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Self-Driving Uber Car Kills Arizona Woman in First Fatal Crash Involving Pedestrian (gizmodo.com)
Joe_Dragon writes: Last night a woman was struck by an autonomous Uber vehicle in Tempe, Arizona. She later died of her injuries in the hospital. The deadly collision -- reported by ABC15 and later confirmed to Gizmodo by Uber and Tempe police -- took place around 10PM at the intersection Mill Avenue and Curry Road. Autonomous vehicle developers often test drive at night, during storms, and other challenging conditions to help their vehicles learn to navigate in a variety of environments.
According to Tempe PD, the car was in autonomous mode at the time of the incident, with a vehicle operator sitting behind the wheel. A police spokesperson added in a statement that the woman's 'next of kin has not been notified yet so her name is not being released at this time. Uber is assisting and this is still an active investigation.' The woman was crossing the street outside a crosswalk when she was hit, the spokesperson said. Update: Uber says it is suspending self-driving car tests in all North American cities after a fatal accident.
According to Tempe PD, the car was in autonomous mode at the time of the incident, with a vehicle operator sitting behind the wheel. A police spokesperson added in a statement that the woman's 'next of kin has not been notified yet so her name is not being released at this time. Uber is assisting and this is still an active investigation.' The woman was crossing the street outside a crosswalk when she was hit, the spokesperson said. Update: Uber says it is suspending self-driving car tests in all North American cities after a fatal accident.
Sympathy=0
I'm very familiar with the types of sensors used in these cars. They have trouble with rain, snow, sunlight, scratches, dirt, basically anything. Try sticking your head out the window while driving and pretend your eyeballs are the sensors. It's a pretty comparable comparison. We're 50 years out from a working self-driving car. The AI isn't there, the sensors aren't there, and every amaaaaazing show-off event being held is on a perfect road with perfect weather or some conditions they know the car can handle.
. . . to the existing legal system. So many have speculated what would happen when a self-driving car inevitably killed a 3rd party. Might as well get the process started so the litigation / legislation is resolved quicker and things move ahead . . .
On the one hand she was crossing illegally. However, if a human had been driving would they have seen her and been able to stop in time? It seems like these automated vehicles rely on certain assumptions and this is one example of what can happen when faced with the unpredictable circumstances that can happen on the road. Until automation has a way to make provisions for these sorts of things these automated vehicles shouldn't be on the road.
I don't believe in karma, I just call it like I see it.
Obviously, the dead woman's fault. She was breaking some law that millions of people break every day without getting killed. Fortunately, this is a learning experience for Uber's algorithms. According to calculations, after about 40,000 more deaths, the algorithms will be able to avoid killing people 83% of the time under those conditions.
Let's all jump to conclusions. Don't disappoint me now. We should be at the root cause with all the information within the next 5 minutes.
Self-driving cars don't need to be perfect, just better than people.
If self-driving cars rack up fewer pedestrian deaths per mile driven than human drivers, that's the critical metric.
--PM
Colt should start testing their product by firing into innocent crowds on the street. I mean who are theses pesky people standing in the way of our corporate progress. We need live test data more than you need your life citizen.
it can be blinding. It's called "Monsoon" weather. If you've never driven in it it's hard to explain. You can't see 6-8 feet in front of you. Like a white out but with water. Not sure if that's what happened here. I've been stuck driving in Monsoon rain a few times. I pull over as soon as I can and wait it out. It can be hard to do that with all the nut jobs trying to power through it.
The woman was outside cross walks, so Uber will probably be in the right. Although IIRC you never have the right of way if it would cause an accident in Az.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
We're 50 years out from a working self-driving car.
Thank you Mr Luddite. It's a shame that we currently live in a perfectly safe world where no pedestrians ever git hit and these darn self-driving cars come along and...
Wait, what? Drivers hit pedestrians all the time? Especially so when they cross in the middle of the street at night in the rain?
Remember, there WAS a human sitting behind the wheel. The fact that he didn't see here / could not react in time means she was (A) really hard to see, and (b) probably came in front of the car very suddenly.
We are not 50 years from self-driving cars. We are *0* years from self-driving cars. They are being deployed today and the ramp-up will only continue, because even if they make mistakes it's still FEWER mistakes than people will make, on average.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
One major factor to consider when the facts are out is whether or not a human driver could have avoided the crash.
