Posted on 03/20/2018 10:51:55 AM PDT by Kaslin
John covered this story last night, but the death of a pedestrian struck by a self-driving Uber vehicle in Arizona should have ramifications for the entire idea of autonomous vehicles. (Something I’ve been concerned about for a couple of years now.) After covering the initial reports from the accident, John concluded with the following observations and questions.
There will be an investigation of this accident as well, but my first thought is to wonder why the human ‘backup driver’ didn’t stop the car and prevent this. Reliable self-driving cars and trucks may still be a couple years away but it’s worth pointing out that human drivers are responsible for tens of thousands of fatal accidents on the roads every year. In 2016, there were an estimated 40,200 fatal crashes. Ultimately, the question is whether the record of driverless cars turns out to be better or worse than the humans who would otherwise be at the wheel.
Before addressing those points, it’s worth noting that new information has been provided by authorities investigating the accident. While it will take a while to sort this all out, initial findings indicate that the car probably wasn’t at fault in this case and the test monitor probably wouldn’t have been able to prevent the accident even if they’d been in complete control. (Fortune)
“The driver said it was like a flash, the person walked out in front of them,” Moir said. “His first alert to the collision was the sound of the collision.”
According to the Chronicle, the preliminary investigation found the Uber car was driving at 38 mph in a 35 mph zone and did not attempt to brake. Herzberg is said to have abruptly walked from a center median into a lane with traffic. Police believe she may have been homeless.
Since there’s dashcam video of the entire incident, the police should be able to sort this out without too many questions going unanswered. Going by their description, the possibly homeless and confused woman was pushing a bicycle in a median strip when she suddenly veered out into traffic directly in front of the Uber vehicle which was going nearly 40 mph. Assuming the next lane of traffic was blocked by another vehicle, the car would have had no other option than to possibly try to drive up onto the median. (It looks like it would have been physically impossible to stop the vehicle in that short span.) But the car’s programming clearly wasn’t anticipating a person diving out in front of it and a human being likely couldn’t crank the wheel over in a split second to avoid her either.
So Uber is off the hook and testing of autonomous vehicles can resume presently, right? I honestly hope not. The woman’s death is a tragedy, but this accident should also give us pause to ask whether any autonomous system will ever be able to replace a human being for such tasks. The woman appears to have done something completely unexpected which the navigation software had no reason to anticipate, but the fact is that irrational, unexpected things do happen in the real world all the time. And it’s in those razor-thin moments of doubt that a human being will always best a machine.
NASA regularly argues that manned space exploration will always be superior to drones and robots because human beings are more adaptable. We simply see the complexity of the world around us in a way that no set of logical rules coded into the most complex software will ever match. Humans are also able to imagine things in a way that computers can’t, including the most unexpected. Take the idea of color for example. A computer can analyze a video image and assign a value to a given color. But there’s a limit to the number of colors it can recognize and it has to force the object into one of those pigeonholes, even if they number in the thousands. In reality, there are an infinite number of colors, with each subtle shift in light frequency blending from one to the next. A system built on ones and zeros will never grasp that.
Returning to the auto accident scenario, the car was unable to anticipate a possibly homeless and confused woman suddenly lurching out in front of it. The car may have identified her as a pedestrian, but that’s not what pedestrians are “supposed to do.” But a human driver, under other circumstances, may have noticed things about her such as disheveled clothes or an unsteady rhythm to her gait. Seeing that, a human could have slowed down in advance, wondering if she was about to do something crazy. Do you honestly believe that an autonomous car is going to be capable of that sort of thought process? And none of this even begins to address the potential problems with hacking and terrorism.
Cars need drivers for precisely this reason. John was right to point out that we’re far from perfect and humans cause many, many accidents each year. With that in mind, some technology could likely improve our record. Perhaps some of those collision detection systems which are able to slam on the brakes when they locate an object we’re about to strike could be added to most vehicles. Sensors which detect a sleepy driver nodding off and sound an alarm to fully wake them might save many lives. But we should still keep a human being at the wheel as the primary operator. Autonomous driving software isn’t going to match the human mind.
So you’re saying all cars should be autonomous...
Load of baloney. A small bump towards getting us into the 21 century.
I *hate* having to worry about driving if I’m tired, pissed off, need to talk to someone or a little buzzed. Damned right there should be an app for that. Plus, the .08 and crap DUI laws have killed live music many places; a bar needs to sell 5-6 drinks per person to be able to pay the band, and I sure like being able to put down a pitcher or two when I go out somewhere, without worrying about stupid DIU laws the like.
The sooner the better. I drive OK, but have grown to hate doing it most of the time, particularly at night.
