatic brakes and alerts on cars. Think about how many clunkers those laws would make illegal. You can't hold Uber to different legal standards, but we can certainly say they were negligent from a moral standpoint
- jimktrains2 8y ago
  > The law doesn't require automatic brakes and alerts on cars. The law isn't written for the case when the car is under its own control. The driver is assumed to be in control of the vehicle. However, if the car is also _a_ driver, neutering its ability stop, or even ask for assistance, in an emergency should be tantamount to disability the human driver's brakes.
hcurtiss 8y ago
A civil suit for negligence is still available, even when not criminally liable. Two different standards. See O.J.
Rapzid 8y ago
If I had to review criminal negligence and pick a reason I would say that a standard of reasonable care has not been established that requires a car to be configured in a way that would have prevented the accident.

r00fus 8y ago

On one hand, I think Uber was reckless and wantonly created the conditions for this incident. On the other hand, I don't want this to be the death knell for autonomous driving experiments. On the gripping hand, it's possible that a large settlement might have been the best outcome from this tragedy for the family of the woman in question. They gain nothing from Uber's criminal liability. (edit: clarity)

thecynicc 8y ago
What do you mean they gain nothing? The death wouldn't have been in vain and we would immediatelly have the right precedent for reckless behaviour of self-driving providers. Quoting the report: In the six seconds before impact, the self-driving system classified the pedestrian as an unknown object, then as a vehicle, and then as a bicycle, a preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board explained. While the system identified that an emergency braking maneuver was needed to mitigate a collision, the system was set up to not activate emergency braking when under computer control. Instead, the car's system relied on the human operator to intervene as needed. "The system is not designed to alert the operator" The car knew something is terribly wrong. The company willingly set the system in a reckless manner. They did not make sure the tests were run properly. They did not set up the tested system in any way that verified the "emergency driver" was actually doing it's job By typical US corporate welfare, the verdict protects the reckless company from real consequences and instead throws the expendable min-wage scapegoat under the bus. Ironically, if the case can be used as a precedent (I don't really know common law that well), it's a death knell for real use of self driving cars. But in the meanwhile some "passengers" will get really hurt economically...
dajohnson89 8y ago
FTA: >Uber, which declined to comment for this story, could still be sued in civil court and be forced to pay damages. The government could also potentially pursue criminal charges against managers or employees of Uber.
derekp7 8y ago
I saw a post on Reddit at the time of this incident, from someone who claimed to be a former Uber backup driver. The claim was that Uber was too strict with regards to cell phones, and that if you were caught interacting with your phone while on the job you were immediately terminated. I'd like to know how true this is, and if there is a better source for this claim.

helthanatos 8y ago

Isn't most of the point of computers driving us so they can react to things we can't? I dont know why that bit would be turned off... Seems seriously problematic. Secondly, that looks like a really bad place to be pushing your bike at night.

baroffoos 8y ago
When you are traveling at 60km/h+ no amount of computers can save you when even reacting instantly is not enough to slow down enough. Cars, self driving or not are extremely unsafe. Sure its a bad place to be walking at night but its quite problematic that we accept that walking around without looking both ways at every step is punishable by instant death.
- ylbss 8y ago
  We already accept this. You could also be looking both ways and be killed by a driver on their phone even with the right of way because drivers will not react in a predictable manner. We've accepted vehicles as being the #1 non-natural cause of death for years.
  - caf 8y ago
    The commenter you are replying to understands your point perfectly, and is simply saying that they find this acceptance for years to be problematic.
- jimktrains2 8y ago
  60km/hr isn't that fast when you have multiple seconds of time to react. The reason cars are unsafe is because driver's think they're better than they are. How many times have I seen snow covered cars this week? Or excessive speeding on snow and ice covered roads? How often do people drive on the highway without anywhere near stopping distance between them and the car they're tailgating at 80mph? The actual car itself is actually an amazing reliable and safe machine. The people using them in extremely dangerous ways are largely just irresponsible.
- 8y ago

