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Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

> Waymo said its robotaxi struck the child at six miles per hour, after braking “hard” from around 17 miles per hour. The young pedestrian “suddenly entered the roadway from behind a tall SUV, moving directly into our vehicle’s path,” the company said in its blog post. Waymo said its vehicle “immediately detected the individual as soon as they began to emerge from behind the stopped vehicle.”

As this is based on detection of the child, what happens on Halloween when kids are all over the place and do not necessarily look like kids?

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These systems don't discriminate on whether the object is a child. If an object enters the path of the vehicle, the lidar should spot it immediately and the car should brake.

It is more complicated than that. Deepends on size of object and many other factors.

The object could be a paper bag flying in the wind, or leaves falling from the tree.

You're right: a quick search shows that pedestrian fatalities are 43% higher on Halloween.

That's probably more a function of more people being in the road than people not understanding what object they're about to hit.

Sorry, I was being oblique. Humans kill other humans with cars every day. They kill even more on Halloween. Let's start addressing that problem before worrying whether Waymos might someday decide it's OK to drive through ghosts.

Autonomous vehicles won't be perfect. They'll surely make different mistakes from the ones humans currently make. People will die who wouldn't have died at the hands of human drivers. But the overall number of mistakes will be smaller.

Suppose you could wave your magic wand and have a The Purge-style situation where AVs had a perfect safety record 364 days of the year, but for some reason had a tricky bug that caused them to run over tiny Spidermen and princesses on Halloween. The number of fatalities in the US would drop from 40,000 annually to 40. Would you wave that wand?

"The number of fatalities in the US would drop from 40,000 annually to 40. Would you wave that wand?"

This strawmam is bordering offtopic fiction. Only the 40k yearly deaths is based on reality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

So is the trolley problem, which this problem restates. I'm not sure what you're adding by observing that a hypothetical situation is hypothetical.

Lidar would pick up a moving object in 3D so unlikely to just keep going.

"Oh that obstructing object doesn't look like a child? Gun it, YOLO." Lmao.

I suspect the cars are trying to avoid running into anything, as that's generally considered bad.

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