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Comment by leggomylibro | Hacker News Reader

FTA:

"The Uber vehicle was reportedly driving early Monday when a woman walking outside of the crosswalk was struck.

...

Tempe Police says the vehicle was in autonomous mode at the time of the crash and a vehicle operator was also behind the wheel."

That's a very bad look; the whole point of self-driving cars is that they can react to unexpected circumstances much more quickly than a human operator, such as when someone walks out into the road. Sounds like Uber's platform may not be up to that standard yet, which makes me wonder why they're on public roads.

On the other hand, it sounds like it happened very recently; I guess we'll have to wait and see what happened.

View on HN

> That's a very bad look; the whole point of self-driving cars is that they can react to unexpected circumstances much more quickly than a human operator, such as when someone walks out into the road.

Some of these accidents are unpreventable by the (autonomous) driver. If a pedestrian suddenly rushes out into the street or a cyclist swerves into your path, the deciding factor is often simply the coefficient of friction between your tyres and the road.

The autonomous vehicle and the human attendant might have made a glaring error, or they might have done everything correctly and still failed to prevent a fatality. It's far too early to say. It's undoubtedly a dent to the public image of autonomous vehicles, but hopefully the car's telemetry data will reveal whether this was a case of error, negligence or unavoidable tragedy.

Yet this tragic accident will now set a precedent and finally start to scratch the delicate unspoken question: Who is responsible now?

Obviously Uber in this case, but as mentioned in response to a separate article, AI's must be like pets or children and have a liable guardian.

Not obviously. Let's wait to judge until we have the facts. The pedestrian was outside of the crosswalk. There's not a whole lot of information about the events that lead up to the accident. It is possible that a pedestrian is at fault if they stepped in the way of moving traffic outside of a crosswalk. It's also possible Uber's cars are not up to the task of driving on public roadways.

The penalty for walking outside a crosswalk is not death.

Arizona requires drivers to "exercise due care to avoid colliding with a pedestrian". If a fatality results, but due care was taken by the driver to avoid it, then the tragic accident is just that, an accident.

Like my comment says, let's wait until we have facts before passing judgement.

Sure, we don't know many of the details.

But from this distance, things don't look good for the technology or the future of autonomous trials on public roads.

The evidence that due care was not taken will pretty much be the existence of the fatality.

There surely will be video, from the car itself and also perhaps third party security or traffic cameras. The level of carelessness we are going to have to see in order for a jury to blame the victim will be pretty high.

I agree with the final paragraph in your comment. All I'm saying is let's reserve judgement until we know what happened.

As for a fatality proving that due care was not taken, I agree. It doesn't tell you who failed to take due care though.

Who would the guardian (and therefore responsible) be - the driver or the car manufacturer? Sounds like a circular argument to me!

In this case, the driver is an Uber employee, and the automation is Uber-created and deployed, so the driver is the car manufacturer.

Likely the more apt word is liable.

In law you split that into criminal and civil. Very unlikely there will be any criminal charge, hence no criminal liability but it’s possible.

Civil liability is more interesting, but if the deceased’s estate brings suit it opens up a can of worms in the discovery process. Every internal communication, prior incident, etc...

At the end of the day it’s not much different than any other vehicular fatality case, but there will be a defective product component (again nothing unheard of in the case of vehicular fatalities). At the end of the day the car will be insured for accidents, so we will probably learn more about the insurance coverage for self-driving cars.

Corporate manslaughter is still criminal.

The cars telemetry data will undoubtedly point to a unavoidable tragedy if it's just uber analyzing it.

Makes me wonder the likelihood of the public ever seeing that telemetry if it appears incriminating to Uber.

The data will have been lost in an unfortunate accident, which Uber will promise never to repeat.

...despite them taking this incident very, very seriously.

This stuff needs to be regulated sooner rather than later.

That wont be the case, the data is an evidence in a criminal investigation.

Making evidence disappear is indeed inconceivable. Especially for a firm of Uber's stature.

If you have good judgement, it's quite easy to prevent a fatality. I.e. I go slower in places where I know pedestrians might jump out.

Lower the chances of, not prevent.

Exactly, you can never reduce accident rates to zero, even if you slow to a crawl or stop (now you're endanger traffic behind you). Debris could fall on your car and make the steering non-responsive. A flat tire could burst at any speed and cause a bicyclist to veer into traffic/off a cliff/whatever.

When it comes to human drivers we deal with probabilities, but for some reason people want absolutes with autonomous ones.

This seems like the opinion of someone who drives too fast?

Sounds like the opinion of someone who knows minimum braking distances still exist even when going slowly.

If pedestrians or especially children are present, one should be driving very slowly. 15mph sounds about right. At that speed one is unlikely to kill, since even if a pedestrian "jumps out" (an event that is vanishingly less common than drivers not paying attention), one has enough time to stop.

Most drivers drive too fast. (Me too!) Most drivers have not killed anyone. All drivers who have killed someone, were driving too fast at the time. Many drivers will disagree with me, but they are simply wrong about appropriate speeds, and we will all be safer when robocars are driving for them.

Even when the minimum braking distance is not small enough to avoid hitting a pedestrian, a lower speed will impart a lower kinetic energy vastly reducing the odds of fatally injuring the victim.

This statement is either very poorly thought out, or needlessly accusatory and inflammatory.

I would say that if you claim that a massively complex system like public traffic, with thousands of participants, many of them badly or completely untrained, can be organized in such a fashion that any and all accidents can be prevented, the burden falls on you to show how.

This subthread is not about the massively complex system. Rather we are discussing the good judgment of individual drivers. Even if my statement were not literally true (the best kind, and it literally is), it would still be good practice for all drivers to commit themselves to driving slowly enough to prevent collisions with pedestrians.

Sure, but in the above user's hypothetical, that would mean that in such an area a concerned human driver with a greater ability to predict general human behavior would have a statistical safety improvement on the autonomous vehicle, which might not understand, for instance, that since it's a Friday night and the big game just ended and I'm in the city center I should be more careful than usual because there will be more intoxicated people.

Which is a lot of high level reasoning and inference with information from a variety of sources which aren't on the face of it strictly related to the driving task.

That's the type of thing that an excellent driver thinks about, but about 10x more thinking than I believe the average driver does.

This is the reason robocar firms will fight to keep all their data private. If it were public, researchers could show and personal injury attorneys could argue persuasively that there are some speeds that would never cause fatal collisions. Since those speeds will be slower than most passengers wish to travel, this mode of travel will be more vulnerable to lawsuits.

I’m kind of in the Elon Musk camp here where you gotta break some eggs to make an omelette? Human-driven cars kill a lot of pedestrians today, but we can actually do something to improve the human-recognition algorithms in a self-driving car.

