Self Driving Uber Kills Pedestrian

wturber

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/uber-driverless-fatality.html

Lots more information needed before we can better understand the situation and circumstance.
 
It's one thing if there is a automobile assembly line robot swinging back and forth and you step into the area where the arm swings and it smacks you in the head (much like listening to a running car engine to figure out where a noise is coming from, and you stick your hand into a spinning fan belt), but

March, 2017...Michigan USA

"A federal lawsuit alleges that a robot bypassed safety regulations, entering an unauthorized area and killing a human worker"
https://www.techrepublic.com/articl...ing-concerns-about-human-robot-collaboration/
 
Workers being injured and killed by industrial/manufacturing equipment, is common and as old as industry.
Pedestrians and drivers being injured and killed incar accidents also has been happening since vehicles first moved.
So whats new ?.....autonamous controls !
isnt the human brain (driver) supposed to be so much safer than a computer ,...but human driven cars still kill pedestrians ?
 
Hillhater said:
Workers being injured and killed by industrial/manufacturing equipment, is common and as old as industry.
Pedestrians and drivers being injured and killed incar accidents also has been happening since vehicles first moved.
So whats new ?.....autonamous controls !
isnt the human brain (driver) supposed to be so much safer than a computer ,...but human driven cars still kill pedestrians ?

Yes. Autonomous controls and the laws and rules that will be implemented to govern their use. I think cases like this can have a potentially disproportionate and distorting influence on those laws and how quickly people accept this kind of technology on the roads where they travel. I think makes this tragedy more interesting that similar tragedies that also occur regularly with human piloted automobiles.
 
Leave it to Uber to shit in the pool before the party has even gotten started.

That said, the basic problem isn't how reliable or faulty a car's guidance system is-- it's the degree to which motor traffic has been prioritized over human lives.

If lives are more important than the convenience of selfish people (and I believe they are), then I think a civilized city would institute speed limits like these:

Muscle powered - unlimited speed
Motorized under 100 lbs - 30mph
Motorized 100-1000 lbs - 20mph
Motorized over 1000 lbs - 10mph

Enforceable by impoundment on the first two offenses and crushing on the third offense. Zero emission, low noise vehicles only.

While I'd prefer to live in a city that prohibits private motor vehicles on any rights-of-way where people are present, I think the above would be an acceptable compromise to address the worst excesses and hazards imposed by motor traffic.

P.S. - Yes, I am sure we can get by with electric supply trucks and garbage trucks that don't go faster than 10mph in the city. The world won't come to an end. In fact, a lot fewer people will have their worlds forcibly brought to an end if dangerous machines are obligated to operate safely (meaning slowly enough to react appropriately to conditions). And it will save a huge amount of energy.
 
When I worked in melbourne about 15 years ago a bike courier struck and killed a guy his estimated speed was about 35 kmh.
 
Chalo said:
Leave it to Uber to shit in the pool before the party has even gotten started.

Perhaps. Or perhaps the unfortunate woman was crossing illegally and not paying attention to oncoming traffic when she decided to cross the street. I'm continually amazed at the people who will step into crosswalks without even looking to see if cars are approaching. She, apparently, was not in a crosswalk. Though I wouldn't trust any of the reported details or lack of them at this early stage.

For selfish reasons, I hope that this turns out to not be a fault in the Uber system. I expect well designed self-driving cars will eventually be safer for pedestrians and cyclists than the current human piloted system we currently have. Case in point are the three people who were killed last week in Fountain Hills, AZ by a driver who apparently lost control of his car, jumped the curb and ran four people down. That event will not make national news - even if it turns out to be a fault in the vehicle and not in the driving of the car.

Autonomous cars are new. So everybody is paying extra close attention to them. Human piloted cars are not new - so what happens with them fades into the background noise of daily existence.

