Doug Ducey walks away from his handiwork without a care in the world.
Disgusting.
4
About a month ago, I saw a brigade of four of these self-driving Uber cars in the lane next to me as I was driving along Rural Road on the east side of the Arizona State University campus. This was just after my brother was in an accident in an inaugural ride of a self-driving bus in downtown Las Vegas. (You can find news stories about it.)
I am afraid of these vehicles and made a left turn as soon as I could to get away from them. A friend who lives in the city of Chandler, just south of Tempe, says not only Uber self-driving cars, but others, pass her house all the time and she fears for her young daughter playing on the sidewalk.
These cars are not ready for our roads. I feel safer crossing the jam-packed streets of Manhattan and northern Brooklyn knowing that I will not, at least, get hit by a vehicle controlled by a non-human being.
7
This article omits the crucial information re: WHY the human, "safety driver", behind the wheel was unable to intervene and control the car, or if they tried to do so, in order that it would not hit this pedestrian. SLOPPY journalism. ..recently seen too often in the NYT.
13
Dear NYT, a lot of people are getting pretty upset here. If there is a story anywhere out there with the facts about this accident, could you please include a link? Lots of people here would like to know the story behind the headline if that's not too much trouble. Thanks!
11
The photo caption is factually incorrect. The woman was struck a couple hundred yards south of that intersection. It is an important difference. If you look at where the accident actually took place, it is more apparent why the car may have had no fault.
9
I'll say this first - the current law (where I am anyway) is "The Pedestrian ALWAYS has the right of way".
The reporting is a bit shoddy here - the caption:
"A woman crossing Mill Avenue at its intersection with Curry Road in Tempe, Ariz. on Monday" accompanied by a photograph of a textbook intersection crossing leads one to believe that the pedestrian struck in this grossly unfortunate incident was walking across the road within the intersection, was struck down by an autonomous vehicle.
Crossing at it's intersection does not appear to be true. Judging from the crash site photo and using google maps, it would appear the vehicle came to rest over 55m (over 180ft) BEFORE the intersection - about here:
https://goo.gl/M62rZg
It looks like a dangerous place to cross, however as I stated our laws state:
"The Pedestrian ALWAYS has the right of way".
If she wasn't crossing the road and was actually riding her bike (you can see a bike lane about to begin right at this location), then it is a dangerous place for autonomous vehicles to be left in level 5 mode.
Either way this really is a tremendous shame and I feel for the victim, her family, those who endeared her, and her colleagues.
AVs let out on our roads with no changes to existing rules places tremendous strain on pedestrians, non-autonomous motor vehicle operators, law makers and AV service providers alike. We need changes where av's are better segregated from pedestrians, and non-autonomous
4
It’s easier to automatically land a 747 in a thunderstorm. Easier to safely land a space shuttle orbiting at 17,000+ mph to a full stop in Florida. Sensor based auto-driving will never work. There are too many incursions and unpredictables. Too many ways to inhibit or occlude sensors from rain, dirt, grim and other road nasties. There will always be multiple unknowns of objects and/or scenarios to confound the computer. Only one scenario will allow the technology to thrive: Investors stand more to gain in sales than in casualty payouts. But the payouts won’t last for long. As corporate persons, they will write new legislation absolving themselves of all liability; for the rights of the corporation shall not be infringed!!!
Thank you SCOTUS.
32
Perhaps the invention of the automatic transmission in opposition to the manual allows the driver to yield to continual distractions do to boredom. With the intervention of electronics the driver is now able to check their emails and text message on with their smartphones. SIMPLY BECAUSE THEY CAN, WHAT ELSE IS THERE TOO DO?
6
From the article " Tempe, with its dry weather and wide roads, was considered an ideal place to test autonomous vehicles. In 2015, Arizona officials declared the state a regulation-free zone in order to attract testing operations from companies like Uber, Waymo and Lyft." I would say the best place to real-world test would be the places where the conditions are less than ideal - say, Connecticut, Pennsylvanioa, Massachusetts - around Boston perhaps - Vermont, Maine. If they can survive and be useable in these places, Tempe would be a breeze.
3
All these words, all this information, but what is lacking is just what happened. Perfect drivers, paying perfect attention still hit people.
Excessive rush to judgement!
11
The craze around self driving cars is itself crazy. Our highways aren’t railroad tracks. Someone, or a lot more than someone, including government entities, need to be sued until they go bankrupt.
7
This is interesting and raises something I hadn't thought of before - how a human pedestrian can interact with the LiDAR sensors used in automated cars. I jog, and like many others often run into the problem of a passing car that seems not to see me. Many times this is a car turning right at a corner, when the driver is looking back to his or her left for traffic while driving forward, blindly. I often have to bang on the hood of the driver's car to make sure he sees me. I then get the "why are you banging on my hood like a jerk?" look, but at least I know he sees me and will not inadvertently kill me.
So, in the human operated scenario, the ability of the human pedestrian to see and interact with the human driver is key to the pedestrian's safety: it allows the pedestrian to know if the driver sees him in the first instance, and also allows the pedestrian to signal his presence to the driver and for the driver to acknowledge the pedestrian's presence, so that they may avoid a collision.
There should be some substitute or proxy for this added into the automated technology mix dominated by the LiDAR. Maybe a flashing light that indicates the car is slowing down? It seems like something is needed.
3
This was a horrible, inexcusable tragedy. What riddles me is that I had no idea about these being tested on the streets of cities with many pedestrians. Further, I just read that there are multiple trucks out on the highways? Am i asleep ay the wheel? No. I read the NYT daily and I listen to public radio daily. Where was the warning? Where were the public service announcements to be extra cautious in Arizona or otherwise?
5
humans: 100 million miles 1.18 deaths
robots cars: 8 million miles one death
Does not sound safer to me! Sounds more like they are ten times as dangerous at this point. Corporate greed over human life has gotten out of control. All of this just to put another huge amount of real living breathing human being out of work
8
Final Jeopardy Answer:
The 1st person killed by a petrol-engined car and the 1st person killed by a self-driving car.
Final Jeopardy Question:
Who were Bridget Driscoll & Elaine Herzberg?
1
Imagine being a passenger in an unmanned Uber that hit and killed someone, sitting in the backseat and seeing it all happen without any power to stop it. This technology is not ready for prime time.
12
Driverless cars have only killed one woman? That's extremely impressive compared to the number of people regular cars have killed. It's unrealistic to think that driverless cars would never kill anyone. The real issue here is: would a driver have been able to do any better in avoiding her? In addition, a driverless cars will never get drunk, get sleepy, get distracted, or text while driving.
9
"A Senate bill, if passed, would free autonomous-car makers from some existing safety standards and pre-empt states from creating their own vehicle safety laws. Similar legislation has been passed in the House. The Senate version has passed a committee vote but hasn’t reached a full floor vote." So states' right are paramount - except when they are not? Who wrote this bill - Waymo?
4
“Our hearts go out to the victim’s family,” Really! Buddy, more than your hearts should and will go out to her and them. Real blood (in business that means money and firings) will and must be bled. Airy assurances of the wonders, inevitability and value of "progress" don't cut it: innovators need to understand viscerally the change they are making and what it may cost the innocent.
4
The technology that has been around for over 100 years - Its called a train. Oh, and subways, buses bicycles, rickshaws, feet. More cars - self driving or not - is not the answer. A working public transportation system shouild be the goal. No parking, no pollution, no congestion. Read, eat, sleep, text, talk in comfort while your chariot delivers you to your destination. Europe has known this for years. America - due to its size - will still need cars- to get you to the station, in the country, in remote areas or just for pleasure - yes, some of us actually know how to drive and enjoy using the skills learned. So, ban cars totally from every city and make public transportation easy and efficient. Plenty of jobs there.
9
One death by driverless car is just the beginning, People. It will be an interesting trial.......nobody sitting in a defendant's seat. A "driverless" trial I guess it could be called. Perhaps George Orwell was more "forward looking" than we all thought. We need to remember that driverless cars are also brainless cars without judgement. Similar to our politicians.
7
One always finds the language of religion in articles about technology: "Researchers believe self-driving cars will ultimately be more safe . . . " Combine that kind of faith with the cult of profit, and you have one heck of an appealing spiritual pathway into the hearts of many Americans brought up on hot air and greed and the notion that one should just keep pushing hard on whatever one wants badly enough, like "success." But "belief" is a lot safer itself when directed towards the mythology of the past the way it generally is in religion itself. Start attaching it to future predictions with the promise of big bucks for somebody, and anyone who happens to be in the road had best get out of the way or die. Our language includes an insult for anyone reluctant to leap on every last techno-bandwagon that humps and pumps its way into our fantasies: "Luddite." We need one for the techno-bandwagon-jumpers too, who have already done so much damage to reading and education with their innovations that we may already be too stupid to stop the rest of their destruction.
5
30,000 people are killed in car wrecks every year, gruesomely, in cars controlled individually by humans and we just accept it in the same vein as deaths by cancer, heart attacks and guns. Yet an autonomous vehicle, still in experimental stages, tragically kills one person and people react as if North Korea just nuked the US.
These autonomous vehicles promise to reduce the death rate drastically in car accidents, to the point that an autonomous vehicle death will be rare indeed, rare enough to make national headlines, much as this sad death was.
Mourn for the victim today, but also go forward with the knowledge that once autonomous vehicles are the only vehicles on the road for personal transportation, deaths will be measured likely less than 100 per year, not 30,000.
6
Looks like becoming a company worth billions of dollars by having 25% commission is not enough for uber. I tolerate this greedy company just because it provides numerous jobs for people and students. But their eyes on 100%. They are on course to become another soulless tycoon.
2
Test them here in Montreal - against our swarms of cyclist who jive down one way streets the wrong way (legal), or dip and dive through traffic outside their bike path, fly across roads with red lights, etc etc.
AND they are not required to have a licence, wear reflective clothing at night, or even given a rule book when they buy a bike.
You can hear the steam coming out of my ears.
Anyway when AI takes over, I'd guess the bike will become hugely popular because it gives personal freedom....how on earth will AI cope? Drivers can hardly cope now, and do NOT expect cyclists to obey rules...even if they knew them.
Sorry a bit off topic. And I feel fierce sympathy for the woman killed and her family. So little sorrow for her and massive concern for the future of AI. I hope people hsve laid flowers at the site of her death.
4
So, Arizona's governor OK'd such testing on city streets so that the state could draw testing from California and enhance Arizona's reputation as a business-friendly, low-regulation state. And the governor was so impressed with his decision that he later decided to not even require safety drivers to be on board. (Not that the presence of a back-up driver would have been able to take over in the event of a potential collision at 40 mph.) I hope that these decisions of the governor give comfort to the family of the Ms. Herzberg.
Arizonans, maybe you too can be a pioneer martyr in the tweaking of driverless cars.
2
#1, Driverless cars are not safe now, and never will be.
#2, The reason the car didn't see the woman and her bike is because all electronic sensors have to filter out noise.
#3, Even if humans looking at the data find that the car saw some data signature that there was "something" there, what we already know is that the car filtered that out, because the car didn't slow down.
#4, Electronic sensors HAVE to filter data, so it is a misguided belief that a driverless car can now, or ever will be able to, accurately identify a person walking on a road with a bike in the dark from behind.
#5, There is no computer that is as fast or flexible or autonomous than the brain we carry around with us every day! Humans can think faster than any computer on this planet, and process massive threads of data all at the same time. Humans can switch from a state of normal processing to this state of fast and efficient processing instantaneously, and without conscious thought, because our brains are built to keep us safe.
Just because human drivers annoy us, and even harm us, the best computer we can put at the wheel of a car is a human.
5
I was just visiting Tempe and saw these cars driving down Mill Ave--a very busy road bordering Arizona State University--a school with 50,000 students--many on bicycles and even longboards (!) in strange bike lanes set in between regular lanes and right turn lanes! Mayhem! This is just not a good idea in the overpopulated world we live in today. I hope the family sues Uber.
22
This article's headline is misleading - Self Driving Uber car??? But then the article adds "...with an emergency backup driver behind the wheel". This seems like a contradiction or worse, click bait... :(
4
The biggest problem I see with computer control is the ability of a computer system in an autonomous car to really recognize what it "sees". It's not just a matter of recognizing a shape and size- beyond that, it also has to instantly know things about what it sees, the way a human does ("is that just an empty paper bag that just blew in front of me,that I can simply proceed to run over, or is it a strange shaped boulder that rolled down a hill and will smash my front end if I hit it?" Or heavy rain and puddles obscuring a road boundary that a human mind could still imagine fairly reliably (knowing what we do about water, reflections, and the properties of light).
Sure, computers are much faster than the human brain, but a lot of that has to do with the fact that, as sophisticated as they've become, they're still much simpler in some of the ways that they think, which is not always a good thing.
4
I saw several numbers quoted to claim human drivers are worse/better than self driving cars. My own research shows that the self driving cars don't have enough data to claim they are better. I have my own suspicions about why they are allowed to share roads with humans. This is the data from public sources.
1. Wikipedia article on Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year shows fatalities are about 33K per year.
2. US Department of Transportation data shows about 3 Trillion miles driven by US drivers per year.
The above 2 stats give 1 fatality per 91M (M = Million) miles for human drivers. This is not restricted to passenger cars only, but given that the self driving tech is going into trucks, we can use this for comparison.
From Uber & Waymo sites, we see that Uber self driving cars drove 2M miles by Dec 2017, and we can extrapolate to 3M by March 2018. Waymo shows 5M miles driven by Feb 2018. This gives a total of 8M miles driven.
We can assume 1 fatality and say self driving tech has 1 fatality per 8M miles, which is significantly worse than human drivers. Obviously, it is not correct as we have only 1 sample.
Given the above, I don't see how one can claim that self driving tech is safer than human drivers. All such claims are based on personal biases and unsupported by any real data.
I welcome any comments/criticism if supported by data.
6
One question I would have about self-driving cars is how they behave when they are making a turn and pedestrians are in or might enter a crosswalk. In some cases I will keep walking because I know that a human driver is unlikely to want to run me over. In other cases I walk a little slower and let the car make the turn. Pedestrians and drivers negotiate these little interactions all the time. What will happen if and when self-driving cars take over? Will such cars ever be able to make right turns at intersections that are busy with pedestrians?
