It certainly looks bad for Uber

The meat of the article is about how LIDAR, Radar, or any number of systems could have detected the pedesetrian/obstacle on the road and should have stopped the car.

If those worked, considering likely crossing locations in addition to certain crossing locations like zebra crossings should only improve safety, not be required for it.

Still, IMO it's a workaround, not a solution.

This can get interesting in Asian countries. As pointed out by wiradikusuma:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16646415

people tend to cross ignoring the traffic laws.

The technology should be good enough that every single meter of road is considered a "likely crossing". There shouldn't be an iota of difference between a supposed "likely crossing", versus any other section of road. If the sensors and decision engines aren't good enough to be driving under normal conditions, then perhaps they should not be on the road (yet).

I think it's absurd these vehicles are on the road today. The process is being rushed for the financial gain of corporations. No matter how far up the list safety of these cars is, it's not priority #1. The greed of companies vying to be the first to stake a majority share of this new market is the only real priority.

Neither humans nor robots can treat everywhere like a crosswalk. We human drivers see pedestrians standing on the edge of the road all the time, often getting ready to cross. If we slowed down every time we saw that, roads would flow poorly. On the other hand, we do slow down when we see people poised to cross at an actual crosswalk, and the law demands we do that.

Right now, live humans are better at reading the body language of pedestrians than machines are, and this is an area of research.

My suggestion is that mapping places where people are likely to cross allows you to dial up your caution in those locations. Not to dial it all the way up to what the law demands in legal crosswalks, but not to have it at the most basic level. Of course, once a ped enters the roadway, you will dial up the caution.

On 45mph roads, peds know to expect cars not to keep them safe. You wait for a long clearing in the traffic and you run if you have to. On low speed roads, we cross even with cars coming, expecting them to see us and react.

This blog post, like much of the HN discussion, is full of baseless speculation. There's really nothing here except "LIDAR should've seen it." Duh.

The idea that Uber should release more data which won't be analyzed Donnelly but will only fuel even more speculation doesn't make much sense.

The NTSB is investigating. They are extremely through. Most importantly once all the data has been carefully analyzed and the failure mode had been understood the NTSB will be able to devise guidelines and protocols to prevent it from happening again.

Until then I don't see how all this speculation helps except to fulfill some sort of misguided anti-Uber fantasy.

> It would be the best for Uber to release the raw sensor data during the event.

I agree with that statement only if we define "best" as "for the common good." The best thing in Uber's own interest is very likely to lock that shit down and hold onto it until a judge makes them give it up. Somebody died here, and it very well may have been Uber's fault. Uber could very well be on the hook for a tremendous amount of punitive damage.

They'll probably fight that as much as they can, because it's not in _their_ best interests. Raw data will likely make what happened appear easy to stop, particularly if they were capturing LIDAR at the time and (assuming no negligence), at best will make Uber look incompetent.

People won't accept the nature of how image recognition tends to fail - ie seemingly randomly and catastrophically. Assuming a driver-less future, we'll definitely see more of these random tragedies.

Quote from the article:

> To be clear, while the car had the right-of-way and the victim was clearly unwise to cross there, especially without checking regularly in the direction of traffic, this is a situation where any properly operating robocar should have avoided the accident anyway.

I'm not assuming you haven't read it, but I think this is the best answer I can give you.

"entirely her own fault"

Why does the entire Internet feel the need to apportion blame in this case?

There are four entities who could have and should have relatively straightforwardly avoided this death.

1. The woman shouldn't have crossed the street there and then.

2. The safety driver shouldn't have been looking at her phone.

3. Uber's automation should have caused the vehicle to brake much sooner.

4. That street should have been designed much safer. The design of a lit crosswalk on the median encourages people to cross there, so much stronger discouragement is required. Furthermore, a 35mph limit in an area with pedestrians is going to regularly cause pedestrian fatalities. That's a trade-off most people seem willing to make, but if you make that trade-off you have to own it. If the speed limit was 20mph that woman would be alive today.

