Slashdot Mirror
Police Chief: Uber Self-Driving Car 'Likely' Not At Fault In Fatal Crash (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The chief of the Tempe Police has told the San Francisco Chronicle that Uber is likely not responsible for the Sunday evening crash that killed 49-year-old pedestrian Elaine Herzberg. "I suspect preliminarily it appears that the Uber would likely not be at fault in this accident," said Chief Sylvia Moir. Herzberg was "pushing a bicycle laden with plastic shopping bags," according to the Chronicle's Carolyn Said, when she "abruptly walked from a center median into a lane of traffic." After viewing video captured by the Uber vehicle, Moir concluded that "it's very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode (autonomous or human-driven) based on how she came from the shadows right into the roadway." Moir added that "it is dangerous to cross roadways in the evening hour when well-illuminated, managed crosswalks are available." The police said that the vehicle was traveling 38 miles per hour in a 35 mile-per-hour zone, according to the Chronicle -- though a Google Street View shot of the roadway taken last July shows a speed limit of 45 miles per hour along that stretch of road.
Much like a river kills the person jumping in it?
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
There will be a thorough investigation of the vehicle, the programming, all of the data and details. Even if it is decided that the victim acted imprudently, such accidents always (at least around here, unless it was the police involved) are fully investigated, and the driver is rarely exonerated from all blame, just the proximate causal fault.
Now, for you ignats who see class discrimination in the description that the victim was pushing a bicycle laden with shopping bags, a word; the police are the upper caste in these situations. Corporations will be prosecuted more often than police officers, and more often than reputable members of the community, IE, government. Or favored citizens. This is not new.
There was more than one factor leading to this tragedy, and if the end result is change in how these vehicles monitor their surroundings to have more time to analyze and react, excellent, and if the result is a recognition that even self-driving vehicles are unable to avoid such accidents, just as even skilled and careful human drivers are, well, then we've learned that self-driving does not equal infallible. That's important, and useful information.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
In my community, we have great sidewalks, many crosswalks and all that needed to create a safe and walkable community. What do the pedestrians still do, you ask?
Walk out into traffic if it's more convenient. If a car hits them after taking reasonable measures to stop, they ought to be liable for all of the damage caused including to the vehicle and the driver's therapy if required.
My wife knew someone who killed a pedestrian who just walked out into traffic like this without thinking. Totally unavoidable. The "victim" was the driver, not the pedestrian because the driver was obeying the law and some stranger decided "fuck the traffic laws" and made her party to an accidental vehicular homicide.
Yes likely. Look, the guy who's seen the video says that a human driver probably wouldn't have averted the accident. You, who haven't seen the video, are only going on "generally." This incident isn't "general," it's very specific.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Interesting series of tweets: https://twitter.com/EricPaulDe...
The median looks like it has fancy, inviting paths, but it also warns you not to use them. And the actual crossing is kind of daunting...
It is a rather bad design, but it does look dangerous in any case, so if I wanted to cross that way I would exercise extreme caution...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
You are overcomplicating it. If a car ends up in a complicated situation where it has to guess at how many will get killed, the answer is always to just brake. Get the amount of energy in the collision down, and who knows, some people just might survive. If not, too bad.
Squirrels don't count for the evaluation, you are obliged to not risk anything to avoid a squirrel.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Those are valid ethical questions that have to be answered by the AI and the programmers. If a car is forced to make a choice between killing a squirrel or killing a child, will it treat them the same?
This is not a "valid ethical question". It is just silly.
How will it choose if it has to decide between killing 4 people or 1?
Unlike most humans, the SDC will do the right thing.
But these rare corner cases are not that interesting, because they are ... rare. Far more common are accidents where the correct course of action is obvious: hit the brakes. And SDCs are FAR better at that. A typical human takes about 1.5 seconds to realize what is happening, move a foot to the brake, and start depressing it. An SDC can do it in less than 10 milliseconds. At 70mph, a car travels more than 150 feet in 1.5 seconds. The response time will be even worse if the human is not paying attention.
Doesn't matter a damn if it has a reaction time better than a human if someone steps out onto the road 20 feet in front of the car and you've got half a second to judge and react.