4
p.s. What I am trying to say is that when I am letting the car make the turn, the driver of the car sees that I am letting them do that. The driver can draw on a certain model they have of human psychology and purposeful agency. Sometimes the pedestrian steps into the intersection when the car is about to turn, and stops; and then the driver may wave for the pedestrian to keep walking, which the pedestrian may or may not see. Somehow it all gets worked out, but that's because intelligent human agents, who know they are dealing with other human agents, are involved. What does a self-driving car do if a pedestrian walks part way into a crosswalk and just stands there? Does it wait forever? Does it proceed, taking the risk that the pedestrian might continue? One thing, I suspect, is unlikely: that it knows much about how the pedestrian thinks.
5
Technology has become the new God. I wonder what it will take for us to realize that tech cannot effectively or safely replace us humans? In some circumstances, yes. But not in most.
No amount of marketing savvy, big data, or tech magic can accurately predict the actions, reactions, thoughts, or emotions of a human being.
The prophetic creators of 1970's era science fiction accurately predicted where we are now...the wonder of technology and its inherent dangers.
Interference in our elections, Facebook's lack of responsible oversight, and now self-driving cars...these are only the tip of the iceberg. Unless we learn how to balance the use of technology in our daily lives well - work and personal - it will become our master at the cost of our relationships, our humanity, and our values.
4
One might reasonably ask what percentage of the self-driving car’s code base came from H-1B visa holders. You get what you pay for.
5
If an object (say a jaywalking pedestrian) obstructs a self-driving car, what does the car do? Does it act to avoid the object, possibly harming the passenger of the car if it drives off of the road? Or does it hit the object, but in doing so prevent possible harm to the passenger? (Call me selfish, but if I had a self-driving car, I would prefer that it protect its passengers!)
Also, how many times per day are people who are "crossing the street outside of a crosswalk" struck and either killed or injured by normal cars with average human drivers?
This is barely a blip. Yes, self-driving cars will kill people. But they will kill fewer people overall than normal cars with average human drivers, so I am looking forward to the self-driving future.
1
Pedestrians are not "blips". We're human beings. Maybe that's the whole problem here--people think self-driving machines are meant to just mow down anything in their path, and that's okay as long as the "human passengers in the car" are safe.
5
Kara, great question. I think the answer is that the programmers will have to research the "trolley problem" in ethics and program the cars with the correct answer. Arguably, this means that if the car has a choice between harming someone who is about to discover a cure for cancer versus a nobody like me, it will make the choice that has the greatest utility.
Artificial intelligence meets artificial ethics!
4
Why are we spending so much money & effort on developing self-driving cars and not on developing & building safe, efficient public transportation systems? When is America going to get over its love affair with the automobile?
6
All this investment would be much better spent on expanding and improving mass transit and transit oriented development, rather than focused on car dominated systems. It is not just a matter of robotic cars or human drivers being safer on average, but what we are becoming: passive beings incapable of doing basic things for ourselves.
5
The critical question is not whether this technology is 100% safe, but whether it is better than a skilled driver (or even the average driver).
If the number of overall crashes and deaths can be reduced, it should not be debilitating that accidents still occur.
2
There has been an update on this story, and based on the video evidence, it looks like the AV was not at fault. The woman abruptly tried to cross the road and was difficult to see in the shadows.
3
I am confused.
"Then on Sunday night, an autonomous car operated by Uber — and with an emergency backup driver behind the wheel — struck and killed a woman on a street in Tempe, Ariz"
What was the emergency backup driver doing?
5
This is the result of devaluing all other forms of road traffic but automotive. This is negligent manslaughter if there ever was and were it not the darling of Wall Street and the great white hope uber would be in the defense dock in criminal court. None of us will ever be safe walking or biking on a public road as long as self admiring corptechs, mindless robots and bored inattentive minders ignore the rights of others to use the public right of way.
3
Sorry, but as I was crossing the street on my way to work this morning a cyclist just blithely zoomed right past me and through the red light. Too many cyclists just ignore the traffic rules because (I surmise) they don't want to be bothered having to stop and then do the work of starting up again. They ignore the rules for one-way streets, so one steps even into a bike lane at one's peril if one doesn't look, not only in the direction from which traffic is supposed to be coming, but the opposite direction as well. If you don't look, you may not hear them.
At least with cars, you see and hear them coming, they don't often go the wrong way on a one-way street, and they don't come out of nowhere. They are not as maneuverable as bicycles, and, from the pedestrian's standpoint, that makes them in a certain way safer. I think this whole expansion of bicycle traffic in the city in recent years has been a mistake and that, on the whole, cyclists are a menace.
4
To put it in some perspective, visit pedbikeinfo.org. Driverless cars will have to kill at least 5,735 more people per year to catch up with the way humans drive.
1
People keep quoting the fact that 100 people a day die in car accidents and somehow that's worse than the 2 killed by self driving cars....200 million cars are on the road everyday, driven by humans. How many self driving cars are there? 50? Statistically, it is a miracle that so few people die every day in car accidents and the reason is because people are better at this than a machine will ever be.
Self driving cars will work only in a routine situation. Snow, rain, sleet, an accident, an emergency - any anomaly - and machines simply cannot adjust. THE REASON SO FEW PEOPLE DIE IN CAR ACCIDENTS IS BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE GOOD AT HANDLING REAL WORLD VARIATIONS. COMPUTERS ARE NOT.
5
For the life of me, and the life of the other person, I can't understand why anyone in their right mind would allow themselves to be driven around town in a car sans driver. If this preposterous notion were proposed but a few decades ago that person would be declared certifiably insane. Now it's thought of as cute, something one can brag about. Hey, be the first on your block escorted in a driver-less car. Now, isn't that special? What's next? Having a robot vote for you? Considering the complicit ignorance of the American Electorate perhaps that is not as terrible an idea as it sounds. Bon voyage.
DD
Manhattan
6
We would need statistics on fatalities per mile traveled for both autonomous and human-driven automobiles before we could reach a rational conclusion about this accident. The fact is that accident tells us nothing whatsoever about the safety of autonomous vehicles, but this comment section is full of drama queens who have done all of the investigating of this incident and reached their conclusions.
2
The people running these technology companies and venture capital funds are with hardly an exception sociopaths. The American experiment is now failing because it rewards sociopathy, which destroys the fabric of our lives and societies.
1
I used to object to stories that read "woman killed by pickup truck" because of course it should have read "Woman killed by driver in a pickup truck." NOW we can actually write "woman killed by car!" We have arrived! Next, "woman killed by "smart" refrigerator; child killed by autonomous toy doll.
.
5
I'm going to be carrying my laser pointer, flash camera, gps signal blocker, and handheld led spotlight whenever anyone one of these things gets near my region and it's gonna get ugly, fast. What's to stop a terrorist from loading one of these monsters up with a couple of hundred pounds of amfo, sending it on its way, and watching the thing crater the federal building or courthouse? Homeland security, I say! Defend your streets from the geeks! Autopilots work in the sky because there's relatively little to run into up there but air. Laser pointer, flash camera, gps signal blocker and handheld led spotlight. You watch. I'll make bike lanes great again!
4
Your use of laser pointers, flash camera and all your other gizmos will probably end up blind the surrounding human divers more then any autonomous vehicle.
1
link to a google earth screen shot of where the woman crossing the street was struck while trying to cross. It's about where the first shadow is...though it was night time- https://i.imgur.com/LD19NYL.png
1
Dear American Voter,
These types of avoidable tragedies are the fruits of the decades's efforts by Conservatives and Republicans to destroy all regulations, particularly since 1981.
This is the result of undiscriminating, undifferentiated so-called Libertarian thinking and advocacy.
Deregulate, deregulate, deregulate!!!
The collapse of the walkway bridge in Miami, Florida will undoubtably also be the result of deregulation.
Regulations are necessary because they protect individuals and society from the predatory behaviors of BAD ACTORS who abuse our under-regulated free enterprise system to maximize profits. Their filthy lucre is earned over the injuries and deaths of the public.
Safety regulations are necessary for a safer, free and civilized society. Their destruction only enriches those who regard you and me as expendable.
Think back to the 1949 classic film, "The Third Man," where Orson Welles's character, Harry Lime, tells Joseph Cotton's character:
[gestures to people far below who look like little dots from the distance]
"Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man."
The Kochs Bros., Mercers, Adelson, et alii of the rightwing would have no compunction. Not one whit whatsoever.
That's Conservativism.
4
Don't lasers bounce off reflectors like you might find on a cyclist?
1
The sensors found on these autonomous vehicles can detect laser reflections off of nearly all surfaces and so they do not need to rely on the reflectors found on bicycles to detect them.
According to police the woman stepped right in front of the car from the median. No one could of avoided it. She was homeless with a long record of arrests for substance abuse.. A driver's ed teacher would have still hit her.
Oh, that's okay she died then. Will you say the same thing the next time it's a child or someone in the crosswalk? How about when the computer misfunctions and it makes a right turn and plows into someone crossing on a WALK signal? It will happen, give it time. Anyway, we're talking about a human being, but, hey the new-fangled car's more important. People's priorities sure are messed up when it comes to technology.
3
I agree that this is a tragedy, but I would like to point out that this is the second fatality in the entire history of self driving cars. There are about 100 automobile deaths per day in the US for human driven cars. All in all, I think the self driving cars have a much safer record.
Self driving cars are going to replace human drivers--- so what happens to those taxi, Uber and Lyft workers who rely on driving for a living? Drones are going to deliver packages, so what's going to happen to UPS and Fedex workers? What happens to all the people who are to be replaced by robots? What happens to teachers who are going to be replaced by online learning? I fear that all this technology will be good for the top 1% and for the rest of us... a disaster.
1
"The company quickly suspended testing.." Why?
Without testing, improvements can not be done.
By the way, a human-driven car also killed a pedestrian yesterday.
Have we quickly suspended human-driven cars? Why not?
1
I was in a cab in NYC last Fall when a man looking at his phone began walking across the street in a rambling fashion. Our driver had to yank the wheel and spin the car to avoid the man from hitting the car. It was a scary moment and we praised the driver for his incredibly quick reactions .
I have often thought of that incident when reading about self-driving cars. I wonder how they could possibly be programed to react to all the variables we have to cope with while driving. People aren't machines we act without thinking, crossing streets ,chasing our kids or animals As we all know people often drive pretty crazily .How can a program cope with our irrational driving much less the strange unpredictable behavior of pedestrians, bikes, trees, animals....
A few years ago I had to take my mother's car away which changed her life for the worst. I was hoping the next generation will to have cars all their lives , how wonderful but then they must be safe!
1
We know how to drive down (no pun intended) vehicle deaths, which include many pedestrian deaths. New York and other cities are doing it, through low-tech approaches (blocking cell-phone use in a moving vehicle) and no-tech approaches (like having plenty of protected pedestrians crosswalks, and lowering speed limits where cars tend to hit pedestrians and each other). We don't need robots to lower the death rate. We need not autonomous cars, but fewer cars. We certainly don't need more cars, which is the hidden agenda behind this push to produce autonomous vehicles at, of course, a higher price.
Perhaps this incident is a revelation of what is to come in the future concerning AI and machines as they are proliferated by corporations and governments/military for their benefit and replaced with ordinary humans where robots/computers become the dominating force in many facets of life.
The Human element and intelligence will be reduced to feebleness and these machines will eventually progressively decimate our existence.
Humans driving hit and kill other humans daily, many times a day usually. One accident by an autonomous car vs 40,200 in 2016 and estimated 39,950 in 2017. Let's not let 1, derail what is absolutely a fantastic New technology that will make our roads safer. How many people don't you see texting while driving, or getting into their cars after leaving a bar. This is traffic and should be investigated to improve the technology, but humans are worse drivers than machines.
1
I try not to think about driverless cars. I put this phenomena in the same box as "flying cars". I've been reading about flying cars since the late 40's and by the grace of God, very little progress has been made in those 70 years.
I realize some very big and well-financed companies are working 24/7 to be the first on the road with a fleet of these marvels of the 21st century, but I have one big problem. It seems like every month, we have a serious crash involving two trains, usually with serious injuries and deaths. Now, these are vehicles that designed to make zero right or left turns through some technology that is a couple of hundred years old called "TRACKS". Even with today's computers, we are unable to avoid head-on crashes... faster trains running over slower trains... trains wrecking because they are going too fast for curves... and who knows what!
My point is, controlling trains seems like a simple problem compared to controlling a driverless car on a crowded 6 lane highway at 70 MPH. I'd be more impressed if Google, Amazon or even Lionel devoted some funds to ending train crashes rather than developing driverless cars.
1
Uber better have deep pockets. This is a huge lawsuit waiting to happen. Let's not forget Uber is testing these vehicles because they it will be more profit for them in the long run if they don't have the middle men, aka the drivers making any money. I hope their project fails.
2
We cannot sacrifice safety simply in an attempts to eliminate payroll costs.
There is no compelling reason to remove people from this job. There is no shortage of people wanting to be drivers.
In the areas of business process outsourcing and off-shoring we, the consumers, have realized little benefit as the costs we pay are not reduced. The increased benefit is in the C-level suites and in the boardroom.
I'm not willing to accept death at the hands of a robot in order to unfairly enrich someone else.
5
The only reason for a self-driving taxi to exist is GREED. This is absolutely shameful and this car should never have been allowed to operate in the first place.
This situation is like someone walking around shooting a gun randomly. It's murder.
2
Every year, about 200 pedestrians are killed in Arizona.
None of those deaths make national news.
1
This is creepy: Police investigators found that "the vehicle was moving around 40 miles per hour when it struck Ms. Herzberg" and "it did not appear as though the car had slowed down before impact."
3
Your article omitted the detail that the woman was pushing a bicycle across the street, and not in a crosswalk, that not only the car but the in-car driver failed to note her presence until the accident. (Source: NPR)
3
Autonomous cars usually can foresee impacts faster than humans. That sums up as also a good possible explanation for why didn't the human driver intervene.
Everything is recorded by the car itself. It's a new era: there is a lot of data from the accident, we don't need to search for cameras near the street.
Regulations may obligate autonomous cars companies to let the people access all those images and data, without restriction.
Everything from the accident should be there, recorded.
And for sure: the people and experts should be able to conclude if autonomous cars can be even more secure, avoiding more types of collisions.
Or even better: any fatal collision should motivate meetings and improvements, together with people, not only in internal secret private offices.
Every autonomous car company should be able to access all data from fatal accidents from any other autonomous car company. So all autonomous car companies are able to improve together at least at these fatal cases.
Competition and private data - the economic argument - should step back and be in second place when we try to avoid fatal accidents.
