Self Driving Uber Fatality - Thread II 8

[drawoh]

Continued from thread815-436809

Please read the discussion in Thread I prior to posting in this Thread II. Thank you.

--
JHG

 

[BridgeSmith]

"...the potential elimination of...human reaction time..."

From movement of an object toward the path of the vehicle to application of the brakes, is the AV reaction time better or worse than an attentive human driver?

 

[cranky108]

Just a question: If walking across a major street in the wrong place is risky thing to do, if not illegal, then why is that considered an accident when something does happen?

It's not like she did not know, like in the case of a young child.

That the AV did not see her is a problem as this could have been something else it missed.

If the problem with humans really is being board, then would we expect a higher ratio of rural accidents than in cities? And would this not be reversed for AV's because of too much input? Or is the input problem also a factor for humans?

 

[IRstuff]

The standard time for human reaction as applied to stopping distance is typically 1.5 seconds. The issue isn't necessarily a single driver's reaction time, but the chain of drivers in the same lane, and how some will jam on their brakes, while others aren't doing that.

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[IRstuff]

There was a recent case where a drunk driver was involved in a fatal accident, but was judged to be only guilty of the DUI, as the accident itself was judged to be cased by the deceased driver.

As for this pedestrian, while they were certainly not supposed to be crossing the street at that location, in California, the pedestrian has the right of way, even if they are doing so illegally. The fact that the pedestrian was at fault for jaywalking does not alleviate the responsibility of the driver to yield to the pedestrian, much less hit the pedestrian.

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[BrianPetersen]

Perhaps it would be best to take out the word "accident" and replace it with the word "collision". There are many "collisions" but very few "accidents", since almost all of them have root causes that turn out to be preventable, frequently by both parties involved.

Legal "fault" with Uber's collision may lie with the pedestrian who jaywalked (edit: simul-post suggests that California may give the pedestrian the right of way regardless of jaywalking). But drivers, including self-driving vehicles, also carry some responsibility for avoiding collisions that are legally the other driver's fault. I've already mentioned in this thread, the inadvisability of slamming on the brakes in a full-speed travel lane of a motorway with a fully loaded dump truck filling your rear view mirror. Doesn't matter human driver or automated one. Doesn't matter that getting hit from the rear is legally the responsibility of the driver behind ... the occupants of your vehicle are still flat.

Humans vary widely in their ability to prevent situations that result in a collision. Some people have good situational awareness and take intentional actions to prevent potentially dangerous situations from developing before they happen ... others focus narrowly on the path directly in front of them and are oblivious to any other surroundings or on what's in their mirrors. Good drivers will spot the other vehicle in a lane about to merge with their own and will pro-actively speed up, slow down, or move over so that the other driver can merge without conflict. Others ... not so much. Self-driving? Who knows!

Humans get bored when there is sensory deprivation or when they don't have anything to do. In the case of road traffic, humans certainly can get bored, and it doesn't take babysitting an automated vehicle to do it. Take a long, straight road with few features along it and impose a 55 mph speed limit and strictly enforce it, and you'll find out that arbitrary reductions in speed limits don't necessarily correlate with reducing the number of collisions. Reason ... people get bored, and nod off, or start doing other things (playing on the phone, etc). An automated vehicle won't get bored in those circumstances ... but you can be pretty much assured that the babysitting "driver" will be sleeping.

Humans can most certainly get overwhelmed, too. They don't multitask very well. They may be so fixated on making sure they don't hit the pedestrian who looks like they might be stepping off the curb that they miss the fact that the traffic signal ahead of them has turned red.

 

[Spartan5]

Just a question: If walking across a major street in the wrong place is risky thing to do, if not illegal, then why is that considered an accident when something does happen?

It's not like she did not know, like in the case of a young child.

Just to touch on this subject, the picture below shows the main road adjacent to my community. The speed limit is 45 (55-60 is the norm). All of the houses (+/- 500 units) are to the SE. There are none on the NW side of the road.

The red circle is the bus stop, which are spaced evenly along the road every 500' or so. That is 140' curb to curb. The nearest crosswalks are 1/2 mile in either direction.

Don't even get me started on the turning movements and different ways right-of-way is perceived through those intersections. That causes more peril than the traffic moving along the main road.

 

[IRstuff]

There are some things that one can successfully multitask, like watching a movie and eating popcorn. I tried to listen to a lecture and write a technical memo at the same time; that was not pretty.

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[SwinnyGG]

it doesn't yet matter much when the cars are driving into things that should be easily avoided....