As long as self driving cars represent an improvement over human drivers, I’m ok with them having a non-zero accident date while we work out the kinks.

The problem is the blame game. Human behind a wheel hits a pedestrian, if they're found at fault then that "horrible inattentive/drunk/whatever driver" goes to jail for the death of another human being. It never makes anything "right", and I won't even start on how a jail sentence regardless of length can ruin your life in the US, but the public as a whole gets a feel good that "justice has been served".

How do we handle this for autonomous vehicles? Do we just fine/sue the company that made the vehicle/developed the software? Do we send imperfect human developers to jail because they made a mistake, even if in the grand scheme of things they have saved lives compared to humans being behind every action made by a vehicle?

A big part of the public image for autonomous cars is increased safety, any deaths at their hands starts raising where and how to place the blame - a subject I think very few are prepared for right now, which is likely part of why Tesla explicitly states autopilot needs a human driver present right now, and why Google has been extremely cautious with operator-supervised tests up until recently.

People get found not at fault for hitting pedestrians all the time.

In some sense, yes.

But is it any surprise that Uber had the first self driving car to kill a human being? You can cook in an orderly, careful way, or you can turn the kitchen into a disaster zone and expect other people to clean up for you.

I know which I prefer when it comes to human lives.

While I agree that the AV safety record is better than the human one, how is "you gotta kill random bystanders to make an omelette" okay just for this one industry? (As opposed to e.g. medical or military testing)

Military testing is typically done by putting a few pieces of tested equipment in the field. Russia is doing exactly that in Syria with their new Su-57. Pretty sure it's where a few other of the planes got a first taste of live combat, that's part of testing. I'm sure it'll either cause some unintended fatalities.

And, medicine takes tens of thousands of lives unintentionally, if I recall correctly.

So, by this logic, AZ is now a war zone?

Medicinal testing kills tens of thousands?

Not at all. You had mentioned military testing, which is safe in early stages, and I addressed that first: the testing process does follow through into live environments. Where things can go wrong.

But no, medical testing doesn't kill tens of thousands, practiced medicine does. I may have read your post wrong an figured you meant medicine in practice separately from military testing. There's research to suggest mistakes are the third leading cause of death in the US [1]. My point wasn't so much that killing random bystanders is okay, but that there's a level of unintended death in both, and not just in testing. Society decides what's acceptable, and if for miles driven the number of deaths that self driving vehicles cause is lower than the number of deaths caused by human drivers per miles driven, well... I'd say that's a fair way to look at it.

1. http://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i2139

Okay, that does sound far more reasonable than comparing dead people to a part of a recipe.

...where breaking eggs means killing people?

There's no way for autonomous driving to become a reality without people dying?

I think we could achieve autonomous driving without needless deaths along the way. It might take longer, but I'd say it's worth it to, I can't believe I have to make this argument, avoid killing people.

you seem to be giving uber a big benefit of the doubt. these autonomous cars generally go slow. tempe has flat roads with great line of sight and clear weather. coefficient of friction? highly doubt it. the sensors should be looking more than just straight a head

It's not unreasonable for there to an expectation of basically zero accidents of this nature during testing in cities. The public puts a huge amount of trust in private companies when they do this. And, pragmatically, Google, Uber, etc, all know that it would be horrible publicity for something like this to happen. One would think they'd be overly cautious and conservative to avoid even the possibility of this.

Lastly, the whole point of the human operator is to be the final safety check.

You're right that we have no idea of the cause until the data is analyzed (and the human operator interviewed). Yet, my first thought was, "Of course it'd be Uber."

>If a pedestrian suddenly rushes out into the street or a cyclist swerves into your path, the deciding factor is often simply the coefficient of friction between your tyres and the road.

This only true for the uninitiated, never let it get to that. I drove for Uber/Lyft/Via in New York city so I can experience and study these situation. These sort of accidents are preventable. The following is the basic:

1.) Drive much slower in areas where a pedestrian and cyclist can suddenly cross your past.

2.) Know the danger zone. Before people "jump into traffic" or a cyclist swerve in front of you, they have to get into position, this position is the danger zone.

3.) Extra diligence in surveying the area/danger zone to predict a potential accident.

4.) Make up for the reduce speed by using highways and parkways as much as possible.

It helps that Manhattan street traffic tends to be very slow to begin with. Ideally I will like use my knowledge to offer a service to help train autonomous vehicles to deal with these situation. It has to be simulated numerous times in a closed circuit for the machine to learn what I've learn intuitively driving professionally in NYC.

While what you are saying can reduce the number of occurrences, it does not change what your parent post said.

You're making an observation about what it's like in an urban area. Sadly, in a suburban area like Tempe the presence of any pedestrian anywhere is unexpected.

The ASU campus area around Tempe has diverse traffic conditions. There are spots near the campus where you would expect to stop at every crosswalk, while in some roadways, a pedestrian would be completely unexpected.

Around the bars, people stumble into traffic all the time. Any driver, automated or human, would need to anticipate that.

> 1.) Drive much slower in areas where a pedestrian and cyclist can suddenly cross your past.

So essentially everywhere? I have seen pedestrians walk unexpectedly into traffic on high-speed 4-lane divided roads with no crosswalks.

> 2.) Know the danger zone. Before people "jump into traffic" or a cyclist swerve in front of you, they have to get into position, this position is the danger zone.

What "position" are you referring to? There are places where you can account for or predict pedestrians. There are also places where you cannot, such as when someone walks into traffic from behind a tall parked vehicle, where you have no chance to see them in advance.

Simply counting traffic fatalities suggests that crazy pedestrians causing unavoidable accidents cannot be common, even if every single pedestrian accident were both unavoidable and the pedestrians "fault" (although I'd argue that ethically it must be primarily the vehicles fault, but that's another story).

And that'ss with humans behind the wheel: lazy, distracted, slow to react fleshbags that we are.

I'm not sure that a truly unavoidable accident would occur even once a year in a fictional world in which all drivers were perfect and had millisecond reaction speeds.

What is obvious however, is that these situations are so rare as to be irrelevant. In practice accidents are avoidable by the driver of the vehicle - or at least avoidable to such an extent that it's not worth considering the other cases.

Also: although I personally don't object to some rational victim blaming I think it's a little distasteful that we're already speculating about how this must be the victims's fault, when there's simply not enough evidence to make that kind of determination yet. Let's not forget that part of the privilege of being allowed to participate in traffic implies a responsibility not to kill people even when they behave unexpectedly.