The state could regulate a minimum set of public data that every autonomous car company must make public when a fatal accident happens. This public data would allow all autonomous car companies to learn from any fatal accident, even from other autonomous car companies.
More or less like flight companies.
What do you think about?
1
The poor lady was killed whilst walking on the road and being hit by a car. We do not know YET. If the car just drove in to her, or if she walked in front of the car at the last second and nothing could have been done regardless of who or what was on the road.
96% of accidents are caused by human error. 2% by poorly maintained cars. 2% by driving in extreme conditions. You could argue that makes 100% of all road accidents down to humans.
Off course Autonomous cars are not perfect yet. But the future will be much safer when we are removed from responsibility of driving cars.
3
Professor Bennet...Elaine Herzberg has answered your "inflection point'..with emphasis....
.....indeed, and before the inevitable and false equivalency is made between the same thing occurring with driver or without, let us hear about "individual" responsibility and corporate swagger.
1
Would this be news if a taxi had hit a person?
Probably not.
1
Bad idea from the get go......sue them for so much thatvthis idea gets buried deep where it belongs.
People enjoy driving.....
1
If the lady wheeling the bike had had a gun she could have defended herself shot the vehicle bearing down on her.
About as realistic as expecting the human driver to 'disengage' in time to avoid her.
No artificial intelligence here, I am thriving carless.
1
Lots of commenters assume Uber was at fault. It is impossible to cast blame without knowing the facts of the tragic event. Better to wait until the facts are known before passing judgement from an armchair.
Duke University Rugby players come to mind. The players were convicted in the court of pubic opinion before the truth about rape allegations were known. I made that mistake and learned not to jump to conclusions again.
1
A woman was killed. And.
Your parallel is to cite one case of elite privilige (the exception proving the rule) to defend another (uber mega wealth concentration)?
Just. Wow.
4
People have a way of rationalizing certain tragedies. So many comments here (including the most highly "recommended") shrug off this accident with a comparison to the huge number of human-driven car fatalities. But I have several questions:
- There are not that many self-driving vehicles on the road - what *percentage* of them have been involved in accidents?
- When we ask people what would be an acceptable limit on the number of crash fatalities a year in a populous state, they say, perhaps, fewer than 1,000; But when it comes to their own families, the answer is zero. If all families feel that way, then maybe we need to rethink that answer.
-When commercial airlines started in the US, the goal was zero deaths. NONE. Statistically, they are pretty close to that goal in this country. Aren't we moving toward driverless cars BECAUSE they are supposed to be safer?? (Or is it just to get rid of the cost of paying a human?) It sounds like it is not really "ready for prime time." Are we all just part of their lab experiment while they "work out the kinks...??"
6
The amount of testimony from the Sheriff’s report missing from this article is embarrassing. She was a homeless woman stepping into a 4-lane road in the middle of the night...”any mode of vehicle (autonomous or human-driven) would have been unable to stop in time.”
2
You might be able to purchase the AI car of your dreams with all the bells and whistles you'd like to have, but won't you be reliant on a company (who'll you'll have to pay, probably on an ever-increasing monthly subscription basis) to get around in it? People have shown they are willing to do that with their entertainment (TV, music) and communications (phone, internet), but will they be willing to do that with their daily mobility? Perhaps...and yet, people in suburbs won't use mass transit. And is that Uber self-driving car going to speed down residential streets for you because you left work late — again — and are going to have to pay an extra $10 — again — for picking up your kid late from daycare? Maybe...the news says that the car that killed the pedestrian in Tempe was doing 38 in a 35.
Typical of Arizona to have no regulation whatsoever! This state is one big accident waiting to happen...
2
And where are them Dems at stopping Assault Robotic vehicles?
While researchers believe that self-driving cars will ultimately be safer, at this time that is belief NOT evidence based truth. These profit driven companies ought to treated with more skepticism. Cities and states ought to consider the safety of their residents before
abrogating their responsibility.
3
Who is inventing the :
Autonomous Lawyer?
Autonomous Judge?
Autonomous Funeral?
1
I hope they can clarify why the driver did not or could not disengage the autonomous driving system before it hit the pedestrian, but it appears that people still need to be behind the wheel to prevent this from happening.
1
I try to put myself in the place of those who knew Elaine Herzberg when I think about this. Would I rather have a loved one killed by a self-driving car or a human motorist who was texting while driving, driving drunk, speeding, or who simply made a mistake and lost control of the vehicle. I think I trust more the focused and deliberate R&D process of companies like Google and Ford, the thousands of hours of testing, the teams of smart people who design the AI, and the commitments they make to regulators, to produce a safe outcome as compared to a few dozen hours of driver's ed training that each of us takes to get a driver's license. Furthermore, if a loved one were killed by another motorist out of negligence, I think it would hurt me more than if I knew that it was the result of a flaw in the technology. Although the analogy isn't perfect, it seems to me similar to the difference from having a loved one die from a natural disaster as opposed to human agency or want of care. I think it would be less of a burden for friends and family, to be relieved of the burning desire for vengeance against a specific person.
2
Wow. Nope.
The technology is not mature. It is operating in a zero regulation environment. And you trust "the deliberate approach" of corporations to keep you safe, evoking family and friends of to support your argument?
Beyond the myriad historical examples to the contrary, the logical fallacies in your "argument" (more like : apology for a murderer) compound upon themselves.
If you're boosting for the industry, you need to rethink your pay scale because when the realisation you're shilling hits you, you're going to need all the consolation you can muster.
1
Nvidia will be on the hook for hundreds of millions in damages if found liable that its DriveXavier hardware was to blame for not detecting the pedestrian and taking evasive action.
This previously happened when a Navya robotaxi powered by Nvidia DrivePX steered into the path of a truck backing into her when there was 20m of clearance around. Humans would have steered clear of the truck.
What good is Autonomous driving vehicles when they can't take evasive action ?
3
It's true that I'm probably in the "old fogey" class, but I think some technology is running amok.
2
Perhaps if they tested first in Silicon Valley, our tech wunderkind would be more concerned about the risks.
6
Self driving cars' computers can be hacked, and the cars theoretically be programmed to... well, use your imagination.
Until hacking is impossible, which, given the best current technology available, is impossible, self driving cars will remain a risky idea.
4
Shocking that even a self driving car with radar was unable to see a pedestrian crossing the street in low light outside the crosswalk.
2
Anyone who drives in New York knows to account for pedestrians crossing outside the sidewalk, even in low light (couldn't think be addressed via movement sensors?). An autonomous vehicle has to be able to account for unpredictable occurrences, because that's what driving is.
Autonomous cars will be a small segment of the overall mix of vehicles on the road. The dreams of the technologists are more like fantasies.
Here is why.
1. Autonomous cars will have to have their code written to do the speed limit and no more. They will have to come to a full stop at stop signs. They will have to brake and stop on a yellow and not accelerate through it. If they do not they will be legally responsible for breaking the law. Strict observance of the vehicle code will increase travel times by as much as 20%. The so-called increase in travel times by the cars talking to themselves is a myth based on faulty science. The adherence to the vehicle code will cancel out any advantage.
2. Since people at a behavioral level are bad at managing their time, they use their driving as a way to make up time. Item number 1 will prevent that. I do not see people changing their behavior, so they will end up choosing regular human driven cars to maintain that (perceived) control over their time.
3. The end game of autonomous cars is to get people to not actually have a car. That will not happen. People use their cars as big storage closets. Are soccer moms or dads going to lug around all the gear from their house or office to the trunk of a car every time?
My point is that the technologists completely ignore the way people behave. These cars will be great for a big % in the big city and for elderly. But for the average suburban it is just not going to work.
2
1) Guns don't kill people; people kill people.
2) Self-Driving Cars don't kill people; uh... wait.... they do. Hmm.
Never mind about number 2.
1
I wonder why the human driver in the autonomous car couldn't stop the car. Was the driver sleeping on the job or what? Or maybe the driver was driving the autonomous car at that critical moment. Tell the truth but not the whole truth is a great way to wet my appetite.
2
I wish they would stop calling the person that was hit a "Victim," that word doesn't fit she died of her own impulsiveness and of course there was a bicycle involved that explains a lot, bicyclists are notorious for skirting the traffic rules wanting it both ways!
Statistics show that well in the 90% of car accidents is due to human error, error was also a factor in this accident as well but it wasn't on the part of the autonomous car it was a person jaywalking a bicycle into traffic with a vehicle approaching. Everybody thinks that pedestrians always have the right of way that is definitely NOT true, pedestrians have the right-of-way when they follow the law at a crosswalk with the pedestrian traffic control device that is separate from the vehicle traffic control stoplights, I see these morons all the time darting out into traffic between parked cars jaywalking or crossing when it says don't walk!
We teach, or at least we are supposed to teach children to cross at the crosswalk look both ways and obey the pedestrian crossing signal but later in life they don't believe they need to follow those rules. Don't blame the car it's just another case of human error on the part of the pedestrian/bicyclist.
1
I cannot tell you how many morons in cars will just make right turns as I'm crossing on a WALK signal-nearly plowing into me and then they have the nerve to honk their horn at me! Or how about the clowns who almost hit me as I'm walking on a WALK signal and they simply must rush to make that left turn and again nearly plow into me. Forget about crossing in a crosswalk (legal crosswalk). Those clowns won't even slow down and then have the nerve to glare at me.
Not every pedestrian is a lawbreaker. Most of us need eyes in back of our heads just to cross a street safely. I don't text or look at my phone or get distracted otherwise. I just want to get across the street safely.
People always want to blame the pedestrian--it makes them feel better and absolves them of all responsibility involved with driving a multi-ton killer machine.
may l ask why, why we have to have self-driving Uber vehicles, next planes with out pilots, how about make love to Uber robot, does not talk or ask 130.000 dollars, oh l know how about no more secrateries , boss just stay home and thinks what to be written and send to his office and type writer will type it in any language want it, than may be we do not have to have a Trump in white house , a robot will do a much better job than him,
1
Yes, Uber has a sketchy track record.
Yes, the thought of a flying metal death trap moving without a human in the loop is terrifying.
And yes, this is a terribly sad incident.
But the facts speak for themselves.
37,461 people died in traffic-related accidents in the U.S. in 2016.
In almost ten years of testing, self-driving vehicles have taken 1 human life.
Every human life is important, and my heart goes out to the victim's family, but this work must continue. I hope that law makers and the general public are able to see the incredible future that lies beyond this horrific accident.
3
This work can continue on closed test roads where there is very limited to almost no chance that someone will die. It's just not street ready. Also, this is absolutely not the first time a driverless car has killed someone-- there was at least one incident in 2017, and I'm sure a quick Google search would reveal others.
3
My german manufactured car has those rear view cameras for helping me to reverse. Sometimes when the weather is too cold, the camera fails, the electronics dont fully work... why would i trust myself in a driverless car, swhen i dont even fully trust a car that i “think” i have full control over but whose minor electronic malfunctions tell me otherwise
4
Who needs hearings or regulations? Republicans are endangering all of us, not just their voters.
The state government of Arizona neglected it's duty to its citizens by not approaching the experimentation of driverless vehicles as untested science. Standards, facts and data ensure a more predictable outcome. Gov't for the people not for Uber is how it should be.
California, don't let the tech companies extort unregulated testing on your roads, Stick to what is right.
4
Just as there is no reality in "reality TV" there is no "self" in "self driving car". First thing to go is the language. Call them "machine driven", "computer driven" or "robot driven". Elaine Herzberg had a "self". My condolences to her family.
3
The conditions at the site of this accident appear to have been "ideal" for the use of driverless cars: no rain, no snow, a wide, straight & well lit street, etc. So if a driverless car can fail so massively there, how can they possibly work here in rural New England where it rains a lot and snows a lot, where the roads are narrow and winding, and where the lines painted on the roads are often faint or even totally obliterated each year by the road salt and sand?
5
What safety standards are these cars and drivers exempt from? Why have experimental technology be less regulated than other technology when it involves real time use?
5
There seems to be a whole lot of victim blaming going on in the comments to this article. The person surrounded by two tons of steel is required to watch out the people not surrounded by two tons of steel, regardless of where they walk. Shouldn't the same rules apply to the robots?
7
It is as simple as 1-2-3 to understand and predict the outcome:
1. Uber has deep pockets has demonstrated an urge to spread the wealth in the direction of people who can help them become bigger billionaires
2. Politicians love deep pockets
3. Thus, hence, therefore, and on account of the above: no meaningful regulation will be coming our way any time soon
5
“Supporters say driverless cars are safer because they take pedestrians out of the equation”: in the case of the woman in Arizona, permanently. Don’t we have even problems and don’t Companies such as Uber cause enough disruption of once good paying jobs and misery for former cabbies who perhaps had their life savings in a medallion. The gig economy is bad enough, replacing humans with robots is something neither we, workers nor the economy needs, cant these whiz kids come up with something that produces good paying jobs rather than new ways to do old jobs cheaper and apparently less safely. Where does the liability lie in this scenario, robots can’t do time for manslaughter, my vote goes to Kraznic.
4
We should encourage Facebook to develop a self driving car. What could possibly go wrong???
5
Some pedestrian accidents cannot be avoided if the victim simply steps into the path of an oncoming vehicle. It happens frequently with conventional human driven cars. On just one thoroughfare, Interstate 35 in Austin Texas, there were 4 such pedestrian fatalities last week alone. Austin averages around 30 such accidental deaths a year and I think we can assume that other cities have similar stats. Many of the fatalities (if not most) are homeless persons (like the Uber driverless car victim) who simply attempt to walk across a roadway directly into the path of an oncoming vehicle (usually at night) creating a situation where stopping is impossible. An ongoing effort in Austin, Tx is underway trying to educate homeless and others who don't have vehicles and walk as their sole means of transportation about how to avoid being struck and the limitations of cars to stop when someone walks directly into their path.
But, based on the history, no matter how many attempts at education are attempted, we will continue to see such accidents occuring where the drivers are not at all at fault. Occasional similar unavoidable events, tragic as they are, should not be detriments to the advent of driverless vehicles.
4
With so many jobs expected to be eliminated in the future by artificial intelligence, do we really need to add all those truck, bus and cab drivers to the list of unemployed? Even trains, running on tracks with someone in the driver's seat, have fatal accidents.
So the car was programmed to go over the speed limit.