I.e., we know it was not on a pedestrian crossing, but should the vehicle have detected the risk from the human's movements on the pavement prior to the accident?
Luckily these cars have a lot of sensor and video data, so there will be plenty of evidence to decide whether she ran out into the road without looking, or if the car turned into hunter-killer mode...
So many missing details here. Was it raining causing limited visibility? Did she dart out between two cars right in front of the moving vehicle? Was she crossing and then doubled back? Did the human behind the wheel have time to try and react?
The good thing about this being an autonomous vehicle is that there are likely cameras and sensors all around the vehicle that will be able to tell investigators exactly what happened.
And while jaywalking is certainly not a capital offense, it's hard to argue that this would have happened if she'd been in a recognizable crosswalk with as many miles and hours as have been racked up by self-driving vehicles already.
As I suspected, a bunch of people blaming the pedestrian for crossing the street wrong. Cars still have to stop for them legally, and autonomous cars are no less liable. Once again, autonomous cars need to drive more like humans, not the other way around.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
It won't be the last.
Self-driving technology is not ready for deployment yet.
New way to commit suicide: jump in front of an uber.
There was a human behind the wheel, just not holding onto it. So the answer is no, a human WAS NOT able to stop in time.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Given Uber's record of "assisting investigations", we should be worried. This is a business founded and built on evasion, legal circumvention, (taxi) licensing disruption, lies, cover-ups, pay-disputes, spying, ducking and weaving.
While it's hard to say what happened yet, what I can say with confidence is that we should be able to figure out what happened far more easily than if any non-self driving car had hit her...
Why? Because of the vast amount of sensor data collected by the car every second. We should be able to see exactly when she left the sidewalk, exactly where she went in the road, and exactly what led to the car not "seeing" her.
Otherwise you'd MAYBE have some dash-cam footage and some super poor traffic camera footage.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
also criminal liability and civil liability are not the same and this case needs to go down both routes. criminal cases have more power to override NDA's and eula. Also they can get around an log list of subcontractors
We need the 3 laws of robotic implemented in the IA machine NOW!
Before we all pay the ultimate price...
Oh good, the first autonomous vehicle liability test case. Uber has really deep pockets and probably not a lot of sympathy from the jurors... I'm thinking maybe $10 million? Of course, it might be just like the Ford Pinto gas tank economic calculation: the cheapest thing to do is to pay off the occasional lawsuit rather than fix the problem.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
a driver sitting ready to take over is not the same as one driving in manual mode
I see quite a few comments claiming it's her fault since she J walked... What happens when the 5 year old runs out into the street to get his ball?
This technology has to be better than people before it can be let loose on public streets. Things happen, millions of times a day - tires blow, rocks fall off trucks, things happen, and we drivers expect and anticipate.
The kid chasing a ball scenario will happen, with regularity. What can also be expected with regularity is company ending lawsuits and NTSB investigations that may end this till it can be proven safe.
Same with air taxis. None have been certified by the FAA - which is required for commercial work - and the FAA has already slapped down "ride share" for non commercial pilots. Don't hold your breath.
The reality is we are years from this being ready for prime time- aka safe. Unfortunately it will take people dying to separate the truth from the hype.
Now no one will be safe.
a driver sitting ready to take over is not the same as one driving in manual mode
There are plenty of times drivers behind the wheel remove hands from controls to reach for something, or simply get sleepy, or are singing along to a song not paying attention... or maybe reactions are slowed because they are tired, or have had a bit to drink.
The truth is a human driver out at 10pm at night in an empty downtown would not expect anyone either, and would almost certainly have hit the same women crossing in front of them well away from a crossing. Why is that so hard to believe, when it happens all the time?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
One wonders what instructions the drivers are given. At what point does the human realize the car is not taking action?
"The woman was crossing the street outside a crosswalk when she was hit, the spokesperson said."
And in just about every civilised society to do so is perfectly acceptable and you still have right of way as a pedestrian.
"Jaywalking" is a stupid law unless you are literally trying to obstruct traffic or cause an accident.
Fact is, all the super-duper software in the world didn't spot her in time and killed her. Which kinda puts a dent in your plans that this software is somehow any better than the human in the driving seat (who also didn't spot her).
Tragic and pointless a death as it is, probably better it happens now than later when there are more of them on the road. Now we see they're just not ready -- and probably won't ever be.
