Self-driving Uber car kills pedestrian in Tempe, AZ

SAN FRANCISCO — A woman in Tempe, Ariz., has died after being hit by a self-driving car operated by Uber, in what appears to be the first known death of a pedestrian struck by an autonomous vehicle on a public road.

The Uber vehicle was in autonomous mode with a human safety driver at the wheel when it struck the woman, who was crossing the street outside of a crosswalk, the Tempe police said in a statement. The episode happened on Sunday around 10 p.m. The woman was not publicly identified.


Uber said it had suspended testing of its self-driving cars in Tempe, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto.

“Our hearts go out to the victim’s family. We are fully cooperating with local authorities in their investigation of this incident,” an Uber spokeswoman, Sarah Abboud, said in a statement.


The fatal crash will most likely raise questions about regulations for self-driving cars. Testing of self-driving cars is already underway for vehicles that have a human driver ready to take over if something goes wrong, but states are starting to allow companies to test cars without a person in the driver’s seat. This month, California said that, in April, it would start allowing companies to test autonomous vehicles without anyone behind the wheel.

Arizona already allows self-driving cars to operate without a driver behind the wheel. Since late last year, Waymo, the self-driving car unit from Google’s parent company Alphabet, has been using cars without a human in the driver’s seat to pick up and drop off passengers there. The state has largely taken an accommodating approach, promising that it would help keep the driverless car industry free from regulation. As a result, technology companies have flocked to Arizona to test their self-driving vehicles.


Autonomous cars are expected to ultimately be safer than human drivers, because they don’t get distracted and always observe traffic laws. However, researchers working on the technology have struggled with how to teach the autonomous systems to adjust for unpredictable human driving or behavior.

An Uber self-driving car was involved in another crash a year ago in Tempe. In that collision, one of Uber’s Volvo XC90 sport utility vehicles was hit when the driver of another car failed to yield, causing the Uber vehicle to roll over onto its side. The car was in self-driving mode with a safety driver behind the wheel, but police said the autonomous vehicle had not been at fault.


In 2016, a man driving his Tesla using Autopilot, the car company’s self-driving software, died on a state highway in Florida when it crashed into a tractor-trailer that was crossing the road in front of his car. Federal regulators later ruled there were no defects in the system to cause the accident.

The National Transportation Safety Board was sending a small team of investigators to Arizona to gather information about the Uber crash, said Eric Weiss, an N.T.S.B. spokesman.



https://nyti.ms/2u3QDYx

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There are too many challenging events that autonomous cars can't figure out how to work their way around yet.

An alert human should really sit behind the wheel and be prepared to take over the vehicle instantaneously.

@HPrime Advanced has an idea with some merit, although I don't believe the US is terrorist-filled. There are quite a few people with awfully bad ideas, e.g. white supremacists, Nazis, KKK, gun nuts, but not those who instigated 9/11.

Artificial intelligence is still artificial stupidity in many ways.

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People riding in self-driving cars that crash could find themselves unable to hold the manufacturer accountable if legislation currently pending on Capitol Hill is passed, consumer advocates warn.

They caution that the legislation under consideration in the Senate benefits big tech and car companies at the expense of average Americans.

Legislators have pushed to clear the way for self-driving vehicles. The House unanimously passed a related bill in September. But critics warn that autonomous vehicles won't be perfect, and could have defects that lead to bad crashes. Like all computer systems, they will be vulnerable to hacking.

Among other potential problems, research has shown, for instance, that placing stickers on a stop sign can cause a self-driving car to misinterpret it as a speed limit sign, which could trigger a crash at an intersection.

Critics are concerned that the bill, known as the AV Start Act, does not prohibit forced arbitration between autonomous vehicle manufacturers and consumers. A person badly injured while riding in a self-driving car would not be able to take part in a class action lawsuit, or sue the maker of the technology. Instead, disputes would be settled in arbitration. Experts say arbitration shifts the balance of power in the favor of big businesses, because they generally hire the arbitrator and will be its repeat customer.

Arbitration proceedings are also private, so use of them would mean the public is more likely to be kept in the dark about flaws in self-driving vehicles.

