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Comment by antonkm | Hacker News Reader

I think a big problem with this whole debacle is that we're discussing cameras and lighting, before discussing the actual matter: a person died and someone is responsible.

It doesn't matter if I were to run someone over when it's dark. I would still be accountable.

The discussion about footage removes focus from the actual issue which should be a legal issue, not a technical debugging session.

Edit: Sorry, am not native English speaker. What I meant when I wrote accountable was that I would have to own up to what happened. Not that I would get a sentence if it was an accident.

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> It doesn't matter if I were to run someone over when it's dark. I would still be accountable.

As long as you weren't drinking or otherwise found to be obviously negligent this is typically not the case.

The interesting part of this to me is that the police are treating this as if it were a human driver and holding the car to that level of responsibility. A human driver would not be charged with anything for a typical accident like this one (hitting a pedestrian in low light conditions outside of a crosswalk on a high speed road).

The court case will happen since this is so high profile, but if an average Joe driving the exact same route home from work had hit her, it likely would not even go that far.

>A human driver would not be charged with anything for a typical accident like this one (hitting a pedestrian in low light conditions outside of a crosswalk on a high speed road).

It wasn't low light conditions and it isn't a high speed road. It most definitely could be pushed to court in the case of a human driver.

It would go to court if the victim were a young white woman, or an older white woman with money, and the perpetrator were not one of those. A white male victim might have a chance at "justice" if the driver were a minority. A drunk driver would be more likely, but by no means certain, to be charged with anything more than drunk driving. The victim in this case was 49, has been described as homeless (I automatically discount this detail in reporting on pedestrian fatalities), and she had a bicycle. Not the sort of person who inspires prosecutors to inconvenience upstanding taxpayers.

I don't think this is accurate. I'm not a lawyer or even very knowledgeable about law, but I would be very surprised if the driver is at fault here. This is anecdotal, but I know someone who was in an eerily similar accident (as the driver) and unfortunately killed a person who walked in front of his car. While tragic, he did nothing wrong and there were no legal repercussions.

I live in NYC, where jaywalking is a way of life, and I've adopted two policies over the last few years:

1. Never jaywalk. Just don't do it. Find the appropriate and safe crosswalk, and wait. 2. Never assume it is safe to cross a street, even when you have the right of way. People laugh at me when I look both ways when we have the right of way, but logic is simple: just because I have the right of way does not mean the drivers coming from either side are aware of that or are paying attention.

I've just approached navigating streets as a pedestrian/cyclist as if I were invisible, because I might as well be to any driver that hits me with their vehicle.

Yes, but there is video proof that the human in control of the car was on her phone.

If there had been no interior video, and a regular car, the driver wouldn't be charged with anything. The prosecutor would keep the investigation open for a few months to make the woman's family happy, and then decline to file charges.

With the interior video, and the guy looking at his phone, it gets a little trickier. I think most prosecutors would let the guy twist in the wind for a few more months and then let him plead to a misdemeanor. A lot depends on the victim's family.

The problem is that the case is political and prosecutors tend to behave badly when media and publicity is involved. Hopefully the Tempe prosecutor isn't a camera hound.

People are also saying it might be OK if a human wouldn’t have been able to do better. Setting aside whether a human could have done better by at least braking, is “as good as the average human” really a good or reasonable standard?

I thought the whole point was that the average human sucked at driving. If a human driver had LIDAR they would not have crashed into this woman; more precisely, a human driver with LIDAR would have had to have been criminally negligent to have crashed into and then killed this woman.

Sure it is, for the moment. We can't require a high bar from the get go. To use an analogy, where would we be if we required the reliability of modern airplane from the advent of the Wright Flyer?

Not really. The equivalent would be criticizing the Wright brothers for (hypothetically) having built and deployed a plane over a city that they knew had a strong risk of crashing and killing someone, when that risk could have been averted by basic engineering available and known to them. We are talking about negligence, not sure why you are trying to change the subject.