Despite the pedestrian jaywalking, Uber's had a LONG history of problems with their self-driving program. The worst google's self-driving program has gotten itself into is having cars crash into it because of confusion between right of way. Meanwhile Uber's managed to rollover one of their cars in a collision. At this point, I think Uber's rushing to have a successful IPO, Google is taking the time to do it right. So no thanks to Uber for giving self-driving cars a bad name...
While incident is unfortunate, this will likely settle a number of legal questions:
a. Is non-driver human behind the wheel held responsible for the accident?
b. What is the liability model would be used in such cases.
These, and not technical limitations, would likely determine the direction of self-driving cars would take. Considering precedent, self-driving is likely dead. All cars would require hands-on-the-wheel, relegating self-driving to assistive technologies.
Finally. Thank you Uber.
Now pedestrians will learn their place.
Next time, take out a couple cyclists as well.
Get over it
Just like in that documentary film Terminator!
The original reporting on ABC15 Self-driving Uber car hits, kills pedestrian in Tempe actually includes a video that has the caption "Self-driving vehicle hits BICYCLIST". The video also shows a crumpled-up bicycle.
Unfortunately, ABC15's text article says "a woman walking outside of the crosswalk was struck" and that is what the rest of the media is regurgitating as their own reporting.
There is a reason why we have lighted intersections, and crosswalks with bright signs calling them out to cars.
Jaywalking is intrinsically dangerous. Physics can't be escaped. Reaction time and stopping distance mean that even under perfect circumstances a jaywalker could wind up dead (depending on the road).
It is ridiculous to say that a jaywalker is 100% not responsible. Jaywalker is knowingly putting themselves in the path of fast-moving vehicles in a place designated for the vehicles to have the right-of-way (and, in this case at a time of low visibility!). This is a dangerous, stupid, and illegal thing to do! So, doing it puts you partially at fault.
The technology is being billed as being safe and there is still problems with it.
It is irrelevant if the person was jaywalking or texting or whatever. The car should have stopped.
Because, what if some little kid runs into the road after his ball? The kid should be run over because he was illegally in the road?
So, No excuses for Uber and their over-hyped technology.
I like how the media refer to her as a pedestrian when she was on a cycle, and the picture of her post-event puts her nowhere near a crosswalk.
...if these cars can't avoid an adult jaywalking, how can they avoid:
Large Animals? Deer, and other wildlife that often end up as hood ornaments.
Children? They are famous for unexpectedly running out into the street.
Other obstacles?
You would have thought that these considerations were first and foremost on the minds of the software folks.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Sadly, when people don’t look both ways before crossing a street and walk out in front of a car, ya know what happens to them?... So many people don’t care about their own lives.
The correct instructions would be to take over as soon as you think the car might not be reacting to a critical situation.
(as the Ai is suppsoed to react faster than humans if the human can react to the situation before the AI we can call the AI a failure and try to reproduce the incident in the lab with dummies to find out precisely what would have happened and why.)
What most people will do is wait and see if the AI will do something and ultimately miss their chance to help (or even more likely not be paying attention and miss the whole thing themselves). And what the company with a vested interest in success likely does is discourage the human from taking over at all in a variety of potentially subtle and unintentional ways if not overtly.
The difference between human's and computers, isn't that computers will never make mistakes. It is that when a human makes a mistake, and you retrain him not to make the same mistake again... you probably can fix that one human once... and a very slight chance you can get some details from that into the training for some of the next humans, which may or may not teach it correctly and some will and won't learn the lesson. Meanwhile you fix that on a computer software.. you literally have the opportunity to teach the lesson to every existing and follow up AI in the world at the same time. Seriously how many human caused accidents probably happened the same minute as this event... and how few people has it crossed the minds of to suspend human drivers for a little bit while we get this thing figured out
needs to be an criminal case!
Except the part where only 50% of humans get fixed, and the training of humans is as shit as ever and even becoming shittier in some regions, and you can't fix driving teachers who are thanked by trainees for being soft-handed and thus become part of the fucking problem that never gets reported, and they get thanked either because of the special-snowflake MUH EMOTIONS BE EASY ON ME syndrome, the EVERYONE GETS A MEDAL EVEN WHEN THEY ARE AN INCOMPETENT DUMBFUCK syndrome, and they remain shitty teachers because many have ego already present or developed as a consequence of getting treated by students as daddies and mommies who spoil their children.