The whole promise of autonomous cars is that they're safer because computers don't get drunk, computers don't run red lights, etc. They just started testing these things and they're already programming them to break the law. And somebody is already dead.
6
The Phoenix New Times reported that the speed limit in the area is 45 miles per hour. Quote from the NyTimes article; "... a preliminary investigation showed that the vehicle was moving around 40 miles per hour."
Interesting how our culture seems to be rushing headlong into making self driving cars ubiquitous without examining whether it is a good idea overall. We seem to have a penchant for any new idea regardless of its advisability. Social media and other technology is implemented and given free reign for self determination of how it is developed and spread throughout our society. It is deregulation at its heart and we, as a society have a blind spot for the negative effects of this non-regulatory regime. It appears that the only popular outcry fro regulation occurs when mentally ill people engage in a shooting rampage; then there is an outcry to ban guns, but in contrast, here, popular media can never hear too much negative information about self driving cars to deter the blind enthusiasm for them.
3
We can all presume all cars will be self driven sometime in the future. Can the tech industry invent a remote signalling gadget for the pedestrians to carry which when pressed will automatically stop all oncoming traffic while crossing the road?
1
Oh, boy. I can imagine what would happen when a mischievous 11 year old borrowed one of the gadgets from his mother's purse.
2
It would be better than being killed. Under the U.S. Constitution, the eleven year olds have the same rights as any adult to cross the streets. My daughter has put in several safety features in my iPhone so that my grandchildren can not mess with it.
How many pedestrians were killed by human drivers in the preceding years? I think this is the demographic we need to weigh in this case. Every life is precious and we should continue to develop technology that protects us, even from ourselves. The Eando Binder story, “I,Robot”, published in 1939, opened the discussion on human reactions to artificial intelligence. It captured the imagination of its generation and the subject today is becoming even more pertinent. Autonomous vehicles are probably the way to reduce traffic fatalities. We should continue to test and refine these mechanisms, not revile them as was the case back when robotics was first being explored by the pioneers of 20th century science fiction.
3
The wild and wooly west needs to end when it comes to AI in automobiles. Aircraft software must serve as the model. To be overly technical: every branch instruction in the software must be tested before the car is ever driven, critical processors must reboot in milliseconds, a design must be qualified in the car on a test track under strict testing standards such as children chasing a ball into a street at dusk when you are heading into the sun and so on, no single point of failure should exist, before a car can go out on an actual street, it must have an autoworthyness certificate issued by the NTSB/DOT, ... and so on.
The two deaths so far with these cars could have been avoided with even the simplest of test plans.
5
Computers make mistakes. On your desktop - find and open the error log. The difference is that error log is for a machine sitting on top of a desk, where split second corrections largely go unnoticed to the user. Spinning beach ball, etc. You don't give it a second thought, you just wait for it to clear. Probably in a two ton machine moving down a road that is not likely to always be the case. Do car touch screen displays show a spinning beach ball when the computer hangs?
My bet is that humans will ultimately prove to be the safer drivers.
2
No matter how few people are killed by driverless cars compared to the enormous swaths of the population wiped out by normal automobile accidents each year, it will be too many. People will always set the bar far too high for something that brings change. This is the first person hit in all of the combined road hours of driverless cars. I would say that's pretty impressive.
2
If they keep the deaths down to just a few in each state, will people will be able to buy auto 'steering' kits to fit their cars? Is that what our lives are coming to?
1
I have no positive feelings toward self driving cars. But the fact is, the person was jaywalking, and jaywalkers are routinely hit by cars and trucks that they step out in front of.
So what is the expectation for self driving cars? Is it that they be as safe as human driven cars? Safer than human driven cars? Or is it the unrealistic expectation that they never, ever be involved in a fatality?
The world is an unsafe place. Safety can be improved, but total safety is not achievable, and a totally unrealistic goal.
9
The expectation is that they never be involved in a fatality. I called it a couple of years ago that as soon as the first person died, there would be a huge outcry to ban the technology (and the same with each subsequent), and then those same outcriers would get back in their cars and continue to accidentally mow pedestrians down. The unattainable dream to elimate all automotive deaths is ultimately going to stand in the way of reducing them.
4
Nice to see that the poor woman only warranted a couple lines in the report. And where does it say that she was crossing outside of a crossing as some readers indicate? And she was a pedestrian, walking her bike.
7
Why can't assault rifle policy be as stringent as driverless car policy?
3
How about we wait until the camera footage comes out before we place judgement? Autonomous vehicle technology and people deserve as much.
1
We should be proud that human-driven cars never kill pedestrians.
Oh, wait . . . In the US, 5.984 pedestrians were killed by human drivers in 2017, compared to zero killed by autonomous vehicles. While this one death is sad (and probably could have been avoided if either human had been paying attention), the safety record of autonomous vehicles is amazingly low on the basis of miles driven. Let's not overreact.
4
Think of the numbers though - how many people cross the road in Tempe, how many drivers avoid them versus hit them. How many driverless cars on the road in Tempe and how many hit a person.
I would imagine that the car with driver has a better percentage.
Of course the non-driver car has less data to present but right now the car with driver is winning.
1
That is the worst assumption I've seen yet in these comments. Why do you think driverless cars would be worse at noticing a pedestrian when they are designed to look for issues constantly on all fronts, compared with humans who, at best, can only focus on one thing at a time, and it's usually their cell phones or their passengers? Just looking at the current data, driverless cars already have far fewer accidents relative to the number of road hours they have, compared with cars with drivers. With each accident they have, driverless cars will be improved on a wide scale to prevent similar scenarios in the future. You can't say the same for human drivers.
1
While it's still too early to make a definitive statement based on numbers, given that Uber and Waymo have resulted in 3 fatalities in 8 million miles and human drivers have resulted in 1.18 fatalities in 100 million miles, the self-driving cars are far less safe at the moment. Or perhaps the assertion that they'll be safer is the result of the premise - they'll be safer when only self-driving cars are on the road.
3
Before blame the robot and rush to add regulations, can we focus on why the human in the car didn't avoid the accident by braking and/or steering?
2
So what happens if a driverless car violates a law and gets a ticket? Who goes to traffic school? Are the cars engineered to respond to police sirens? Even our best engineered machines have some failure rate. I assume driverless cars will get things wrong occasionally, even if they do so less often than cars with drivers. Who is held accountable? This becomes a serious issue if someone dies as a consequence. That didn't happen in this case, but I hope the powers that be are thinking ahead on this one.
4
I doubt that the powers that be are thinking about much in this regard. Has any state preemptively passed laws relating to liability in cases like this?
I struggle to understand what is driving this mania for self-driving cars? What are the benefits?
What do people imagine they’ll be doing while they sit in their cars being chauffered around by the machinery?
I also find it hard to believe that any computer-controlled car can manage as well through all the vagaries of driving on all kinds of roads, in all kinds of surroundings, with every variety of novel and unpredictable situation that can be encountered while managing an automobile, as can most human beings. These vehicles aren’t traveling on tracks, and I don’t think there is any way to account for every possible confluence of complexities that can occur within a simple 10 or 100 mile drive.
Computers can outperform humans at fast calculation and accessing and organizing incredible amounts of data quickly, but that’s a long way from managing a moving vehicle among other moving vehicles and many other moving as well as stationary objects.
Maybe autonomous autis can work well in the midwest and on the plains where roads tend to be straighter and less crowded. But it’s hard to imagine one adeptly navigating the streets of NYC or Boston.
Perhaps I’m just prejudiced though. Driving is one of my life’s great pleasures. I have a practical yet high performance car with a 6-speed manual stick shift and I’d as soon desire some machine to eat my food for me as to drive for me. Some other drivers I encounter, tho, perhaps are better replaced!
8
Read the article? They hope to make the cars safer than human- driven cars for one thing
2
Besides increasing safety, there is also the fact that self driving cars can preserve mobility for the aged and infirm. Taking the keys away from mom or dad is one of the big issues for adult children.
2
Did you read her statement? She doesn’t believe driverless cars can ultimately be safer than human drivers.
Car accidents have killing and maiming those in the vehicle, and those outside the vehicle, by the tens of thousands through the years. Just one cause, sleeping at the wheel is a major hazard.
Industry is on the verge of the first really major improvement in years (since the air safety bag which when it contributed to a death also stirred dread.) Planes plummet regularly and take hundreds of lives while humans are at the controls. Accidents at amusement parks are 'tolerated'.
Yet an earnest attempt improve driving safety which results in a single lost life has critics energized. Why not praise the experiment, and for victims provide an "Honor Tablet". We fly safely in space because that experiment seemed important. Autonomous vehicles are an important experiment. The effort should be praised.
2
The experiment has no right to use the rest of use as guinea pigs.
Testing should not be done on public roads.
10
Every aspect of this incident will be recorded. Cameras inside and out along with every important parameter of the vehicle and it's actions. We'll know precisely what happened. This tech doesn't fill me with enthusiasm but I highly doubt the machine was at fault, within it's designed behaviour.
I believe this is an example of what is coming in two ways:
1. The world has steadily become safer yet most people feel less secure. It's due to mass and social media combined with our collective lack of understanding of basic psychology. Things like the availability effect. We're more aware of bad stuff happening even though there is less of it now.
2. Related, statistics vs human nature. It seems certain to me that crash stats will plummet as automation becomes available in cars. And those stats won't be lying. But we will see different kinds of accidents. Things will go wrong horribly and in ways that shock people. Head-on smashes for no apparent reason. Mass casualty incidents that seem incomprehensible. This, combined with the availability heuristic etc and our general unease with relinquishing control will great impact community sentiment.
2
Human drivers find it hard not to hit JAYWALKERS as well. If the autonomous vehicles are 10 times safer than human drivers, there will still be the rare accident. But so many human lives will be saved using the autonomous vehicles. Math does not lie, and we should not let emotion overcome our reasoning skills.
3
The law funnels pedestrians to their death. Its a killing zone called an "intersection".
THERE ITS CHAOS.
4 steams of 4000 pound vehicles converge at once, moving in 4 directions. The cross walk signal does nothing to stop this, as drivers often ignore them.
RESULT:
Death of the pedestrian. If not that - extreme stress load.
SAFEST WAY TO CROSS:
In the middle of the block where traffic flow is predictable, one direction at a time, with a center island for safety.
Note in the Pic: no center island where the woman is walking across Mill Avenue. She must walk a VERY long way exposed to traffic in 4 directions.
Result: She will be killed in no time.
SO:
To blame this on "Jaywalking" is worse than blaming the victim. It taking away the safe way to cross. It's telling AVs to kill a person taking the only good way across the street.
3
Technology is here to stay. The legal framework which includes the public engagement structures need to be put in place. This is where the 'pins' are. If in place this would be the single most important innovation in the history of automation. Self-Driving technology is bound to be far more safer than human driven vehicles.....Change is what we need to embrace
1
This sounds like Uber is saying "Oops" and having to suspend all it's testing. Like this was a setback for them and not a loss of someone's life/mom/sister/daughter. Remember that name next time you need a ride: Uber.
5
I am writing from France but live in Arizona half of the year and wish to point out that Gov. Doug Ducey made a deliberate, conscious decision to welcome driver-less testing to Arizona. The lessening of regulations may attract business to Arizona but there are reasons for some regulations. One is to protect people. What comes first? Business? Or safety?
5
Driver-less automobiles are utopian and ill-conceived. They are an unfounded effort at technological triumphalism (i.e., the idea that technology is the answer to all problems). The mindless deployment of this patently unreliable technology represents a manifestation of America's corporatocracy.
12
My phone app tells me when there is a pot hole ahead. Cars and pedestrian phone need to be linked. Sensors need to be enhanced.
4
I live near the headquarters of one of the autonomous-car companies. I've watched their growing pains. They've been in my neighborhood, memorably, the time I had to knock on the safety driver's window and ask him to move so I could pull into my driveway as he was intently taking notes on the car's reaction to my neighbor's torn-up sidewalk with barricades flashing.
They've definitely come a long way but I do not believe they are ready to be without human backups yet. One chose to hit a bus last winter rather than a sandbag jutting into the lane near a storm drain.
8
I'm not understanding how the actual human being in the car didn't try to apply the brake before the woman was hit.
2
And what of the cases where a human being IS behind the wheel when a pedestrian is hit?
3
What about them? The person behind the wheel was supposed to be an emergency backup driver. According to the article, the car never even slowed down.
5
There was a driver behind the wheel.
People are forgetting this. So human reaction was also unable to avoid the impact.
I am sure we people will demand that ASAP Uber releases all images from the accident.
We want to know and learn more about autonomous cars. Let's wait a few days for the images.
Certainly the accident will be able to create more levels of security.
For instance, there is no "blind spot". Infrared can be used. And other sensors. Computers can process any input, all at the same time.
Autonomous cars will make our grandchildren laugh at our incredible confidence on humans driving one ton of steel at 60MPH, before autonomous cars entered the scene.
We just need to learn fast and hopefully with no deaths.
Condolences to the fragile human that represented the first autonomous car fatal accident. It could be you; me.
Another 35k will be killed this year (by humans mostly). We are fragile, this we must never forget.
4
No matter what the AI "experts" tell us, the statistics never lies - 100 million miles per 1.18 fatalities, while the new Uber Volvo reached 1 in what, about 1000 miles?
4
Are you comparing the mortality rate for every car in America to that of the one driverless car — one that had a driver, let us not forget — that’s been involved in a fatal accident?
1
No, the mortality rate is not for one driverless car.
By definition, the rate is for the number of deaths per the number of miles driven.
The comparison is valid.
2
I was the lead for a complex spacecraft instrument controller (Space Sextant) and I can tell you how tough it is to get a computer to react to its environment. The computer has to process an "interrupt" - a signal from the environment that jerks the computer out of its normal state. That is a mess. Its slow and awkward and the computer can easily loose control no matter how good the programing is. Hypothetically, the car computer got an "interrupt" from a safety sensor but ignored it, or the interrupt was never generated because the woman was not seen. It's a devil of a problem to solve. You need standards, and approved hardware and software architecture. And hire Jet fighter avionics engineers - they are the worlds most qualified. You have to qualify any human who touches this hardware. NASA has a term for its rockets - "man rated" - that launch people into orbit. Look at that stuff.
7
Putting more cars on the road is not a long-term solution. Improving public transportation is a long-term solution that can alleviate our energy crisis.
14
My Toyota has been recalled three times since I bought it -- computer glitches. Millions of cars recalled at a time. Why would we think that driverless cars run by computer technology, would be any different?