vichu 8y ago

This is potentially precedent as a legal blocker for public adoption of self-driving cars. If I am to serve a 1 year prison sentence for faulty code or a deprecated LIDAR sensor, I don't see in what scenario I would be willing to leave my fate in the hands of a self-driving car manufacturer. Just as in the case of a chauffeur, if they are driving and commit vehicular manslaughter, I would not expect to be deemed guilty. It seems to me that it would be the benefit of self-driving car companies to own up to liability as it is to their benefit of achieving widespread adoption. For example, Volvo is in line with this idea and has publicly stated that they would accept full liability in fully autonomous operation modes[0]. In this case, I do think that some liability lies with the driver - as they were tasked specifically with prevent situations like this. What is not clear is whether or not this task is even humanly feasible given reaction times, and based off of this, whether or not Uber has been criminally negligible. Given this, I am surprised that the prosecutor seems to have absolved Uber of any blame. [0] https://www.media.volvocars.com/global/en-gb/media/pressreleases/167975/us-urged-to-establish-nationwide-federal-guidelines-for-autonomous-driving https://www.media.volvocars.com/global/en-gb/media/pressrele...

Symmetry 8y ago
I'd really like to see self-driving car liability treated the same way airline crashes are. Less "whose fault is this" and more "how can we prevent this same accident from ever happening again?" The second is the really important question and the one we need to keep answering to reduce the toll of driving deaths. This will mean the cars driving on our roads getting more and more regulated over time but I'm quite OK with that.
- freddie_mercury 8y ago
  Airline crashes absolutely are treated as "whose fault is this". That's why airline crashes usually have lots of lawsuits, with millions of dollars of damages, filed after they happen. Every NTSB report has a "probable cause" section determining who or what was at fault. And then the FAA hands out fines and courts award additional damages largely based on that finding. It is true that the punishments aren't handled by the NTSB but that's more about separation of concerns & departmental remits than anything else. Is separating out "fault finding" from "punishments" a good idea? Maybe? I honestly don't know.

xutopia 8y ago

Blame the driver... of course the driver was told that the car drove itself... he was watching a show on his phone when it happened so Uber is putting the blame on him. I don't think the driver was trained properly to drive in that semi-automated driving system. Is the fault lying with him or is Uber just trying to lay the blame on him to avoid paying anything.

jimktrains2 8y ago
Trains have had dead man's switches for nearly 50 years at least. You can't give people the job of paying attention if there is nothing to pay attention to 80%, 90% of the time. It's not reasonable to me to expect someone to be at peak alertness while doing nothing at all.
- smileysteve 8y ago
  It is reasonable, however, that they not be watching a cell phone when they're being paid to be a backup driver. The optics for the driver were really bad. They weren't just not paying attention, they weren't "just" eating and drinking (something accepted in American driving for the last 60 years), they weren't staring blankly into the desert, they didn't fall asleep. No, they were doing the one thing that has received the most public messaging for the last decade.
  - jimktrains2 8y ago
    > The optics for the driver were really bad. Oh don't get me wrong. I don't feel like the driver is blameless. I just mean that people not paying attention when they don't have to do anything isn't a new problem or one without what seems to be an adequate solution.
- WillPostForFood 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Philadelphia_train_derailment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Philadelphia_train_derail... dead man's switches don't activate when the engineer is simply distracted.

mnm1 8y ago

Unbelievable. I wonder how many other self driving cars are out there designed to not brake even when they clearly detect an object in their path. It's ridiculous to rely on a human to intervene in such situations. This was a completely preventable homicide, yet Uber gets away with it. As I've said before, the easiest way to get away with murder is to commit it under the protection of a corporation. True, this is manslaughter, but the principle still stands. I bet they will go after the driver now and try to place blame on her despite her having an impossible job that should simply not exist because it can't be carried out. So they get away with manslaughter and a precedent is set for other car companies that no matter how negligent your system and operations are, you can kill people and get away with it as long as you find a patsy to sit behind the wheel and take the blame. With this kind of attitude, I hope self driving cars never make it to market. I no longer think they will be safer than human drivers because there is no incentive for these companies to make them safe, let alone safer.

