Slashdot Mirror
Uber Halts Self-Driving Car Tests in Arizona After Friday Night Collision (businessinsider.com)
"Given that the Uber vehicle has flipped onto its side it looks to be a high speed crash," writes TechCrunch, though Business Insider reports that no one was seriously injured. An anonymous reader quotes their report:
A self-driving Uber car was involved in an accident on Friday night in Tempe, Arizona, in one of the most serious incidents to date involving the growing fleet of autonomous vehicles being tested on U.S. roads... Uber has halted its self-driving-car pilot in Arizona and is investigating what caused the incident... A Tempe police spokesperson told Bloomberg that the Uber was not at fault in the accident and was hit by another car which failed to yield. Still, the collision will likely to turn up the temperature on the heated debate about the safety of self-driving cars.
Conversations would be different if the uber car was at fault but not all accidents can be avoided.
OMG.
Why is still happening? Why won't Uber stop raping their female employees?!?
So a human driving a car makes a mistake and crashes into a self-driving car. And our reaction is to reduce the number of self driving cars.
How bout we fucking reduce the number of humans driving? They seem to be the ones doing most of the crashing....
I am reminded that when cars were first invented, there were laws put in place mandating that someone walk ahead of any self-propelled vehicle waving a red flag, for fear of scaring horses and making people uncomfortable.
I'm sure that in one hundred years this sort of reaction - blaming the software for an inattentive driver failing to yield - will be seen in exactly the same way.
Don't be silly...Uber isn't raping anybody. Uber is just trying to innovate here.
Right now only the passenger can give the driver oral sex, but what if the driver wants to give the passenger oral sex too? Thus you need self driving capability. Just think about it: You no longer need to jack off before work, instead somebody else does it for you on the way to work while you check your email. This saves a lot of time off of your busy day by doing three things at once.
Isn't the gig economy wonderful?
Fiverr blowjob?
Don't be silly...Uber isn't raping anybody. Uber is just trying to innovate here.
Right now only the passenger can give the driver oral sex, but what if the driver wants to give the passenger oral sex too? Thus you need self driving capability. Just think about it: You no longer need to jack off before work, instead somebody else does it for you on the way to work while you check your email. This saves a lot of time off of your busy day by doing three things at once.
Isn't the gig economy wonderful?
Ublowjob?
Uber has acted quickly to classify the AI driving the autonomous vehicle as an independent contractor, and disavowed any potential liability as a corporation.
Think about it this way. If someone cuts me off in traffic and I run into them because I'm not watching, wouldn't the accident technically be my fault? An accident is your fault unless you have done everything within your power to prevent the accident and it still occurred. Perhaps the AI was not programmed to deal with this situation, that would be the same as a human driver not watching the road because there would have been a disconnect between the sensors and the AI.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
No, ublowjob.me
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
"Fuck you California, we are pioneers, we'll go to Arizona where they welcome pioneers!"
* THHHUNK! *
"Ahhh, arrow in my back, arrow in my back! Help!"
Table-ized A.I.
Just like google glass people can't stand progress. I was wondering how long until people started intentionally crashing into auto cars.
Yeah, damn self-driving car not avoiding dumb human... How's that better than a human getting hit by a dumb driver? Down with self-driving cars! /s
"Given that the Uber vehicle has flipped onto its side it looks to be a high speed crash, which suggests a pretty serious incident..."
In one past life I learned accident investigation and in another extricated victims, both dead and alive, from vehicle collisions. I have to call malarkey on the "high-speed" claim.
Cars can tip over at very low speed. I've seen at least two such crashes within two blocks of my house. In one, a driver ran a stop sign and clipped a small SUV which tipped over onto the opposite sidewalk. The entire accident scene covered, perhaps, 30 feet edge to edge.
In the other, a driver drifted into the parking lane sideswiping a parked car such that the door-panels hooked which caused the car to rotate then roll.
The "high-speed" car in both cases was traveling 20-30mph.
Though the provided photo does not show a large surrounding area, neither car looks crushed - just some body-panel denting and debris is right next to the car vs. scattered down the roadway and "nobody was seriously injured."
Nothing about this suggests high-speed.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
That's a reality of driving that the self driving car programmers still haven't gotten down.
It is also the reason why true self driving vehicles won't be ubiquitous for many many years to come, despite predictions of a very soon revolution by marketing and investment salesmen. This is not 'the next smartphone' here people.
I am reminded that when cars were first invented, there were laws put in place mandating that someone walk ahead of any self-propelled vehicle waving a red flag, for fear of scaring horses and making people uncomfortable.
Not automobiles as we know them.