For some statistical perspective: if human drivers had as many fatal accidents per mile as uber has, then the average male driver would kill 1 person in his lifetime (men drive more). Clearly: that's absurd; people may cause too many accidents, but not nearly that many - and that's being rather charitable to uber's self-driving vehicles, since they have back-up drivers and thus don't count complicated traffic situations, and safety drivers, and thus may well have caused more accidents by themselves. So going purely by the unusual-ness of such an accident with so few miles, I'd say the initial assumption must be that this is likely a bug in uber's car, even if I'm sure there were contributing factors.

Edit: I guess it's not surprising wikipedia has stats on the influence of alcohol on fatalities, but it tops out at 4 times the legal limit - at which point human drivers are still safer than this (sample size of one...) uber record so far. :-/

> Simply counting traffic fatalities suggests that crazy pedestrians causing unavoidable accidents cannot be common

Of course not. I'm not saying they're common, merely that they exist. I do not agree with the idea that accidents would go away if drivers were just trying harder, though. There are legitimate unavoidable accidents, and there are also limits to practical human driving.

> Also: although I personally don't object to some rational victim blaming I think it's a little distasteful that we're already speculating about how this must be the victims's fault

To be really clear, I am not blaming the victim here. I have no idea what happened. I'm actually very inclined to blame Uber, though I recognize that's just my personal bias against them.

Why can't you slow down when driving past tall parked vehicles that you can't see through? If you are going slower you will have a chance to see them in advance, select a speed where your stopping distance is less than the length of the obstruction and be prepared to brake. You will have no chance of striking all but the most willfully suicidal of pedestrians.

Near my house there is an arterial I often cross where a large bush on the corner of the intersection obscures the view to the left from the stop sign roughly 10 feet back. I don't just stop at the sign then YOLO through the intersection, I stop, then creep forward, first looking for pedestrians or bicyclist that might step out from the bushes, then at the edge of bushes I stop again and look again both left and right for cars and bikes or pedestrians in the far lane before proceeding across. I often have to stop another time between the sign and the bushes for the pedestrian or bicyclist that just emerged, if I was focusing on getting across the arterial and beating cross traffic I would have killed every one of them.

At what speed do tall vehicles suddenly become transparent?

The idea that cars should drive past tall vehicles at 5 mph is slightly ridiculous. I have never ridden in a car with someone who constantly adjusted their driving speed based on the cars parked on the road. Choosing a reasonable speed? Of course. Extra care at obvious obstructions? Absolutely. Slowing traffic to 5mph because a van happens to be parked? No.

It is not ridiculous if you are driving in a narrow lane close to the obstacles. When I am driving on a residential (one lane, parked cars on both sides) street and I am approaching a tall opaque van I start by noticing if anyone is around it as I approach, when I have better sight lines, then as I get near it I absolutely slow down from an average speed of 15-20mph to well under 10mph and yes, depending on the situation sometimes as low as 5mph or slower. When I am on a faster road with two or more lanes there is often room to move laterally in these situations and so my speed reduction is less extreme, but I absolutely do still slow down as I pass these vans/trucks, cover the brakes and also check my blind spot to see if there is room for evasive maneuvers should they be required. If I see people in the area as I approach and have reason to believe they might try to cross, enter or exit a car, or otherwise be near the lane of traffic I will often change lanes to the left if possible.

Agreed that it's too early to really say one way or another. In maybe 100k miles of urban driving I've had one cyclist run into my car and a girl on her phone walk directly into the corner of the front, I was at a complete stop watching them both times.

Until there's a detailed report it's really hard to say if it was preventable or not - but I think regardless the optics are bad and this is going to chill a lot of people's feelings on self driving whether or not that is an emotion backed by data.

> If a pedestrian suddenly rushes out into the street or a cyclist swerves into your path, the deciding factor is often simply the coefficient of friction between your tyres and the road.

This holds iff the control input you apply is only braking. Changing the steering angle is generally far more effective for the "pedestrian darts out from hidden place onto road" situation. It's far better to sharply swerve away to ensure that there's no way the pedestrian can get into your path before your car arrive there than it is to stand on the brakes and hope for the best.

Indeed, the faster you're moving, the more you should consider swerving away over braking -- take advantage of that lethal speed to clear the pedestrian's potential paths before he can get into yours.

Yes, this intentionally violates the letter of the traffic laws (and might involve colliding into a a parked or moving automobile on the other side of the road) and also involves potentially unusual manoeuvring on a very short deadline; but it's far better to avoid a vehicle-pedestrian collision even if it's at the cost of possibly busting into the opposing lane / driving off the road / hitting a parked car. Decently experienced drivers can do this, I can do this (and have successfully avoided a collision with a pedestrian who ran out between parked cars on a dark and raining night), there's no fundamental reason that computer-controlled cars can't do this.

>Yes, this intentionally violates the letter of the traffic laws...

...so you probably won't find any support for it in this crowd.

> there's no fundamental reason that computer-controlled cars can't do this.

Sure, there's no fundamental reason you can't swerve but you need to identify the thing in the road you're trying not to hit before you can decide whether to swerve or brake. Self driving cars can't yet reliably ID things well enough to take the only evasive action they know (stopping).

I think you touched on the fundamental reason self driving cars cannot currently do this. It would mean programming self driving cars to, in some circumstances, break the law.

I agree with the thrust of your comment though, and think that a change in the law may be required to allign incentives for machines as well as people to drive humanely.

They already do that for speed limits - iirc Waymo cars will 'go with the flow' to a certain extent if everyone around them is speeding. Swerving out of your lane (assuming it is safe to do so) to avoid a collision seems pretty straightforward.

Which eventually gets the vehicle into conflict: Exhibit A, amongs other things going over the speed limit, oops, now someone's dead.

Hmm, interesting. Google Street View seems to have 45 mph speed limit at that location...https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4350531,-111.941492,3a,75y,3...

This is a good point. Robocars will have more evidence for their defense in such a case than human drivers would have. "Oh there was a kid who jumped out? And that's why you plowed into this parked car? Likely story!"

Obviously if there's room and time to swerve and avoid the pedestrian, you should, but swerving into an oncoming car? That sounds extreme. There's no way I'd risk killing myself and anyone in the oncoming vehicle to save one person who made a poor decision. In any situation where there's other traffic and off-street foot traffic, swerving might just cause more harm than good. Everything is situational, and I'm sure there are bound to be cases where there is no sensible option for avoiding a fatality because of exceedingly bad timing on the pedestrian's part.

That’s technically true but the number of truly unavoidable cases is orders of magnitude lower. With human drivers, “jumped out in front of me” really means inattention 99.9% of the time and police departments historically tend to be unlikely to question such claims. (For example, here in DC there have been a number of cases where that was used to declare a cyclist at fault only to have private video footage show the opposite - which mattered a lot for medical insurance claims)

With self-driving cars this really seems to call for mandatory investigations by a third-party with access to the raw telemetry data. There’s just too much incentive for a company to say they weren’t at fault otherwise.

