Google blames a Human for its Robot Car Accident | Hacker News Reader

Google blames a Human for its Robot Car Accident

allthingsd.com

12 pointscanistr14 comments

Anyone else disturbed by the weirdly Luddite/anti-Google tone of this piece? Is there some reason not to take Google's statement about the human driver at face value? Is there really anything more to this story than: "A human quite unremarkably crashed a car into another car, as happens millions of times a year"?

I am not disturbed. Why would a human driver be driving an automated car? What is the security mechanisms that allow such cars to be in the streets? Isn't there a need for independent monitoring for such experiments?

All Google self driving cars have a human driver who can take control at any time. I don't know if the human was driving the car when this accident occurred, but so far there is no evidence supporting the notion that Google is lying to the cops (which would be a crime).

The security mechanism _is_ the human driver, for now - the only reason they're legally allowed to run these cars is because there's a human standing by to take over control at a moment's notice.

> Why would a human driver be driving an automated car?

Because Google cannot legally operate the car in the streets without a driver. Therefore they put a driver there and it's on him to choose how to drive the car.

> What is the security mechanisms that allow such cars to be in the streets?

The wonderful security mechanism of liability, lawsuits, and insurance.

This is interesting. So Google can claim that 160K mile of automated driving with the driver on-board and a single accident is blamed on the human.

How many times in that 160K miles were accidents prevented by vigilant human override?

Yes, apparently it is ok to have airplanes carrying hundreds of people fly themselves but cars driving themselves, well that's impossible!

To be fair, as best I understand it an airplane cruising at altitude is not very hard to pilot. Nothing to run into, nobody merging into your airstream- nothing much more complicated than "steady as she goes"

I believe takeoff, ascent, landing and descent is still done by pilots.

Additionally, trouble with cars is, they have evolved for 100 years around sight as the primary navigation function. Planes almost never had that luxury, so they have relied on instruments for a long time. Computers are good at instruments, not so good at sight.

Actually besides airport taxiing and unexpected events there's no reason to have humans in the cockpit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopilot and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland

I didn't necessarily assume an anti-Google tone, but I did mutter "what the hell?" when I read "Glad no one appears hurt, but this is a good reminder of one of the main reasons Google’s experiment with robot cars both fascinates us and creeps us out.".

If it was human error, 160K miles have been logged without incident... how the hell is this a good reminder of why we should be creeped out by Google's experiment? (edit: The last sentence of that last paragraph is equally useless.) I'm no journalist but I feel comfortable rolling my eyes at this article and its style.

Also submitted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2850815

I love the random guesses in the comments, despite any actual facts in the article. I literally don't know what caused the crash - did the human drive have total control and bump someone?

It's like they are trying to say "look at what bad things can happen when humans crash cars. Aren't you afraid of robots also crashing cars? Even though Google's robots have never crashed cars, and thus already a better track record than nearly every human?"

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