Heard on the radio that there was a ‘driver’ (monitor?) who probably wasn’t paying attention
Sometimes a$$holes point out that humans cause crashes too, bla bla bla. Here’s what will happen. One day, in the not too distant future, the all-knowing government will pass a law. The law will determine liability. Developers will immediately adjust their algorithms which will decide who lives and who dies, and the injured or killed person will have no recourse.
It will just be that way. We will just have to accept it. Too bad if you’re dead. There is no stopping the worship of man’s ventures into technology. Victims will just have to suffer silently.
The current state of this technology is something akin to learning how to take off, but not having a clue how to land.
We will see. But it is some coincidence that it would happen to a driverless car, which is 1 of some millionth of all cars on the road at any given time.
We need to develop autonomous pedestrians.
Yes True too!!
The photo posted above may be something else, since the person who was killed in this incident was a pedestrian, probably a homeless person (and probably drunk or on drugs), who had wandered out into the road from between two parked cars. And there actually was a human driver in the car.
The car was going 38 in a 35 mph zone, which is pretty normal for a human driver, and the human driver didn’t react in time.
Self driving cars are still a work in progress, so the human driver is put in as a back-up.
However, one of the problems is that even for non-self driving cars, vehicle-pedestrian accidents are way up, and one of the reasons suggested is that there are simply so many drugged or drunk “homeless” pedestrians wandering the streets and roads that the possibility of hitting one has increased a lot since these cars were designed.
I think they might have to make it supersensitive, but if even a human being who had the controls as well didn’t have time to intervene, I’d say this was an unpreventable fatality. Streets are streets and roads are roads - meant for vehicles.
“Driverless vehicles will have the side effect of putting countless lawyers’s kids through college.”
indeed. personal injury lawyers are going to have a field day with self-driving cars, as well they should, given the extreme likelihood of continuous death and mayhem from this foolish, not-yet-ready-for-prime-time technology.
and the great thing about this from a liability lawyer’s standpoint is that almost all accidents nowadays are caused by the drivers and NOT by faulty or unsafe auto design or manufacturing. Thus, today’s main liability targets have been the bad drivers themselves and their insurance companies, IF THEY ARE INSURED.
With driverless cars, there’s no possibility that the drivers can be at fault since there aren’t any, and therefore there’s a 100% chance that the manufacturers are at fault, and the manufacturers have DEEP pockets, unlike individual drivers, even the ones WITH insurance.
Quite quickly, driverless car makers will be sued out of existence unless states absolve them of their liability, at which point it becomes open season on the innocents by driverless car manufactures. (In point of fact, the liability waiver would actually have to occur at the Federal level because of cars sold in a state that has liability waivers driving across the border to another state that has no liability waivers.)
Ubiquitous driverless cars are part of the same nonsensical utopia as ubiquitous flying cars, ubiquitous electric cars, ubiquitous wind power and ubiquitous solar power.
We have a long way to go before we have a safe and reliable self driving car
My WWII MP dad drove a jeep escorting VIP’s and prisoners in France, he taught me how to drive and always encouraged me to look for, slow down and give a wide birth to any pedestrians in the roadway expecting a misstep or intentional lurch into my path. He taught me how to watch the front tires to get a heads up on a drivers intentions and look under cars for walking feet. He also taught my Mom how to drive over 60 years ago and she just passed her drivers test at 91 years old, she has been accident free since just after I was born in 1963. I am also a computer developer / designer and I have designed and implemented countless systems over the last 30 years. The human brain is so many orders of magnitude more powerful than the most advanced computer today it is almost laughable to draw a comparison. In time perhaps there will be an acceptable autonomous driving system but like the titanic this technology is pushing the envelope and it just hit an iceberg.
Except that the human legally required to be behind the wheel ALSO failed to prevent the accident.
There will be an investigation of this accident as well, but my first thought is to wonder why the human ‘backup driver’ didn’t stop the car and prevent this.
...
She stepped right in front of the car. There was no time for the car or the driver to respond. The driver never saw her. His first indication was the sound of the impact.
She was walking the bicycle according to the police. She’s homeless and had a lot of plastic bags on the bike.
According to this report, she was in the median and possibly pushing the bike and abruptly entered the traffic lane. So..........
In before the “Well, the jaywalker walked right out in front of the car...” posts.
...
According to the police, that’s what happened.
These are the type of people who would have us eliminate the internet because “people need libraries”
It is very possible to have an unmanned vehicle safely, and I can’t wait for it.
I don’t even need to say that if there was a human at the wheel this girl would not have been killed, because THERE WAS a human at the wheel.
Blaming the car when someone walks in front of it, and then saying we should never have unmanned vehicles is backwards thinking. Maybe we should go back to horse and buggy too.
I think an unmanned vehicle can and will be successfully produced AND it will have a better safety record than a human-driven car.
In other words, texting, on his cell phone or masturbating?
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