Alright, so given your observations, which I don't doubt, here's a question I have: why have a pilot on public roads?
If uber's software wasn't robust, why "test in production" when production could kill people?
If uber's software wasn't robust, why "test in production" when production could kill people?
Because it's cheap. And Arizona lawmakers apparently don't do their job of protecting their citizens against a reckless company that is doing the classic "privatize profits, socialize losses" move, with "profits" being the improvements to their so-called self-driving car technology and "losses" being random people endangered and killed during the process of alpha-testing and debugging their technology in this nice testbed we call "city", which conveniently comes complete with irrationally acting humans that you don't even have to pay anything for serving as actors in your life-threatening test scenarios.
Surely it's a question of balancing against the long term benefit from widely adopted autonomous driving?
If self driving cars in their current state are at least close to as safe as human drivers, then you could argue that a short term small increase in casualty rate to help development rate is a reasonable cost. The earlier that proper autonomous driving is widely adopted, the better for overall safety.
More realistically, if we think that current autonomous driving prototypes are approximately as safe as the average human, then it's definitely worthwhile - same casualty rate as current drivers (i.e. no cost), with the promise of a much reduced rate in the future.
Surely "zero accidents" isn't the threshold here (although it should be the goal)? Surely "improvement on current level of safety" is the threshold?
Of course that is absurdly expensive. But it's not impossible, and it's the only acceptable way of developing this high-potential but also highly dangerous technology up to a safety level at which you can legitimately make the argument that you are NOT exposing the public to any kind of unacceptable additional risk when you take the super-convenient and cheap route of using the public infrastructure for your testing. If you can't deal with these costs, just get the fuck out of this market. I'm also incapable of entering the pharmaceuticals development market, because even if I knew how to mix a promising new drug, I would not have the financial resources to pay for the extensive animal and clinical testing procedures necessary to get this drug safe enough for selling it to real humans. Or can I also just make the argument of "hey, it's for the good of humanity, it'll save lives in the long run and I gave it to my guinea pig which didn't die immediately, so statistically it's totally safe!" when I am caught mixing the drug into the dishes of random guests of a restaurant?
Humans get 1 death per 100 million miles.
Waymo/Uber/Cruise have <10 million miles between them. So currently they're 10 times more deadly. While you obviously can't extrapolate like that, it's still damning.
If you consider just Uber, they have somewhere between 2 and 3 million miles, suggesting a 40x more deadly rate. I think it's fair to consider them separately as my intuition is that the other systems are much better, but this may be terribly misguided.
This is a huge deal.
I honestly never thought we'd see such an abject failure of such systems on such an easy task. I knew there would be edge cases and growing pains, but 'pedestrian crossing the empty road ahead' should be the very first thing these systems are capable of identifying. The bare minimum.
This crash is going to result in regulation, and that's going to slow development, but it's still going to be justified.
My first reaction when I watched that video was that my Subaru with EyeSight+RADAR would have stopped/swerved. Even the news articles state something similar (from this article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2018/03/21/uber-c...)
>The Volvo was travelling at 38 mph, a speed from which it should have been easily able to stop in no more than 60-70 feet. At least it should have been able to steer around Herzberg to the left without hitting her.
As far as why test this, I'm guessing peer pressure(?). Waymo is way ahead in this race and Uber probably doesn't wanna feel left out, maybe?
Once again, all of these are speculations. Let's see what NTSB says in the near future.
Does the car have immediate 360 degrees perception? A human would have to look in one or two rear view mirrors before steering around a bike, or possibly put himself and others in an even worse situation.
If you're about to hit a pedestrian and your only option is to swerve, then you swerve. What could you possibly see in the rear view mirror that would change your reaction from "I'm gonna try to swerve around that pedestrian" to "I'm gonna run that pedestrian over"? Another car? Then you're going to take your chance and will turn in front of that car! The chance that people will survive the resulting crash are way higher than the survival rate of a pedestrian being hit at highway speeds.
You also cannot decide in 1 second what would happen if the pedestrian were to freeze, and whether you'd end up hitting him/her even worse by swerving left.
Most people in that situation would just brake, I think.
Other self-driving car companies (like Google (or whatever they renamed it)) have put a lot more work into their systems and done a much greater degree of due diligence in proving their systems are safe enough to drive on public roads. Uber has not, which is why they've been kicked out of several cities where they were trying to run tests. But Tempe and Arizona is practically a lawless wasteland in this regard and is willing to let Uber run amok on their roads in the hopes that it'll help out the city financially somehow.