That is exactly the point, though.

Autonomous vehicles will ALWAYS drive into things that *should* be avoided.

Reaching some point where autonomous vehicles have zero accidents of any kind in trillions of miles driven per year is a statistical impossibility. It will not happen, ever.

The question you have to answer, if you're in favor of automated vehicles, is: what accident rate are you willing to accept?

If your answer is precisely zero, we will never get there. It just isn't possible.

If your answer is "a lower statistical rate than humans in the aggregate", the technology today is such that it may be possible right now, but we don't really have enough data to know yet.

If your answer is "a lower statistical rate than some subset of humans that have the least accidents or the least damaging accidents" then the technology today might still be there already, or might not be, or might never be. We, again, don't have enough data to know, and having enough data to know with a high level of statistical certainty is many, many years in the future based on current rates of miles accumulated per year.

 

[IRstuff]

"Autonomous vehicles will ALWAYS drive into things that *should* be avoided."

You ignored the "easily" part of the previous statement. The pedestrian death should have NEVER happened, i.e., there should be ZERO probability that specific set of conditions with that pedestrian should result in any collision, short of an outright failure. Now, it's certainly possible that the Uber incident was the result of a serious failure, but we probably won't know for a while.

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[IRstuff]

It occurred to me on the way home that another reason for disengaging humans from driving is the increased level of "road rage." There's a FastTrak toll road that people use to bypass some of traffic on the SR 91 between Anaheim and Riverside; the on-ramp is often backup for up to a mile in the afternoons. There are invariably people "cutting" the line by zooming up to the last few hundred feet before the on ramp and just inserting themselves, knowing that someone will yield to the aggression, and the psychopath is meanwhile blocking the thru-traffic lane.

Now, if it were just people waiting in line, you'd almost never see people just cutting; so I see this as a symptom of a depersonalization of other drivers, because being rude and obnoxious to a mechanical box doesn't rank anywhere near the level of being rude to an actual, visible, human. So that's something that AVs could eliminate. The AVs would also make the transition to the toll road cleaner and reduce the congestion, since AVs wouldn't slow down going up the grade on that part of the 91 and the traffic would flow better.

Better flow and fewer exhibitions of psychopathic behavior --> less road rage.

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[SwinnyGG]

You ignored the "easily" part of the previous statement. The pedestrian death should have NEVER happened, i.e., there should be ZERO probability that specific set of conditions with that pedestrian should result in any collision, short of an outright failure. Now, it's certainly possible that the Uber incident was the result of a serious failure, but we probably won't know for a while.

I understand what you're saying I just think that "easily" has no effect on the end result. The ideal case is zero accidents. As engineers we know that's not possible; even confining accidents to hardware-failure-only incidents will not drive the total to zero.

There should be ZERO probability that a plane could crash and kill its passengers, yet this happens with relative frequency. This doesn't cause us, as a whole, to stop buying plane tickets.

The 'outlaw all testing of AVs on public roads' reaction to this accident is like if the reaction to the early crashes of the DeHavilland Comet led us to abandon airplanes.

 

[LionelHutz]

What happened to the word "easily"?

OK, to put it bluntly, the 3 incidents causing death, driving under a truck trailer, into the end or a road barrier or into a person, are NOT acceptable to me. They illustrate the level of improvement still required.

As a general rule, if the capabilities of the car mean it is capable of avoiding something, then that something should be avoided. If the brakes are capable of stopping it before the impact, then it should have stopped. If the tires and suspension are capable of an avoidance maneuver then it should have maneuvered to avoid the accident.

If it is put into a situation where it can't brake or maneuver to avoid, then it should try to minimize. But, it should have some intelligence to recognition a situation that could become impossible to survive intact instead of blissfully driving until the situation presents itself. In other words, take steps like slow down or quit driving beside another car in the next lane when caution is called for.

The developers of these systems have been touting how they will avoid making the stupid mistakes a human does. So, they'd better quit making those mistakes if they are to be acceptable.

 

[Spartan5]

I understand what you're saying I just think that "easily" has no effect on the end result. The ideal case is zero accidents. As engineers we know that's not possible; even confining accidents to hardware-failure-only incidents will not drive the total to zero.

There should be ZERO probability that a plane could crash and kill its passengers, yet this happens with relative frequency. This doesn't cause us, as a whole, to stop buying plane tickets.

The 'outlaw all testing of AVs on public roads' reaction to this accident is like if the reaction to the early crashes of the DeHavilland Comet led us to abandon airplanes.

