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Comment by mistahenry | Hacker News Reader

That’s an unfair characterization if you’re talking about the crash in Arizona. Perhaps: “Did you hear about the Uber crash where the AI couldn’t track a pedestrian jaywalking at night across the middle of a nearly pitch black two lane highway and then killed her?” would have been more apt. https://youtu.be/ufNNuafuU7M

That being said, I’m a huge skeptic of the current state of self driving cars. I would have assumed these systems use LIDAR as well as vision and could have at least slammed on the brakes.

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Police concluded that given the same conditions, Herzberg would have been visible to 85% of motorists at a distance of 143 feet (44 m), 5.7 seconds before the car struck Herzberg.

A vehicle traveling 43 mph (69 km/h) can generally stop within 89 feet (27 m) once the brakes are applied.

The police explanation of Herzberg's path meant she had already crossed two lanes of traffic before she was struck by the autonomous vehicle.

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

I was also misled by the poorly exposed "official" video. Given the numbers above there was time for a human driver to see her and even come to a complete stop. Further since she was moving from one side of the road to the other and only entered directly into the vehicle's path in the last 1.3 seconds (image in "Software issues" section of wikipedia article) it is likely that all that would have been needed to avoid the collision would have been a minor slow down and she would have completed her crossing safely.

I hate that people attribute that accident to a visual issue because of that video. It wasn't a visual issue. It was 100% a programming issue and everyone involved should be criminally liable for negligence, IMO.

It only looks pitch black in Uber's badly-exposed dashcam video. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22307013

oh wow, that is certainly different than the news video which I assumed was relatively unbiased

A more precise narrative, as shown in the evidence submitted by Uber to NTSB (as opposed to the PR video), is "AI saw something for 6 seconds, but because it couldn't decide what it is, it drove through. Turned out to be a human."

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