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> Waymo said its robotaxi struck the child at six miles per hour, after braking “hard” from around 17 miles per hour. The young pedestrian “suddenly entered the
by koolba 8mo ago
> Waymo said its robotaxi struck the child at six miles per hour, after braking “hard” from around 17 miles per hour. The young pedestrian “suddenly entered the roadway from behind a tall SUV, moving directly into our vehicle’s path,” the company said in its blog post. Waymo said its vehicle “immediately detected the individual as soon as they began to emerge from behind the stopped vehicle.”
As this is based on detection of the child, what happens on Halloween when kids are all over the place and do not necessarily look like kids?
- sowbug 8mo agoYou're right: a quick search shows that pedestrian fatalities are 43% higher on Halloween.
- Rudybega 8mo agoThat's probably more a function of more people being in the road than people not understanding what object they're about to hit.
- sowbug 8mo agoSorry, I was being oblique. Humans kill other humans with cars every day. They kill even more on Halloween. Let's start addressing that problem before worrying whether Waymos might someday decide it's OK to drive through ghosts. Autonomous vehicles won't be perfect. They'll surely make different mistakes from the ones humans currently make. People will die who wouldn't have died at the hands of human drivers. But the overall number of mistakes will be smaller. Suppose you could wave your magic wand and have a The Purge-style situation where AVs had a perfect safety record 364 days of the year, but for some reason had a tricky bug that caused them to run over tiny Spidermen and princesses on Halloween. The number of fatalities in the US would drop from 40,000 annually to 40. Would you wave that wand?
- catlikesshrimp 8mo ago"The number of fatalities in the US would drop from 40,000 annually to 40. Would you wave that wand?" This strawmam is bordering offtopic fiction. Only the 40k yearly deaths is based on reality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
- sowbug 8mo agoSo is the trolley problem, which this problem restates. I'm not sure what you're adding by observing that a hypothetical situation is hypothetical.
- rullelito 8mo agoLidar would pick up a moving object in 3D so unlikely to just keep going.
- Rudybega 8mo ago"Oh that obstructing object doesn't look like a child? Gun it, YOLO." Lmao. I suspect the cars are trying to avoid running into anything, as that's generally considered bad.
- sweezyjeezy 8mo agoThese systems don't discriminate on whether the object is a child. If an object enters the path of the vehicle, the lidar should spot it immediately and the car should brake.
- tintor 8mo agoIt is more complicated than that. Deepends on size of object and many other factors. The object could be a paper bag flying in the wind, or leaves falling from the tree.