Steam powered road tractors, mammoth agricultural tractors and heavy construction equipment. Ca. 1860-1896. Think township or county roads that were dirt or gravel tracks barely more than a single lane wide. Now do you know why you needed a flag man?
The other car was a Tesla in autonomous mode whose driver was watching a Disney movie.
#DeleteChrome
Too busy thinking about how to harass her male colleagues and forget to debug her code.
Most people try to pin the blame for an accident on a single cause. Most liability laws are based on this same (erroneous) concept.
Airline accident investigations are really good at demonstrating how an entire chain of events led up to the accident. And that any single factor happening differently could've prevented the accident. e.g. The Concorde crash was caused by (1) debris on the runway from a faulty repair on a previous plane, (2) failure of the Concorde's tires when it struck the debris, (3) failure of the undercarriage to withstand tire debris striking it from a blowout at take-off speed, (4) the manufacturer not making any procedures or provisions to recover from a double engine failure on a single side because it was considered so unlikely. Any one of these things doesn't happen and the Concorde doesn't crash.
Safety systems layer multiple accident-avoidance measures on top of each other. This redundancy means that only when all of those measures fail is there an accident. Consequently, even if the self-driving car was not legally at fault, that it was involved in an accident still points to a possible problem. e.g. If I'm approaching an intersection and I have a green light, I don't just blindly pass through because the law says I have the right of way. I take a quick glance to the left and right to make sure nobody is going to run their red light, or that there aren't emergency vehicles approaching which might run the red light, or that there's nobody in the crosswalk parallel to me who might suddenly enter into my lane (cyclist falls over, dog or child runs out of crosswalk, etc).
So even if the autonomous car wasn't legally at fault, that's not the same thing as saying it did nothing wrong. There may still be lessons to learn, safety systems which were supposed to work but didn't, ways to improve the autonomous car to prevent similar accidents in the future.
Ask anyone in the industry who isn't a liar. Self driving cars are 10 years off. They can't drive into the sun, are full of logical flaws for obscure situations, can't deal with basically any bad weather of any kind, get traffic lights incorrect, lose GPS signal often, etc. They just don't work and they're horribly unsafe.
In most states, if the vehicle was moving and not legally stopped or parked, then it is partially at fault. In states without no fault insurance laws, no matter how negligent the other driver is, both vehicles will be blamed.
OMG.
Why is still happening? Why won't Uber stop raping their female employees?!?
They should let them write code for the self-driving cars instead. That way, just like in real life, female drivers would cause accidents but it's the male driver that has to swerve or veer to avoid a collision that would be at fault.
lucm, indeed.
I don't mind self driving cars, but I don't want to be forced to use them...
bird strike
The penalty for failure to yield suddenly went way up
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I was actually driving to California cross-country last weekend and saw an autonomous semi laying in its side in the middle of the highway. This stuff just isn't ready to deploy, carmakers' and tech companies greed be damned. This is one instsnce where insisting something isn't still in beta will (and already is!) have very real and life threatening consequences. It is insanity. It's inanity, too, they are supposedly smarter than this in the valley. I think that is seriously debatable.
Since Uber is supposed to be testing their self driving cars (not in revenue generating production mode), it has to be stuffed to the gills with sensors with telemetry stored on board and/or sent back to the mothership. Dashcams are well under USD $100 in single quantities. So where is the video footage and telemetry just before and during the crash?
They are using a system stolen from Google .... a system that has the record for the most crashes and accidents in the autonomous vehicle market.
You get a stolen flawed system, and add the incompetency of Uber to the mix and you get accidents.
Interesting point. The accident was the human driver's fault because they failed to yield. Just this week I was passed while driving in the fast lane on I95. The other driver passed me on the left! I guess he "failed to yield" in a big way. I steered right and stepped on the brakes to avoid collision. If my vehicle had been robot-driven then presumably there would have been a multi-car pile-up, as the robot dutifully kept my vehicle between the white lines at a constant speed. Do we take comfort knowing that it would have been the fault of the driver who passed on the left and not a problem with the robot functionality? Is a licensed driver only responsible for being able to move a car without hitting anything?
The self-driving car was not at fault because the human driver was too self-absorbed thinking that they are all that and a bag o' chips and the rules of the road do not apply to them because they have been lead to believe that they are more important than everyone else in the world.
Don't believe me? Start observing how many people pull a full car-length PAST the stop line painted on the pavement BEFORE they even consider stopping. Lots of them would likely blow right through if they decided that opposing traffic was far enough from them and there wasn't a cop around.
Seems to be a case of finding fault with the victim - the self-driving car. It acted properly - humans are to blame, so the solution would be to get humans out from behind the wheel as quickly as possible.