The hope is that AV can see 360 and observe things outside of blind spots further away. So the kid running from a yard into the road after a ball should be safer, but a person walking out from behind a parked truck wouldn't.

If a pedestrian suddenly rushes out into the street or a cyclist swerves into your path, the deciding factor is often simply the coefficient of friction between your tyres and the road.

I mentioned in another comment that something I use to try to improve my own driving is watching videos from /r/roadcam on reddit, and trying to guess where the unexpected vehicle or pedestrian is going to come from.

Here's an example of a pedestrian suddenly appearing from between stopped cars (and coming from a traffic lane, not from a sidewalk), and a human driver spotting it and safely stopping:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYvKPMaz9rI

Why can't a self-driving car do this?

>> Sounds like Uber's platform may not be up to that standard yet, which makes me wonder why they're on public roads.

They're on public roads because they've decided that deploying their tech is more important than safety.

I don't see any other explanation. We know that it's pretty much impossible to prove the safety of autonomous vehicles by driving them, so Uber (and almost everyone else) have decided that, well, they don't care. They'll deploy them anyway.

How do we know that? The report by RAND corporation:

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1478.html

  Key Findings

  * Autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds 
  of millions of miles and sometimes hundreds of billions 
  of miles to demonstrate their reliability in terms of 
  fatalities and injuries.

  * Under even aggressive testing assumptions, existing 
  fleets would take tens and sometimes hundreds of years 
  to drive these miles — an impossible proposition if the 
  aim is to demonstrate their performance prior to 
  releasing them on the roads for consumer use.

  * Therefore, at least for fatalities and injuries, 
  test- driving alone cannot provide sufficient evidence 
  for demonstrating autonomous vehicle safety.

That report ends by saying essentially, "it may not be possible to prove the safety of self-driving cars". [1] So the value here is questionable and the same logic could apply to anything with a low frequency of occurrence. The value of air bags by this measure was not proven until they were already mandated.

[1] "even with these methods, it may not be possible to establish the safety of autonomous vehicles prior to making them available for public use"

The difference, of course, is that an airbag can't take control of a car and run someone over.

More to the point, the report notes that new methods to determine the safety of self-driving cars are required.

Which the industry is not exactly falling head over heels trying to develop.

The report also says that these hypothetical new methods may not be able to prove safety. It’s not a straightforward problem. How do you prove that you’ve reduced (or at least not increased) a problem that occurrs so infrequently?

Realistically no one will trust “new methods” and establishing their relevance is really difficult. I would imagine that most of these companies are running lots of simulations, because why wouldn’t you? But how many people will see that and trust it more than data gathered on the road?

Indeed, there are very few reasons to trust simulations to tell us anything about safety in the real world.

The main problem with self-driving cars is that they can't "read" humans' body language. A human driver can see pedestrians and cyclists (and other cars) and have a rough idea of what they're likely to do in the next few seconds, i.e. the pedestrian leaning out on the crosswalk curb is likely to step into the road soon. Even a reaction time of milliseconds can't make up for the (currently exclusive) human ability to read other humans and prepare accordingly.

With sufficient data, I'd expect self-driving cars to be better at predicting what such leans mean. Moreover, for every one human driver who notices such a lean, there may be another human driver that doesn't even notice a pedestrian who has already started walking.

For someone so confident in the application of data, you sure just made up some data to support your point.

True, but commuting daily for the past 30 years sure seems to validate it.

This comment seems unnecessarily hostile. But, still, I'll change my previous comment from "there is" to "there may be" so that it's clear that I'm not claiming any data. Just guessing (reasonably, based on experience).

Are you sure that supervised learning does not create the same classification capabilities in self driving car AIs?

I'm speaking more of the current state of the self-driving cars I've been in - future improvements will likely narrow the gap or eventually surpass human abilities in most scenarios. How or when is the main question.

Only through this HN thread did I learn that AI is actually barely used in current self-driving car software. This was after I wrote that comment.

They also fail to "write" human body language. Nobody else can predict what the autonomous vehicle will do.

It gets worse when a person is sitting in what appears to be the driver's seat. If the car is stopped and that person is looking toward another passenger or down at a phone, nobody will expect the vehicle to begin moving. Making eye contact with the person in that seat is meaningless, but people will infer meaning.

that is an interesting point. cycling, I often am forced to rely on reading the driver's intentions-something I don't really want to have to do; signals obtained from person sitting in the driver seat but not operating the vehicle could be totally irrelevant to predicting the behavior of the vehicle itself (and cars are not equipped to really signal those things very well).

Great point. So much of our daily driving relies on the exchange of subtle social cues with other drivers.

I have never driven a car. I walk, bike, skateboard everywhere. If there isn't a light I require human feedback before walking in front of a car. Normally I wave and they wave back. They know I am there.. I can walk.

Humans also can't read humans' body language. A pedestrian waiting at a corner isn't waiting for the weather to change. They are waiting for passing cars to stop, as required by law. But passing cars speed by instead of stopping, unless the pedestrian does a lunge into the street -- preferable a bluff lunge, since most drivers still won't stop, preferring to race the pedestrian to the middle of the lane.

OT, but I would love to see how self-driving AIs handle something like Vietnam moped traffic and pedestrian crossings. The standard behavior for pedestrians is to walk slowly and keep walking -- stopping, even if it seems necessary to avoid a speeding driver, can be very dangerous, as generally, all of the street traffic is expecting you to go on your continuous path. It's less about reading body language than expectation of the status quo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKPbl3tRf_U

I walk to work every day, and I can assure you that most human drivers have zero awareness of what pedestrians are about to do.

Even on crosswalks. If I just strolled out on a crosswalk without looking, and waiting for drivers who were paying no attention, I’d be long dead.

Could a human have reacted fast enough to stop for someone jumping out in front of them? If the person jumped out so fast that nobody could have possibly reacted in time, then it's not a stain on the technology- even with an instantaneous application of brakes, a car still takes a while to come to a stop. If the human jumped out ten seconds earlier and was waving her hands for help, then it's an issue.

"the whole point of self-driving cars is that they can react to unexpected circumstances much more quickly than a human"

This statement isn't really true. Do you think Uber is investing in this because it makes their passengers safer? No, they are pretty much immune to any car crashes with a human driver, the risk and insurance hit is assumed by the driver. They are doing this to save money. They don't have to pay a driver for each trip. The safety aspect is just a perk, but Uber will be pushing this full force as long as the self-driving cars are good enough.

I'm more concerned that Uber will "lose" the video evidence showing what kind of situation it was, and we'll never be able to know if a human would have had ample time to react.