zeroname 8y ago
> I bet they will go after the driver now and try to place blame on her despite her having an impossible job What's impossible about watching the street and hitting the breaks if necessary, while testing a prototype self-driving car? I would say if you can't even do that, you shouldn't be in that seat. This isn't the case where just one person is responsible. The system shouldn't have been configured that way. The driver should've been alert. The woman shouldn't have crossed the road like that. Everyone was negligent.
- cgidriver 8y ago
  It happened because one company was greedy, and negligent, - and has the money to pay the bill. The question is, will the jury really make them pay.
  - WillPostForFood 8y ago
    It happened just as much because one driver/monitor wasn't doing their job.
  - 8y ago

sneak 8y ago

I’m not a lawyer, so forgive my ignorance, but how can a corporation be criminally liable for anything ever? It’s not like you can charge a corporation with a crime or put a corporation in prison. Corporations can’t commit crimes because they cannot act; only humans can.

snek 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood
anateus 8y ago
The Ltd or LLC after many company names refer to the Limited Liability that those forms of companies confer, that protect individuals within them from personal liability. Corporations were intentionally a lot like people even before Citizens United. There's also a concept called Piercing the Corporate Veil that is intended specifically for penetrating through these legal protections in certain cases.
- sneak 8y ago
  That limited liability is a civil one. How would you even charge a corporation with a criminal act, eg murder? Corporations cannot act, regardless of their personhood. Piercing the corporate veil, again, is a civil issue.
telchar 8y ago
The supreme court says corporations are people and have the rights of people (e.g. free speech). If they're people then they are subject to the criminal codes that people are subject to. I don't know how you carry out such punishments, ask the 5 guys who decided to make that the case.

dana321 8y ago

I know its bad having a machine-controlled car killing someone, but.. it will happen and we must accept it and my guess is that it will happen far less than with human operators in the long-term.

smallgovt 8y ago
The problem is that deaths per mile driven are currently much higher for self driving cars than humans. We don't have to just accept it. Progress can be made while still being safe -- at least, safer than how the free market would act. > The NHTSA reports a fatality rate of 1.25 deaths per 100 million miles[2], twenty five times the [4 million miles] Uber has driven. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16620736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16620736
- smileysteve 8y ago
  One of the issues is that the car's stock system was disabled;
  - JimmyAustin 8y ago
    Absolutely not an issue. The last thing you want when developing a prototype piece of software for a 1 ton chunk of metal is another bit of software plugged in that you dont control or understand.
    - hopler 8y ago
      That's nonsense. The car had a human backup driver and human pedestrians, all not under the autonomous cars control. An automatic emergency brake doesn't prevent a computer or human driver from braking when it wants to. If the autonomous system can't even avoid interaction with emergency brake, the prototype belongs in a lab, not on a public road.
steelframe 8y ago
The problem is that people deeply care about the reason a bad thing happened, much more than they care that a bad thing happened.

aasasd 8y ago

Funny enough, this is about the fifth attempt to post this story to HN, with different links. It's getting barely any response.

dajohnson89 8y ago
Those previous attempts were successful. Perhaps you mean, "attempts to get upvoted to the front page"?
- smallgovt 8y ago
  Yea, he's saying it's suspicious that this didn't get more upvotes. I agree.
  - dajohnson89 8y ago
    What's the angle exactly? A shadow force of HN mods, colluding with Uber, to prevent this story from getting upvotes?

wand3r 8y ago

Self-driving vehicle development has so many difficult problems to solve. The technology itself is extremely difficult to create and relies on this extremely complex compromise where vehicles are allowed (and are) operated by code but ultimately babysat by drivers. I think self-driving technology is worth the risk and worth the large amount of property damage and human injury that comes with it. However, this is a societal issue and there needs to be some sort of referendum on this. While many parallels can be drawn with space travel, those projects were tightly contained and included individuals who were specifically trained and informed of the potential dangers--there is no way to really do this at scale for self-driving tech which necessarily demands an expansive ecosystem that can't be tightly controlled nor can consent be inferred from the unknown number of people involved in this experiment.