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/scottsdale-traffic/2018/03/19/canadian-sisters-mourn-loss-triplet-killed-fountain-hills-crash/438497002/

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix-breaking/2018/03/13/arizona-official-10-pedestrian-deaths-week-show-major-crisis/422808002/
 
Sean9002 said:
When I worked in melbourne about 15 years ago a bike courier struck and killed a guy his estimated speed was about 35 kmh.

I recall reading of a similar case in London where the cyclist was riding a fixed gear bicycle that was not equipped with a legally mandated brake system. As I recall, the cyclist claimed that the accident was the woman's fault because he yelled out for her to get out of the way but she failed to react. I guess he somehow didn't seem to think he also had a responsibility be operating a bicycle with brakes so that he could make a reasonable attempt to stop - even for someone crossing the street and not paying attention. The cyclist was apparently ignorant of "the doctrine of last clear chance" ... even though it appears to have originated in England.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davies_v_Mann
 
It's not to say that collisions at those speeds aren't potentially fatal, a 10 ton truck at 10 mph will smoosh you real good.

A 200lb bike/rider package going 25 mph is also packing enough stored energy to make you dead if things go horribly wrong, but at these reduced speeds the likelihood of a collision is substantially reduced.

Expecting autonomous vehicles to eliminate collisions altogether is unrealistic, the laws of physics still fully apply. If a pedestrian steps out in front of a 2.5 ton SUV traveling 40 mph, it's still going to take time to decelerate, because it's a 2.5 ton object traveling 40 mph, and contains a certain amount of stored energy which must be transferred into it's braking system.

I'm sure all of those murderous industrial robots have safety systems as well, but they can't stop instantly. If they're moving at high speed and someone sticks themselves in the way, there's no guarantee they can stop themselves prior to collision, even if they detect the intrusion instantly. The only way to make them safer at that point (aside from teaching common sense to those working around them) is to slow them down, making them proportionally less productive.

A person steps out in front of a fast moving vehicle driven by another person and gets smoked, we blame the guy that stepped out into traffic, and maybe even sympathize with the driver.

If the vehicle is driven by a computer, we expect it to perform some kind of miracle to prevent a collision, physics be damned.

In this particular case, if the SUV had been travelling 10mph as Chalo suggests, there's almost no way a collision would have occurred.

So the way I see it, we either need to accept that autonomous vehicles are unavoidably going to kill some of the people they share space with (albeit far less than human piloted ones will), or make them go much slower than we are used to having vehicles travel at present, so they can respond to unpredictable (sometimes stupid) human behavior.
 
dustNbone said:
So the way I see it, we either need to accept that autonomous vehicles are unavoidably going to kill some of the people they share space with (albeit far less than human piloted ones will), or make them go much slower than we are used to having vehicles travel at present, so they can respond to unpredictable (sometimes stupid) human behavior.

Most people I've discussed this with tend to agree. The problem is that sensationalized events can distort perceptions. Also, we still want to promote the idea of automated cars that do a better/safer job than the typical driver. I can imagine how eventually sophisticated vehicles might be able to travel at slower typical speeds while enjoying similar, the same or even faster average speeds if the smart cars can also communicate back and forth with smart traffic control devices.
 
And as soon as you slow down the autonomous vehicles, the rest of the traffic on the road is going to cause collisions with them (or each other) in their impatience to get around them (just like they do bicycles and other slow traffic).

It'll happen less the larger the AV is, but it'd still happen. (just like how my SB Cruiser trike makes more people go around it passing farther away from it than with normal-bicycle-sized bikes, simply because it's large enough it might actually hurt their car if they did hit it).


If it were possible, I'd prefer to live in a city that followed the rules Chalo listed above, but I can't imagine that happening. :(
 
amberwolf said:
And as soon as you slow down the autonomous vehicles, the rest of the traffic on the road is going to cause collisions with them (or each other) in their impatience to get around them (just like they do bicycles and other slow traffic).

It'll happen less the larger the AV is, but it'd still happen. (just like how my SB Cruiser trike makes more people go around it passing farther away from it than with normal-bicycle-sized bikes, simply because it's large enough it might actually hurt their car if they did hit it).