The bicyclist did not "suddenly" jump out in front. The Uber car did not sense the bicyclist.

Video says bicyclist, written article says pedestrian. Video says they don't know if a person was behind the wheel, written article says there was a person behind the wheel.

There's enough discrepancy here that I'm not sure what happened until we see the onboard data (unlikely to be released to the public) or a statement from a trusted public official like the Tempe police chief.

Police have clarified that the victim was walking her bike across the street: https://twitter.com/AngieKoehle/status/975824484409077760

I've been saying this from the beginning: it's not enough for self-driving cars to be "better than the average driver". They need to be at least 10x better than the best drivers.

I find it crazy that so many people think it is. First off, by definition like 49% of the drivers are technically better than the "average driver".

Second, just like with "human-like translation" from machines, errors made by machines tend to be very different than errors made by humans. Perhaps self-driving cars can never cause a "drunken accident", but they could cause accidents that would almost never happen with most drivers.

Third, and perhaps the most important to hear by fans of this "better than average driver" idea, is that self-driving cars are not going to take off if they "only" kill almost as many people as humans do. If you want self-driving cars to be successful then you should be demanding from the carmakers to make these systems flawless.

Median*

Average means something else, technically.

Median is a type of average, as is Mean, as is Mode.

Would you really use mode to calculate "average"? Ever? I'd have half a mind to slap someone doing that.

And I strongly doubt "average [X]er" would be interpreted as a median by most people. (Except when median and mean overlap)

Context is important.

The quote is "by definition like 49% of the drivers are technically better than the "average driver"." It's obvious to anyone who's not pedantic that they're referring to the median.

As for an example of a mode average: "The average participant's favorite polygon was a triangle."

> The quote is "by definition like 49%...

That's not the original use. That's a response to the (unattributed) idea that self-driving cars would need to be "better than the average driver". In the original context of people giving thresholds for self-driving cars, I disagree that median is what is meant.

> As for an example of a mode average: "The average participant's favorite polygon was a triangle."

But that mode might be 5 out of 40, and I'd just call that a lie. In a lot of distributions the mode just gives you the biggest or smallest number. And it's affected a lot by bucket size; if I measure "how long did you sleep last night" with a resolution of seconds, the mode is probably going to be 0, which is hilariously misleading. Mode, much like a broken clock, might pick a suitable number sometimes, but all the factors you need to check to see if it's suitable basically render the idea of 'mode' redundant. Just use those factors to pick your number. Mean and median are pretty reliable in being useful. Mode isn't.

> Would you really use mode to calculate "average"? Ever?

Of course, to impute a categorical variable in a data set with empty values, for example.

Sure, and that’s what average may refer to before you drill in with a specific definition. If I say by definition, rectangles are technically polygons with 4 edges of equal length, you’re going to say “technically” I meant a square.

> First off, by definition like 49% of the drivers are technically better than the "average driver".

No, that’s not the definition of mean, that’s (something like) the definition of median.

In a skewed distribution (which driving skill may very well be), the mean can be very far from the middle. If a relatively small number of people are extraordinarily bad at driving, most people are above average. If a relatively small number of people are extraordinarily good at driving, most people are below average.

Why this nitpick matters: if the leading point of your thesis depends on is quantifying how many people are above average, you should really know if the average is at the 10th, 50th or 90th percentiles (or somewhere else entirely).

If 1% fewer people died with self driving cars that would be 400 fewer deaths a year. That's absolutely a good change.

I agree that the _goal_ should be 10x or even 100x better than the best human drivers, but better than average would result in net good and it's hard for me to see an argument in which that's not true because it's less net suffering/death.

>If you want self-driving cars to be successful then you should be demanding from the carmakers to make these systems flawless.

We're still talking about tons of metal moving at very high speeds around other vehicles. That's just not possible. Should my self driving car handle a catastrophic tire failure at 90mph better than me? Absolutely. Is that still a situation that's likely to result in a crash regardless of the best inputs on a compromised system? Yes. There will _always_ be situations in which fatalities can occur with cars or any other kind of vehicle no matter how well they're engineered.

Even if, worldwide, self driving cars only caused there to be 1 less death per year, why on Earth would you not want that? What's the advantage to you in having more people die while waiting for self driving cars to be perfect?

Your first point depends on what question we're asking. Are we asking which is morally justifiable? Or are we asking what the public will accept?

Having seat belts is obviously statistically safer, but when they were first introduced, many people loudly protested that they'd rather be thrown clear in an accident.

I have seen no evidence that any autonomous vehicle currently deployed can react faster than an alert and aware human. The commentariat tends to imagine that they can, and it's certainly plausible that they may eventually be. But I've never seen anyone official claim it, and the cars certainly don't drive as though they can quickly understand and respond to situations.

> I have seen no evidence that any autonomous vehicle currently deployed can react faster than an alert and aware human.

The argument I've always heard is that an autonomous systems will outperform humans mostly by being more vigilant (not getting distracted, sleepy, etc.) rather than using detectors with superhuman reaction times. Obviously, whether or not this outweighs the frequency of situations where the autonomous system gets confused when a human would not is an empirical question that will change as the tech improves.

Lots of people imagine both: that the system will never be distracted and also that it will have superhuman reaction time.

And, like, once the systems are mature and hardware has evolved and so forth, I think that's right. It will. It might today under certain circumstances, like if it gets a really unambiguous sensor input (or it might not).

But I've never heard anyone actually associated with a driverless car program assert that their vehicles have superhuman reaction times today, and the vehicles drive extremely cautiously. I think it's likely that due to their difficulty in understanding their sensor readings, if you look at total time necessary to make a course correction from the point when an obstruction first could be noticed by an alert human driver, driverless cars are not winning and may be substantially losing in at least some cases.

"Alert and aware human" is already a high standard, given how most humans drive in routine mode, which is well understood to be much worse than "alert and aware".

From what I've seen I wouldn't trust autonomous cars to "understand" all situations. I would trust Waymo cars to understand enough to avoid hitting anything (at a level better than a human), at the risk of being rear-ended more often. Everything I've seen from Tesla and Uber has given me significantly less confidence than that.

I live and commute in Waymo country, and see evidence of quick reactions, though I can't say for sure whether it's an alert human taking over. Mostly, the Waymo vehicles still drive conservatively.

Not a truly autonomous vehicle example but this is a case where most likely the car reacted before the driver was even aware of a problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APnN2mClkmk

I agree with the sentiment though. This has been a major selling point for this technology, but it has not been sufficiently demonstrated yet.

From the video, it looks like the car noticed the crash at the same time a human would, but the car decelerated immediately, whereas the human might have slower reaction time.