Face it, when it comes to Humanity, the file corruption in its operating system is far worse than self-driving AI, ever-present, and spontaneously occuring due to genetic individualist nature.
It's a new thing. Literally everyone on the planet foresaw the potential for this has very very high. I'd be amazed if the developers themselves found themselves in a quandray that often occurs in machine learning: holy crap these are amazingly good results but we can't tell you when it will fail. After not seeing failures in all the test cases you find yourself letting go of that worry that it will fail catastrophically.
When cars were new themselves there were some remarkably crazy pedestrian protecting rules put in place such as requiring a flagman to walk in front of a car. But the thing about cars was that they really weren't a big leap from horses,trains, or boats. Propulsions systems controlled by human drivers are dangerous too of course. But were used to them and have mental models to protect us well ingrained.
Not so with driverless vehicles. And everyone thought this would happen even if they hoped it would not.
The whole tesla didn't see the truck thing should have been a tip off that the system wasn't flawless yet.
As usual it's the race to market that takes off the safety restraints. This is why we have regulations. To add some friction into the tragedy of the commons.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
For those wanting the text of laws for pedestrians in Arizona: Arizona: Vehicles must yield the right-of-way to pedestrians within a crosswalk that are in the same half of the roadway as the vehicle or when a pedestrian is approaching closely enough from the opposite side of the roadway to constitute a danger. Pedestrians may not suddenly leave the curb and enter a crosswalk into the path of a moving vehicle that is so close the vehicle is unable to yield. Pedestrians must yield the right-of-way to vehicles when crossing outside of a marked crosswalk or an unmarked crosswalk at an intersection. Where traffic control devices are in operation, pedestrians may only cross between two adjacent intersections in a marked crosswalk.
Also we get to find out an answer for who is at fault when an autonomous car causes harm, and to what extent are they liable. These will be precedent setting questions. The circumstances of the actual accident will influence the answers, but don't fool yourself, they won't drive it.
Said the Uber spokesperson.
give us the logs or it's contempt of court!
Uber says it is suspending self-driving car tests in all North American cities after a fatal accident
Emphasis added.
Because lives elsewhere are not as expensive?
Good thing Uber is illegal here!
I came here to say this. What the heck does "at the ready mean?" By the time the driver realizes the car is not going to stop for that pedestrian, it is likely already far too late.
Waymo says they have logged 5 million miles of testing. But what sort of testing it is really? There's these safety arresters for table saws that stop the blade harmlessly if a human finger touches it. While you can run 5 million hotdogs through it, do you really believe it works till some person actually tries it? And who's going to do that? And Is testing under controlled conditions with well maintained saws any test of neglected heavily worn saws in real shops?
Same with car testing. If you aren't having real bicyclists darting in front of these things under bad driving conditions at lethal speeds how are you testing these things for real? Perhaps they should require car company execs to actually perform these acid tests.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
She was not walking.
Bicycle crossing 6 lane highway (40 to 50 mph speed limit)
outside the crossing lane.
If she popped out from behind an obstruction (most likely)
Neither human or machine could have stopped in time.
This might be a case of lawful movement being unsafe by design.
Please. The founders never considered restricting immigration. The Supreme Court required the federal government to have a nationwide immigration policy only in 1875, and the INS was established two decades later. Under previous immigration laws you could only apply for citizenship after having lived here for up to 15 years. Setting aside the fact that it would have been impossible to police the border, no one attempted to, and there was nothing wrong legally with just showing up here, buying land, and living your life. It was, after all, a free country.
This accident happened about 1 mile north of Arizona State University's Tempe campus. The Uber cars (grayish SUVs) all look the same and run similar routes around the campus, along Mill and Rural Rd (parallel major roads that run north/south), and Apache Rd (southern border of ASU's Tempe campus) every workday. You kind of know where they're going to turn on what appear to be predefined routes, and they had blended into the car landscape enough to where you'd just think, "There's another Uber," without any novelty.
On those routes, I've never seen one do anything that appeared to be dangerous or erratic in traffic or around pedestrians.
Mill Ave. up near Curry is just across the Salt River bed, is in a patch of undeveloped desert between developments, next to the First Solar headquarters building, a theater, and not too far from a light rail stop.
I'm not saying Uber isn't at fault at all, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if it was a jaywalker hurrying to catch the light rail. Despite the signage and engineering, people frequently jaywalk near light rail stops along the route.