11
To those strongly opposed to self-driving cars, I'd ask, when 30,000 Americans die every year in car accidents caused by drivers and everyone, literally thousands of engineers who have been working on self-driving cars for years, they all think it's likely that computers can do a better job driving than humans do and they can cut that 30,000 dead statistic way down, maybe in half, maybe more. How do you know it can't be done? How do you know 15,000 lives can't be saved every year.
To those cheer-leading the self-driving cars, how did we decide that it was time to start testing them without drivers on open roads? How have the tech companies demonstrated that they've achieved enough safety to warrant that? How do we know that simulation training opportunities have been exhausted? How come the cars can't be further tested and trained on (massive) closed tracks?
And to everyone, why are we talking so much about an accident when the local police chief is saying it looks like it was the pedestrian's fault?
4
Read the statistics better - 100 million miles per 1.18 fatalities, while this new Volvo reached 1 fatality in what, about 1000 miles?
There are robots performing automated surgery and commercial airplanes currently fly 90% of their routes automated in no different a manner and in a more hostile environment than these cars. They have already surpassed humans, the only thing to surpass is human ego and fear.
1
Robots performing surgery are not autonomous, rather guided and controlled by surgeons.
The car in the accident that killed a pedestrian was supposedly autonomous.
Big difference in the way we use them.
6
I find the entire self-driving car discussion sickening. I have low vision, and I would much rather depend on inexpensive public transit than shell out tons of money to Ford, Uber and their ilk to drive empty cars around the town to pick me up. Would I benefit some? Yes. Would pedestrians and cyclists become further marginalized in our cities built practically as shrines to the car? Yes. Let’s build sustainable, transit-focused, community-focused and walkable cities, rather than auctioning off our quality of life to the highest bidder.
24
A couple thoughts for Elon and friends:
1) Driverless cars are a terrible and dangerous idea. Period. Driverless cars on a freeway? In a populated urban center? How are we even talking about that? Half the time there are problems connecting to my WiFi -- now add thousands of pounds of steel and glass and send it 50 mph?
2) And while I'm at it, no, we don't *have* to send humans to Mars. The degree of physical and emotional stress, much less the cost, is far too high to make any rational sense.
I know that Capitalism gives these entrepreneurs the right and the means, but it doesn't automatically grant them moral superiority or sound decision making, but no one's reading this comment by now...
20
And 100 years ago people feared those dangerous flying machines. And yet today 900+ million people fly every year. Get a grip.
You could probably eliminate a lot of accidents right now just by developing technology that disables cell phones once the key is in the ignition.
17
Someone has. They were talking about it on the radio here in Ireland, last week!
AMEN to that!
Then apply it to all schools and workplaces.....
People who were all worked up about a pedestrian deaths caused by a self driving vehicle should ask themselves how many pedestrian deaths were caused by human driven vehicles on that same day. Self driven computer-controlled vehicles are already dramatically safer than human-driven vehicles, and promise an overall decline in vehicular deaths in America. Slowing down the deployment of self driving cars will clearly have a negative public health impact. It’s time for us to collectively get over our simian phobias regarding robotics, and embrace the dramatic public safety benefits that this technology will provide.
7
It's the PROPORTION. Yes, people get hurt and die from ordinary cars. But there are tens of millions of cars on thousands of roads. Your chances of dying are pretty low.
With self-driving cars, there are at most a couple of dozen (if that many) and ALREADY there are several deaths. Furthermore, they look like system failures that cannot identify something as basic as a pedestrian crossing the street!
There would be video footage of the accident taken by the self-driving car. The NYTimes should use its leverage to being that video to light. Safe self-driving technology is still decades away. The extreme dangers of this insane experiment with real human lives needs to be ended as soon as possible.
5
What question do ‘self driving vehicles’ answer?
5
Thank you for asking.
1. Lazy smart-phone obsessed people could then yak on their iPhone XXX 24/7 instead of bothering to drive.
2. Companies and big corporations could lay off tens of thousands of drivers, and replace them with robotic vehicles -- saving salaries, benefits, health insurance.
According to news reports .... Chief of Police Sylvia Moir told the San Francisco Chronicle on Monday that video footage taken from cameras equipped to the autonomous Volvo SUV potentially shift the blame to the victim herself, 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg, rather than the vehicle.
“It’s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode [autonomous or human-driven] based on how she came from the shadows right into the roadway,” Moir told the paper, adding that the incident occurred roughly 100 yards from a crosswalk. “It is dangerous to cross roadways in the evening hour when well-illuminated managed crosswalks are available,” she said.
Though the vehicle was operating in autonomous mode, a driver was present in the front seat. But Moir said there appears to be little he could have done to intervene before the crash.
5
The claim is computer can react much faster than human, but obviously did not react fast enough in this case - as a matter of fact the car was driving above speed limit, obviously unsafely in order to get into accident, and didn't even try to stop or turn to avoid collision.
3
A computer can react much faster than a human but that does not negate the laws of physics, i.e., a body in motion tends to stay in motion. There will always be scenarios where the collision cannot be prevented, whether robotic or human.
1
Ever look around you and see how many human drivers are traveling above the speed limit? Probably most of us. People called “horseless carriages” dangerous and unnecessary back when they first emerged. Don’t fight progress. Embrace it.
1
One death is too many.
I am glad that they have suspended the self-driving cars in AZ, until a fool-proof system has been installed to prevent ZERO pedestrian deaths.
4
Than it'll never happen.
In this case, a woman was trying to cross a major street, at night, in a low light (park) setting and not at an intersection. I live in the neighborhood BTW.
People...pedestrians make mistakes.
2
Do you have the same standard for human-driven cars? I think we should take away half of the licenses out there for the reckless, unconscionable driving I see every day. Have you been on a road lately?
4
Yes, pedestrians make mistakes.
But self-driving cars are supposed to react to such mistakes, much faster than a human driver could.
3
Any reason anyone thought this would NOT happen? Seriously.
9
Self-driving cars are all hype and greed. Cities are the worst place for these to be initially tested because of the endless variety of possible confounding obstacles. They could be tested and improved over time here in fly-over country, but that is neither sexy nor immediately profitable. (This is redundant, I know.)
10
I m not worried about individual AI getting into accidents. It will happen but the rate will be far less than human drivers. But I am worried about them getting hacked and used in swarm attacks as autonomous missiles.
5
Currently the AI rate is much higher - read the article; the average fatalities for normal cars is 100 million. Here it happened much faster - this is a new car that probably doesn't have even 10K miles.
2
I am an admitted 58 yr old fuddy duddy. I care very little for the idea of self-driving cars. However, if they must exist I think this is a litmus test for their safety:
Have all the company executives stand in the street in a staggered manner at one hundred yard intervals while the self-driving car starts self-driving at a decent speed. Oh, and all the executives must be chained to the ground during the test. How many executives would be willing to take this test? Of course I'm not suggesting this test actually take place. But I am suggesting I don't want to drive to work and pass a self-driving vehicle going 60 mph just a few feet away from me going in the opposite direction.
I think some people forget that machines/robots are only as proficient as the humans that made them. I'll take my chances with the humans I can see behind the wheel.
14
I have been driving over 40 years. I am still presented with novel, new, dangerous situations at least once per month. There is simply NO WAY that the programmers of self-driving cars can predict every possible situation. Computers don't "think," they simply do what they were programmed to do, AI doesn't change that. Self driving cars simply aren't ready for prime time, and as an engineer, my guess is it will be another TEN years before they are. First legislator will have to protect the "deep pockets" of their developers from the inevitable massive lawsuits (claiming negligence) from the first 1000 victims of self driving cars. Investors, bet against this one. These companies don't have 1% of the brainpower NASA required to put man on the moon. At least paint their bumpers orange so the REST of us can avoid 'em.
14
Wade, also an engineer from CO. See my comment when approved. You need NASA and Jet fighter avionics engineers to build those systems. Hackers from S Valley? Not quite. You got to qualify the engineers. The self driving stuff is not actually new. Rockets and jets mostly fly themselves - but they have the best men and women in the world building that electronics.
1
Just as Florida engineers should not have been stress testing the Florida International University pedestrian walkway over an open street used by the public to pass underneath; state legislatures should now rescind indefinitely previously granted authorizations allowing autonomous vehicles to be tested on public roads. Whether the victim of the Uber autonomous vehicle accident was jaywalking, a homeless person pushing a grocery bag-laden bike, had limited line of sight to oncoming traffic, and ignored signage warning pedestrians from crossing the road at the spot of the accident is irrelevant. The vehicle's radar and lidar should have detected her presence in the street with sufficient distance to initiate braking to avoid striking her. We should expect better detection and response capabilities from so called self-driving vehicles before public safety is exposed to testing protocols. It appears financial incentives have rushed the implementation of this technology before the proper maturity of safeguards. I feel we should broaden the mandate of the #NeverAgain school shooting prevention movement to rebalance our laws to emphasize the value of human life against the liberty to unleash certain technologies and practices upon the public. We seem clear-headed when it comes to legal proscriptions against the release of chemical nerve agents, but things quickly enter a gray area beyond bright line culturally identified atrocities.
39
Thank you for a great, thoughtful comment.
" The vehicle's radar and lidar should have detected her presence in the street with sufficient distance to initiate braking to avoid striking her."
Charles Buck, what if the vehicle had no time to brake? Where was the victim coming from? Where was she hit?
Too many question marks at this stage that need to be addressed before any sensible or overreacting comment on this road accident.
1
This tragic accident resulting in the loss of a life is directly attributable to our governor's laissez-faire approach to autonomous vehicle testing in Arizona. Rather than working to ensure safe streets for residents and visitors, Ducey has denigrated the efforts of our neighbor California to regulate this activity and promulgated a regulation-free environment in which to operate. As such, he and his administration are more concerned about the health of foreign corporations than they are about the safety of Arizona residents.
10
Except that the article explicitly states that California is willingly allowing autonomous cars to drive with no back-up driver starting in April. As it is, you know nothing of the cause of the accident yet, yet have jumped to the greatest hyperbolic conclusions and conveniently attacked a political figure as the cause.
What about the backup human driver who did not pay attention and prevent the accident? This is blame of a machine when a human monitor failed.
Maybe these cars are not detecting non-automobiles on the road.
5
The human back up could not take control fast enough. It would take several seconds, and the situation required millisecond response.
2
My condolences to the victim's family. The testing was known to have risks, and expectations that nothing like this would occur are foolish. But Uber has not established itself as a transparent candid, ethical entity. This worries me regarding what the company will say and do regarding what happened. We need the truth in order to adjust and provide safety protocols. But Uber and the truth are often strangers. I hope investigators take this into account.
7
Exactly! Uber is not a Boeing or Lockheed Martin. These are the companies that know what they are doing.
3
To me this has always seemed like a manufactured market trying to create demand when it seems there is little to no demand from the public at large.
15
Self driving cars will never work in an environment with human driven cars. The ethical decisions an experienced driver does with his experience can never be implemented on a computer chip.
So the only safe way is to separate both and build extra streets for the autonomous ones, if something like this shall be prevented in the future.
4
I mostly agree. Humans pick up on very subtle things. Is there a child on a porch 50 feet from the street? Watch the little boy or girl. These things cant be programed in. And AI? That stuff is a pile of junk.
1
Self driving cars are a menace waiting to happen. Driving in complex environments is too dangerous to leave to heartless computers.
This will happen again.
And again and again.
14
Just like car accidents by humans happen again, and again, and again. The onus is on you to prove that autonomous cars are MORE dangerous before making that factless assumption.
Unfortunately, not the last. i have guaranteed car insurance for life from my company. Why ? Part of it maybe is that i anticipate things ahead of me and deal with novel situations. Ever have one of those built in boxes fly off the back of a truck ahead of you ? Ever have a tree tall enough to cover 4 lanes of traffic fall down in front of you ? i have no scary stories about pedestrians except those who think its okay to walk behind a moving car.
i very much doubt a computer is capable of abstract thinking, like we are.
6
I had the entire retread of a semi trailers tire come off and go under my Civic hatchback, which caught air. Literally entire car was in the air for a second, at 70mph passing a truck. managed to keep it under control thank god, could have easily been under the trailer and crushed. Messed up the front bumper quite a bit.
1
The folks like Tesla, Uber, Google, etc, who are designing and manufacturing these potential "death machines" should be the ones to insure others against damage and loss, and I have little doubt that in the end they will be the ones held accountable for things like this.
3
The prices of aircraft rise to include insurance like this for the manufacturers. It'll be a cost of doing business.
1
I’m so sorry for this tragic loss of life.
To reduce or eliminate this tragic risk autonomous cars must adapt and evolve new features much the way biological species and populations improve, evolve and adapt in their environment.
Evolving in this cyber context means being upgraded with new sensors and code to make this tragedy significantly less likely to recur. In other words, more data is needed.
One idea to upgrade in this direction is to make it so self driving vehicles can detect and respond to cell phones signals - a data stream most if not all pedestrians carry with them. In this way we would have a secondary failsafe data stream to rely upon when the primary pedestrian detection feature set fails.
Another idea is to enable infrared vision as another datum the vehicles can detect. Living creatures all have a thermal signature and the sensors to see in the infrared are inexpensive. The code to support these infrared data would be trivial to develop as the main variable would be vehicle speed.
Current visual, pattern recognition based detection systems being used to avoid hitting pedestrians have unacceptably high chance of yielding errors of omission - that is not seeing a pedestrian because they are overly reliant upon noisy data from light regimes, pedestrian clothing and variable backgrounds. In other words they are at risk to camouflaging and crypsis. Cell phone signals and infrared images alone or together are data well worth integrating.
2
Everyone I know has been in an accident. My father was killed by a drunk driver, my grandfather and aunt were killed due to driver error. Every day behind the wheel, I witness at least one near-miss accident. I'm tailgated by aggressive drivers, I'm passed on the right by aggressive, reckless drivers, I see cars drifting as their drivers are busy texting, reading, talking, or in many cases, apparently merely zoning out. What keeps drivers safe is safe cars, not safe drivers. I think autonomous driving is goofy - take the bus, for gosh sakes - but it is the next generation in auto safety technology and it should be pursued, notwithstanding inevitable, and sometimes tragic setbacks.
6
Yes, the technology should be pursued.
But not on public roads, using the rest of us as unwilling guinea pigs.