(It certainly didn't predict the crash "seconds before", as the car accelerated into the imminent colission, until <1sec before collision.

Consider that autonomous braking systems know the distance required to stop and activate appropriately. Try getting a human to mimic that.

Humans correctly gauge stopping distance and "activate appropriately" like tens or hundreds of billions of times per day. Try again.

Something that is endemic in HN discussions of driverless cars is commenters who dramatically overestimate the dangers of humans driving. Like an order of magnitude or more. You see it all over this thread, in which people imagine that killing one pedestrian in like let's say 10 to 20 million miles driven (with those miles overwhelmingly done in unchallenging conditions) constitutes "vastly safer than human drivers" rather than "vastly less safe than human drivers."

Where did you get 1 in 10million miles from?

Driverless cars simply don't have the mileage yet to prove they are safer than driverful cars. But there's also no indication they are less safe, based on casualty rate so far.

Waymo said that they'd hit 4 million miles back in Nov 2017, they seem like they've done the most miles, there are several other contenders, so I took a wild guess, trying to err on the side of overestimating # of miles.

There is an indication that they're less safe! They have (very conservatively) 5x the number fatalities per mile driven! Now, look, the error bars on that estimate are of course massive. It is plausible that they are much safer and they just rolled the dice and got unlucky. But this is data, as long as you include the error bars.

> Humans correctly gauge stopping distance and "activate appropriately"

Toyota has enough UX data that they added "brake assist", turns out that a lot of accidents happen when the user stomps the brake, but then releases, just never presses it hard enough to come to a complete stop, or was trained before anti lock brakes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grcuorbrYxA

Another scary thing about braking is that most cars probably don't have their brake fluid changed often enough; most owners and even dealers treat it as a lifetime interval, when it may be closer to an annual thing interval.

No, the whole point of self-driving vehicles is that firms operating them can pay the cheaper capital and maintenance costs of the self-driving system rather than the labor cost of a driver.

I imagine these vehicles (especially test vehicles) are also recording regular video and therefore getting a clear picture of what happened should be straight forward.

This is Uber, who designed systems for remotely wiping entire offices when they thought that the data might be called for by the authorities.

Perhaps there will be unexpected 'issues' meaning that such data will have been lost in this case.

That kind of thing might fly in some arenas, but judges have literally no sense of humor when evidence is “lost” in a criminal case, or civil wrongful death suit. That’s more or less a quick way to lose in the worst possible way.

Judge - you don't understand - the office that's responsible for this remote deletio^w securing of data is in another jurisdiction (Canada!). So Uber USA is absolved[1].

1. Uber really had a tool that did this IRL: https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/11/16878284/uber-secret-tool...

As I said, context matters. In the context of a death, this kind of thing is doom. When someone is killed, there is also a lot of cooperation across jurisdictions.

I can guarantee you (at least one) other major tech companies have the same system in place. Companies that operate in multiple jurisdictions don’t want all of their assets compromised because of a raid in one city/state/country.

E.g. Brazil was at odds with WhatsApp over their message encryption — Brazil wanted WhatsApp to stop encrypting messages so that it would be possible to subpoena chat logs. If Brazilian police raided a hypothetical WhatsApp Brazil office, would it not be prudent for Facebook to cut off data access from that office? Especially given that the nature of technology means that once police have an employee’s laptop and can compel them to enter their password, they have access to essentially all of the company’s data worldwide.

I agree completely. One thing that is important to me is that the whole self-driving field will learn from every mistake. In other words, every self-driving car should only make the same mistake once, whereas with humans, each human has to learn only from their own mistakes.

That isn't correct. Culture is learning from other people's mistakes. The only question is whether the human can and is willing to accept the lessons (and whether the lessons are correct).

Culture is comprised of many things, and some similar things, but not that. By definition, culture is merely a collective persistence, and therefor inherently superficial. Culture cannot capacitate “learning” or even lessons. Culture is limited to memetic abstractions, with a lot of alleged noise. Insofar as culture supports persistence of worthwhile norms, it would be limited to evolutionary adaptation (survival of the fittest). It’s important to distinguish to avoid the fallacy of argumentum ad populum.

Uber's algorithms might learn from this. None of the other self driving car companies will.

That’s where the ntsb steps in and regulations created.

I'm having a hard time imagining that kind of regulation of ML algorithms.

Making sharing of all sensor data of an accident and the preceding couple of minutes mandatory could be a simple regulation that would be very helpful for all companies trying to improve their algorithms.

I disagree. I would be astounded if Waymo, Tesla, and every other player in the field isn't already trying to craft 1000 new test cases about this incident. It's now the second(?) known death involving this technology. The first question their bosses will be asking them in their next meeting would be "would our cars have done this, too?"

If there's one company who hasn't demonstrated it's learned from its mistakes it's Uber.

But let's extrapolate. Say one day there are 20 self driving car companies. Should they be required to share what they learn so the same mistakes aren't repeated by each company or does the competitive advantage outweigh the public benefit from this type of information sharing?

Federal regulation demanding shared accident databases wouldn't be the worst thing...

Or does the prospect of onerous regulation outweigh the competitive advantage?

What mistakes has Uber not learned from recently? They changed their leadership. That shows some learning.

"recently" is a pretty big caveat to throw in there. Historically Uber hasn't changed any of their behaviour until they've been caught doing something. Let's wait and see how they react to something like this.

Good point, but I added that in because I think recent is the most important for trying to know if something learns from its mistakes.

They seem to be adjusting quite a bit in the last 1-2 years so that is the definition of learning. Otherwise, just showing how companies were once dumb is usually not very useful in knowing how adaptable they are.

I agree that we’ll know better looking back how they react to this event.

Nice case for a "Reductio ad Absurdum":

Should "not killing pedestrians" be a competitive advantage? No. It should be mandatory for every vehicle.

Therefore,we should make sure that everything works towards this goal, including sharing data!

I think there is a case for open sourcing the decision making code for this exact reason.

Airlines are the same way. Every time there’s been a crash they’ve learned something and changed procedures to prevent it again. It’s made flying pretty safe, unless you’re an animal flying on United...

> Sounds like Uber's platform may not be up to that standard yet, which makes me wonder why they're on public roads.

Who exactly do you think is granting Google, Uber, etc. approval for trials like this on public roads? It's going to be some bureocrat with zero ability to gauge what sort of safety standard these companies' projects have reached.

There are no standards here... what were you expecting would happen?

Not bad even a self driving car can stop in time for deer jumping out from behind tree/bush cover.

People still need to look both ways when coming out from behind cars.

I want more details.

That's a really good point that many (myself included) aren't mentioning. Stopping distance is a universal, reaction times be damned. Would be curious to see if that played a part.

