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Comment by lulmerchant | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand this line of reasoning at all, but it's getting repeated a lot on HN. Is the AI expected to hit cyclists, but not pedestrians? Shouldn't it consider any moving object to be a hazard?

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It may not have had good enough information to tell that she was a cyclist at all, and instead interpreted her to be something static/non-human altogether (in parent's example, a bush). Of course, without seeing the data its sensors gathered, and what that data registered as, it's all speculation. The problem is with misidentification, not bad priorities.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was some kind of classification problem involved. But wouldn't the AV by default treat a solid object on the road as a hazard to brake for? There's no possible way to specifically train for every variation of thing that could be encountered on a city street (imagine Halloween, for starters).

It was a 3-lane highway. It wouldn't really make sense to break if the system detected a immobile object in a different lane. The problem is more that the system failed to detect the woman moving between lanes.

But the system has the ability to detect whether an object is moving in parallel (i.e. within its own lane) vs. across lanes, right? That would seem to be fundamentally necessary in everyday conditions, e.g. day traffic in which cars are switching/merging lanes.

If the problem is that the system didn't detect the woman moving between lanes, then that seemingly contradicts the police statement that the victim moved quickly enough to surprise the AV and its driver.

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