cgidriver 8y ago
Indeed its worth the risk - but not at the cost of human life. And if the risk is being taken by a company, it has to pay for it - because it intends to reap the rewards? Not a woman or a negligent employee.
- zeroname 8y ago
  > And if the risk is being taken by a company, it has to pay for it - because it intends to reap the rewards? Not a woman or a negligent employee. First of all, this is criminal liability. Uber may still be held financially liable in a civil court. Secondly, liability needs to be decided on a case by case basis. In this case, the woman (not "a woman") shouldn't have crossed the road and the operator should have been alert. Furthermore, why should a company be criminally liable for any negligent behavior of an employee? That's ridiculous.
  - cgidriver 8y ago
    > First of all, this is criminal liability. Uber may still be held financially liable in a civil court. I am waiting for the 10% of market value punishment for Uber. > Secondly, liability needs to be decided on a case by case basis. Agreed. > In this case, the woman (not "a women") shouldn't have crossed the road and the operator should have been alert. In this case, "the Uber" should have made sure it's sensors pick up the point cloud in 1/15th of the second and stop the car in time. >Furthermore, why should a company be criminally liable for >any negligent behavior of an employee? That's ridiculous. Indeed - I am just preaching for 10%. And only from the shareholders :).

userbinator 8y ago

After all these stories I strongly believe that "self-driving, except when it's not" is even worse than manually driving, because supervising a computer is not too far from a driving instructor supervising a student driver; most of the time it's OK, but you have to be extremely alert to catch the times when it makes a fatal mistake. On the other hand, if you're "manually" driving, you are fully in control of and can anticipate the situation, thinking ahead with what's next. A self-driving car, like a student driver, won't tell you what it's going to do and ask whether that's OK --- it just does and you have to be very alert to instantly take control to correct when things go wrong. Autopilots work in planes because the operators are extremely well-trained, and the reaction times needed are measured in seconds or even minutes. In a car, it's less than a second.

Rebelgecko 8y ago
I think there's actually some debate about how just the right amount of automation can be dangerous in planes. Automation works great in nominal conditions but can leave pilots unprepared to handle bad situations. There was a really interesting article I read about this regarding the Air France plane that crashed a few years ago (I think it was this: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-flight-447-crash https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-...). Similar things even came to play with the recent Lion Air crash, although there was also a lot of negligence and crappy maintenance.

smallgovt 8y ago

I wonder why Uber (and other self-driving car companies) don't have remote employees monitoring the road who can take over in case the appointed driver doesn't react quickly enough. The problem with these driver-assisted self driving cars is that the driver is unlikely to be paying attention at any given time since the system is 99% reliable. By adding remote monitoring, you could even have multiple people monitoring each car. It might be impossible to safely steer the car from a remote location, but they could surely activate the breaks and/or trigger other simple directives to drastically decrease a fatalistic collision. Given that the average driver reaction time in a car collision is 2.3s [1], I doubt network latency would pose much of a problem, and cost surely isn't an issue for these companies. A remote person could also use the car's cameras to gain a superior field of vision (especially at night time) when compared to the in-car driver. [1] https://copradar.com/redlight/factors/IEA2000_ABS51.pdf https://copradar.com/redlight/factors/IEA2000_ABS51.pdf

rossdavidh 8y ago
From what I've seen/read, the more people are responsible for monitoring something, the less likely each one is to monitor it, sometimes to the point where more monitors can get a worse rate of catching problems. Sort of like why the driver of a "self-driving" car is more likely to watch TV instead of paying attention to the road.
userbinator 8y ago
If someone sitting in the vehicle can lose attention, there is not much hope for someone watching from afar on a TV (even if you're streaming at something like 4k 120fps --- which would be an immense amount of bandwidth to handle for each car --- it's still not much more immersive than watching someone playing a driving game.)
- smallgovt 8y ago
  Maybe they can make it more like a video game, where you're constantly saving cars from collisions, and you don't know which is a simulation and which is real. Give them bonuses based on what percentage of collisions they successfully deter.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

edgartaor 8y ago

Let say that in the future every car it is a Self-Driving Car. Which are more reliable and accidents are reduced by 99%. How to deal with that 1%? Whose fault is it? The manufacturer? The developer?

rhacker 8y ago
There will plenty of money to pay for the 12500 people that die because of those systems. (WHO says there are currently 1.25M dead each year from road accidents, if that reduces by 99% we'll have 12500 dead). Even if that costs $20B per year in liability, a company like Alphabet/Waymo can pay for it by the amount of money they are making in the actual self-driving tech.
- pmoriarty 8y ago
  "There will plenty of money to pay for the 12500 people that die because of those systems." How much is a life worth?
  - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
    > How much is a life worth? Value is relative. Nothing has intrinsic financial worth. “What is a life worth to the average person in a society” is a well-researched and answered question.
  - saltyshake 8y ago
    The monetary worth is a function of your citizenship, family connections and fame.. The worth of a 3rd world orphan living in the streets << Hillary

sfopdxnonstop 8y ago

"If I am to serve a 1 year prison sentence for faulty code or a deprecated LIDAR sensor" Found the guy who didn't read the article.

dang 8y ago
Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here?