Airline crashes killing the passengers happen with regular frequency? Not in the US. The last US-registered, scheduled passenger airline to crash was Colgan Air Flight 3407, which crashed on Feb. 12, 2009, killing 50.

That is due, in large part if not entirely, to extensive regulation. The exact opposite of what AVs being tested on public roads are subjected to.

 

[drawoh]

Spartan5,

Regulations about aircraft were written in response to accidents. Nobody anticipated any of this stuff. I would say that unless the robots are shown to be more dangerous than an average driver, or perhaps a 15th percentile driver, they should be allowed to continue. One of the problems with American or Canadian roads is that new communities are built around cars. If you take someone's driving license away, they cannot travel or work or to anything else. The robots are an opportunity to take really bad drivers off the road.

--
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[SwinnyGG]

OK, to put it bluntly, the 3 incidents causing death, driving under a truck trailer, into the end or a road barrier or into a person, are NOT acceptable to me. They illustrate the level of improvement still required.

These types of accidents will never stop happening.

They won't. Period. It's impossible.

3 accidents isn't the point. 3 accidents against the number of successful detection/avoidance events (likely, at this point, to number in the hundreds of thousands at least across all companies testing AV tech)is the actual metric that matters.

We don't know the value of that metric.

 

[drawoh]

IRstuff,

Robot cars always will have to deal with unpredictable (i.e. non-robot) elements along the right of way. My guess is that the very last people who will be pried out of their cars will be those psychopaths you mention. I drive differently on the highway when I notice someone four feet behind my bumper. I anticipate crazy lane changes. The robots will have to cope with this too, and the serious psychopaths probably will learn the game the robots' behaviour.

Is there a safe way to program a robot to operate in Asshole mode?

--
JHG

 

[Spartan5]

drawoh,

Are you claiming there is/was no proactive regulation of aircracft/airlines? That's quite a stretcher.

I think there is a place for limited, controlled testing of these vehicles. But both Uber and Tesla have shown themselves to be negligent in little (Tesla) to no (Uber) basic monitoring of driver attention in what are only intended to be supplemental assistance level automation systems.

And to touch on your last point, to make a generalization, the sorts of people who are having their licenses away are not the sort who can afford to run out and buy the latest and greatest robotic car.

 

[SwinnyGG]

Airline crashes killing the passengers happen with regular frequency? Not in the US. The last US-registered, scheduled passenger airline to crash was Colgan Air Flight 3407, which crashed on Feb. 12, 2009, killing 50.

I didn't say airline.

Per the FAA, in 2017 there were 209 incidents and 347 fatalities.

The statistics aren't the point.

The point is, if someone's only acceptable criteria for AVs to be present on public roads is that they will never cause a fatality of any kind under any circumstances from from now until the end of time, that person has a wholly unrealistic point of view with little connection to reality.

 

[SwinnyGG]

in what are only intended to be supplemental assistance level automation systems.

This is inaccurate. Uber's intent is level 5 automation of all vehicle operations.

the sorts of people who are having their licenses away are not the sort who can afford to run out and buy the latest and greatest robotic car.

This is also inaccurate, and pretty insulting too.

There's a lot of lawyer/doctor types out there with a couple DUIs, no driver's license as a result, and enough money in the bank to buy a fully automated Ferrari if they released one tomorrow.

 

[Spartan5]

I didn't say airline.

Per the FAA, in 2017 there were 209 incidents and 347 fatalities.

The statistics aren't the point.

You said "still buy tickets" which implies commercial airlines; for which there has not been a fatal crash in the US in the last 10 years. Hardly "relative frequency."

The point is, if someone's only acceptable criteria for AVs to be present on public roads is that they will never cause a fatality of any kind under any circumstances from from now until the end of time, that person has a wholly unrealistic point of view with little connection to reality.

This, my friend, is the text book argument of a straw man. Is any one in this thread making that claim? Then why are you arguing against it?

This is inaccurate. Uber's intent is level 5 automation of all vehicle operations.

Their intention is irrelevant as it pertains to what they are actually operating on public roads. Of what use is a backup driver if there isn't even a basic system in place to ensure they are paying attention? What they are operating is Level 2 at best. They are negligent for not having simple safeguards in place.

There's a lot of lawyer/doctor types out there with a couple DUIs, no driver's license as a result, and enough money in the bank to buy a fully automated Ferrari if they released one tomorrow.

Come ride the bus around the suburbs with me. What do you think the relative percentage of passengers are who are lawyers with a couple of DUI's who can't drive anymore.

I can tell you're not engaged in rational discourse anymore.