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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.
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.
I appreciate the point that, statistically, this *will* happen as some accidents are unavoidable. You're absolutely correct and we should look at the bigger picture.
However I'm skeptical of reports where the self driving car is not at fault because the other car "failed to yield". Being legally in the right doesn't necessarily mean the car was driving well or defensively, and these are the particular situations where a human might have been clued in to the other driver's behavior and avoided it entirely.
But. If we concede that any human life = any other human life, and the widespread use of driver-less vehicles saves X accidents and Y highway fatalities over the same number of driven miles, it has saved more accidents and human lives than it lost.
If we set the bar at ZERO accidents a human could've avoided, well, that is an impossibly high standard; and self-driving vehicles should be shelved right now.
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If everybody drives aggressively, traffic jams will get worse. When there are sufficient self-driving vehicles, they'll probably come up with some communication protocol so they can synchronize their strategies and achieve optimal road use, benefiting everybody.
I concede that companies should not profit from products that might kill people. That is all that I concede.
You might as well just say that companies shouldn't be allowed to sell anything. Read the safety labels on anything you buy these days.
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Automated cars just need to become as good as an average human who is paying attention, awake, and sober. That will make them better than 80% of the cars on the road. Good enough for mass use at that point.
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
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