If it were possible, I'd prefer to live in a city that followed the rules Chalo listed above, but I can't imagine that happening. :(

I can only imagine slower typical speeds with autonomous vehicles down the road when they become overwhelmingly dominant. So probably not in my lifetime.

Yes. Chalo's outline is even less likely to occur while I'm still alive ... even assuming I die of natural causes and not by a car running me down.
 
Alan B said:
I suspect autonomous vehicles will not exceed speed limits, so in light traffic they will definitely be slower than impatient drivers.
I wonder how police will ticket them like they do drivers that are "impeding traffic" under such conditions?

(when the rest of traffic is significantly over the speed limit, it's common enough around here for those maintaining that limit to be stopped and ticketed, which seems really stupid to me--they *should* be enforcing the speed limit instead. But I guess it's easier to punish the law-abiding citizens instead).
 
amberwolf said:
I wonder how police will ticket them like they do drivers that are "impeding traffic" under such conditions?

It'll be like a camera ticket and whomever is responsible for the vehicle when it's on the road will get a citation in the mail.
 
It will probably bring the speed limit setting into question, they are supposed to be set to traffic surveys but other things often override that.

Of course they can program the vehicle to pull over when there are too many cars behind stacking up, which is what the law calls for.

It would seem that programming a vehicle to exceed the speed limit would be a legal liability. They could choose to do that, but safety is probably more of a priority.

Vehicle accidents kill about 100 people each day in the US alone.

(96 people per day in the US in 2016, according to IIHS)
 
amberwolf said:
Alan B said:
I suspect autonomous vehicles will not exceed speed limits, so in light traffic they will definitely be slower than impatient drivers.
I wonder how police will ticket them like they do drivers that are "impeding traffic" under such conditions?

(when the rest of traffic is significantly over the speed limit, it's common enough around here for those maintaining that limit to be stopped and ticketed, which seems really stupid to me--they *should* be enforcing the speed limit instead. But I guess it's easier to punish the law-abiding citizens instead).
I find that unbelievable !
Any half alive lawyer would have that thrown out and the cop roasted.
 
Yeah, it seems stupid, but it's the way it works here. Several people I've known over the years have had this happen to them. Don't think any of them got out of it.


Alan B said:
Of course they can program the vehicle to pull over when there are too many cars behind stacking up, which is what the law calls for.
Around here, there's often nowhere to pull over. (unless you're on a freeway/highway, which has shoulders) You can pull to the right, but that lane doesn't have enough space for two cars (not even a car and my trike in some places).

So pulling over and stopping makes an even worse traffic impediment than just going "a bit" slower than the rest of traffic, and would be downright hazardous on some of the roads around here, especially in heavier traffic.

Some years back, I saw the results of a series-collision on Greenway (one of the worst in my general area of town for speed of traffic) near the mountains east of here that as far as I could tell was from a disabled car stopped at the rightmost edge of the road, and another car hit them in teh left rear quarter (probably didn't notice they were stopped and not moving until too late and hit them while trying to swerve around), then someone else hit them, and so on.

The side roads that do have space to pull over aren't all that likely to have this problem.

Some of the major "mile" roads do have separated "frontage" roads for neighborhood access (otherwise no one could get out of their driveways in those areas), so I suppose those could be used, assuming the car knows to use them and how to get into them. But they dont' have them for their entire length, just in residential areas.
 
It was pretty predictable this would happen, there are even videos on youtube where other drivers dashcams have caught Uber driverless cars going through red lights while they are waiting at the red light.

https://youtu.be/pzzQ42D9Srw
[youtube]pzzQ42D9Srw[/youtube]

The main reason this person is dead is due to corporate greed. It's as simple as that.
Uber is losing billions of dollars every year.
Uber's loss jumped 61 percent to $4.5 billion in 2017
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/13/ubers-loss-jumped-61-percent-to-4-point-5-billion-in-2017.html

Uber is desperately trying to find a way to make its business profitable instead of losing money and the best way to do that is to make human drivers redundant as paying drivers expensive.
The funny thing is most people expect when driverless cars take over that prices will go down but the fact is if Uber is in a 10billion plus loss hole their whole plan is to hope if anything people are willing to pay the same amount or even a premium over normal taxies for at least 10 years. They probably hoping their biggest market will be women who are afraid of getting into taxis with dodgy male drivers etc.