Perhaps (self driving) cars can be redesigned to mitigate the outcome of pedestrian collisions, eg, like cowcatchers on trains [1], except something more appropriate for the situation. External airbags?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_(locomotive)

Sometimes the best reaction in this situation is not to stop, but to swerve around the obstacle, perhaps even accelerating slightly to do so quickly. Deer can be pretty unpredictable here, but most on foot humans will not put themselves into the new path of your vehicle.

Here's a times article you reminded me of that mentions Saab engineers putting on crash helmets and running the 9-5 into a concrete moose.

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/04/05/automobiles/behind-the-whe...

> Sounds like Uber's platform may not be up to that standard yet, which makes me wonder why they're on public roads.

Uber cutting corners and playing fast and loose with legislation? Unheard of!

Here's hoping they get hit with a massive, massive wrongful death lawsuit.

I'd also add the goal of self-driving cars is to decrease costs for ride-sharing, home-delivery companies, etc, and also to decrease congestion via coordination amongst autonomous vehicles.

It's an interesting dynamic. We want this tech to be much better than us terrible humans before we deploy it and anything like us terrible humans is not acceptable.

The first martyr of the AI age, I suppose.

> That's a very bad look; the whole point of self-driving cars is that they can react to unexpected circumstances much more quickly than a human operator, such as someone walking out into the road. Sounds like Uber's platform may not be up to that standard yet, which makes me wonder why they're on public roads.

That's an invalid conclusion to draw from this accident.

There were 34,439 fatal motor vehicle crashes in the United States in 2016 in which 37,461 deaths occurred. This resulted in 11.6 deaths per 100,000 people and 1.16 deaths per 100 million miles traveled.[1] As far as I know, the instance this article is about is the first death in an autonomous vehicle accident, meaning that all the 2016 accidents were humans driving.

Why is it that you see one death from an autonomous car and conclude that autonomous cars aren't ready to be driving, but you see 37,461 deaths from human drivers and don't conclude that humans aren't ready to be driving?

I admit that there just aren't enough autonomous cars on the road to prove conclusively that autonomous cars are safer than human-operated cars at this point. But there's absolutely no statistical evidence I know of that indicates the opposite.

[1] http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalit...

EDIT: Let's be clear here: I'm not saying autonomous cars are safer than human drivers. I'm saying that one can't simply look at one death caused by an autonomous car and conclude that autonomous cars are less safe.

> don't conclude that humans aren't ready to be driving?

I'm not sure I see anyone here making that conclusion. I think you're the only one who's brought it up.

For one, I personally sure as fuck do not think humans are ready to be driving.

> That's an invalid conclusion to draw from this accident.

The conclusion was not invalid at all. Other self-driving car companies have driven more miles than Uber has and they have done so safely. Uber has even taken its cars off the road, so even Uber agrees that their self-driving cars are not ready for the roads yet.

It is also important to take into account what Uber is like when it comes to safety and responsibility. They have knowingly hired convicted rapists for drivers, they have ridiculed and mocked and attempted to discredit their paying customers who have been raped by their employees/drivers, they have spied on journalists, they have completely disregarded human safety on numerous accounts. A company with a track record like Uber's probably not should be granted a license to experiment with technology like these self-driving cars on public roads.

They just aren't responsible enough.

> I'm not sure I see anyone here making that conclusion. I think you're the only one who's brought it up.

Look at the post I'm responding to, and the section I quoted.

> Uber has even taken its cars off the road, so even Uber agrees that their self-driving cars are not ready for the roads yet.

Uber avoiding a PR nightmare should not be taken as Uber thinking their self-driving cars aren't ready.

> It is also important to take into account what Uber is like when it comes to safety and responsibility. They have knowingly hired convicted rapists for drivers, they have ridiculed and mocked and attempted to discredit their paying customers who have been raped by their employees/drivers, they have spied on journalists, they have completely disregarded human safety on numerous accounts. A company with a track record like Uber's probably not should be granted a license to experiment with technology like these self-driving cars on public roads.

I'm not defending Uber as a whole. I think in general they're a fairly typical rent-seeking middle man whose only real innovation has been figuring out a way to break the law ambiguously enough to get away with it (admittedly, a law I don't agree with). I don't even necessarily think autonomous vehicles are a good thing. I just think that if you're going to criticize autonomous vehicles, safety isn't the criticism I'd level against them, because it's not backed up by the evidence when compared to how unsafe human drivers are.

1 July 2016 "Tesla driver dies in first fatal autonomous car crash in US"

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2095740-tesla-driver-di...

He's arguing from foundations. The hypothesis is that autonomous drivers should perform better at task X than the null hypothesis (aka human drivers). So any instances where autonomous drivers do not seem to perform better are all potential counter-arguments to that hypothesis.

The fact that human drivers aren't particularly good isn't really relevant, beyond setting a correspondingly low bar within the null hypothesis.

This all ties to regulation allowing these vehicles to drive on public roads, because that regulation was permitted due to the above hypothesis and hopeful expectations that it would be true.

Obviously, I haven't seen the entirety of the data set to know fatalities per car-mile. Which would be the relevant statistic here. I also didn't see such a number in your post, which I'm assuming means you are probably not aware either. But simply providing the numbers for the null hypothesis doesn't do anything.

you have to take into account miles driven. Yes, we have 37K fatalities, but trillions of miles driven. So, it comes out something like 1.2 fatalities per 100 million miles driven for human drivers. Which means, so far, self driving cars have a worse record per 100 million miles driven. So far.

I haven't been able to find any reliable source of miles driven by self-driving cars to make that claim, but if one exists it wouldn't surprise me.

But that's not really my point. My point isn't that self-driving cars are safer, it's that merely looking at one car accident doesn't prove that self-driving cars are less safe.

as of today, yes, the data indicates that self driving cars are less safe. The fact is, as of today, self driving cars are generating more fatalities per mile driven than human drivers. That may change in the future as technology matures.

I'd love to see the data you're talking about, but even if such data exists, that doesn't make extrapolating from this one accident any more valid.

https://medium.com/waymo/waymos-fleet-reaches-4-million-self...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bizcarson/2017/12/22/ubers-self...

so, 6 million miles driven and one fatality is significantly worse record than human drivers. So far.

If solution does not solve anything, what's the point of the „solution“? Most of the deaths on the road I hear in my country are the result of someone doing something really reckless and stupid. „Normal“ drivers do not kill themselves or others. So if self-driving car is only as good as a dumb driver — I do not want these cars on the road. Also, interetingly enough there is little talk about human driver assisted by technology, not replaced by it. For some reason it is binary: either humand driver or self-driving. How about some human drivers plus collsion avoidance system, infrared sensing system (way too many people die there simply becaue they walk on the road in the dark without any reflectors/lights), etc.

