hazardmat

And what a great tip it is! "Drive so that if you need to brake, you don't collide". No shit, Sherlock.

In other words, people just need to always drive far slower than what everyone believes they can handle in a situation that they aren't trained for, and everything will be fine. Everyone who collides anyway is just reckless and stupid!

Now please excuse me, I have exhausted my sarcasm budget for today.

>> Good start, but that doesn't say that night driving isn't safe.

It also doesn't say that it is safe. It lists all kind of risks that make it unsafe in one way or another. Whose definition of "safe" are we supposed to go by, anyway?

We can probably at least agree on what isn't safe: Crossing a road at night into incoming traffic, as a pedestrian.

"Oh my god, I accidentally killed someone" is something quite different from "Oh my god, my willful negligence alone has caused a fatality and I'm ready to take full responsibility".

While not entirely impossible that the latter happens, it's highly unlikely. What's much more likely is that these people are saying this because they want to hear "Oh, but it's not your fault" from somebody else.

I'm making a prediction on what's likely to happen based on well-researched human psychology. Again, the keyword is "cognitive dissonance". It encompasses all aspects of human life, the petty theft is just an example.

The moral dimension to this is entirely besides the point, the fact that you even bring it up tells me you are probably "suffering" from what is called a "Moralistic Fallacy".

I'm not making a moral argument or judgment here, but there's certainly the related question of whether someone who believes their own lies is truly a liar.

What is that supposed to mean? What's prudent and what is safe?

The reality is that driving at night isn't safe at all and that people often can't avoid collision from an obstacle suddenly appearing at night.

Maybe if they drove at 15MPH at all times, it would be possible in 99% of cases, but in practice we don't expect that.

Hence, we have collisions. Not because the drivers are always guilty of recklessness, but because driving at night has a risk to it. That's the point.

>> Possibly. But a distracted driver is definitely at fault, no matter what.

Both parties are at fault, I'm not denying that. That's not the point.

>> Pretty good. Most people are honest, even in a bad situation.

What gives you that idea? People are dishonest all the time, especially to themselves. It's a basic coping strategy.

>> Well, you probably have your reasons for writing this under a novelty account.

Yes, it's that I'm saying "controversial" things that inevitably collide with the ideas of all the "righteous" people around here.

>> But it's clear that when you are at fault it is best for everybody involved to recognize that fact, even if it means discomfort for you.

That's cute and all, it's just not how human psychology works. There are endless examples of this, from the pettiest thieves to the biggest mass murderers.

>> I get that in todays climate it's what you can get away with, but I don't think that strategy will hold in the longer term.

If you sincerely don't believe you are at fault (even if that is objectively wrong) and there is no evidence to prove otherwise, you'll get away with it. That's how the legal system works, if it works. In fact, if you were to get convicted despite believing to be innocent, that's (psychologically) the worst thing that could happen to you.

On the other hand, if you happen to be the odd one out that seeks atonement for their sins, getting convicted may help you out. That's probably a pathology in and of itself though.

>> But that's wrong on many levels and I refuse to subscribe to that view.

But... that's entirely irrelevant. Have you considered that maybe your moral ideals are distorting your view of physical reality? Some sort of magical thinking towards justice?

First of all, in this scenario, the woman would have at least shared some of the blame.

Second of all, what are the odds that a human who just killed a woman would admit even to themselves that they were the one to blame in such an accident? Practically zero. Cognitive dissonance won't allow it. In their minds, they weren't distracted, at least not enough to take any of the blame.

What is that supposed to mean? You can't have 100% safety at any speed. If it really is incumbent upon the driver to always drive at night in such a way that no collision can occur at all, then why not change the speed limit?

My whole point is that it's not the driver's responsibility to account for every possible scenario. It can't be.

That's not really true. Thousands of deer get killed on the road every year, because deer aren't smart enough not to be an obstacle when it's dark. Do we therefore change all the speed limits at night? No. It's a driving risk taken, just like any other.

The whole point of this piece is to put the blame on a human programmer, of course.

What's there to "sloppily" program here? Most likely, somebody set an arbitrary threshold constant 0.05 too low. The data that threshold was working with will still have been provided by the machine learning system, which is opaque to humans.

We'll have to face it that if we want self-driving cars, there isn't some magic procedure we can follow to not have accidents due to false classifications.

Yes. They said "preliminarily" the Uber driver was not at fault. Judging from the footage, that was reasonable. You can't put the blame off the woman, you can't just cross a road at night like that and expect to be noticed.

Accidents like that happen all the time, it's only because of the self-driving car that this is newsworthy.

Imagine if there wasn't any dashcam footage and this was a normal car with a distracted driver, without any other witnesses they would likely be off the hook.