Autonomous cars are still significantly more dangerous per mile than human driven cars. Believe me, on the day that autonomous cars have been proven to clearly be safer than human driven ones, we'll hear about it. That's the day that all of the autonomous car manufacturers have been waiting for so they can start to really advertize and sell. That day will come, but probably not as fast as the car companies would like.
6
"Autonomous cars are still significantly more dangerous per mile than human driven cars."
What evidence do you have for this?
1
Read the article. It implies this is the case. Waymo cars needed human intervention every 5,600 miles to avoid an accident. Humans average a traffic fatality every 100 million vehicle miles. Granted, this is something of an apples to oranges comparison. Waymo drivers may have disengaged to avoid non-fatal accidents or simply were being extra cautious. And, the statistic ignores non-fatal human accidents. However, humans still drive in far more challenging environments than much of the Waymo self-driving cars. So, the statistic is suggestive.
And, the comments blaming the victim are repulsive We don't know the circumstances yet. It would be nice if some of these folks defending self-driving cars were as passionate when defending or even empathizing their fellow humans beings.
4
Other than this, we know nothing about the victim: " . . . the vehicle was moving around 40 miles per hour when it struck Ms. Herzberg, who was walking with her bicycle on the street." Blame the victim? No, but these self-driving systems will always be slightly imperfect, especially for anomalies, like children/animals/nose-in-the-phone folks walking out from between parked cars.
4
Quite sensational, there were no parked cars on this road. I know this road, it is a long, somewhat desolate, and winding road that gives access between two busier roads and is adjacent to bike trails, parks, Tempe Town Lake, ASU, and large corporate buildings. Beyond walking a mile or so to the next crosswalk, many sensible people and experienced bikers "jaywalk" across this road, it is not particularly busy. I am originally from Chicago and was first taught to jaywalk by my grandmother on chaotic downtown streets amongst cabs, busses, bicycles, and other jaywalkers. I am a supporter of these autonomous vehicles, but the fact is that these vehicles need to be proven to be as safe or safer than humans with regards to jaywalkers, as it is a common activity, regardless of its illegality.
4
Accidents will continue to happen, because nothing is perfect. Even trains on tracks derail.
It might seem more tragic because we can chalk it up to a failure of a computer, but it makes no difference to the life lost.
We need laws to go with the technology, which is unstoppable.
We dont know that for a fact. The tech might not work, not ever. Or maybe it will. But lots of tech hit dead ends. LIke supersonic airliners.
1
So there's a driver and a driverless car.
Both equipped NOT to hit and to safely and deftly maneuver around and near solid, visual objects.
3 eyes and 2 brains.
And an an unsuspecting woman who simply went out for a bike ride, who met an untimely death.
Who wasn't looking??
The car, or it's human " emergency brake?"
7
If driverless cars are as reliable and work as well as my IPhone we are all in serious trouble.
11
Very good point. We see junky computer performance every minute when using them. And dont expect it to get better.
3
... as reliable as the exit gate at work, that has a sensor to see cars and open the gate, simple, right?
We had to paint a line on the road, so when the gate doesn't go up, and we can't get out, we know how far to back up to get the sensor to trigger, and recognize there's a car on the road.
The same kind of sensors are in self-driving cars...
2
"Open the pod bay doors, SIRI." "I'm sorry Dave, I can't find "Pot Day" by the Doors. Would you like me to search the web?"
The robots are going to be here whether we like it or not. The first deaths due to stone tools didn't stop us using stone tools.
The first deaths by human drivers didn't stop us from driving.
This is the growing out pains, Yeah I might sound callus, but we have had death since we started living. We will get better and have fewer deaths or maybe we will go back to walking everywhere. The intermix regions need to be safer for people on foot and have needed that for a long time, We can make our cities function better. We are smart creatures.
Better interfacing and all that will take a bit of time and we will have days like this when people want to end the Horse drawn carriage era right now, those horses are just to big for our mud filled streets.
We have been at this cross roads before. Learn and grow that is the only way forward.
3
Both those analogies fail.
Stone tools? No organized safety rules existed in prehistoric times to insure responsible use of them.
Early automobiles didn't kill people by themselves. Inattentive drivers and heedless pedestrians did.
By all means test driverless car technology.
But not on public roads.
You cannot stand in the way of progress.
1
Heart disease, plaque build up caused by lack exercise and gluttony, is leading cause of death in USA. I don't hear politicians about banning McDonalds and other junk food joints, do I?
Automation will happen. But it will have to be fully tested. How do you test automated system? ............ There, you fill in the blanks.
However, automation will change humans. Brain and muscle atrophy will ensue, causing behavioral changes in humans.
Automation is good but it must be moderated, just lika about anything else in the world.
1
The people who die as you describe chose to eat those foods/not exercise. This woman chose nothing to do with the instrument of her death.
1
Counterpoint, there have been politicians across the country discussing banning fast food, soft drinks, junk food. This is in the NYT, based in the land of big brother telling you how much soda you can drink.
1
Heart disease is hereditary -- it can be worsened by a poor lifestyle or obesity, but they are not direct causes.
McDonalds and fast food are not the sole source of calories in the American diet -- you can get very, very fat eating home-cooked organic health foods.
These companies and governments simply can't just use people lives to beta-test your self-driving vehicles! If you want to do it properly, build a controlled test environment that puts no one at risk.
9
Human drivers are extremely accident-prone and kill dozens of other humans every day. Autonomous vehicles don't have to (and never will) be perfect, they just have to be better than humans. And if they are not already, they soon will be. And lives will be saved.
5
Why are sport utility and other big autos being used as test beds while the technology is being refined? A smaller car would do much less damage in the event of an accident and still should provide virtually the same accident avoidance data as does a large vehicle.
13
"Our Hearts Go Out To The Victims Family" .. and so will alot of your money. I'm sorry but this is never going to work on a large scale. There is just too much that can go wrong. I think 90 percent of driving is judgement calls. And if you have to have someone in the car as back up, what's the point. Forget it .. count me out.
9
It will never happen? Do you realize that the airlines that you fly on are automated for approximately 90% of the flight? I guarantee this will be standard in 15-25 years and your airline will be pilotless within 50.
I suspect you are right. It wont work on a massive scale. It did not even work on that simple street intersection - see picture. You have to re engineer cities to make it work.
3
Rebours*** There is a big difference from flying the wide open skies than driving the LAX or the Washington Circle, or the Lincoln Tunnel at rush hour. Your analogy is bogus. And if you think they will have commercial airliners with no pilot at all, man you are dreaming. They will never take that chance. One crash would put them out of business. Also you really should sit down and think of all that could go wrong. I'll just mention, what if there was some sort of power outage or a hacking, or just some mixed computer signals at a busy spot. Your talking multiple deaths and injury. Not going to happen.
1
According to Wikipedia's article on autonomous cars, it appears that this is not the second fatality, but the third fatality. Apparently a Tesla car in China killed its driver before the Florida fatality, but Tesla seems to have "hushed" that fatality up.
5
Amazing adaptability by UBER's AI to Phoenix driving standards, why am i not surprised.
No surprise it happened to Uber. Could not have happened to a worse company.
5
A somewhat long article but not a word about liability. Uber is just a "platform" where drivers and riders 'come together.' I don't suppose you can sue a platform. It's funny how everywhere you go so much of everything enables this brave new world of inequality, but those bound to be the most burdened in their lives by it embrace the madness anyway. Let the apps reign. Long live the king.
2
Reading through the comments, it seems that people are now experts on autonomous driving technology. Ever talked to a scientist or an engineer who has worked on such systems, or read any of its technical details? The fact is that technology is simply not there, and the CEOs and marketing departments have been selling snake oil to the ignorant and gullible masses.
Anyone remembers when greatest-genius/God Elon Musk told us that self-driving cars will be here in 2015? https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/20/business/elon-musk-says-self-driving-...
Almost two years after that, in September 2017, NTSB held Tesla partly responsible for a fatal accident involving its "autopilot" feature.
3
You do realize that they have been picking up passengers for over a year? Newsflash- it has been here and one accident is not changing anything.
1. The last I checked, there is always a human in the loop, no?
2. There is a reason why they only do those trials/tests in mostly dry arid places. Some of the issues related to visibility have been around for decades, and to my knowledge, they are no where close to solving those issues.
2
This is terrible. Acompany can deploy deadly weapons like self-driving cars
3
Stop the world, I wanna get off!
3
Autonomous cars are what makes you want to get off in the world of Syria, Sudan, and North Korea?
If you check with CHP, speed is the main factor in traffic accidents and fatalities. So, why is an experimental vehicle driving at 40 MPH? At almost 4400 lbs, does the Volvo XC90 need to go faster than 25MPH since its still a research system?
6
It should go the speedlimit and the speedlimit there is 40. Driving under the speedlimit is dangerous and a ticketable offense as well.
Boy! The family of the woman killed just might end up owning UBER.
3
This is terrible. A for-profit company can deploy deadly weapons in our neighborhoods. Are there no regulations to prevent this? Aren't our local leaders supposed to keep us safe?
10
You are upset that Volvo is deploying weapons in our neighborhoods? Guess which has killed tens of thousands of times more people... Volvo's with human drivers or autonomous Volvo's. No need for hyperbole.
Hmmm... Apparently an expert at the wheel isn't a reliable back-up. This would mean the system should be essentially almost perfect before being allowed on the road.
There may be a slight delay.
67
I suspect that he was distracted watching "Lays of Thunder" on his cell and will be charged. Autonomous vehicles are the future and it will continue to be pushed through for passenger transport as well as cargo.
2
As a cyclist, autonomous vehicles scare the daylights out of me. I'm a lane-commanding urban cyclist who stays safe because of robust communication with motorists. I make eye contact, talk to, gesture, smile, and occasionally holler "bicycle" if i'm not sure I'm being seen. I would say, too, that over the past decades, motorists have adjusted to cyclists; I feel safer than I did ten years ago. Nothing about removing human interaction from city streets causes me any confidence.
25
"Lane-commanding urban cyclist" using "robust communication with motorists"? Oh oh, one of those. As a long time cyclist who is very careful around cars, I think I prefer to take my chances with the autonomous car than a bicyclist who thinks they have the right to command a lane.
Never seen "Bike may use full lane, change lanes to pass" signage, eh? Besides, being visible, predictable, and commanding my lane is exactly how I stay safe. Edge riding puts you where the holes and debris are, and, worse, gives a motorist the impression they can squeeze between you and the next lane. I lost a mirror to a motorist just that way.
1
You can make a well constructed programs that fill up a truth table accurately every time. You can make a program that can sort out flawed fruit from an assembly line. You can make a program that will accumulate data from connected sources or from capturing images in the real world and sort through it to find well defined kinds of things and use it to diagnose illnesses, etc.
But can you make a program figure out what to do when a large tractor tire breaks loose from a flat bed, rises several meters up, rights itself and then bounces across four lanes on an interstate to bounce off the hood of a station wagon with a family?
Before you decide that you can find a computer program that can surpass humans, remember that the human mind is the most intelligent system known and that it took billions of years of evolution to make.
14
What makes you think 1% of human drivers could figure out what to do in the situation you describe?
But 0% of computers could. We know what they would do. Nothing. Or worse than nothing.
H Smith,
While I oppose testing self-driving cars on public roads, I disagree with your blanket statement.
A computer's collision avoidance system can react many times faster than a human driver.
That should be self evident.
I enjoy greeting my city bus driver each morning. I like that he has a good paying job with benefits. I don't want a robot driving my bus.
I've never really gotten a straight answer as to why Elon Musk believes that autonomous cars will be so fantastic for the MAJORITY of society?
I'm sure he'll lead with the fewer traffic fatalities argument--- but I'd have to weigh the cost of lost lives on the roads with the cost of yet another technological affront to the human spirit by adding driving as one more thing humans will no longer be " allowed" to do for themselves.
14
Because a robot would work for free, endlessly, with no paycheck -- no downtime -- no sick leave -- no health insurance -- no retirement plan required -- endlessly. It is a kind of slave.
A human needs those things, plus they get old. Robotic vehicles means OBSOLETING many tens of millions of relatively well-paid drivers, truckers, cabbies, uber drivers and so on.
CHA-ching!
It's the money, honey.
So glad we have an independent agency ready to go to investigate transportation-related crashes. I trust NTSB's independence and objectivity in conducting objective and precise crash investigations and in advocating follow-up safety recommendations. However, beyond the circumstances of the tragic fatal crash in Tempe, Arizona, many questions are unclear about how new technologies detect and anticipate people outside the vehicles as well as how they then stop or take some other action in time to protect those outside the vehicle. Bicyclists encounter glass on the roadway and swerve, people take shortcuts when faced with lengthy-out-of-way suburban walking trips, folks cross mid-block because the bus is coming on the other side, children may not understand vehicle approach speeds and try to cross. There may be no crosswalk. People are traveling the network on foot, bike and other devices and will continue to do so. The under-lying infrastructure and layout has created an environment where people behave in many different ways and use many human cues to communicate as they make their way around. Do AV design criteria really recognize our non-ideal world and how people work right now?
4
Yes, and human walkers find the safest ways to cross streets - where the traffic is most predictable - in the middle of the block - not in the chaos of an intersection where cars converge from 4 directions, at the same time, and the center island disappears.
H Smith,
You are advocating jaywalking, as opposed to crossing at controlled intersections.
I'd like to see statistics supporting your incredible claim.
"It can be challenging, however, to take control of a fast-moving vehicle."
My driver's ed instructor did that over 40 years ago. Look, there's an investigation to be done. We don't even know if it was the self-driving vehicle that was at fault.
4
No pedestrians in the sky.
90% of the time the plane you ride in is on autopilot.
This is the future. And it will be MUCH safer than human drivers.
7
90% of the time a plane we are in flies in one altitude with no obstacles in sight. It’s like you would compare a ship on the ocean with a ship in a busy harbor or narrow busy river full of vessels. The whole argument is nonsense. But it sounds great, like the geeks who just cannot stop messing with things promising ever new and better stuff. Venture capital in technology has become the carcinogen of our economies and societies. That is the true sickness of Wall Street.
5
Dan,
An airplane's autopilot is not capable of detecting another aircraft on a collision course.
1
Dan: when the plane is on auto pilot, the PILOT is still there paying attention. Plus a big open sky is not exactly like a 4 lane highway with hundreds of other cars moving INCHES away from you.
