Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by MTmind 974 days ago
The baseline should be other engineering we trust with our lives, like planes, trains, ships, skyscrapers, and bridges. Society expects more from technology than from humans... that's why we use technology! Deaths from self-driving cars should be very minimal, every crash analyzed and understood, and findings publicly communicated and mandated.
1 comments
__loam 974 days ago
It's worth noting that both Waymo and Cruise do report a shit load of statistics to regulatory bodies, including all incident reports. Neither company has caused a fatality to my knowledge.
link
choppaface 974 days ago
Waymo did run over a dog https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/06/a-waymo-self-driving-car-k...
link
__loam 974 days ago
They made this public immediately and it was physically impossible to avoid. It ran out basically right in front of the vehicle between some cars. A human driver would have hit the dog too unfortunately.
link
bumby 971 days ago
This is where I think edge cases favor the human driver.

Imagine driving by a playground and, instead of a dog, you see a ball roll across the street in front of your car, but you can already intuit that it is rolling fast enough that it won't be an obstacle in your lane. A human driver can intuit from the context (playground + ball) there is a chance a child may come running after that ball, from between those same cars.

While self-driving tech may be faster at 'seeing and classifying'* objects, is it able to predict from a larger context? I haven't seen much to indicate it can. I think that's where a lot of the edge cases are going to come from. Driving is more than just 'see object and make a decision'.

*Because most of the tech is relatively opaque to the public, this performance seems to be generally taken on faith. But what the Uber accident in AZ showed is that (with that system, at that time, at least) the self-driving tech really wasn't very good at classification in real-time.

link
choppaface 973 days ago
The dog fatality might not be a human fatality but it’s still a reported fatality.

Also relevant is when Anthony Levandowski at Google / Waymo caused a freeway incident through unsafe testing: https://www.businessinsider.com/anthony-levandowski-google-s...

While at the time the DMV did not require reporting, later when Levandowski was on trial Google / Waymo hid the video of the incident when it’s existence was finally reported on.

link