Uber even originally refused to obtain a self-driving car permit when it first started.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/03/uber-rethinks-defiance-will-apply-for-self-driving-car-permit-in-california/

I tell you every time I get on my bike and go out there I have had this fear on the back of my mind, would I rather be killed by a stupid driver or killed by someone else's simple greed? The upside that comes to mind is I know with human drivers is they are much more likely to be properly punished than a reckless CEO. I hope Uber gets punished, I hope people understand this is a death from the result of greed. Elon Musk and his self-driving cars are the same, its all about pushing that stock price up.

This is just a race to push up vehicle stock prices, make no mistake about it.

I think a hybrid of human+driver sensor technology is the best way to go.
https://www.honda.com.au/about/safety/honda-sensing.html
I think this will be great as its basically making dangerous driving a thing of the past. All the built-in sensors make it difficult to impossible to run over or run into anything with collision detection technologies or verge into other lanes. I think the final "driver-assist" technology should be one that restricts drivers going faster than legally possible which really should be a no-brainer, if not first implemented technology.
To me, there is no logical way a perfect hybridization of these driverless sensor technologies makes a fully driverless car any safer than one with a human-driver, in other words, with this tech the human can only make it safer.
In the short term-future I think drivers will be more of an instant guide to where the car is going rather than specific detail but one still with instant breaking, steering wheel etc..
I think these hybrid driver-assist technologies coming to market will ruin the argument that the only safe car is a driverless one, because if the sensors are working properly the human driver only becomes an extra asset sensor on top.

One of the main reasons I am a fan of advanced hybrid of human+driver sensor technology is due to the fact it takes the extreme greed race out of it all, as getting rid of human drivers doesn't become the top priority and only the safety becomes the top priority.

1zsxx8.jpg


Uber being a billion dollar company (about 60billion dollar private market cap), the only way the CEO keeps his job is by spending 10s of millions of dollars on lawyers and publicists coming up with the best way to word up statements and press to make it look like it was everyone else's fault but their own.
 
Alan B said:
I suspect autonomous vehicles will not exceed speed limits, so in light traffic they will definitely be slower than impatient drivers.

It doesn't take much to kill someone. Tripping and hitting the cranium is plenty to terminate a human. It happens occasionally.

I would expect the cars to use an algorithm that considers the speed of nearby cars, the speed limit, and the custom of allowing cars to exceed the speed limit by up to 10 mph in most (not school zones) areas. I would not expect the cars to slavishly abide by posted speed limits.
 
Hillhater said:
I find that unbelievable !
Any half alive lawyer would have that thrown out and the cop roasted.

My wife was pulled over by an indian reservation cop for going slightly below the speed limit during rush hour. But he did not cite her, he just warned her.
 
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-20/video-shows-woman-stepped-suddenly-in-front-of-self-driving-uber

The Uber had a forward-facing video recorder, which showed the woman was walking a bike at about 10 p.m. and moved into traffic from a dark center median. "It’s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode,” Sylvia Moir, police chief in Tempe, Arizona, told the San Francisco Chronicle.

"The driver said it was like a flash, the person walked out in front of them," Moir said, referring to the backup driver who was behind the wheel but not operating the vehicle. "His first alert to the collision was the sound of the collision."

https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Exclusive-Tempe-police-chief-says-early-probe-12765481.php

The Uber was doing 38 mph in a 35 mph zone.

USA Today is making a pretty big deal about the fact that the Uber operator is an ex-felon.
 
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