> If solution does not solve anything, what's the point of the „solution“? Most of the deaths on the road I hear in my country are the result of someone doing something really reckless and stupid. „Normal“ drivers do not kill themselves or others. So if self-driving car is only as good as a dumb driver — I do not want these cars on the road.

If self-driving cars are between dumb drivers and normal drivers, and self-driving cars take dumb drivers off the road, it may be a net positive.

Not if they also take normal drivers off the road...

That depends how many dumb drivers it takes off the road compared to normal drivers, and the relative percentages of accidents caused by each.

Let's say we have 9 normal drivers and 1 dumb driver. The 9 normal drivers cause 0 accidents per year each, and the 1 dumb driver causes 15 accidents per year. Let's say autonomous cars cause 1 accident per year. If autonomous cars replace all the drivers, there's 10 accidents per year instead of 15.

Obviously these are hypothetical numbers. All I'm saying is that if you only have one of these numbers, you don't know which kind of driver is safer.

I guess I'm just working on anecdotes and guesswork here, but I always assumed the vast majority of drivers are pretty reasonable most of the time. I imagine if this were not the case the clusterfuck on the roads would be considerably worse than what I see in practice. It is certainly true that the dumb drivers heavily outweigh the sane ones in my memories of traffic, but I also know the details of more plane crashes than successful flights.

Maybe simply because "normal" people cause accidents, it's not newsworthy enough for you to hear about it?

As of late 2017, Waymo/Google reported having driven a total of 4 million miles on roads. Given that Waymo is one of the biggest players, it's hard to see how all of autonomous cars have driven 100 million miles at this point.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/27/waymo-racks-up-4-million-s...

Nevermind that the initial rollouts almost always involve locales in which driving conditions are relatively safe (e.g. nice weather and infrastructure). Nevermind that the vast majority of autonomous testing so far has involved the presence of a human driver, and that there have been hundreds of disengagements:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/31/16956902/california-dmv-s...

Humans may be terrible at driving, but the stats are far from being in favor of autonomous vehicles. Which is to be expected given the early stage of the tech.

My point is that "the stats" don't exist if you're only looking at one autonomous car accident without comparing it to the relevant statistics from human accidents.

If the stats don't exist then what was your whole basis for making an argument? On what grounds do you have to argue that we shouldn't be pessimistic about the state of autonomous driving? That you pulled out the IIHS stats without apparently bothering to look up the number of reported self-driving miles driven seems to suggest that you assumed that the fatality rate was obviously skewed against human driving.

That's fine, we don't have to consider just fatal accidents:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/31/16956902/california-dmv-s...

> One result of the sharp increase in GM’s number of miles driven is a plethora of accidents. The auto giant’s autonomous cars were involved in 22 fender benders over the course of the reporting period (and two more in 2018). That’s one crash for every 5,985 miles of testing.

> On what grounds do you have to argue that we shouldn't be pessimistic about the state of autonomous driving?

I didn't say that.

I'm not saying autonomous cars are safer, I'm saying that this accident doesn't prove autonomous cars are less safe.

> That you pulled out the IIHS stats without apparently bothering to look up the number of reported self-driving miles driven seems to suggest that you assumed that the fatality rate was obviously skewed against human driving.

I brought up the IIHS stats to show that merely reporting an accident in isolation from a full statistical model doesn't prove anything.

OK. And the person you responded to with the fatality stats said nothing about proving which way either:

> That's a very bad look; the whole point of self-driving cars is that they can react to unexpected circumstances much more quickly than a human operator, such as when someone walks out into the road. Sounds like Uber's platform may not be up to that standard yet, which makes me wonder why they're on public roads.

I'm not sure how you can interpret what you're quoting as saying anything else.

The commenter said it's a "very bad look". Followed by this:

> On the other hand, it sounds like it happened very recently; I guess we'll have to wait and see what happened.

How in the world do you see that as an assertion of proof.

Actually there was a metric of accident per distance drived. It was often pull out by Tesla before their first fatal accident last year (IA didn’t saw rear of truck because of sun or smthg like that).

This metric was often decried because it had poor statistical significance. It would however be nice to update this metric according to this death.

Maybe now this metric would indicate that IA are more dangerous than human, will be interesting if the perception of this flawed metric will evolve in reaction...

> Actually there was a metric of accident per distance drived. It was often pull out by Tesla before their first fatal accident last year (IA didn’t saw rear of truck because of sun or smthg like that).

I'm curious to see that, do you have a link? That would actually be a valid comparison.

I’m on my phone so maybe I haven’t found the most relevants links, but I found the followings.

This is Elon musk bragging before the first autopilot accident : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/04/25/elon-musk-...

This is a counterpoint with some fact: http://safer-america.com/safe-self-driving-cars/

And concerning the crash, last update seemed to point driver’s fault... with autopilot... don’t know if final ruling is already out:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/06/20...

Neat, thanks for the data.

According to that "update", Tesla Autopilot can never be at fault right? Because the driver is supposed to be in charge. So, even if Tesla rams full speed into a semi, the driver is at fault!

Yes, that's how Level 2 systems (like Tesla Autopilot) work.

Apples and oranges.

They will have video for sure if since they are testing, then we will see. Your statement about reaction time is assuming so many things, may as well declare the AI guilty now right?

It's not "intelligent", it's a dumb computer that is programmed by humans. The people responsible for putting it on the road must be liable.

It's not intelligent but it's also not programmed by humans in the sense that someone painstakingly put explicit logic for the possible cases.

It's programmed by humans. Get over it. It's not intelligent, it's not "learning" it's following instructions, saving data, and iterating. Your comment is obvious to the point of meaninglessness.

This tendency to buzzword out of obvious truths (NN's are programs for example) derails rational discussion.

This comment breaks the HN guidelines by being uncivil as well as by calling names in the sense described here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Doing these things derails discussion much faster than an obvious comment, so would you please (re-)read the rules and abide by the spirit of this site when posting here?

Thanks, I appreciate the check. Sorry about that jobigoud.

nope, its trained as a neural network. Nobody ever sits down and programs in 'how to handle an intersection with a bike lane' other than putting that sort of driving experience into its training data. It may have modules designed for general scenarios (i.e. one module is great at freeway driving, another is great at intersections etc) but still trained by experience.

It is programmed by humans. Machine learning algorithms are designed and implemented by humans. If machine learning algorithms do not perform well in a way that puts human lives at risk, the humans who designed and implemented them are responsible.

> may as well declare the AI guilty now right?

AI (short of AGI) is never guilty; it's creators and operators, OTOH...

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