First death involving self-driving car

Even if the human driver had been paying attention I'd guess that there's about a two percent chance that he could have avoided contact. Take Uber out of the picture and this would likely be just another traffic fatality that none of us who live outside of the immediate area of the accident would have ever heard of.  Two things that come to my mind, are: Do we hold machines to a higher standard than humans? And what do the insurance companies have to say about this? The two are related. If the survivors file a civil suit and the courts decide that Uber's technology should have been able to avoid collision, therefore they are liable, that could have a significant effect on insurance rates. If OTOH a court says that since a human driver couldn't be reasonably expected to avoid the accident, Uber's responsibility ends there, the liability is significantly more limited. 

I can't tell you how many times I've encountered pedestrians at nightime wearing dark clothing acting as if it's the light of day. 

In reply to Keith Tanner:

Without doing the math, I'm not sure we can say if it was a factor or not.  Also, from an ethics perspective, I'm also not sure if the fact that the outcome would have differed matters either.  How much lawlessness from a machine is "acceptable", if any.  I'd argue that the machines should initially be completely constrained by the laws of the road.

Kreb said:

I can't tell you how many times I've encountered pedestrians at nightime wearing dark clothing acting as if it's the light of day.

I've missed a couple of them walking on unlit backroads with no sidewalk or shoulder due to nothing but sheer luck. I've decided that I'm going to ride the center line of these roads at night to improve my odds.

ztnedman1 said:

There is no justification here for autonomous fans, period.  This is the whole point of this technology and it failed spectacularly.  This is a black eye and a reality check.

I'm not sure what you mean about no justification for autonomous fans.  I think once the video became available, every person on here who supports the development of autonomous vehicles, myself included, has now come out and said 'in my/our opinion the car failed in exactly the sort of situation it should be better than a human driver'  It appears to be hard to argue that.  The poor victim was certainly in the road dor several seconds before impact.  Light conditions should have zero impact (poor choice of word maybe) on this situation.  RADAR/LIDAR doesn't see visible light.  The victim should have(was?) visible to the car, but the programing appears not to have identified them as an issue.  What we will find out in the future is if this is a basic programing flaw for any similar threat, or if there is some (as yet) unknown (by the public) specific set circumstances that lead the program to say, in this case the victim (object) wasn't' a threat.  

For the record I'm adamantly opposed to autonomous cars; mainly because software always has issues (albeit sometimes minor) and when you call tech they say "Hmm it's not supposed to do that"

With that said, this person was not a victim; people do not belong in traffic. If you're outside a cross walk or crossing against the light and get hit it's 100% you're fault. As much as I don't like the whole self driving car thing this wasn't the self driving car's fault. A human driven car would have hit them as well. For the life of me I can not fathom why pedestrians play Russian roulette with their lives. It's frustrating to see them dart through traffic every day. In a couple parts of town they've had to put fencing up on the median to make people go down to the light and cross there. This after 15-20 fatalities.

In reply to Tom1200 :

The fencing was a regular sight in the U.K. and Ireland of my youth. The FIU bridge was to make it safer for pedestrians - you can see another bridge nearby just not over traffic. I certainly think the onus is on the non-metal encased biped. 

Indeed, we should not completely rely on the AI, robot, or whatever we call.

I always agree that there are some situation that the computer cannot handle.

Knowingly crashing to the self-driving car is not an excuses

Keith Tanner said:

About the speed - it appears that the speed limit on that road may have recently changed and GIS data was out of date.  The car was going 3 mph over the current limit but 7 mph under the old.

The overspeed is not a factor in what happened here, so don't get distracted by it. The result would have been the same at 35 mph. 

The only issue I would have with the speed, is it seems competitors do not rely on map data to determine speed limits, etc, they actually read the signs with the cameras, which this system apparently does not do, again pointing out some inadequacies in the Uber system, further signaling that maybe it isn't ready for "primetime".

