Remember the Uber self-driving car that killed a woman crossing the street?

Argus Tuft wrote:

The collision avoidance systems were turned off because they weren't working.After all the time and money that's been poured into autonomous cars we're nowhere near a vehicle that can travel on any road at any time under any conditions without human input.

And if a human has to be standing by ready to take over at any time he/she may as well be driving the bloody thing!

Unrealistic expectation. No technology has ever been delivered in a perfectly safe form. Think of the history of commercial flight, or closer to home, the introduction of carbon fibre bicycle frames. Far fewer catastrophic failures these days.

My prediction is that some sections of British motorway will be opened to autonomous vehicles for large scale trials within 5 years.

Mungecrundle wrote:

Argus Tuft wrote:

The collision avoidance systems were turned off because they weren't working.After all the time and money that's been poured into autonomous cars we're nowhere near a vehicle that can travel on any road at any time under any conditions without human input.

And if a human has to be standing by ready to take over at any time he/she may as well be driving the bloody thing!

Unrealistic expectation. No technology has ever been delivered in a perfectly safe form. Think of the history of commercial flight, or closer to home, the introduction of carbon fibre bicycle frames. Far fewer catastrophic failures these days.

My prediction is that some sections of British motorway will be opened to autonomous vehicles for large scale trials within 5 years.

Well, OK , it's an "unrealistic expectation" - which is why I suspect self-driving cars will never work and why it will turn out to be one of those tech-fads that over-promise and under-deliver and turns out to be a waste of money. Unless they turn all roads into motorways, with everyone not in a car banned from them.

You can't compare autonomous vehicles to carbon-fibre bike frames! The crucial point, as illustrated by this very case, is that the half-way house of self-driving cars that need a driver ready to jump in, is intrinsically dangerous and can't be allowed on public roads. So they have to be either 'in perfectly safe form' or not allowed on the road.

Argus Tuft wrote:

And if a human has to be standing by ready to take over at any time he/she may as well be driving the bloody thing!

This!

At present, the machine learning systems don't seem to be up to everything they'll encounter in a typical urban (or rural, for that matter) road environment.

How many people are we willing to sacrifice so that the machines can learn, so that the later models are safer and can deal with the Real World?

Argus Tuft wrote:

Two points-Why was the car driving at a speed inconsistent with it's headlight range?

 And don't these self driving cars have a radar system? Radar works in the dark doesn't it?

The radar did pick up the pedestrian 5.6 seconds before the collision, but the AI didn't categorise correctly and predicted that she wasn't in the path of the car. Lidar then picked her up 5.2 seconds before, but again predicted no collision - it registered her as stationary.

AlsoSomniloquism wrote:

I'm assuming the cameras they used for the footage might not have been high quality, but I'm pretty sure the woman pushing the bike was in total darkness until lit by the car lights a second before impact. Whilst it might have been avoided if the "vehicle operator" had been fully in control rather then being a bored passenger watching a phone or whatever. And definitely would have been avoided if the programmers had thought that roads might contain people anywhere, why was she crossing a road, in the dark, without waiting for the traffic to clear or sure they had slowed down? I suspect the accident would have happened if it was a normal car in those circumstances.

If I recall, the video footage was much darker than you would expect from the general lighting conditions, so the pedestrian would have been much more visible than you'd expect from the car footage. Personally, I don't think that drivers can pay enough attention if they're not driving and are just being passengers until they're suddenly in the middle of a situation.

FluffyKittenofTindalos wrote:

The account talks repeatedly of 'jaywalking'.  Jaywalking is only a 'thing' in certain legal systems (notably the US).

 

  It's worrying if that concept, that is irrelevant to the UK, where there is no such thing, was built-in to the logic of the vehicle.  It all fits precisely what worries me about autonomous vehicles - that the law will changed to accomodate them at the expense of pedestrians and cyclists, rather than the reverse.

I think that is more of a symptom of Uber being rubbish and cutting corners. It does seem that autonomous vehicles are a lot harder to get right than originally thought, but I still think that they have tremendous advantages in the long run. Give it another 10 years maybe.

FluffyKittenofTindalos wrote:

The account talks repeatedly of 'jaywalking'.  Jaywalking is only a 'thing' in certain legal systems (notably the US).

 

  It's worrying if that concept, that is irrelevant to the UK, where there is no such thing, was built-in to the logic of the vehicle.  It all fits precisely what worries me about autonomous vehicles - that the law will changed to accomodate them at the expense of pedestrians and cyclists, rather than the reverse.

Jaywalking does seem to have a particular hold over the American psyche. Just about every US TV prog or movie, there is a scene where the protagonists chase each other across an otherwise deserted street which seethes with traffic the moment they race across, barrel rolling over bonnets (hoods?) etc. Miraculously no one is run over, although the baddie escapes to prolong the drama when the goodie is encumbered by one final vehicle. By the next scene the traffic has melted away. Only in America.