8bitsrule 8y ago

A woman on a road was killed. By a car with no driver. There was a person sitting in the driver's seat, but that person was in no way engaged in maintaining safe operation. That person was hired by Uber. As the judge, therefore, I would certainly assign -most- liability to Uber for putting that screw-off behind the wheel in the first place. Uber's driverless car killed a woman. The charge would be negligent homicide.

pkaye 8y ago
> Uber, which declined to comment for this story, could still be sued in civil court and be forced to pay damages. The government could also potentially pursue criminal charges against managers or employees of Uber. Looks like they still have a lot to deal with.
- 8bitsrule 8y ago
  Good. For Elaine's sake, and all other potential victims of overhyped tranport options, I hope that option will be pursued vigorously.
WillPostForFood 8y ago
How do you feel about the Amtrak engineer being charged in the Philadelphia derailment? Does Amtrak deserve most liability for putting the engineer in charge of the train, or does the engineer deserve the blame for failing the most basic duties of their job? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr-gridlock/wp/2018/02/06/criminal-charges-reinstated-against-engineer-in-deadly-2015-philadelphia-amtrak-crash/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr-gridlock/wp/2018/02/0...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- 8bitsrule 8y ago
  I'm not familiar with the details there. IIRC, the engineer was going around a curve much faster than it was rated for. Whatever. Failing to detect that an employee is not fit to do a job which potentially jeopardizes many lives is a very serious failure. I might -want- to ask which executive the company will expect to do the time. Airlines and railroads seem to prefer to blame their operators, particularly when the operators are killed and unable to defend themselves. In this case, however, the vehicle had no operator to blame.

rayiner 8y ago

> In the six seconds before impact, the self-driving system classified the pedestrian as an unknown object, then as a vehicle, and then as a bicycle, a preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board explained. While the system identified that an emergency braking maneuver was needed to mitigate a collision, the system was set up to not activate emergency braking when under computer control. The prosecutor made the wrong call here. This part is absolutely criminal negligence. Putting a “self driving” car out there that doesn’t have emergency braking enabled (apparently because it creates too many false positives) is an unjustifiable risk. Working emergency braking should be the first thing perfected, before the computer gets to control the car.

roenxi 8y ago
The prosecutor has no doubt thought long and hard, and there is no evidence of a bad call here. We don't even have the benefit of hindsight yet. The driver being criminally liable is a more powerful incentive. People will not buy & drive vehicles that have a reputation for getting their drivers criminally prosecuted. And the government can still regulate for high safety standards on self driving vehicles independent of criminal liability.
- solveit 8y ago
  > The driver being criminally liable is a more powerful incentive. Too powerful. The driver should not be punished for correctly using a legally purchased vehicle. We don't apply that kind of standard anywhere else, and for good reason. Plus, people would refuse to buy self-driving cars even if they were on average safer than human-driven cars because 1. Everyone thinks they're an above average driver 2. Illusion of control So your proposal would cost lives in the future when self-driving cars actually are safer.
  - smilekzs 8y ago
    > for correctly using a legally purchased vehicle The eyes of the driver in this case were on the phone, not the road. That's hardly "correctly using".

pteredactyl 8y ago

My thoughts go out to her family. And the many many people who die every day because of reckless drivers and accidents. Driverless or not. Really sucks to lose someone due to no fault of their own (other than being there). To add, driverless or not, most who kill others using a car are not criminally liable. Often times not even liable beyond what the state minimum is. Unless the victim sues for personal assets. So in California, that's 100k. Which is one of the lowest in the USA.

