The Tech Blogger Take on the Driverless Uber Crash

Rush Limbaugh.com ^ | March 20, 2018 | Rush Limbaugh

[Kaslin]

RUSH: I mentioned that there’s the first known, first reported fatality involving an autonomously driven car. It was an Uber car. It was in Arizona. An Arizona pedestrian was killed. And because of this, Uber has halted testing of its autonomous vehicles all across North America, including San Francisco, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Toronto, and a number of others have canceled theirs too.

And, you know, it’s fascinating, folks, to read liberal blogs about this. As you know, I spend time on the tech blogs. And the tech blogs are populated by young Millennial leftist journalists. And while they hate Uber for one reason, they don’t like the CEO and his mistreatment of women. But on the other hand they love Uber ’cause it’s high-tech, it’s software, it’s automatic driving investigations or experimentation.

Now, what happened in this case, there was a human being acting as backup, so there was a human being in the car. The car was tooling along, and a woman, according to the cops, darted out in front of the car from shadow. She was in a median between lanes, and she was not in a crosswalk. Now, that’s important because the software for one of these autonomously software driven cars, the crosswalk would have been programmed into it, and it would have had a sensor, sensitivity.

The woman darted out, and the investigators, the cops said it wouldn’t have mattered if the human being in the car had total control over it, this woman would have not been missed. Nobody would have had a reaction time quick enough to avoid hitting her. So the autonomous driving car has been exonerated from any blame in the death. So I’m reading my tech blogs on this and the tech blogs are urging caution, and let’s not rush to judgment. People die every day. We can’t be hasty in our condemnation of this marvelous new technology, driverless automobiles.

And all I could think of, if this woman had been killed by a gun, would these same tech bloggers have expressed caution and said let’s not rush to judgment here, or would they be on a tear today? And, in fact, one of the tech bloggers pointed out, “Hey, we gotta keep things in perspective. There are 50,000 people a year killed in automobile accidents,” as though this is just one of them. Isn’t any big deal. But wait a minute. I thought it was life that was precious.

So is it 50,000 people killed one way or another involving automobiles every year — well, we’ll look past that. I mean, we’re not gonna ban the wheel, and we’re not gonna ban the car, and we’re not gonna blame AAA. But let there be a gun involved, they throw all that out and they become banshees on the warpath to get rid of every gun in the world. And yet they’ll sit by and acknowledge 50,000 people, hundred people a week die in car crashes, so let’s keep this in perspective. And I thought, what a bunch of hypocrites.

‘Cause the point is, we cannot allow this masterful new technology, driverless automobiles, we cannot allow it to be sidetracked. We cannot allow it to be delayed. We cannot permit it being harmed in any way because it’s the future. So in certain cases, a random death here, a random death there, that’s just the cost of doing business. But when a gun’s involved, why, we gotta go out and get rid of the Second Amendment. We gotta disband the NRA. We gotta put the chairman of the NRA in jail. Amazing hypocrisy.

Anyway, the cops said it was not the car’s fault; it was not the software’s fault. It was the woman’s fault. She jumped out in front of the car. Nobody would have been able to stop it.

[Ransomed]

I recall one driverless car drove right into a truck trailer because it couldn’t tell the white trailer was there. I wonder why they are calling this the first fatality?

Freegards

[TheNext]

A computer driverless car has 80 accidents by one account. Tell the Dept of Motor Vehicles you have 80 accidents on your record.

Tell the DMV the fatality was a mere computer glitch, and you apologized already.

Government is making human drivers 2nd class citizens.

Many Robot car incidents are angry people smashing the peopleless vehicle.

[thoughtomator]

What will happen is the auto-car industry will shovel a sufficient amount of money into the pockets of Congressmen and friends and families thereof, and immunities will be made law.

See: telco immunity

[zeugma]

You've been listening to Red Barchetta again.

HA! Came up on the playlist this weekend actually.

[I want the USA back]

The bleeding cars are being sold with the claim that they can PREVENT accidents! Obviously they can’t.

Does anybody really think that a camera attached to a computer program can perceive what’s happening in front of it?

A human can perceive another human, based on seeing only a small part of that human. Who is going to try to program a computer to understand that another human is present, when the program is able to examine only a small part of that human and remains unable to determine that it is a part of a whole human?

Example of what I mean: if you see a jacket at a height of about 5 feet off the ground, and it is moving, you know, without thinking, that it is on a human who is walking. Gonna try to program a computer to come to that same conclusion?

Lotsa luck.