They did get a warrant for a mandatory oil alcohol test on the vehicle? Maybe we need unconstitutional traffic stops to ensure that the car isn't hitting the sauce.
So Phoenix, as the Uber test city, has registered its first fatality. With no information made public other than it involved a jaywalking pedestrian, we have 250 posts predicting the entire future of the automated car industry. And illegal aliens, for some reason.
I can't wait to see what the all-wise multitude will say once we actually know what happened.
Everyone is making these crazy statements that pick one side or the other. BOTH sides are in the wrong here and any other analysis is insane.
1. The person crossing the street / killed was an idiot. Don't run in front of cars. This is the easy one and this person has to (not) live with the consequences.
BUT
2. The Uber self driving vehicle is inadequate. A reasonable person would stop for someone running/biking in front of them. A reasonable person would be looking ahead. Self driving tech should be held to a standard that is above humans and the illegal nature of the crossing should not matter i.e. given the general nature of this "problem" we should be questioning the cars ability to detect all pedestrian crossings, not just illegal crossings.
Humans cross illegally all the time and the fact that it was an illegal crossing is not an excuse for not stopping. It would NOT be acceptable for self driving cars to just run into people crossing illegally based on the premise that they have the right-of-way and no liability (this also happens to be a legal standard as well: The "would you want to live in a society where" ... "self driving cars are allowed to run into jaywalkers with no consequence" ).
Self driving tech should not just achieve a better accident rate than humans. The types of accidents that occur matter. Self driving accident of this nature should not be brushed off as "well the person was breaking the law". As a human driver we avoid accidents that would not be our fault all the time. Not doing so would be considered idiotic, especially when considering pedestrians.
A more general problem here is: To what degree do AI driver programs need to avoid accidents that are not LEGALLY their fault but that human drivers would attempt to avoid. There are a whole host of accidents that drivers avoid even though they wouldn't NEED to avoid the accident for a legal standpoint. My personal opinion is that they need to at least provide the same effort as humans drivers would, if not more. I don't want to live in a world where AI drivers never try to avoid accidents they don't have to.
As a pedestrian I can often look at the driver and determine if they have seen me. They're looking in my direction, or at me directly, or they'll wave/motion their hand for me to proceed across the street. This is very often the case when there's a crosswalk with no light/stop-sign.
How can a self driving car provide this acknowledgement? So that I know that the car sees me so I know for a fact it's safe to cross the street?
If the sensors were not adequate to see this woman then that amounts to a person hitting a pedestrian while driving with their eyes closed.
yes that is exactly correct, all self driving vehicles must come to a complete stop whenever they sense the presence of a human anywhere near them, even if they are not going to collide with them
and no human being has ever hit a pedestrian, in recorded history, so there's that!
Otherwise they need to be much, much better than a human.
so if self driving cars kill 1/4 as many pedestrians as humans, throw it all out because they don't meet your stupid arbitrary criteria
That's a unfortunate lost, lots of pedestrians don't check for on coming traffic before walking into the street.
Are we sure that the other lane didn't have a baby carriage in it?
Maybe i didn't get the memo but when did it become SOP to beta test on the general public? At least with out some theatrics about testing in controlled circumstances first?
Or are the corporations just giving up on bullshit research and flawed tests to the regulatory bodies like they used to do.
Also what ever happened to that mock city that these companies were supposed to be testing in?
Where I live, snow and ice gathers on the windshield. Some people get lazy in the morning and only scrape away a small section; just enough to see out of the windshield. We get tickets if we are seen operating a motor vehicle in this way. However, people still do it and can drive for quite a long time in this way without having issues. If we hit a person crossing the street while our vehicles were this way then we would surely be at fault. How do we tell whether sensors put on an automated vehicles are enough to consider that vehicle to be in a reasonable safe working condition? Or is automation just peeking through its hole in the windshield?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
If it can't drive at least as well as a human -- i.e. be able to respond to outside environment, signs, road markings, other vehicles, and follow a generalized map of how streets connect to one another, it's not "self driving."
Humans don't need a map to the nearest half-inch to drive a vehicle. An autonomous car should not need that either.
This technogy is not even *remotely* close to ready for prime time. We likely won't see fully autonomous anything in our lifetimes. I wish they'd sue the living hell out of these companies that claim the contrary, they are con artists, plain and simple.
I'm sure uber follows the same professional and legal business practises for their self-driving cars as they follow for their ride-hailing side of the business. Same people at the top, right? We don't that a thing to worry about.