As far as I can see it, all 4 entities are 100% responsible for the death of the pedestrian.

None of those 4 entities passed the "reasonable person" test with their actions, therefore all 4 are fully responsible.

Sure you can argue all you want on whether one entity's misbehaviour is more egregious than the others. It doesn't matter; all 4 engaged in behaviour that regularly kills people at a rate much higher than acceptable.

Self-driving cars are meant to coexist with humans so they tend to be programmed to drive like humans (slightly above the speed limit).

There are 12.5 deaths per billion vehicle miles driven. This is the statistic that self-driving cars have to beat in order to be "safer."

Based on this, Uber has had about 3 million test miles (under mostly safer than average road conditions, but I'll leave that aside). They're now at 333 deaths per billion miles driven. Gonna have to go a few more days without a death before they're "safer." (This is not all robot cars, of course, but not all robot cars are meaningfully the same right now).

http://www.eschatonblog.com/2018/03/the-faith-is-strong.html

> The good news about self-driving car accidents is that improvements to the system will be eventually shared by all cars saving many lives.

If this was true, how come the car was not trained for this pretty common/typical scenario. Did it take one human life to show that it is possible that a pedestrian can cross the road in front of the car?

Are the people gone so blind with this obsession with new tech?

Sadly, I suspect all three of those sentences have a fairly high chance of being incorrect.

If Uber think they can gain some benefit from keeping part or all of what they learn here to themselves, I strongly suspect all that data will be wrapped up forever in trade secret claims...

I certainly wouldn't want to be the one going to tell this woman's family that "she didn't die in vain, thanks to her and Uber, self driving cars will now be safer for everyone!" If they didn't punch me in the face and say "Fuck you! She died in vain, while Uber made the most profitable calculations and moves as they risked and callously ended human lives to increase their shareholder value!" then they've better people than me.

The human behind the wheel was not sitting in a known-safe autonomous vehicle with a record of better-than-human road safety, they were at work doing the critical job of overseeing a prototype self driving car with a barely alpha-release software version controlling a machine which is well known as capable of killing people. It was their only job - to keep their full attention on the road.

I do not believe the human behind the wheel was at direct fault. I would find them guilty of (gross) negligence since they were supposed to pay attention.

The problem here is that the car had superior systems to the human eye and no large lag between perception and action. It was fully capable of seeing the pedestrian and yet it didn't even attempt to break.

Such a human shouldn’t be fucking driving.

If I’m driving fast enough that I can’t see pedestrians with enough time to react, I slow down.

Yes, this means in near-total darkness, slowing to a crawl if you can’t turn on your high beams.

Someone pointed out elsewhere that human eyes are better in low light conditions than cameras. It's a lot less likely a human couldn't see her than that camera, but the human wasn't looking at the time.

Human eyes have much better dynamic range than most of the cameras out there. Yes even in differently illuminated areas. If the vehicle was on High beam, (which you would be on if you have trouble seeing stuff in distance), then A human should have spotted her from a very good distance..

The video is extremely misleading because the camera is overcompensating for the bright lights illuminating the road. A human driver could have seen the person and/or bike from a long way off.

Our eyes are extremely good at adapting to high, non-linear contrast. That's why "pictures" of total solar eclipses have to be composite images to really capture what people see when they look at one.

Did you read the writeup? He directly addresses the points of when a human would be able to detect the person as well as the fact that the Uber was driving at the upper speed of safety for the situation which a human driver may not have done.

Bullshit. Do not overdrive your headlights.

The video is misrepresenting what's visible vs. invisible.

There was no human driver in that car. There was a person in the driver seat focused on something other than the road.

If only looking at the posted dash cam video, yes it does look difficult to avoid. But that video is incredibly dark and not at all what the environment looks like to the naked eye.

Here's a video posted by a local on Reddit showing better how the street looks at night: https://youtu.be/1XOVxSCG8u0?t=31