Posted on 03/22/2018 9:31:12 AM PDT by Former Proud Canadian
No exerpt.
Video of accident at link.
(Excerpt) Read more at apnews.com ...
I have a new Mercedes with all the goodies. Lane assist, brake assist, blind spot warning, cameras all around the car. Some of it I use....but only as a confirmation of what I already see. I still turn my head to look when backing out and to see if there’s any cars before switching lanes.
The woman would have been seen by a human driver. That’s when I slow my speed and move into the other lane until I can figure out what the pedestrian is doing
On the other hand maybe we could launch these in SF when the bicyclists are out
No driver, computer or human, could have stopped before hitting that idiot who walked her bicycle in the dark, away from a streetlight and not at a crosswalk across a very busy road. If you watch the video she did not once turn towards the direction of traffic. It’s ridiculous for Uber to be blamed for the stupid actions of this woman, who had abused drugs and alcohol in the past, and may well have been inebriated at the time.
Yes, this is the biggest problem in this case. The car was just relying on sensors, not intelligence to track the person as she was crossing. A human being would have tracked the person and realized from far away that he needed to slow down.
You would have hit the brakes only if you were paying attention, not texting, changing the radio, angry at something, driving while high or drunk, or a thousand other distractions that normal drivers face every minute.
Under perfect conditions, an autonomous car will never have any of the normal driving failures we humans have.
If traffic fatalities really can be reduced by tens of thousands each year, then I’m fine with driverless cars.
Bring ‘em on.
And if in the meantime a less than perfect autonomous car runs over an idiot who should have not been on the street, then oh well. Too bad for her.
I would not make that assumption at all until I was able to drive the same route at the same time of night and determine for myself what the conditions were.
Unfortunately for Uber and its "safety operator," their ability to defend themselves in this case is impaired by the fact that the operator wasn't paying attention to the road.
I read a recent by some organization (maybe AAA) that concluded something I've suspected all along ... that many late-model cars with all that sh!t in them are actually less safe than an older car because the technology ends up being a serious distraction for the driver.
They'll get better over time. Airliners are practically self-flying these days. All the pilot really does is start the engines and taxi them to the runway. They take off, fly to their destination and land all by computer. The pilot just monitors the gauges.
Self-driving cars are the future. Sure, there will be a few speed bumps along the way but we'll get there. The real question is how will insurance companies cope with this.
Oh I imagine Uber's going to get taken to the cleaners in litigation over this. As I said on another thread, I'll be some "suit" at Uber decided that FLIR wasn't worth the expense to include in a self-driving car. Had it had one, the vehicle probably would have detected the bicycle-lady well before she stepped in its path and avoided hitting her.
Well, now Uber may go under as a result of this.
Having watched this video a few times, even knowing she was coming up I don’t think I could have missed her, unless what I could see at night is better than what the camera is showing me. She was in a particularly bad spot, just past the streetlight, and she was dressed in dark clothing. A human driver probably would have hit her, but Uber is going to have to pay millions anyway.
I came very close to hitting a cyclist at night——no reflectors and all dark closing——in other words,an idiot.
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Even if Uber is found to be 100% at fault in this case, how much do you think will actually be paid out in damages? I wouldn't even assume that their liability would exceed their insurance cap.
The long-term prospects of "self-driving" vehicles will suffer more than Uber does as a result of this.
Oops,all dark clothing.
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All the reports I’ve seen indicate the brakes were never applied. This is a huge problem for Uber and the designer of the self-driving system. Even if the vehicle could not have stopped in time to avoid striking the pedestrian, the brakes should have been applied.
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Well, yes. Obviously the brakes should have been and would have been applied if the system had recognized the object as a person.
The part that’s difficult to comprehend is the driverless system is nothing more than a giant algorithm. It doesn’t know about actual objects like roads or people, squirrels darting across a road or anything.
You look at a person and you see a person. You know it’s a person. You know you shouldn’t run over a person while driving.
The driverless car receives millions of data points on its GPS location. Pixels of light from its camera system. Radar pulses from its onboard LIDAR. Then using only the algorithms, as it is not conscious, the algorithms need to plot what to do in the next split second. No problem as computers are super fast.
But how does it digest all the raw information and interpret it? That’s the trick. The system has to discount shadows, identify other cars (pretty easy, they’re large and radar reflective), and other moving things.
It’s those other moving things that are tricky. You know you’d avoid running over a squirrel if you could help it, but you would run over a squirrel if by swerving you’d hit another car or a tree. That’s all obvious to a thinking person. The machine doesn’t know any of this except by training for all the possible scenarios.
This woman on a bike is one of those scenarios that was not anticipated. A good driver might have automatically given a bike a wider berth just in case the bike rider wobbled or veered. A good driver would do this because they have a knowledge of how bike riders operate. The computer program likely saw nothing more than an object that was originally vectored on a course that would not interact with the vehicle. The code didn’t “know” enough to provide a margin for error.
At this point, we’re at the Windows 1.0 level of driverless vehicles.
The woman needed an RFID chip and to have her real time position transmitted to the vehicle so it could slow to a crawl as it passed her so she coukdn’t jump out in front and get hit.
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At some point there may be an option like that, perhaps built into cellphones. But it should be optional.
There is another major flaw in self-driving technology. The airline example actually exposes the LIMITS of technology, not just the benefits of it.
If a vehicle still has to have an operator paying some level of attention to what's going on, then what exactly is the point of paying a premium to have all that crap on board in the first place? If I can't sleep while I'm being driven to work by my car, then I might as well drive myself.
Same here. In my case, the moron was driving on the wrong side of the road, too.
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