Your article is quite incomplete, sometimes misleading and the caption under the photo is wrong. The accident did not occur at the intersection, the woman came out of shadows walking her bike in a jaywalking situation quite some distance from the intersection, the police chief has indicated that it's entirely possible that a driver would have hit the woman - it's pretty irresponsible to have the narrative trying to support your viewpoint at this point. Having said that, I feel for the woman and her family greatly, and an investigation is needed, and I hope the video shows conclusively whether there was any fault of the man behind the wheel of the autonomous mode car. I suppose this is why these are trial situations to make the cars better, they won't be accident free, and they may not work out in the end - but I'm surprised there haven't been more than this death so far.
2
Victim blame much? Pedestrians have the right of way and drivers are supposed to yield regardless of cross walks etc so, you know, people don’t get killed. If an autonomous Uber can’t handle a pedestrian in an unusual location, it’s not ready to be on our streets.
7
I agree, dont blame the victim. Cities are for people, not for cars and certainly not for robots.
3
Brad,
If the self-driving car cannot detect obstacles "coming out of the shadows" it's worse than useless.
1
I'd trust a driver-less car any-day over a human driver
Lets start with simple statistics-
So far, having humans behind the wheel averages 1.3 million deaths worldwide a year, or about 3,400 a day. If you want just the U.S statistics, you are still looking at 37,000 deaths per year on average. Human drivers aren't doing so well, are we?
Driver-less vehicles which have been on the roads since about 2014 have only after four years been in an accident that resulted in a death, which is the one mentioned in this article. In fact, since 2014, there have only been 34 reported accidents involving self-driving cars on California roads, for example, according to state incident reports — and most happened when a human-driven car rear-ended or bumped into a self-driving car stopped at a red light or stop sign, or driving at low speed, not the fault of the driver-less car. Why do human drivers have so many accidents vs. driver-less vehicles.
Humans, unlike machines and computers, have really slow reflex and response times. Coupled with fear and hesitation, human drivers makes lots of errors.
Computers on the other hand, can think and process much quicker than a human mind can in split second instances, and without hesitation or fear, and even in a collision will make the best possible outcome for the situation. In fact, most current cars built in the past few years have some type of accident/collision avoidance system built-in.
3
It's not a question of how long they've been on roads, it's a question of how many vehicle miles travelled. The statistics for human drivers for 2016 are 1.18 fatalities per 100 million miles travelled. That's a lot of miles. Self-driving vehicles have maybe 4 million miles at most...? Human drivers don't have more accidents than driverless cars do. I'm pretty sure it's the opposite so far.
6
I would rather be killed by human error than a machine. Similar to how more terrorists are created when their family members are killed by a drone rather than a human.
And I’m not so keen on the whole driverless cars will put hundreds of thousands of people of of work
2
I drive 15,000 miles per year without a single accident in 25 years. That would be 375,000 miles. Sorry, I dont buy that argument.
How?
By accessing the danger level at any moment. Then driving slower, or faster, or with greater alertness.
Can AI do that? Yes, in theory, but would you let AI do anything?
Although a self-driving vehicle killed an innocent pedestrian there is a lot vehicle companies and governments can learn from this terrible mistake. I can definitely see this becoming a Top product once all issues are resolved! Even though this "self-driving" vehicle hit the pedestrian, where was the human behind the wheel?
2
Yapping on his iPhone.
Perhaps it is best to wait for the results of the investigation before commenting?
4
Then it would be out of mind, and few would respond. It's best to get this flow of thoughts out now, even tho you are technically right.
1
Maybe the self-driving car became self-aware and decided that humans needed to be wiped out.
13
Wolfmanmos*** Yes that's it .. and as we speak the other cars are plotting with the Romba vacuum cleaners, escalators, and assorted robot technology to really take us out .... oh no !!!!!! ....... great stuff
1
The future is going to be a strange world.
6
We don't know the following:
- how did the accident occur? All we know is a vehicle struck a pedestrian who was supposedly walking their bicycle.
--- Did the person have reflective gear on?
--- Did the bicycle have reflective instruments on and working?
I can tell you this. Just today, this is how many people died crossing the street that were struck by humans driving a vehicle.
"There were an estimated 70,000 pedestrians injured in crashes in 2015, compared to 61,000 in 2006 — a nearly 15 percent increase over ten years."
70,000 pedestrians injured by *humans* driving a car. And people are having a cow about *ONE* incident where they have *ZERO* evidence of exactly what happened.
https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/Publication/812375
http://www.pedbikeinfo.org/data/factsheet_crash.cfm
https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&hs=kcn&channel=fs&am...
4
The number by itself is meaningless.
What matters is the rate of accidents per the number of miles driven.
Not zero, we have a good idea what happned. But details may not matter so much, the AV is supposed to be safe in every situation.
I'm noticing that a lot of the pro driving car posts are of similar lexical structure. "Sorry for the victim," or some variant, followed by "but there's more here." I'd love to see someone do a stylometric analysis on those comments, since I suspect we may have some Uber-planted commenters trying to sway public opinion. And that would be a very bad look.
14
Has, "free from regulation," crossed the Rubicon?
Are we now at the point, where deregulation goes from the Scott Pruitt, slowly killing you regime, to now, we can just smash you dead in the street?
Has corporate America reached that stage of omnipotence?
7
If you mean super-rich corporations like Uber, Google, Tesla, Apple, Facebook....yes,they have reached that stage.
How many proud guns owners out there who preach incessantly about their God-given right to bear arms, freedom, and liberty feel about someday giving up their right to drive because it's proven to be safer? If one cherishes the freedom of arming themselves to the teeth, because it's their right, don't forget, why wouldn't they take up arms over someday should they be told their right to drive - remember, driving, unlike shooting off guns, is a privilege, not a right - is hazardous to the general welfare?
Gee whiz, maybe some day we real live Americans won't even have to show up to vote, a laborious task to be sure. We can have the State access our dossier, figure out how we might vote, and Voila!
Another apparently cumbersome and difficult chore (no wonder half the electorate can't be bothered voting) we Americans will be free from engaging in. Happy days.
And in case some of "youse" don't get it, yes, this is what passes for Satire on a Monday night in Manhattan.
DD
Manhattan
7
A lot more people will die before they work out the "kinks" in the code that underpins autonomous vehicles.
3
1 death in four years by an autonomous vehicle for somebody crossing in the middle of the street illegally vs. some nearly 5 million deaths worldwide caused by human drivers doing who knows what while driving.
Sounds to me like the humans are the ones who are accident prone compared to a vehicle driven by a computer.
1
The comparison is meaningless. You need to normalize by number of trips or, better, miles driven. The stats will not then be so favorable.
4
What if we find, after 5 years of AV use, that they have a death rate double that of human driven cars? This is possible, even likely. Then what? We killed all those people for dead end tech?
Many cars here in the San Francisco Bay Area appear to be self-driving even though there's a humanoid-looking creature at the wheel. I mean self-driving after a major virus has invaded the software.
5
Arizona Governor Doug Ducey and the Republican legislature gave carte blanche to companies wanting to test driverless cars in Arizona. Here's his most recent actions quoted from the Arizona Republic:
"Gov. Doug Ducey on Thursday moved to maintain Arizona's status as the most permissive state for self driving cars." (Thursday, March 1, 2018)
Lawsuits should now include the Governor and the State of Arizona.
13
no regulation means no safety.
10
Do we really need self driving cars? Really? is it an really an advancement for mankind? I don't think so. I would never feel safe in such a car. For me, it just a way for Uber to cut it's payroll and the auto industry to make even more profits. I say "who needs it?"
16
I own a Tesla Model X. I am continually amazed at how poorly the autonomous driving function works. The car continually strays over the center line into oncoming traffic. According to Tesla, it would be better if they were just allowed to turn on level 5 driving. But according to Tesla, government regulators are forcing them to stay at level 2. I think actually that Tesla is lying. They cannot even stay on their side of the road.
11
Good point. We should quantify this. Human vs computer driver. I have not seen any such comparison.
2
I realize there was a safety driver, but when they investigate and if they identify an error in programming, will there also be charges for negligent coding or quality assurance (checking of code for correctness)?
3
When there are an equal number of driverless cars and “drivered” cars on the road, let’s look at the data then. I’m confident driverless cars, while not perfect, will be 90% safer.
5
I have no idea why you're confident of that. Driverless cars have a long, long way to go before they'll have that kind of safety record, and on the way there, there will be more frequent and unpredictable accidents than with human drivers. Personally, I don't really want to see them on the same roads as human drivers.
4
How do you figure? Over 5 millions deaths a year have happened worldwide from vehicle accidents powered by a human driver over the past four years alone. This 'driverless' technology has been on the roads since 2014, and until now only a handful of minor fender-benders with driverless vehicles have happened, most caused by another human powered vehicle that was at fault. Do the math 1 death vs. 5 million. Do you see the difference?
Terminology,
It's you who have not done the math.
What matters is not the number of accidents, but the number of accidents per number of miles driven.
One accident in 5,000 miles is a lot worse than 1000 accidents in 100 million miles.
If the goal is to test the technology, why put it on trucks and SUVs, the heaviest and most dangerous vehicles out there? Why not restrict the testing to subcompact cars until the technology proves itself?
5
As I mentioned elsewhere, the testing should altogether be done in other countries like China and India, where life is cheap!
1
Just a quick follow up. Did everyone read the part where these companies are flocking to Arizona to escape regulation?
10
Auto Smart Drive is not a bad thing but who really needs it at this point except those wanting to push economies into larger problems. People have to have some work or tasks to do.
We know there is a huge problem looming with more automation but we seem to want to put our heads in the sand and let the future try to sort it out.
Maybe we need some artificial means of common sense to be developed to enable us to clearly recognize a massive storm on the horizon that no amount of automation progress can get around.
The population expands and work contracts, pure and simple.
2
Uber 's fleet of Autonomous Driving vehicles are powered by the much hyped
Nvidia 's DrivePX/DriveXavier Self Driving controller system.
Nvidia could be on the hook for hundreds of millions in damages if AI controller
failed to detect the pedestrian.
2
Maybe, maybe not. Arizona is bragging to these companies to keep regulation at bay.
1
Contextualize hour many people get killed per mile from self-driving cars versus standard human operated vehicles. Then we can tell you if there’s a problem.
Every single car vs pedestrian accidents are a problem.
2
Jaywalking is dangerous no matter who or what is doing the driving. Condolences to family and friends.
1
Not true!
The safest place to cross is where the traffic is predictable.
o Not at the chaos of an intersection.
o Not with traffic streams coming from 4 directions.
o Not where traffic converges all at once.
o Not where physical safety barriers do not exist.
o Not where center islands are removed.
o Not where you will be killed after x crossing attempts - do we have the data?
You must jaywalk, cross in the middle of the block, to stay alive.
From what I can see in the few photos of the crime scene, the car may have hit a bicyclist riding through a right hand turning lanes start into a bicycle lane between a turning lane and the lanes proceeding through an intersection. Thinking of how computers interpret visual images, the system may have interpreted a bicyclists legs as a joggers, used a range of speed expectation and plotted a course that turned with a jogger not conflicting. I make rudimentary manufacturing robots for my own use, not an expert but not a novice, I am so utterly skeptical of all this autonomous vehicle theory. I have not heard it explained how a bunch of vehicles lacking controls are going to be moved in case of an accident. how does a fireman or two truck driver spin the driving wheel, align the wheels of the car, and push the wreck out of the way? what happens when a bunch are parked and there is a fire and the emergency responders need to move the cars? Wait for a customer service representative? Or a system where every emergency service can take them over? FYI, that won't work, the massive distribution needed makes it hacked as soon as you thought of it.
5
Let's be clear here. They are testing self-driving cars on live pedestrians.
25
Very true!
As a student who goes to ASU, I see a self-driving Uber every day in Tempe. While this is a sobering reminder to look both ways before I cross the street, it is also the first fatality from a self-driving car. In a state that had approximately 6000 pedestrian fatalities in 2016, one death by self-driving car pales in comparison.
7
But how many driverless cars are on the road, in comparison...
5
6,000 fatalities annually sounds like the nationwide statistic.
According to the Governors Highway Safety Association, Arizona has 2.09 pedestrian fatalities per 100,000 people. With a population of a little over 7 million, that equates to about 150 pedestrian fatalities state wide per year. Unless driverless cars are driving more than 0.7% of the miles driven, then they're not doing too well.
It's odd to see folks jump to the defense of driverless cars when they get all fired up that Apple has dumbed down their iPhone due to battery issues.
5
In 2016, cars driven by humans were involved in 1.18 fatalities per 100 million hours driven. Frankly, that's not a bad record. I doubt self-driving cars will be anywhere near as safe for a long, long time.
2
Autonomous vehicles are not going to solve anything as long as they are designed and programmed by flawed human beings. Additionally, they will end up being a commodity where the lowest bidder and cheapest parts are how they are going to built in CHINA.
Add the vulnerability to being hacked and you have more of what Putin can use against us.
2
If only we could put the driverless cars on designated/segregated routes that are thus safer than letting them loose on open roads. Like, um, oh wait, trains.
17
100% That's what is demanded by many who post here. 100% accuracy and zero accidents. We have no such expectation of humans. We make cars and roads safer, but nobody seriously thinks 100% safety is possible.
There is an implicit assumption here - the woman would still be alive if only a human was driving. Possibly, if the human was not impaired, distracted and had enough time to respond. What is also missing is the number of accidents avoided by self driving cars. Red lights not run, full stops at stop signs, not following too closely, speed limits obeyed - could be a life or two saved.
Dire predictions here about what will happen when self driving vehicles become more common as well as the BIG question - who pays? How is the risk worse than what we already face? What will happen when a self driving semi runs a red light? First, it's a lot less likely to happen but if it does for some reason, most likely the same thing that happens when a human driven truck does the same thing.
Look around when you drive. How many people are actually focused and how many are distracted? How often do you see someone run a red light or fail to yield? Are autonomous cars going to do any worse?
6
Yeah, except the self-driving unregulated test SUV wouldn't have been driving around had Uber not been testing unregulated self-driving cars on public roads.
Is it logical fallacy awareness week? Humans make mistakes and kill people while driving, therefore it's okay if humans send out robots which make mistakes and kill people while driving?
7
You seem to have the 100% thing firmly in mind. No autonomous cars until they are 100% safe. At what point would you accept them? Even if after testing with zero errors, there will be accidents because we can never anticipate all the possible situations.
I will point out that the woman crossed in the middle of the block, which is a traffic offense in many locales. Who's at fault? There is no logical fallacy here, other than your demand for perfection which even humans don't have.
uwteacher,
It's an unverifible assumption that a human driver would not have reacted in time.