Here's some silver lining, this crash might've made the future a bit less cyberpunk by causing US lawmakers to reconsider whether allowing car manufacturers to put autonomous car accident victims into forced arbitration is a good idea:

http://money.cnn.com/2018/03/23/technology/uber-senators-self-driving-cars/index.html

What ever happened to these things in the spokes of the wheels?  Every bike I ever had was covered in reflectors.  

In reply to Tom1200 :

Fencing may or may not work.  The city put up 1 1/2 miles of this fence (6' tall) to funnel people to the intersections with cross walks and on-demand walk lights with posted directions for use in English and Spanish.  Only took a week after completion for another one to get hit crossing the road.

Some "experts" are saying that the sensors should have noticed her earlier.   They don't need daylight.

In reply Hal; yes I fully expect stupid people will try and climb the fence trip and fall into the path of a car.  When I was a kid and you'd joking tell a friend to go play in traffic we never thought people would actually do it.

I don't see how the history of the victim is relevant at all. Plenty of people also point out that the human backup driver is a convicted felon, And that's also irrelevant. The flaws of the people involved are not the story here. The story is that a company with a pretty lengthy record of unethical behavior has been testing tech on public streets that's clearly flawed, and a human being died as a result. The tech that's supposed to prevent tragedies like this suffered a complete and total failure, and was even outperformed by a very distracted human. 

I find this reprehensible.  We're going to post a dead woman's picture along with defamatory comments and bemoan the fact that her death might hold up progress??!!

Seriously? 

Mods?

1988RedT2 said:

I find this reprehensible.  We're going to post a dead woman's picture along with defamatory comments and bemoan the fact that her death might hold up progress??!!

Seriously? 

Mods?

X1,000,000

I work with intellectually disabled people. It could’ve easily been one of my patients, could’ve been a drunk family member, an elderly person with Alzheimer’s Disease you name it. SHE WAS A HUMAN BEING.

Looks like somebody removed the inflammatory post. I've modified my response that quoted it so that it's all gone. 

ebonyandivory said:

1988RedT2 said:

I find this reprehensible.  We're going to post a dead woman's picture along with defamatory comments and bemoan the fact that her death might hold up progress??!!

Seriously? 

Mods?

X1,000,000

I work with intellectually disabled people. It could’ve easily been one of my patients, could’ve been a drunk family member, an elderly person with Alzheimer’s Disease you name it. SHE WAS A HUMAN BEING.

As an intellectually disabled drunk, I find this statement offensive! I still have the common sense not to stroll in front of oncoming traffic!

Didn’t read the whole thread, so forgive me if it’s already been mentioned:

1: I heard an interesting podcast a while back basically posing the question: “What does the driverless car do when faced with a moral conundrum?” 

The example given was an unlikely scenario, but as long as we’re playing “what-if:” What if the car is traveling down a two lane road? In the opposite lane, there’s a car. In the “driver’s” lane, there’s a cliff on the side of the road. A person steps in front of the autonomous car. Does it hit the other car, the person, or does it drive off the cliff?

I think it’s a question worth asking.

2. How many people here have center-punched a deer? I have. It was a conscious, split-second “Sorry, dude. I’m not driving into a ditch for ya.” And when I brought my wife’s car to the body shop after some intellectually challenged motherberkeleyer backed into it recently, the owner was telling me they repaired over 200 cars damaged by deer during “the rut.” I have to hope a lot of these folks were smart enough to just plow the deer rather than rolling their E36 M3 in a ditch or swerving into oncoming traffic.

Is there a *chance* that this wasn’t a “catastrophic failure,” and rather a “there’s no point in locking up the brakes and yanking the wheel?” 

Watching the video, it doesn’t seem likely a human-driven car could’ve done much to avoid the accident once the woman came into view. While the ‘driver’ wasn’t looking at the road, he could’ve just as easily been glancing at his mirrors.

While it sucks that this woman lost her life because of a poor decision, it WAS a poor decision on her part. I tend to agree with this

So it's been a dozen years since my brother died; he was a raging alcoholic but that's not what did him in. He was suffering from nearly fully blocked intestine, for months he was chewing beef jerky and swallowing the juice. His reason for not going to the doctor was he knew the doctor was going to tell him it was "serious". When his girlfriend told us this my first thought was "what an idiot".  His liver was already giving him problems so he might not have lived much longer but what a incredibly stupid way to go. It's especially so since our father at that point had been going to AA for 10 years and it wasn't like he was unaware.

