Self-driving Uber kills Arizona woman in first fatal crash involving pedestrian

[melodramocracy]

Clearly the move here is to ban street crossing.

[Independent voter]

Google seems to have a pretty good record, Uber is the worst. I wouldn't want to be on the street with an autonomous Uber car around, at least not at the present.

[LMuhlen]

Clearly the move here is to ban street crossing.

Maybe they should develop self driven boards which are distributed along the streets and transport pedestrians across them safely!

[Doctor Amadeus]

But it was designed by a engineer? Those guys are saints that only design the most perfect code. We're lucky all those STEM guys even deign to give us mere plebs the mere time of day.

We just need to worship engineers and programmers harder. To keep them from designing technology or bridges that won't kill us.

Maybe if we sacrifice our humanities and arts programs at the altar of STEM they will finally be appeased?

/s

Lol yeah pretty much that practice running over their theory. Like you ever seen one of those self defense things where they do in slow motion what you do if this happens. Yeah...

You see the problem with the theory is that autonomous self driving cars is gonna have hard time dealing with the kind of jack ass people you learn to navigate everyday and human unpredictability that often times defies logic or sense. Lol

[LMuhlen]

Could add some external air bags for those pesky jaywalkers...

[Stop Pretending]

Good thing they stopped making cars the first time someone died using one.....oh wait.

[demonyaa]

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-s...-a8263921.html

https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...-arizona-tempe




Looks like the self driving car fantasy is crashing into reality.

Now there will be more due dates for 'the future' pushed back, and promises downscaled.

The human takeover fudge they have in this case clearly is worse than an actual driver because of they wont have any feeling for the setting which leads to slower reactions in emergency situations. A slower response than a human that is driving the whole time is just a worse outcome.

Hope Uber get sued hard.

Because we don't have self driving trains, we don't have autopilot in airplanes, we don't have automatic stability control in airplanes, we don't have systems in our cars that actively disengage with brakes when the wheels slip.... oh wait....

[Tyrianth]

First death after how many hundres of thousands of KMs driven?

[Dudenoso]

oh my, its almost like trusting machines to account of human random decision making in a life or death situation was a bad idea :O

Tell me more about how humans are so much better at the accidents/miles driven ratio :0

[DSRilk]

You see the problem with the theory is that autonomous self driving cars is gonna have hard time dealing with the kind of jack ass people you learn to navigate everyday and human unpredictability that often times defies logic or sense. Lol

The cars will be far better at that than people. They have far, FAR more accurate measurements of the speed, trajectory, and distance to every object on the road, including "jack ass" drivers. On top of that, they don't get angry when they're cut off, or someone speeds up to stop you from passing. They adjust and continue on their merry way. People, on the other hand, have to guess at distances, rely on two eyes and some mirrors to see things for those guesses, and are often easily frustrated or angered by behavior on the road causing lapses in good judgment.

[Ozzyorcborne]

Any proof this wasnt an intentional thing on the womans part that went sour? Walk in front of the car, get hit and sue for millions? Insurance scams are a thing after all.

[Doctor Amadeus]

The cars will be far better at that than people. They have far, FAR more accurate measurements of the speed, trajectory, and distance to every object on the road, including "jack ass" drivers. On top of that, they don't get angry when they're cut off, or someone speeds up to stop you from passing. They adjust and continue on their merry way. People, on the other hand, have to guess at distances, rely on two eyes and some mirrors to see things for those guesses, and are often easily frustrated or angered by behavior on the road causing lapses in good judgment.

Sure it did that’s why a woman is dead.

[Evil Midnight Bomber]

This. Self-driving cars are still in their infancy anyway, I see no reason to not try and fix the issue and advance further rather than letting technophobia cloud our judgement and shutting it all down.

The fact that they are still in their infancy and UBER is already using them is the issue I think.

I think more testing needs to be done before Ride sharing companies start using them. I don't blame the cars...I blame the Arizona lawmakers that decided they would allow this experiment without any overseeing regulation in place.

From another source:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/t...-fatality.html

The state has largely taken a hands-off 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.

[Zantos]

This story is lacking so many details. How exactly did it happen? Did she just suddenly cross? Was it at a light? What about the diver behind the wheel? Was he unable to take over for some reason?

Too vague for me to really say one way or another what was going on. However, I will say this. Idiots or not, this will spur discussion about how safe automated cars really are and what happens if someone dies as a result of being stupid in their presence. I feel like no one really bothered to try to look into the legal side, such as getting regulations in place, before now. Sure, they talked about it and might have tried some, but not as hard as they could.

[Draco-Onis]

The fact that they are still in their infancy and UBER is already using them is the issue I think.

I think more testing needs to be done before Ride sharing companies start using them. I don't blame the cars...I blame the Arizona lawmakers that decided they would allow this experiment without any overseeing regulation in place.

The article states that there was a human in the car but they obviously didn't have their hands on the controls and didn't react fast enough. Also we do not know the full details of how it happened the last time we got an article like this it turned out the self driving car was not at fault but the other driver. Last but not least even if this was their fault considering how long they have been on the road they still have a better track record than human drivers.

[Eurytos]

This is always overblown.

Its not even a question that self driving cars will cause less death and injury than human driven. It's tragic, yes, these deaths always are.
But its always a comparison. Compare the average number of self-driving car incidents to human driven incidents in the same time period. The cost is most assuredly higher with human drivers.

But this is an unstoppable force really. Economics is driving all of this. Soon, it will simply be too expensive to drive a gas powered, human driven vehicle.

[Zantos]

Compare the average number of self-driving car incidents to human driven incidents in the same time period.

The problem with this is, that doesn't work. There are other factors that the human driving cars have in that same time period that will undoubtedly skew any data given.

For example, take me and my family, and all of our combined coworkers, and none of them caused any accidents or fatalities within the same time period. You can even look at specific areas and find different results. It will be hard, until there are far more self driving cars in far more areas, to get a real grasp on this.

Do I think they will cause less deaths? Sure. As long as the technology is capable of doing so. However, we have zero ways to compare the two at this moment in time due to the sheer number of people driving going to always give a result that is in favor of the self driving cars.

[Gaaz]

It is WAAAAAY to early for releasing these things on the road IMO. People break rules on a regular basis and are far too chaotic in behavior for a primitive AI algorithm to cope with it adequately.The way things are, AI driven cars can only be operated on separate roads. They should not be mixed with regular traffic and have contact with general populace in cities. We spend hundreds of millions to develop autopilots, yet they still can not cope with bad weather or any non standard conditions during take off, flight and landing. Roads are far more chaotic than a runway strip.

[DSRilk]

Sure it did that’s why a woman is dead.

You have no IDEA why a woman is dead. It could be because there was a defect in the programming. It could be because the driver started to take over and did something wrong. It could be that she stepped out into traffic at the wrong time. It could be that she was hidden from view, meaning a human would have hit her also.

[LiiLoSNK]

She was probably the next Hitler. Uber has a feature to detect this in a person.