thoman23 8y ago
> to lose someone due to no fault of their own ? She walked in front of a car on the expressway in the dark.
- nkurz 8y ago
  You have a reasonable point that the victim probably bears some responsibility for crossing in the middle of a block in the dark, but I'm pretty sure that it was a divided city street with a 35 MPH speed limit rather than what is typically thought of as an expressway: "the preliminary police investigation determined that the car was speeding—going 38 mph in a 35 mph zone when the crash occurred" (https://www.curbed.com/transportation/2018/3/20/17142090/uber-fatal-crash-driverless-pedestrian-safety https://www.curbed.com/transportation/2018/3/20/17142090/ube...).
- InclinedPlane 8y ago
  It was a well lit section of road (the dashcam video Uber released makes it look much darker than it really is, there is other video out there of the same section of road, you can find it on youtube) and it was a natural crossing point but a very poorly designed road/walk way. Almost any human driver who was paying attention would have spotted her from a big distance and avoided hitting her. Video of the section in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XOVxSCG8u0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XOVxSCG8u0
- pteredactyl 8y ago
  I stand corrected.

deleted 8y ago

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npip99 8y ago

None of the top comments make any sense to me. I simply don't understand them. Anyway, here is my understanding of the subject: (1) Yes, Uber should have trained the driver better to look at the road. By trained, I mean there should have been a sticky note on the wheel saying "PAY ATTENTION OR YOU WILL KILL SOMEONE" (2) Yes, The driver absolutely should have to pay some penalty for this, if Uber told him that he should have been paying attention (Which they most certainly did). Watching a video while in a self-driving car is IDENTICAL to watching a video in a normal car. Modern self-driving cars are NOT fully autonomous, and they SHOULD be viewed as IDENTICAL to cruise control for all legal considerations, and thought experiments. Most of the top comments, which are blindly attacking self-driving cars, are not making this analysis. However, (1) and (2) do not justify the lack of logic displayed by most of the top comments here. There seems to be violations of (a) There is no logical difference between a person accidentally killing someone, and the self-driving car accidentally killing someone. Actually, because the car is already known to not be fully autonomous, this already is a case of the person accidentally killing someone. However, even if the car is fully autonomous, we MUST be considering the ODDS of an accident. None of the other comments are doing this. There is always an odds of an accident, so a specific accident means absolute bullshit. Literally nothing. This post doesn't even mean anything. What SHOULD be posted is "Self-driving cars with humans at the wheel kill X people per road-hour. Human-only cars kill Y people per road-hour". If X > Y, then yes we have a fking problem. But without that information, we literally have nothing to even think about, or process. (b) Disabling the safety feature of the car is not a fk'ing concern, at all. Almost no cars have these features - only expensive ones do. Turning an expensive car into a normal car is NOT something you can be sued for, or is even something anyone should care about. Who is at blame for the situation is simply not dependent on this fact. I don't understand why people are discussing this aspect. (c) Do you see the image? Maybe it's not showing it all. But as far as I can see there isn't a light there. Wtf is she doing crossing the road if there's no light there, without waiting for the cars? As a citydweller that is constantly found in the middle of streets trying to cross parts of the road that don't have stop lights, I just can't fathom ever being in her position. Maybe my city has less considerate drivers than her city, but if I tried to cross roads without a red light blocking cars, and didn't consciously give right of way to the traffic, I would die sometime this week. (d) Many people seem to quote "self-driving system classified the pedestrian as an unknown object, then as a vehicle, and then as a bicycle" as "Oh this self-driving system is complete sh*t it's all Uber's fault". Makes no damn sense. As a side note, if you've ever worked with a neural net, especially with video as opposed to still photos, you already understand that the given sentence means nothing. That's just how they work, and there will always be milliseconds in-between frames where it reassigns the object's identification. But, anyway, this is not relevant. The self-driving part could have been completely off, or disabled. The car is SUPPOSED to be driven by the driver, and any deviation from that is the fault of either the driver, or Uber's training of the driver. Whether it's the former, or the latter, is exactly where and how suing should be directed and handled. Nothing else matters, despite most comments putting much emphasis on many other aspects of the situation.

perfunctory 8y ago

> The Arizona Republic has reported that the driver, 44-year-old Rafaela Vasquez, was streaming the television show The Voice in the vehicle in the minutes before the crash. I guess we shouldn't be surprised any more as even the drivers of the non-self-driving cars do the same sometimes. It's scary how often, when I look in the rear-view mirror, I see drives behind me looking down at their phones. This is one of the reasons I almost stopped driving.

gudok 8y ago

Interaction between humans and AI is far from perfect. It seems that it would be easier for the people to adapt to AI rather than the opposite. I feel that someday every traffic participant (including pedestrians) will be required to carry tracking device. These devices will communicate together and prohibit or allow actions, e.g. making a turn or crossing a road. Eventually they will make traffic rules as we know today, obsolete. No traffic lights, no road signs and no crossings anymore. Every action will controlled by the device. And, of course, they will automatically report and fine law-breakers. Is this the bright future of the humankind? Or is this a setting for a new dystopian book?