Yes I feel terrible for this persons family and even her, but it doesn't change the fact the it was really stupid. I'm not meaning to be up on a soapbox but thousands of pedestrians get killed every year under totally preventable circumstances. Like I said it's frustrating.

In reply to Tom1200 :

I think it’s 100% ok to blame the victim in many pedestrian death cases. I think the lives of DRIVERS  are forever changed or even ruined because they killed a pedestrian because that person committed an idiotic, unthinking act and got themselves killed.

Im not comfortable dismissing the tragedy of it all because the victim was homeless, a drug addict or otherwise mentally compromised.

Brakes were not applied, according to one report.  

Remains to be seen if that was acceptable.

Ebonyandivory; if there are two things my family are familiar with it's substance abuse and mental illness. The two are usually linked. The rise in our homeless population started when a large majority of mental health facilities were defunded  in the early 80s. I had an older cousin who was a homeless drug addict for years before someone managed to get him help. He routinely made bad choices and many of them had nothing to do with his mental illness. Even when taking his meds he made some of these choices. My sister in law is a borderline personality and does much the same, she actually makes more dangerous choices when she's sober.

We can't know this woman's thought process at the time of the accident or what her illness was.  

 I'm not comfortable with this at all and I'm not diminising this at all. My point here is this accident had nothing to do with the autonomous car. 

Tom1200 said:

 I'm not comfortable with this at all and I'm not diminising this at all. My point here is this accident had nothing to do with the autonomous car. 

It had just as much to do with the car as it did with the victim. This tech is supposed to prevent accidents just like this one. It failed completely. I don't say that just because a woman died. I say that because the vehicle didn't seem to sense that there was anything in the road at all, and if it did, it did nothing to prevent an impact. It's got sensors that can detect things far ahead of the headlights reach, at least according to the company that makes them. And yet the very distracted human behind the wheel had more of  a response to an impending collision than the vehicle did (although it was too little too late).

Of all the companies developing autonomous driving tech, Uber is the most desperate. The only way that they survive long term is to remove human drivers from the equation. The other companies all have other products and services that will pay the bills, so they can take their time and make sure the tech is ready. Combine that desperation with a company culture that has a long history of questionable business ethics, skirting rules and regulations, etc and it's really looking more and more like Uber had no business testing this tech on public streets.

Per the linked article there, Google/Waymo have been able to average 5600 miles driven autonomously without a human needing to take control.

GM/Cruise average over 1200 miles between interventions.

Uber was struggling to drive 13 miles without human intervention. And they recently went from having 2 people in each vehicle (1 for data collection, and one for safety monitoring) to having a single person doing all of the testing tasks.

So, their software is inferior. Their testing protocols are ripe for safety concerns to come up with only a single driver doing the tasks that take 2 people in the rest of the industry.

A woman died. There's a decent chance that the outcome would've been the same if the vehicle hadn't been autonomous, but the entire point of this tech is to be better than a human, and that's certainly not the case here.

I am trying not to rush to judgment. I heard two things over the weekend that may be relevant to this discussion.  The first is that the Tempe police are holding the car and have not allowed Uber, or any else to examine the vehicle or pull data from it directly yet.  The second is that the video released is from a dash cam, not the cameras in the self driving system. They reveal a bit more about what things looked like.

In the absence of data and analysis by people not employed by Uber or one of its partners, I don't feel like I know enough yet to make judgments about anyone's actions.  

I’ll have to be convinced that this isn’t a major failure and a legitimate setback for autonomous vehicle technology.

Sure, the woman made a fatally poor decision but if the car did even 1/4 if what they claim its capable of, it would’ve AT LEAST slammed on the brakes.

(I think it’s safe to say that a person crossing the road in the dark while a car is coming is a good way to get hit by a car, autonomous or otherwise)