[baroffoos]

When you are traveling at 60km/h+ no amount of computers can save you when even reacting instantly is not enough to slow down enough. Cars, self driving or not are extremely unsafe. Sure its a bad place to be walking at night but its quite problematic that we accept that walking around without looking both ways at every step is punishable by instant death.

[lugg]

If reacting instantly is not enough to slow down you were driving way too fast for the conditions, period. Defensive driving is a solved problem.

Unless you're talking about times where things really are out of the domain of the car - people jumping in front. But nobody really cares about that non problem.

Cars unsafe? Compared to what? Cheeseburgers? Most of the time when I drive, I don't die and I don't kill people. That seems pretty safe to me.

Regarding liability here in this case, I'm not sure where I sit, probably on the side where uber is liable. Their company, no amount of "it's new so it doesn't count" hand waiving will change my mind.

But the way I feel about this is my bias for strong consumer protections.

In curious what on earth the argument is that lets uber off the hook here.

[baroffoos]

>If reacting instantly is not enough to slow down you were driving way too fast for the conditions, period. Defensive driving is a solved problem.

Why does our law not reflect this? If this was a solved problem than all roads where people walk near would be 40km/h but instead we have people riding bikes and walking across roads with 60km/h traffic and they regularly get killed. You might be able to safely drive your car and not die most days but its shockingly common for people to die on our roads because we prioritize getting to work 30 seconds faster over reducing death.

[lugg]

It does reflect this.

Just to be clear what I meant by solved problem was that is has a known solution, it's not NP hard so to speak.

And while the problem is solved the implementation is far from widespread. Defensive driving lessons are not forced on everyone.

If you're a bus driver and rare end someone you lose your job specifically because you should have had enough distance to stop if they suddenly break.

> shockingly common

This phrase doesn't mean anything. Compared to what? People die all the time. Doesn't mean it's more common than the norm you expect which is what you're trying to convey.

I was actually thinking about this problem more and more.

There is no reason a self driving car can't prevent incidents like this. There isn't really any situation you want to crash into anything, allowing the car to do so is an error.

Defensive driving states if you can't see if there is something that might cross into the road around that blind corner then you need to reduce speed to the point you can safely edge around the corner and see what is oncoming. If that makes for a crappy drive then fix the roads, cut the trees down, make roads straighter and pedestrians more visible.

[baroffoos]

>Defensive driving states if you can't see if there is something that might cross into the road around that blind corner then you need to reduce speed to the point you can safely edge around the corner and see what is oncoming. If that makes for a crappy drive then fix the roads, cut the trees down, make roads straighter and pedestrians more visible.

Yes if self driving cars did this they would be fine but I doubt they will be built like this because people probably don't want their car to slam on the brakes every time someone is walking towards the edge of the street or slowing to a crawl every time they get to a corner. Virtually no drivers slow down to a safe speed when going around a corner its just 99.9% of the time there is nothing around the corner.

The uber car that killed that person was driving far above its ability. From what I read about it, these self driving cars are unable to tell if something in the distance is in the way or not at high speed so they assume that any stopped object in the distance must be not in the way because slamming on the brakes every time there is a tree on the side of the road is not ideal.

[zodiac]

If you jaywalk across a road with a 60km/h speed limit and get killed because the driver couldn't possibly have stopped in time, I wouldn't really want to blame the driver

[anonymou2]

Only if you jumped in the field of vision of the car. Drivers are supposed to be able to stop within that field of vision. Driving faster than that is unsafe. If you jaywalk but you are not in anybody's field of vision and still get hit then it is the drivers fault for driving too fast and not being able to stop when they see you in the middle of the road.

[0x8BADF00D]

> In curious what on earth the argument is that lets uber off the hook here.

I took the position recently that if the code you write directly leads to the death of someone, you should be held accountable for it. But in this particular case, I disagree that Uber should be held criminally liable.

The actual person responsible is the human driver that did not stop. The article states that this individual will be facing criminal charges. I think it’s rather cut and dry in this case; driver’s attention was split, and they were criminally negligent as a result. That argument makes more sense to me.

[lugg]

Interesting take. I mostly disagree, but let me see if I can explain.

> I took the position recently that if the code you write directly leads to the death of someone, you should be held accountable for it.

I don't think that follows. Just because you are responsible for the death in question does not imply accountability or wrongdoing.

> But in this particular case, I disagree that Uber should be held criminally liable.

Why? That doesn't match your previous statement precisely because of what I mentioned about there not being a direct correlation between responsibility and accountability.

> The actual person responsible is the human driver that did not stop.

This implies there is a single person responsible, I think there is far more going on in this case.

> The article states that this individual will be facing criminal charges. I think it’s rather cut and dry in this case; driver’s attention was split, and they were criminally negligent as a result. That argument makes more sense to me.

I tend to agree in this situation, but just because the "driver-not-driver-unless-you-kill-someone-driver" was found to be criminally responsible that doesn't absolve uber of their responsibility or accountability.

Someone at uber decided that their self driving car should not engage a breaking procedure in the situation that an object will be hit. To me, that is an utter failure. It's actually so bad I find it negligently bad.

They also failed to train their user properly. Not that they could have, its an absurd premise to believe a user of a self driving car will pay the same 100% attention that a normal driver does.

This is why I find it negligent to hold the opinion the car shouldn't execute a breaking procedure when it identifies a situation it will collide. To do so and not also implement a user alert system is an abomination.

I know there is a lot of nuance here and I don't hold the position that companies should be held liable for every little crash a car has on the road.

What I do believe is that if they want to operate at the scale they plan to we need to be damn fucking serious about the regulations they have to jump through.

Just look at air traffic control software or better yet nasa's development processes, this is the type of development scrutiny we need to place on self driving cars.

The loss of life and the scale is far to great to trust profit driven entities to take our lives seriously enough.

They will figure out the recall figure and play the numbers, we need to disallow that kind of behavior.

Just in case it wasn't clear, personally all for self driving cars, I think they will be a massive improvement on the status quo. I just don't want it to regret that position.

[jimktrains2]

60km/hr isn't that fast when you have multiple seconds of time to react. The reason cars are unsafe is because driver's think they're better than they are. How many times have I seen snow covered cars this week? Or excessive speeding on snow and ice covered roads? How often do people drive on the highway without anywhere near stopping distance between them and the car they're tailgating at 80mph?

The actual car itself is actually an amazing reliable and safe machine. The people using them in extremely dangerous ways are largely just irresponsible.

[kylek]

Starting to think that autonomous driving should be limited to roads where people are already restricted from being near (e.g. freeways) until the technology is (rigorously) proven safe. Doesn't seem like it would take much to implement on top of the current technologies in the wild.

[ylbss]

We already accept this. You could also be looking both ways and be killed by a driver on their phone even with the right of way because drivers will not react in a predictable manner. We've accepted vehicles as being the #1 non-natural cause of death for years.

[caf]

The commenter you are replying to understands your point perfectly, and is simply saying that they find this acceptance for years to be problematic.

[ummonk]

The car did not need to slow down much to reach speeds where a collision with a pedestrian would not be fatal. And there were several seconds to react had the car been driven by an attentive human driver.

[JustSomeNobody]

I still think the car was going too fast. Posted speed limits are for optimal conditions. Night driving is never an optimal condition so one should always drive slower than the posted speed limit.