There are basic physical numbers at play here - the mass of the vehicle, the ability of the braking system in the car to scrub off speed, the conditions of the tyres, the road surface, etc. In those kinds of short-distance collisions, a computer will be able to reduce the speed of the car by a few mph over a person and that's it.
The only saving grace that a person has is the ability to read body language and judge that someone might step out onto the road. And even then that usually only results in a foot off the accelerator, and not yet placed on the brake.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
What reason did the Uber car have for going 38 in a 35 zone?
Surely the speed limit was lowered from 45 to 35 for a reason, probably for safety reasons.
Can the car not read road signs? It doesn't have the excuse of "I was watching the road, not my speedo" for a minor speeding offence. Did Uber fail to update the map data when the speed limits changed?
The risk of death being hit by a car below 30mph is relatively low. It increases rapidly as speed increases.
9% chance of death at 30mph.
50% chance of death at 40mph.
Starts reaching 100% fatal over 50mph.
There's a reasonable chance the woman, who may well have been in the wrong, would still be alive if the car was traveling at or below the 35mph limit.
source: https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/re...
There's another study that showed a reduction in speed by 5km/h would result in 30% fewer deaths. That happens to be how much the Uber car was over the limit.
http://humantransport.org/side...
No one is programming a car that way.
The first rule is to anticipate and slow down before anything could happen.
The second rule is to brake.
And the third is to stay on your lane. Except you have a spare lane going same direction.
Neither a programmer nor a car is deciding if it hits 2 3 4 or 1 person. If the thing in its lane is not going away, and the car has not stopped in front of it: it is hit. As simpel as that.
What is next is a realtime auction between the life insurance companies of the potential victims to determine who gets hit.
Run by AI bidding bots?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Is usually around 5mph. It's difficult to keep a car at a rock solid 35mph, even for a computer. Changes in elevation can quickly alter your speed and religiously adjusting for it isn't even always the safest thing to do.
One of the hard lessons I had when driving is that if you slow down too much aggressive or stupid drivers will take that as a signal to go. My first accident was a t-bone where a girl hit me because she was trying to do a left into a busy road. I saw her start to move and put on my breaks. She saw me coming and did the same, but then saw me breaking and decided this somehow meant I was going to come to a complete stop in the middle of a busy street (the only option that would have stopped the accident by then). If I had not breaked she wouldn't have gone and the accident wouldn't have happened.
What I'm saying is there's such a thing as too much caution. Now, maybe if we can get the meatbags off the road that won't be true anymore.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Or maybe the person wasn't doing anything that would appear to be a problem until they suddenly changed direction immediately in front of the car?
You can't have the vehicle assume that all people have a death wish and are likely to dive in front of the car at any moment. If you program it like that it will never be able to move if there are pedestrians anywhere nearby. You have to assume that the person will behave in a somewhat rational way or your car will never be able to actually get anywhere.
I had an incident a while back where I was driving on a residential road at fairly slow speed, there was a kid running all out on the sidewalk beside me, I was watching him. As I passed him, without looking, he made an abrupt 90 degree turn straight in front of my truck. I slammed on the brakes and barely stopped. Had he turned 1/4 second later I wouldn't have been able to stop in time, had he turned 1/2-1 second later the best computer wouldn't have been able to stop in time. But there was also no reason to stop or slow down until he'd already made the 90 degree turn, as it was a highly unlikely thing for him to do. It was illegal, it was dangerous, and it wasn't something you'd expect anyone to do. I thought about it a lot afterwards, and have many times been in similar situations but where the kid didn't make that 90 degree turn. There's just no way I can justify driving with the assumption that every person on the sidewalk, median, lawn, etc, could at any time make that abrupt turn in front of me. I'd never get anywhere, and I'd likely get in a different type of situation caused by the road rage from any driver behind me.
Not all collisions are preventable. They never will be, and no technology can ever prevent all collisions. What we can do is prevent all AVOIDABLE collisions, and doing that would save millions of lives. Is that not worth doing, even if a few UNAVOIDABLE collisions still remain?