Such AI. BIGLY flying cars any day now!
these AIs need to assume that all visible pedestrians are a suicidal Usain Bolt and drive accordingly. they must also assume that any area that a human could be hiding also contains a suicidal Usain Bolt and drive accordingly.
Given that at any moment a person on the sidewalk, or hiding in a bush along the side of the freeway, could sprint out into traffic, and the only thing that would save them would be a 10 MPH speed limit literally everywhere... and on Pacific Coast Highway in SoCal that's just not happening. It's already 35 MPH for a lot of it and most people drive 60. pedestrians cross against traffic all the time like frogger taking their life into their own hands.
"the woman jumped out from behind an obstacle in front of the car"
then the AI was traveling too fast near an obstacle behind which it did not have certainty that it did not conceal a suicidal Usain Bolt
"the conditions made the woman hard to see"
then the AI should have known that conditions were making it impossible to react quickly enough to a suicidal Usain Bolt and should have reduced it's speed to 5 MPH or stopped completely and refused to drive.
it's possible to build self-driving cars that are 100% safe, but it would require that they make insane assumptions about the world that no human driver has ever made ever in their entire lives. not that anybody cares but I neither support nor condemn self-driving tech - I think parts of it have value (such as automatic braking which a lot of cars have) and at the same time, companies can overreach in their goals (trying to create an omnipotent self-driving vehicle for all conditions with 100% safety.)
i don't think you'll ever hear any company exec state on the record that they know 100% safety is impossible.
The only reasonable response to this, in the words of a certain movie, is: "SHUT IT DOWN!"
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I wonder if people will become like woodland animals: As a kid that we used to hit small animals on the highway regularly (without intention of course). After years and years of this, it slowed down a lot (near as I can tell). I wonder if people will be the same way: The ones who go out in the middle of the street will get culled.
I know it sounds cold, but come on: wander out into the road and see what happens. This person may have used terrible judgement and paid the ultimate price for it.
Google self-driving cars run literally millions of miles and the worst accident they get into is one of their cars getting rear-ended by somebody else. Uber gets into the game, and 3 months later they've killed someone. Can't say I'm surprised. Google is generally a responsible company. Uber uses a "break things, move fast, skirt the laws and let someone else pick up the wreckage" business model. Expect quite a bit more of this. I'm not opposed to rapid development of new tech like this. Sometimes, accidents will happen. 100% safety isn't a physical possibility. It's just that nobody should be surprised when outfits like Uber rack up an impressive body count.
No, completely wrong, certainly in most of the world.
There is almost always a requirement to be in control of your vehicle and be able to stop in the clear road ahead of you.
This is why you are almost always legally at fault if you rear-end the vehicle in front of you.
This is also why you are almost always legally at fault if you hit a pedestrian.
Your only defense is that they could not be seen in time for you to react.
For that you generally have to show that they appeared on the road in a way that made that impossible.
Examples are stepping out from behind a solid object (like a big SUV), running in to the road unexpectedly, etc.
YOU will need to provide evidence of that, not them. You must show that the default rule does not apply here.
The fact that the operator/driver wasn't paying attention to their surrounding does not "exempt" the operator/driver from the vehicular homicide.
No matter what the law says, the truth is that some idiot trusted the software for do that they should have been doing, which is paying attention and giving a crap.
What the law will figure out... who knows. The person who initiated the drive is at fault of negligent homicide.
there are jails full of motherfuckers that would deny your claim of retraining ability. and tons of dumbasses under 40 with face-in-phone-head-up-ass syndrome too.
She was hit here:
https://www.google.com/maps/@3...
I know this because I looked at
https://www.reuters.com/articl...
and I know the location intimately. The speed limit here is 40. The road, Mill Avenue, going northbound is two lanes plus it is adding turn lanes to go west and east. There is a bike lane. The road has just gone over a bridge (man-made lake) and under a freeway bridge (202) -- there are no off- or on-ramps at this location. There is a parking lot under the bridge for the concert venue (SW corner: visible in the Reuter's image) plus there's a public park/beach on the north side of the lake.
As
https://tech.slashdot.org/comm...
states, there was no rain.
http://alert.fcd.maricopa.gov/...
