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by bradlys 1998 days ago
Maybe a "perfect" autonomous vehicle would've reacted better... But, I'm pretty sure that lady with her bicycle walking across the street in Arizona would say differently in regards to Uber's program. I mean, it was a perfect test case for such a system. The guy whose Tesla drove into the side of a semi-truck might feel differently too. Oh and the one in a Tesla who was driven into a barrier in Mountain View and the car caught fire... He died too.

A perfect autonomous car sure sounds nice - but will it ever arrive? Would it have just hit 1 of those pedestrians instead? Would it just go, ding, and suddenly you're in control? Would it kill 1 and then the company would have the data to know to not kill pedestrians in that one specific example? How many people would have to die as test subjects before the system would be better than people? And what if it never got there but you still killed all those folks anyway?

1 comments

The braking system was disabled in the Uber car. That's hardly representative of anything except Uber's carelessness.

And tesla's system is unable to see stationary objects. It would never qualify as an autonomous driver.

We don't need a perfect system to avoid hitting pedestrians. Current tech can actually do a good job. It just has to be a design goal of the system.