"The nightmare scenario is that someone is hurt because of a defect and it's dealt with through a confidential arbitration proceeding that nobody knows about, and then more people are hurt because no one found out about it," Ed Walters, who teaches robotics law at Georgetown Law and Cornell Tech, told CNN. "Congress could stick up for the right to sue by prohibiting these kind of clauses, but so far they haven't."

Wednesday afternoon, five Democratic Senators released a letter calling for changes in the bill in which they outlined concerns including the bill potentially pre-empting state and local traffic laws. But they were silent on the topic of forced arbitration.

Related: How free self-driving car rides could change everything

"No one is suggesting anyone is looking to intentionally put something dangerous on the road. But it's human nature that the less trouble we're going to get in, the less cautious we may choose to be," said Jason K. Levine, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety, a non-profit advocacy group.

"Going back 50 years, I've never seen a more brazen attempt to escape the rule of safety law, and the role of the courts to be accessible to their victims," longtime consumer advocate Ralph Nader told CNN. "With their unproven, secretive technology that's fully hackable, the autonomous vehicle industry wants to close the door on federal safety protection and close the door to the court room."

Ridesharing companies Uber and Lyft already include forced arbitration in their terms of service with passengers. Consumers will likely first experience self-driving technology in a similar format, by requesting a ride through a smartphone app.

"It's another example of large companies being able to tilt the table their way in terms of service agreements. It's a power shift created in a contract that nobody reads. Everybody clicks 'I accept,'" Walters said. "You have rights to sue unless you sign them away. And companies have gotten very good at making you sign them away."

Related: For self-driving cars, car washes are a nightmare

The largest players in the self-driving car industry, Waymo, GM's Cruise, Ford, Zoox, Toyota, Tesla, Uber and Lyft, all declined to comment for this story. The Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets, an industry lobbying group, also declined to comment.

"Imagine if I put my daughter in the back of a self-driving Uber to get to soccer practice, and the vehicle can't see in the fog or rain, and there's a tragedy," Levine said. "My level of ability to hold the company accountable is entirely constricted by something buried in tons and tons of pages of terms of service, for downloading the app."

Loophole would protect self-driving car companies from lawsuits - Mar. 14, 2018

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I am not wishing ill of the woman who lost her life, however, AI needs to be able to account for human error, whether it's jaywalking, cyclists weaving through traffic, leaving the driver's side door open on a busy street, etc.

Maybe a better training solution would be to have testing grounds using robots and robotics to simulate as many human error situations as possible. I would think that someplace like the Northwestern Traffic Institute or NHTSA would be able to help by providing use cases.

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ProPublica jointly published a story with
the Florida Times Union that might surprise you.

THE JACKSONVILLE SHERIFF’S OFFICE issues hundreds of pedestrian citations a year, drawing on an array of 28 separate statutes governing how people get around on foot in Florida’s most populous city. There is, of course, the straightforward jaywalking statute, barring people from crossing against a red light. But in Jacksonville, pedestrians can also be ticketed for crossing against a yellow light, for “failing to cross a street at a right angle,” for not walking on the left side of a road when there are no sidewalks, or alternatively for not walking on a sidewalk when one is available.

The sheriff’s office says the enforcement of the full variety of pedestrian statutes is essential to keeping people alive in a city with one of the highest pedestrian fatality rates in the nation. The office also says the tickets are a useful crime-fighting tool, allowing officers to stop suspicious people and question them for guns and or drugs.

What the analysis does show is that the pedestrian tickets — typically costing $65, but carrying the power to damage one’s credit or suspend a driver’s license if unpaid — were disproportionately issued to blacks, almost all of them in the city’s poorest neighborhoods. In the last five years, blacks received 55 percent of all pedestrian tickets in Jacksonville, while only accounting for 29 percent of the population. Blacks account for a higher percentage of tickets in Duval County than any other large county in Florida.

Blacks, then, were nearly three times as likely as whites to be ticketed for a pedestrian violation. Residents of the city’s three poorest zip codes were about six times as likely to receive a pedestrian citation as those living in the city’s other, more affluent 34 zip codes.

Tickets for some of the less familiar statutes were issued even more disproportionately to blacks. Seventy-eight percent of all tickets written for “walking in the roadway where sidewalks are provided” were issued to blacks. As well, blacks accounted for 68 percent of all recipients of tickets issued for “failing to cross the road at a right angle or shortest route.”

Walking While Black

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