1. https://www.npr.org/2015/07/31/427990392/remembering-when-dr...
2. https://www.amazon.com/Ascending-Rooms-Express-Elevators-Pas...
These sorts of things look like promising primary sources, but I can't access the full text. https://www.nytimes.com/1949/01/12/archives/city-gets-elevat... https://www.nytimes.com/1949/02/03/archives/tenants-want-a-d... https://www.nytimes.com/1928/11/11/archives/elevator-law-cha...
So this would likely be in the category of cases that would probably never happen with a manual operator. Two solutions were proposed: keep manual operators, or improve the safety of the automatic system.
After Southall [1] the drivers union felt the correct approach was to double man trains. It is surely not a coincidence this would also have meant more members and thus more power and income for the union.
That accident would have been prevented by ATP (fitted to the train but disabled because the driver had not been trained) or AWS (fitted to all British trains but disabled by the driver due to a fault).
The ATP system would have braked to a halt to avoid entering an occupied track section. AWS would have audibly alerted the driver to the signals (showing a Preliminary Caution, an ordinary Caution and then Danger) and if the driver did not react, braked to a halt. With neither it appears the driver simply did not see the signals because they weren't looking and so did not react until far too late.
The correct fix of course is to require trains to have working AWS/ ATP and use it. Operating trains with more humans is a worthwhile work around to get a faulty train back to a repair yard as empty stock, but makes no sense in passenger service.
Almost by definition, more pedestrians will die if we wait for the 4-5x safety threshold proposed in the article.
Autonomous won't be known to be N times as safe as human driving until there are sufficient autonomous cars on the road and the varying ratios of autonomous to human drivers have been at equilibrium for a some sufficient amount of time to gather sufficient data to compare to human driving safety statistics.
So- 4-5x times is a lie. It could be much more dangerous with only autonomous drivers or much less dangerous. They don't know yet.
"could be"? Statistics? Aren't these studies asking about theoretical cars that are by definition a certain amount safer?
When people hear numbers like that, they may assume it's based on sufficient data and is true, even if it's theory.
But how could it be true or acceptable, given that we're only just starting to have more autonomous vehicles on the road, and the safety could be dependent on the ratio of autonomous vehicles to human drivers?
You replied to someone talking about waiting for autonomous cars to be 4-5x as safe. That means they are waiting for a car to meet that threshold with correct statistics. You can't call out nonexistent statistics as being a lie!
What we don't have are adequate safety statistics on autonomous cars on the road with each other and human drivers at various ratios of autonomous cars to human-driven cars.
If a study were to be able to propose safety numbers based on the various ratios and various autonomous cars and systems, then that would be adequate, given the theories behind those numbers are well-founded.
If you were to say, "This is how it is: given that the ratio of autonomous cars to human-driven cars isn't changing and we expect it to stay the same, we can see that the autonomous cars are 4-5x safer," then I'd not call it a lie.
But 4-5x safer without qualifications shows a gross misunderstanding of the importance of the effect of the ratio of autonomous drivers to human drivers; the variation in environment and expected behavior could influence greater or decreased safety, leading false assumption.
And it seems pretty unlikely that increasing the number of autonomous cars will make them signficantly less safe, and that's the only result that would be a problem. Mild fluctuations don't matter on a scale as coarse as "4-5x", and an improvement would be good.
There's a difference between the risk changing, versus merely going from insufficient data to sufficient data.
When you have an extremely small data pool, it's also quite possible that one or two meetings with a really bad driver will give you a misleadingly bad impression of autonomous cars.
But I'll put it this way. Once we've seen either 10 billion miles or 100 fatalities from a particular tier of self-driving, we'll have a very solid idea of how dangerous it is. Getting that much data only requires a tenth of a percent of cars in the US for three years. (And if they're particularly dangerous we can easily abort the test early.)
> And by intuition I doubt that today’s AI could react better than a competent human driver to someone cutting in front of it, and the like. Simply because we are better at reading high-level patterns in others’ driving. Reaction time is not the only metric that matters.
If someone's dangerously cutting people off there probably isn't much to read in their patterns. Being cut off seems to me like one of the situations that is most about reaction time and least about thinking.
With self-driving cars, you don't have those type of backup safety systems.
I'm not saying that braking is magic and solves all problems. I'm saying that braking is morally sufficient in the real world. If hitting something is unavoidable, you can hit whatever is directly in front of you while braking as hard as possible. It's good enough.
Not for a machine which you can file a lawsuit over and say "it had a decision that it can actually make and chose to kill my son." See how that changes things? It's no longer "an accident."
Apply the reasonable person standard. Are they going to do any better? Probably not.
If a self driving car kills someone and it had the choice/option to do something else then we have a problem that needs dealt with. This isn't a human being or human error.
You might personally think that oh, the machine is being rational and intentional, that's different from a human. But a lot of people will treat a human the exact same way. That split second panic is judged as if they had all the time in the world to consider the optimal choice.
The legal system already has and handles this type of lawsuit.
I get your point, but I think it is probably more correct for people who are making a split second decision rather than for a car where the decision has already been made in code and someone (or some company) has to take responsibility for why it was made that way.
And the real issue is whatever got you into that situation, not the split second choice you make.
If the option is available to avoid collision with another car and it brakes instead, colliding and killing someone else, that will be a lawsuit and that lawsuit will easily win.
I am morbidly curious how much from that movie will play out with cars and other machinery as things evolve. I am also curious if we will learn any lessons ahead of time or if like city traffic lights, {n} number of people have to die before it becomes a financially viable discussion.
The interests aren't aligned at all with self-driving cars. Do you think any executives, engineers or salespeople will go to jail if anyone dies? Think again.
Uber ATG's fatal pedestrian collision was the beginning of the end for the program. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick was pushed out of the company, the program has been shuttered, and one of the top engineers, Anthony Levandowski, is in jail (although Levandowski was not implicated in the accident, he's also not invulnerable).
(Of course it wasn't any of those - it was because the self-driving program wasn't anywhere close to working even ignoring all the safety problems. You can do all those things - the only thing you can't do is waste investor money.)
When AI goes bad it could impact whole fleets simultaneously. And for all the many ways we know software can unintentionally go bad the liability can be a rabbit hole.
Do AI drivers face the same variety of conditions as humans? Or is it millions of hours on near [perfect] roads in a temperate climate?
Humans are still far better at dealing with unforeseen circumstances than computers. An AI is trained on a dataset and can overfit for certain parameters.
An AV system needs to pass the driving test your 16 year old sister passed, that's it.
A mistake in a car can cause a crash. A mistake in an elevator can't cause a crash.
An autonomous car can’t really exit a parking building (I’m not really sure what are they called, but those multi-level parking thingies) because it would require them to understand signs and the like and those may often be missing.
they have thousands and thousands of miles of autonomous driving across California and Nevada.