I haven't seen the crumpled bicycle photo, but we JUST started a bunch of "share bike" schemes in the Phoenix metro area (well, Phoenix proper has had one for while -- Tempe/Scottsdale ones are more recent): Limebike is the main one, I think (we have some that have "Ono" on them, as well). So if the bike is yellow or yellow/green, it was probably one of those. Tempe is hugely bike friendly for a US city because it is both (a) the site of ASU (b) progressive.
The southbound lanes are 2 wide at this point, so this lady was riding a bike across ~5 lanes of traffic plus a BIG (mostly paved) median. There's a shortcut trail just RIGHT there to go east, so maybe she was aiming for that.
A sad situation for sure. I see the Uber and Waymo vehicles all the time, so there's no lack of miles in and around that area.
Sadly someone was going to be the first sooner or later.. And with that in mind Uber's behavior when it comes to self driven cars, and as a company in general has always been a bit sketchy. So one could argue that at least it is good that Uber is the one getting the unwanted (but perhaps needed?) attention now.
What on EARTH is with your policies regarding pedestrians? My girlfriend was happily walking directly in front of cars on any streets sub 20mph
Shopping centre car park, intersections, etc, no hesitation just waltzing in front of cars and the cars have to make way.
What? ...... What?
In Australia, unless you're at a crossing, the car has right of way. At an intersection, if the car is turning into a road, the pedestrians have right of way _only_ at that intersection.
I was endlessly seeing people walk in front of cars and while in a vehicle we were constantly stopping for people to just walk in front of us. It's pretty crazy.
Also, while I'm at it, I feel terribly sorry for the software guys having to code in the 4 way stop sign, it's a laughable piece of 1400s technology or something. There's this thing called a roundabout,..... Good god is the 4 way stop sign horrifically inefficient.
(Love your turn on red, if safe though, bravo)
Uber developers are still following Facebook's discarded motto.
Ob xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1428/
If self-driving cars rack up fewer pedestrian deaths per mile driven than human drivers, that's the critical metric.
No. What matters is whether the self-driving car is as a practical matter perfected and trustworthy --- and that is nore than a purely statistical calculation. The numbers may be on your side, but what people will see will be the bodies on on the road and no driver behind the wheel.
And how many people die in or by hand driven cars?
Whats important to learn here is the computer system in control of the car is taught differently. If a human makes this kind of error, we have a legal punishment system and just hope it doesn't happen again. Except it does, frequently. More 'care' is taken, but it seems we have some hard limits. But software cannot ignore updates. If this kind of error occurs, and something was noticed, it will never go unnoticed again, for any model. They are a slave to the update.
>> The woman was crossing the street outside a crosswalk when she was hit, the spokesperson said.
I love (not) how they kill someone then this idiot spokesman is apparently trying to make it sound even possibly like it was her fault.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if it was a jaywalker hurrying to catch the light rail. Despite the signage and engineering, people frequently jaywalk near light rail stops along the route.
Tempe PD say she was going from the West side of Mill to the East side. Maybe just walking her bike over to the bike lane to go north?
There is plenty of brush in median to obscure someone coming out onto the road. And yes, the "no pedestrians/use crosswalk signs" in the median, although there also is a trash can in the median, and for the life of me I can't figure out how you would get to the trash can without being a pedestrian unless you have a jet pack.
Video of the accident scene shows a damaged bicycle on the adjacent sidewalk. Was the victim attempting to cross Mill Avenue on foot outside the crosswalk as suggested or is it possible she was cycling northbound in the cycle lane along Mill Avenue? At the site of the accident, the cycle lane crosses the vehicle right turn lane to continue across the Curry Road intersection. There is a street sign just a hundred feet prior to the beginning of the right turn lane warning drivers to yield to bikes. The victim may have had the right of way. I reserve judgment. Presumably the Uber car was video recording its trip. That video hopefully provides some clarity about what transpired. https://www.abc15.com/news/reg... https://www.google.com/maps/@3...
If its about saving lives then invest in your streets and sidewalks as well (tech). Clear some of those Vars the Car has to deal with.
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Replacing bad drivers with fundamentally incapable technology is not a sane solution.
crossing the street carrying the f'n bike with a cross walk and green walky person. It was at an intersection where the light only turns red if somebody (me) pushes the button to cross. She didn't even register I was there. The lady clipped my rear wheel. Nice big SUV at 45-50 mph. If the lady had been driving half a mile faster I wouldn't be typing this right now.
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This isn't the case you're looking for. There was a driver behind the wheel, and he (or she) was responsible for the operation of the vehicle.
