Uber self driving car kills pedestrian

In the future, will terrorists try to hack self driving cars to kill people?

Sigh. Just IPO and crash & burn already…!!

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You dont need self driving cars for it. A Iot of devices that are critical for human life are connected. You can hack jeeps and cause them to crash already, it is a real danger.

No need to hack. Just drive it the old fashioned way.

I’m thinking to ban all the cars. If everyone walks, global warming will end and accidents will disappear. Healthcare cost will be controlled magically as well.

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I’m thinking of eliminating the human problem once and for all.

Self driving car should be able to detect the pedestrian even if it’s dark and even if she is not in the cross walk. She’s a regular human and even if she runs fast, the self driving car should have avoided a warm body. I think it’s a technical failure or design flaw.

On the other hand, was the woman just curious and wanted to test how the self driving car behaves when she gets on the way?

Is the video available for people to watch?

"Chief Sylvia Moir explained after viewing the car’s own video of the event that “she came from the shadows right into the roadway,” and that “it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode.”

A lighted crosswalk was nearby but the place where the accident occurred was in the dark. The car would almost certainly have been aware of the pedestrian, but it’s also possible that she moved out in front of the car faster than the car could reasonably be stopped"

What would be interesting to know is whether the self-driving car “stepped on” the brakes at all before hitting the victim. Stopping distance is a mechanical limitation that a self-driving robot can’t help improve. If the car detected the victim and tried to stop by slamming the brakes before the hit, either the car miscalculated its ability to stop and did not slam the brakes strong enough, or the car simply hit the braking limit and couldn’t stop fast enough. The likelihood of the prior is small I think.

Or maybe the car missed the victim completely, because lighting was too dim for camera to identify a moving object out of the grainy picture. In this case it becomes a subjective opinion whether the computer is at fault or not. If it’s so dark that a normal human eye cannot make out the moving person, then it’s reasonable to assume it’s ok for a computer to not be able to recognize that person either. But there is a drastic difference between the different people’s abilities to detect objects under low light conditions, so it’s going to take one or more scientific studies to determine how much such capability can be deemed enough.

http://www.government-fleet.com/content/driver-care-know-your-stopping-distance.aspx

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To make self driving car legally practical, it needs to be able to never kill a pedestrian. It should be able to make it impossible for a pedestrian to commit suitcide onto the car when the car is moving. (I hope this pedestrian was not trying to commit suitcide) If a pedestrian commits suitcide when the self driving car has stopped, it would be the pedestrian’s fault.

Also self driving car should be able to espcape a malicious driver who tries to drive into the self driving car, with the exception when there is too much traffic and no way to escape. In that case, self driving car should be able to rise up to the sky to fly in an emergency.

We shall set human life preservation as #1 priority.

Don’t think so. We expect machine to be better than humans.

Exactly

Just heard on the 5 o’clock tv news, the Uber driver behind the wheel served a four year prison term for armed robbery.

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Doesnt mean much.

I think we need to see the footage and the telemetry data to see what happened. Good thing with autonomous cars… They can give us exactly that.

Non autonomous also can.

I just viewed the video from the Uber self driving car and it looks like the accident was unavoidable from Uber’s standpoint. The issue is still the human driver is not paying attention to the road. It looks like she is texting or emailing something. Still I don’t think even if she had been paying attention she could have prevented it.

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/tempe-police-chief-says-uber-014913616.html

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Human here is wrong, and could be much more careful, but I also would like to see the telemetry. Video alone is not sufficient to say car could not avoid it. IT should have, it must, if we want the technology to be ubiquitous. They should get the sensor data, and respond within milliseconds, if not faster.

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Cars have to be re-designed… retrofitting gasoline cars with electrical setup is not ideal

That’s very secondary, and i hope you know it :slight_smile:, but sure!

Did you watch the movie Downsizing?

You are right. A human is limited by what he/she can see but an autonomous car should have radar/lidar to see beyond the range of the headlights.

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