Comment by tom_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tom_ | Hacker News Reader

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Once I'd had it pointed out to me that these articles go out of their way never to refer to people on foot as actual people, I just can't unsee it.

The only thing referred to as human here is the driver, and the only person whose safety is discussed is the driver. Clearly at some point during the composition process the writer got bored of using the term "pedestrian", because it looks like he hit up the thesaurus, discovered the term "biped", and decided that would be a good term to use. (But I bet you a fiver these cars won't stop for kangaroos or ostriches other than as part of some generic collision avoidance system.)

In the writer's defence, the sentence about the driver's safety is a mite ambiguous - but it could have been more explicit, so I'm going to be uncharitable here. And I do give him points for sneaking the term "run people over" in the last sentence, because he could so easily have referred to it as an accidental unavoidable pedestrian collision incident or something.

Entire cities are built around our love for cars — the ideology of the superiority and desireability of cars is deeply buried within the fibre of society. It could be that the author thinks they are just being neutral, while the neutral thing would be to describe this technology as something that regulates the interaction between equally valuable human beeings.

This is car culture 101: expensive Cars (and their drivers) are the top of the foodchain, cyclists and pedestrians are the bottom. Depending on where you live this might differ (e.g. in the Netherlands cyclists are on the same level as motorists and you can really see it in the architecture).

> Entire cities

And the modern police force.

Kind of like how they go out of their way to refer to people operating cars as drivers instead of actual people?

This kind of language is par for the course because these articles basically use a less terse version of whatever language the study or official report uses and those kinds of documents tend to shy away from things like "people driving cars" and "people walking".

You are finding meaning where there is none.

One of the side-effects of using "human centered language" tends to be needless verbosity and resulting clumsy writing as the human being writing the piece of writing labors to appropriately center the human being or human beings being discussed.

No, this is actually a real thing that happens when the news covers driver pedestrian interactions.

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/03/28/how-coverage-of-pedes...

Yes. Thank you for this post - this was exactly the sort of thing my comment was referring to.

To me, the term "bipeds" seemed like a stylistic choice to emphasize the shortcomings of the systems -- the algorithms are not sophisticated enough to understand what a "person" is, so the author used a different word to emphasize that fact.

And the rest of the article is about a test with crash dummies. Why would the author talk about "people" when the tests were performed with dummies?

> And the rest of the article is about a test with crash dummies. Why would the author talk about "people" when the tests were performed with dummies?

Because the upshot of the tests is that if your car is equipped with ACAS that "detects pedestrians," then it may lull you into a false sense that your car will avoid running people over and killing them even if you stop paying attention. The reality is that the ACAS is not foolproof and you shouldn't rely on it. But these systems are likely to create a Volvo Effect, where the people who have them drive much more recklessly than people without them.

What you may be describing is "Risk Compensation:"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation

That has been borne out with studies of how people adjust to airbags, SUVs, pickups, and other vehicles they emotionally perceive as being safe.

One of the things I've read about risk compensation is that it has very little correlation to the actual safety of a vehicle, and a lot of correlation to certain features that people emotionally associate with safety.

For example, modern automobiles are safer when they provide plenty of rear visibility. However, many inexperienced drivers feel safer when cocooned in opaque materials, so they feel safer in vehicles with less glass. It feels to them like they're wrapped in protective steel.

Likewise, in a previous era people felt safer in longer vehicles, even if those same longer vehicles were less maneuverable and therefore more likely to get into an accident in the first place.

Length of vehicle is highly visible, the ability to avoid an accident is not.

"Not foolproof" is the most generous way possible to speak about pedestrian-avoidance systems that hit the pedestrian in every single tested case.

From the article:

Tesla: 20 tests, 20 kills - 0% success

Chevy Malibu:20 tests, 20 kills - 0% success

Honda Accord: 20 tests, 4 kills - 80% success

Toyota Camry: 20 tests, 12 kills - 40% success

There were other tests (also failed) but the article didn't give full details on those so I won't include them here.

Looking at that, one manufacturer has a product that works poorly and three manufacturers should probably face sanctions for selling their "product" in a US marketplace.

These tests seem less than useful if you're not comparing them to the null hypothesis: people keep driving by themselves. As the article points out, pedestrian deaths are up, and that's not because of this technology.

It's hard to compare because people and machines fail in different ways. Machines don't really know what people look like or how they behave, and are easily misled. People get drunk, get tired, get angry, look at their phones, and generally get confused. Humans have remarkable talents for putting together a 3D scene with only two eyes, but those eyes are extremely restricted in the range of wavelengths they perceive.

If we get aggressive in shutting down the cause of accidents, we're going to ban cars entirely. The machines are far from perfect; they may even be far from good. But the machines are getting better, and humans are getting worse.

The “Volvo effect” refers to standardized testing mostly reflecting the income and education level of one’s parents. I can’t find any research showing that Volvo owners drive more recklessly, but I’d believe it. Do you have any more info?

The theory amongst some motorcyclists is that know they’re shit drivers, so they go buy a Volvo. They’re not driving like idiots because they’re in a safe car, they’re in a Volvo because they know they’re a menace.

Hard hypothesis to test. Just stay away from Volvo’s.

That's not a theory, that's some kind of urban legend or folklore, and it's nonsense. Repeating it without a shred of substantiation is equally nonsensical.

If you want to "stay way from Volvos" on account of it, fine. Please also consider throwing a pinch of salt over your shoulder when you spill it, and crossing the street when you see a black cat.

Easy, cowboy. If you took that as being passed off as serious science or some shit, you need to go grab another cup of coffee. Or maybe cut back.

That's ok. This is the REAL reason to give Volvo drivers plenty of room:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_I3hnTaTufg

Volvo even does go out of their way to convince you that your car will avoid running people over and killing them even if you stop paying attention. https://youtu.be/pjQt2lEZIXg?t=144

I approach driving as full focus activity at all times, never trust the other participants in their actions and reaction time, and I am cautiousy trusting that the system that my volvo has will try to prevent harm if all else fails. Their approach and mission statement around safety are very no non-sense, and the Pilot assist system manages to avoid being hyped as a revolutionary but it has just the right features to help me on long commutes. If their software development pipeline is half as refined as their overall engineering, I trust to recommend them.

Aren’t you referring to the seatbelt effect? As far as I know, Volvo drivers are still considered more timid on average?

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