Self-driving Uber car kills pedestrian in Tempe, AZ

i do it all the time, and i'll tell you, as you get older, cognition declines, and it's easy to forget to look both ways carefully.

 

How is this any different from human drivers who are at fault in these scenarios on a daily basis? Are the grieving comforted in the thought that "at least a human killed their loved ones and not a souless machine"?

Will a human driver at their peak performance out perform an AI vehicle and its constant improvements/updates? Currently yes, absolutely. In the future? Maybe, maybe not. What's important is the AI vehicle will perform at its optimum (warts and all) 24/7 while the human driver rarely performs optimally; in fact, more likely poorly due to distractions, physical or mental impairments, age, poor training, etc.

I've stopped riding motorcycles in most urban situations because of all the poor driving I see on a daily basis. It's truly shocking how many oncoming drivers I see OF ALL AGES with the heads pointed down as I pass by inches away.

 

no, but the driver's should be professionally trained and alert when accompanying an autonomous car. they should be better than most of the driver's on the road.

 

Currently the death toll due to auto accidents is greater than the death toll due to gun violence in US. This is saying something! Around 35,000 deaths per year give or take due to auto accidents. I am sure we can do better with driverless cars. But the road there will be tough as it is with any immature technology. On the way to maturity there will be pitfalls for sure. But the human drivers are getting worse and worse. The old school "good" drivers are getting old and dying and the new crop of drivers is distracted to the point of no return. This will only get worse, so the auto piloted cars are definitely going to save lives. No question about it. The question is more about the politics and laws around the whole thing. Our laws still struggle with (not so) new technology of digital media and that has been around for decades now.

 

Ok, perhaps a bit much, but it is technically. Crossing many city streets while not at a crosswalk can be a citation. Rarely enforced (except in Jacksonville apparently ) it is still against the rules.
Regardless of the semantics, it is careless, and caries with it risk.

 

We need to see the video from the car to judge if it was a case that was unavoidable for a normal driver, or what.

 

Absolutely!
Luckily, there are likely many videos from the car that should tell us a lot about what happened.

 

I did not mean that to be a statistical challenge, I just meant it to serve as an eye opener. We loose close to 40,000 lives to cars each year. I did not mean to turn this thread into a gun violence thread. That deserves its own thread.

 

we already have plenty.

 

"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.""
Police chief: Uber self-driving car “likely” not at fault in fatal crash | Ars Technica

It shouldn't be a death sentence, but it sometimes is. Sometimes the dead weren't even careless, but just unlucky.

Airline pilots are professionally trained, but they sometimes still make mistakes with the autopilot. Some autopilot systems are capable of landing the plane at this point.

The point of autonomous cars isn't to eliminate all car accidents and deaths, but to be safer than human driven cars.
It appears that this woman would have died even with a person driving the car. If that were the case, we wouldn't even know about it. This is the first death involving an autonomous car. How miles have such cars driven on public roads? how does that compare to deaths per mile for human driven cars?

 

no idea.

will there be a cockpit voice recording of the 'driver'?

 

peopled from a lot of things besides natural causes. as a society in general, we endeavor to reduce those deaths as much as possible. comparisons won't help, but they sometimes make a separate point.

 

Reports indicate there is a camera on the driver, so authorities likely have that data.

 

Aside from VERY hackable controls, and guaranteed inconsistent reliability (just look at the airbag fiasco, or steering wheels falling off with Ford/Lincoln cars),
there is the HUGE question of responsibility WHEN the accidents occur.
All the BIG BOYS will push for arbitration, and consumers will get the shaft!! I'm glad I probably won't live to see this nightmare!
Oh by the way, you Uber and Lyft drivers will be out of work. Yeah, the best of all possible worlds!!

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AChoiredTaste.com

 

Based on the fact that it looks like the accident was unavoidable, even with a driver operating the car, this story doesn't really tell us much about autonomous vehicles.

To me it seems like we're trying to address too many problems at once with autonomous vehicles. I would start with designing them to operate on designated highways specifically built/updated for autonomous vehicles. Then progressively solve one problem at a time: stop lights, pedestrians, bicycles, motorcycles, bad road lanes, etc. etc. Expecting a car to behave flawlessly (or even acceptably) in all of these conditions at once without extensive testing and deployment in conditions with fewer variables will inevitably lead to crashes and problems.

At the moment I commute 35 miles each way every day with 5 miles in the city and 30 miles on the interstate. I'd be very happy if the car could just self drive the 30 miles on the interstate. I don't need the car to go from parking space to parking space.

I also do think that this could benefit from regulation. For example, a country wide database of roads could be created. In case of construction, bad weather, road damage, accidents etc, automated driving on these roads could be disabled.

 

Yes, progress sucks. What in the world was that person thinking when they invented fire?