No one is saying that self-driving cars need to be perfect. People are asking whether it is responsible to deploy unsafe ones on public roads.

This is just one case, we need to know the relative incidence rate before we can state anything. Even if we could somehow prove that a human driver wouldn't have hit the women that still doesn't mean that self driving cars are not massively better than humans: if self driving cars prevented hundreds of deaths they would still be better even though they miss this one situation.

Of course in the end self driving cars need to fix the bug that caused this to happen.

One of my very first comments about self-driving cars on HN was about who's going to be liable in case of a deadly accident, and that we need to establish that very early, ideally before self-driving cars are even allowed on the road.

So far, the police seems to think "no one". I have a big problem with that. Someone should be liable for it, otherwise there will be no accountability when building self-driving systems. Even if we say "the insurance company is liable", that would still be some progress, because then we'd at least know the insurance companies would put much pressure on the self-driving car makers to prove that their systems are safe.

But I'd say it's the car maker that needs to be the most culpable party, because at the end of the day, if there are say broken brakes in a new car, which causes deaths, you don't blame the brake pad maker. You blame the car maker. They are the ones who should make sure everything works and is perfectly safe before selling the product to consumers or putting it on the road.

> if there are say broken brakes in a new car, which causes deaths, you don't blame the brake pad maker.

Yes you do. You blame both. Both have an independent duty to not sell defective products. MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co., 217 N.Y. 382, 111 N.E. 1050 (1916).

Certainly Waymo have said Waymo will be responsible for theirs.

> It doesn't matter if I were to run someone over when it's dark. I would still be accountable.

I don't know where you live, but in most legal systems I am aware of there are definitely situations where you wouldn't be responsible. If you were not impaired, driving legally and someone suddenly walks in front of your car, why would you be accountable for that?

Someone didn't "suddenly walk in front of the car". The time they stepped into the road, you were still half a mile away.

Time to learn some new favourite german words. The first would be Sichtfahrgebot; you may only drive as fast as you can see. If your stopping distance exceeds your vision, you are driving too fast for conditions. This is doubly obvious with autonomous vehicles.

The other is Betriebsgefahr. It was your decision to drive a multi-ton vehicle with enough power for the electricity needs of a city block. She was walking, you were driving - you introduced the vast vast majority of the risk and it was your choice that is responsible for the lethal injuries. For this mere fact, you bear a significant percentage of the fault, always.

Definite points in the German language's favor! Betriebsgefahr in particular is a concept that should be more salient in drivers' minds.

So, in Germany, all vehicle-pedestrian incidents result in civil and criminal penalties?

In a lot of no-fault states you may not be criminally liable for a car accident but in a civil suit you won't get off scot-free. In every case of car vs human that I have come across the driver pays something, usually medical bills. Reason being a driver is required to have insurance while a pedestrian does not. And as far as I know, auto insurance companies are more willing to pay a settlement.

Do remember that on a civil suit culpability is a sliding scale. It's not guilt or not but what percentage of this accident is attributable to you. A driver looking at their phone, with an enhanced sensor safety system (lidar, sonar, nightvision) will get far more blame than a typical driver.

I expect the civil case to be settled quickly and quietly. T

Uber would like to settle that way, but they don't make that decision. Why wouldn't Uber competitors or detractors set up some kind of Gawker situation?

This problem is too complex to call for a single 'actual' issue. There's many issues to be solved and talked about. Technical, legal, emotional and psychological. I don't think there's need to call for one to be more 'important' than any other.

If you were sober, how accountable do you think you will be held in this exact same scenario?

A computer can have access to sensory information beyond anything that a human can have. A computer can process that information hundreds or thousands of times faster than a human can. Therefore the computer should be held to a much higher standard than a human driver in a scenario like this.

The discussion on lights and cameras in this case is a part of determining who is responsible for the accident.

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