Quarrelsome 8y ago

and this ladies and gentlemen is a major reason why the US is the best place in the world to do business and specifically bleeding edge stuff.

tobyhinloopen 8y ago

UBER is not criminally liable, but THE DRIVER might be, since she was watching a TV show. Subtle but important detail. Looking at the comments, I suspect many comment without reading the article.

kbos87 8y ago

Let's take a look at some of the ingredients that led to this: 1) A pedestrian crossing the street likely expected an approaching driver to see them and slow down. Typical behavior on the part of the average pedestrian and the average driver, whether it's a misdemeanor or not. 2) An engineer at Uber made the decision to put tech on the road without emergency braking capabilities, likely using the justification that a safety driver would be there to intervene when needed. 3) A safety driver in an autonomous vehicle that behaves the right way 99% of the time grows complacent. The pedestrian may have been jaywalking and the safety driver may have been abdicating their duties. The safety driver especially isn't an innocent actor here. But the party who has the most responsibility is by far the engineers and managers at Uber. This set of circumstances was completely foreseeable, but they still decided to take the risk and put this technology out on the roads. I for one don't want to be a part of Uber, or anyone else's great experiments. Spend the money, spend the time, and figure this out in a controlled environment before subjecting the rest of us to the negative impacts of your selfish ambition. Someone at Uber deserves time in prison for this.

mannykannot 8y ago
While I agree that disabling the emergency braking was a foolish and irresponsible decision, and the most important single technical failure leading to this tragic outcome, I don't see prison time as a reasonable response, as I doubt that there was a malicious disregard for safety. If the persons most responsible for that decision still think they did no wrong, however... I'm not sure what the ideal response would be. Beyond that, I do not want to see an extension of the practice where low-level employees take all the blame for a corporate culture that encourages bad behavior.

dkarl 8y ago

Most driving is done by humans. Humans are terrible at it and kill people unnecessarily all the time. That's the standard to beat. Speaking as someone who rides a bike on city streets, I really don't give a shit how many people Uber kills, as long as it's less than human drivers would. This whole thread smells like Monday morning quarterbacking and people throwing aside reason under stereotype threat. (Techies are in love with technology, techies are in thrall to startup narratives and oblivious to social responsibility. Everyone's anxious to disprove that.) In fact, the mistake Uber made here was relying on a human being to do a job that is routine and boring the vast bulk of the time but occasionally requires life-saving decisions that depend on attentive awareness of the surroundings. That's the same mistake our entire civilization makes a million times a day. The fact that the operator had fewer responsibilities than a normal driver probably magnified the problem, but it's the same problem that makes driving fundamentally dangerous. She thought she was doing a good enough job and then oops, guess not, somebody's dead. That happens every day without robot drivers involved. The standards we hold autonomous driving technology to should reflect this insane status quo.

true_tuna 8y ago

Those cars were nowhere near ready to be on the roads. And given how fast the program spun up there’s no way the drivers were properly trained and vetted. I personally had several run-ins with the Uber cars in San Francisco before they got their California registrations revoked. I worked on 3rd in soma and saw them out as I would walk to lunch. They didn’t even try to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks during right turn on red (when pedestrians clearly have right of way). I had more than one near miss. I shouted at the driver and he grabbed the wheel in panic. He went around the block to try again and the car did exactly the same thing. It was like they were blind to anything smaller than a car. Uber knew it too, because the failure to yield was reported to Uber in person at their garage on 3rd and Harrison. Uber (and anyone who behaves like that) has no business running a self-driving program. If they start the program back up I guarantee they will continue to kill pedestrians. If you see one coming get away quick. I speak from personal experience and I’m not joking even a little bit.