I haven't heard of any good cases regarding autonomous mining trucks like CAT 794f, but those might come first.
Bruce Perens.
At least from what Google has said about their testing, I think the safety driver is trained to take over immediately. They can take the data out of the car later and replay it in simulation to see if the car would have handled it correctly or not, so there's no point in taking any risks to try it out in meatspace. (They can also then tweak the scenario in many ways to see what would've happened in thousands of similar scenarios, and to make sure that future versions of their software continue to behave appropriately.)
I have no idea how Uber does their testing, but I really hope for the sake of the whole self-driving industry that they take it a little more seriously than they do for literally anything else they have ever done...
In Europe, there's an entire different kind of mentality:
If something is obviously, common sense dangerous, the public will pressure to limit it's distribution and use: Guns, mass data, opoids, extreme lo/hi wealth, no healthcare, no socials security. Additionally people deeply mistrust any (Europe/us) hidden three letter agencies.
If you develop something obvious unsafe (cars, electric, mechanics...) there a perfomance and safety standards to met.
The security is applied in front of the death, no after:
So in Europe testing AV is strictly limited to testing rages or some, limited parts of the autobahn.
There's a nice environment, more controlled, but still sufficiently challenging to AVs.
City environments a rebuild specificially to train the AV.
-> The common, major mistake you do is to link these controlled, safe conditions to slow progress. If you think about the progress Audi, BMW, and Merc are achieving, that's remarkable.
Jaywalking people, uncontrolled bikers, jumping children, poor weather are a given fact.
If you can't avoid hitting them, you shouldn't be doing, what your doing.
Interesting how Musk is all worried about killer robots and killer AI used by the military, but can't wait to get killer robots out on our streets. What? Yeah, self driving cars are exactly that, killer robots. I work with real time software, flight software, and robots. There is no way these "autonomous" vehicles should be allowed on the streets. We keep people outside of the workspace of robots because they can crush your skull in an instant. Not malevolently like a T-800, because we write the software, but through software, electrical, or mechanical defects. What's the going metric for bugs per line of code nowadays, it used to be one bug per 5000 lines of code. Even if the software had to meet DO-178B standard I wouldn't want them on the road because these are consumer grade devices. Air traffic is much more tightly controlled and much sparser with the only equivalent to a pedestrian being birdstrike.
It's sad that it will take injuries and deaths for ignorant politicians and greedy tech "visionaries" to put the brakes on these public roadway death tests. It's not a smartphone for crying out loud, it is 2000lbs + of metal and plastic capable of causing lots of harm.
The latter is not even considered worthy of protection ;)
Blame the victim.
The correct context is probably passenger-miles per equivalent death (pedestrians hit by vehicles). But finding that data is waaaaay beyond the abilities of a 24x7 news cycle.
If Slashdot is so smart, why aren't we able to help with this problem?
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
Let's write an accurate story here.
Woman Dies After Walking Into Traffic
A woman in Tempe, Arizona died of her injures after walking into traffic and being struck by a car.
Wow. Take out the 'self-driving' part and it's just another story about someone who jaywalked and got hit. Didya know that there were 10 pedestrian deaths in Tempe in a single week this month? Didya know that Arizona ranked 3rd in pedestrian deaths in 2016? No? That's because it's not sensational enough to make the news outside of that area.
It isn't the cars that's the problem. It's the people who don't pay attention to the large metal death machines,
Governments and individuals have cautioned you to move more slowly.
But no. You are Silicon Valley disruptors. So what if a few of the peasants die in pursuit of your riches.
Fucking sociopaths.
What is this? Women can play basketball!! Short people can play basketball!! REEEEEEEE
It wasn't the Jews.
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The UK pedestrian, along with the horse and cyclist, have an enumerated right to be in the queen's highway, while cars require a license. Therefore the car must stop if it is possible to do so (and car recording or skid marks will demonstrate if it was possible to stop). What the UK doesn't have is strict liability, where the driver is by default at fault, no matter what, and a "balance of probabilities" has to be made that it wasn't the driver's fault.
Pedestrians DO have priority on the road.
But they haven't the right to leap in front of cars to cause a collusion, anu more than a driver can do it and T-bone another.
Please learn the law before making jovian pronouncements about it. TIA.
Drill big holes.... Let people auto drive in them :)
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...How many vehicular deaths did humans cause in 2018?