The safety driver undoubtedly was delayed in his reaction by the fact that he was not completely in control of the car.
This was not an accident in the sense of an unpredictable structural failure. It was a failure of the technology to perform as it was supposed to.
An automated system must be virtually 100% safe before it can be allowed on the public roads.
I have been driving a semi autonomous car, a 2018 Volvo XC60 for the past six months. With this car, you can set the cruise control and it will follow the road, and all of its curves, as well as leave a fixed following distance between you and the vehicle in front. This can all be accomplished with no hands on the wheel for limited amounts of time.
Some observations. The sensors work well when the street markings are clear and weather is good. Even so, occasionally I need to nudge he steering so the car stays in its lane. In practice, I NEVER take my hands off the steering wheel. Unless our roads and street lighting are universally improved to world class standards, a self driving car will never work. Given the sorry state of our political system, I don’t see this happening in my lifetime,
The advanced computer in the car sometimes makes mistakes, often turning on the heat when I want to call someone. My iPad is not perfect either. Technology has a long way to go before allowing something as dangerous as a self driving car to be on our roads
10
Try leaving a gap between you and the car in front in LA.
2
If you never take the hands of the wheel anyhow, why do you need this function. The technology plateau soon reached in automotive transport breeds strange ideas. Electric vehicles at least are a goal I can get behind. Self driving? Can’t think a good reason for it and I read a bunch of corporate hog wash on it.
Other than certain freeways I don’t see autonomous cars as a good idea. People are too crazy!
4
Self-driving cars are still cars. They must be thoroughly regulated, Arizona, not left to their own devices (pun intended) for the sake of profit.
3
For a moment, it might as well be August 17, 1896. According to guinnessworldrecords.com., that's when author and artist Bridget Driscoll became the first pedestrian to die in an auto accident. The car was reportedly moving at 4 mph "as it was giving demonstration rides in the grounds of Crystal Palace, London." Today, of course, tens of thousands of US auto deaths annually are overwhelmingly accepted as a price of modern society. How similarly will the cost/benefit ratio, for want of a more polite term, play out after this dreadful milestone?
2
I live in Chandler and see the self-driving cars on my commute every day. In all these miles driven, this is the first fatality and one that likely involved a pedestrian/cyclist who wasn’t following the law. Let’s not get all hot and bothered about this yet.
4
I would like to know which auto insurance company insures Uber's cars and how much they pay in premiums - and how they decide the amount of those premiums, because how does a car have a "driving record"? What about the person behind the wheel - what is the point of having a person there if they can't react in time to the car's mistake. There don't seem to be many regulations or government oversight regarding these driverless experiments and how they are conducted. Uber is one of those companies that just does what it wants and answers for it after the fact. which makes me very uncomfortable.
5
This tragedy is bound to happen, and we don't know the reason why exactly yet, what error caused this.
Contrary to most of the comments here, I do think that driverless cars will be much safer than humans. I have lived and driven in Chicago for over 40 years, and I can tell you most drivers (and pedestrians) are idiots. On their phones, texting away, not paying attention, weaving around, driving too close on the highway. And the pedestrians are just as stupid, walking into busy streets with their headphones on without looking. They often meet cars driven by drivers looking down at their phone who didn't expect a pedestrian in the middle of the street.
5
The corporations will soon pay their lobbyists to pay their politicians to decree that machines are legal people, with the same rights.
3
So many Luddites condemning new technology that has the potential to dramatically increase highway safety for drivers, passengers and pedestrians. I wonder how they would answer the classic trolley problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem).
1
My first job out of college was software engineering. Once you work with computer programs you see how difficult it is. And how poorly focused and trained computer programers are.
Poor drivers? Lets talk about poor programers.
Luddite right here.
1
Bob,
The Luddites did not oppose technology for its own sake, but because it would cost them their jobs.
That's not the argument here, which is against the use of public roads for dangerous testing.
I think it’s highly likely that a given car company would game the trolley problem to secure the wellbeing of that company’s clients. Probably not that hard to pull off.
Substitute "computerized" for "self-driving", then sit back and think about it.
Anything using computer software is subject to cyber-attack. They're people all over the world - kids and adults alike - who delight in breaking into computer systems and creating havoc just for the fun of it.
Do you think all critical systems in self-driving cars are or will be hard-wired and therefore impervious to cyber-attack from afar, activated by telemetry? Why would you think that?
4
The Joker will have a field day.
This death is significant. Hundreds die from automobile accidents every day... okay, but that's with 260 million registered vehicles. With only ~50 cities worldwide participating in autonomous vehicle pilot projects with a small fleet of autonomous vehicles per city, a single death will statistically scale to hundreds of thousands of deaths in the US alone if autonomous vehicles replaced human drivers in Uber's current state.
I'm still positive regarding autonomous vehicles. We should support this technology. In the end we are all human and drive emotionally, unlike computers which do not discriminate. The technology is good for us and best if shared among all car manufacturers. We need every car to be a good autonomous driver, not just luxury vehicles.
4
Driverless cars are already way safer than those driven by idiots.
In fact they are already way safer than those driven by careful drivers.
Maybe it's time to debate whether human driven cars should be phased out for safety reasons
2
My husband and I were visiting Tempe on Friday 3/16, and were driving on Mill Avenue when suddenly we noticed that the Uber self driving car was directly next to us in traffic. At first we thought it was a mapping car, until we saw the driver. Sad to know that only hours later someone died during a collision with what was likely the same driver and the same self driving car.
2
Very, very sad. 105 people are killed in the US on an average day from car accidents and 11,000 are injured seriously enough to require medical attention. This is an immense problem, that should be improved with the widespread adoption of autonomous driving. Accidents, including fatal accidents, will still occur, as will insurance fraud and negligence, including in new permutations.
Media should may attention to traffic accidents that cause death and serious injury, not just the ones that seem exotic.
Condolences to the family of the deceased. Sincerely.
1
Are we trusting self driving vehicles when human beings can't even drive safe? I know that Tesla and Cadillac among other vehicles are coming with hands free steering. This all just sounds so risky! I'm not ready to put my life in the hands of a machine and risk losing it. Way too space age for me! Lol
1
Humans write the algorithms for "self-driving" vehicles and, thus, will have the values of humans. Who will decide whether the "self-driving" car should hit the kid suddenly running out chasing a ball or swerve head on into a car with several passengers? Not merely different individuals but different cultures will have different values and priorities that determine the "choices" the algorithms make. And what of the auto companies, whose bottom line value will be to maximize profit, not save lives? How much will it cost them for X number of lives as opposed to the cost of the technical limitations that would save those lives?
People who think these vehicles are a miracle cure for "accidents", somehow rarely seem to support simple, proven methods for reducing traffic fatalities, such as lowering speed limits, breathalyzer connected ignitions, speed governors, greater penalties and enforcement of D.U.I. laws, and other low tech yet proven ways of saving lives.
Best I can see, at this juncture self-driving vehicles are mostly a goldmine for attorneys, as they argue over who is responsible for a crash, injuries, and in this case a death. Is it the owner of the vehicle, the person who is the "back-up" driver, the software writer, the g.p.s. operator whose data might have been wrong, the satellite owner which might have delayed info, the government agencies that gave approval, a hacker (real or claimed), or who?
And that doesn't even get into deadly, wholesale hacking.
3
The proper comparison is how many pedestrians are struck and how many accidents in general are there per mile of human vs autonomous vehicle. Im sure there will be anecdotal stuff as we go forward, but thats not the right way to evaluate this.
2
Who decided we should have driverless cars? And invest big so we can have them now or in the next couple of years? Do I get a vote?
10
Wouldn’t an autonomous vehicle be programmed to protect the lives of its occupants or the safety of its cargo over the lives and property outside the vehicle? If so, I imagine this is just the beginning of pedestrian deaths caused by driverless cars.
Given that Uber cares about profits over all. I trust them to act in the best interests of pedestrians who haven’t paid them about as far as I can throw an autonomous vehicle.
2
I remain stunned that we still allow firms to test market their "newest" devices/products on people who have NOT signed informed consent and who have NOT been appraised of either their rights (not to participate) or the dangers involved. I do wish full liability would at least accrue to that legal entity who seems to have all of the rights of an individual citizen but NONE of the liabilities. (Thank you SCOUS!)
2
I drive Mill ave about 3 times a week. From University to Tempe Town Lake it is a drunken, college age party area. 20+ bars and ASU campus boardering Mill Ave. Speed limit is no more than 20 mph, and traffic is always bad. 4 different stop lights and plenty of security both private and police.
I have nearly killed at least 3 people from them just jumping onto the street. Not a surprise someone finally died there.
3
WOW....quite the "sorry, not sorry" response you conjured up there. Yes...it IS a college area w/a lot of congestion, however, drunk or not NO ONE should be mowed down. Let's, for the sake of argument, say this woman was a completely pickled college student, still doesn't deserve death by car....wonder if your response would be equally as dismissive if it was an old lady in front of say.....Friendship Village?? Self driving vehicles are not only a safety menace, but an employment menace for all those jobs the right wing keeps championing....you know...blue collar jobs for the under educated trump voters...
4
The accident was NORTH of Tempe Town Lake - quite a distance, and a lake away, from the campus bar scene.
1
Mill ends at Washington Ave... 100 yards further than that park. Across the bridge that the impatient zip across from zero to dead in 30 seconds.
An old lady from friendship village would have to be moving with super powers to make it to Southern and still be hit with any kind of force.
Self driving cars will be as prevalent in 20 years as the phones and tablets we use today.
Uber is the "bad boy" of Silicon Valley and the tech world.
Who knows how well they managed their development of this technology, and how competently developed it. Did they cut corners or rush development relative to their competition in order to catch up?
This company should be solely tarnished by this accident, rather than tarnish the reputation of other companys' efforts at self-driving cars.
4
cars kills more people than the horse, which cars replaced. ditch cars, bring back the horse
4
Horse was a self driving vehicle.
8
Only some of the time, pilgrim!
1
Uh, in 1910 horses killed 211 people in NYC, mostly pedestrians. The same year, cars killed 112.
2
Autonomous vehicles are another dumb idea by supposedly smart people.
10
The article seems very even-handed. Autonomous driving cars can be checked to confirm they're programmed to follow applicable rules and laws, whereas people have and often exercise the discretion to break said rules, as in speeding or jaywalking (unless you live in Singapore, then be more careful). Similarly, when everyone is playing by the same autonomous rules we're likely to find greater transportation efficiencies, but the transition will likely (and already has) result in tragedies such as this one.
1
Human-driven cars kill many more people every day, sadly, it's so common place it rarely makes headlines.
I am seeing a lot of comments defending the technology; that human drivers kill lots of people every day. The assumption of developing a self driving car was that it would be flawless, superior to a human driver, in that it would be able to compensate for unanticipated obstacles and react appropriately with split second accuracy. The technology is currently in its infancy. It is not there yet. There are too many variables to program for. This is not the first time a self driving car has killed someone and the article discusses that. A sober properly trained human driver can react faster and more appropriately, with multiple options, than a computer that has to process information at 60 miles an hour. Who hasn't waited for a program to load or tried to get a signal on a cell phone, and you expect this technology to safely navigate a 1.4 ton vehicle in rush hour traffic, in all weather conditions, at over 35 miles an hour? Why do I get the feeling that this technology is being developed by people who where chauffeured everywhere by their parents during their young lives.
7
No. The assumption is that self-driving cars simply have to perform safer than average drivers to make a meaningful difference.
And no human can see, process, and react faster than even a mediocre computer (your expert experience notwithstanding).
4
I definitely understand the discomfort surrounding self-driving cars, but the largest current problem is not speed. Both of the speed related problems that you mentioned have to do with network connections, not computer speeds. Which is why the self driving cars don't send sensor information to a server before making decisions. Computers themselves are able to process things incomparably faster than humans, but yes the technology is still in the development stage. This is why there was a human safety driver in the car at the time. The woman was killed because neither the computer or the driver was able to respond in time. The promise of self-driving cars is that they will reduce traffic deaths, not eliminate them. They can save a lot of lives and should not be thrown out because of one accident that the human driver could not have avoided either. (On that note, there has only been one other death in a "self-driving" car, and it was ruled that the human driver was at fault. The car was only in auto-steering mode, and the accident was caused because the driver failed to brake.)
1
I do not blame the car! Sorry!
So the woman was killed how?
1
Don't overburden him.
Great reply!! You'd be fine if that was my reply if it was YOUR kid/sister/spouse/mother correct??
2
What a blow this will be to the quest to put us all out of work and replace us with robots. This is a sad day for automation. All machines should observe a moment of silence in respect.
15
How stupid is this “technology “?
6
Every new technology has it's pros and cons. In my opinion, they should've conducted the pilot program with an actual driver ready to take over in an emergency. Uber trusted this young technology way too much.
1
"The Uber vehicle was in autonomous mode with a human safety driver at the wheel when it struck the woman..."
3
Could you clarify the question?
Lots of folks here do not want to be "at the mercy of computers" and feel that humans should control life and death situations. I wonder if these folks would accept a pacemaker in their chest to extend their lives 20, 30 40 years, or if they would rather control their heart's firing themselves.
5
Seems there are now folks that are up in arms about autonomous vehicles when they actually work pretty darn well. I'm not minimizing the gravity of the fatality here, but why not wait for the full story before we denounce the technology as a whole?
2
I liked the old story of the driverless car that got stuck at the four way stop because it was programmed to go when the other drivers stopped.
6
"The Artificial Stupidity, unfortunately" - it's what the Great Stephen Hawking could say about this dramatic accident.
1
He could perhaps. But then again he'd be too smart to do that.
Again we’re slowing down the improvement of humanity, because of a dumb human error... why do they have to stop everything they’ve worked hard for because this woman couldn’t follow rules... I 100% blame her. And everyone that’s blaming the car.... seriously? Go away, some of us wouldn’t like to progress in this world...
2
Another great comment! I completely agree and hope it's YOUR kid/spouse/sister/mother next time!
4
Maria: a self driving car has to be able to anticipate real world conditions, which include jaywalkers and joggers and bicycles and other unpredictable stuff.
Otherwise this is like an automated version of Death Race 2000.
I think it was a mistake to have Skynet write the software.
1
Okay, before the outrage -- note that she was crossing outside the crosswalk. And there was a safety driver. So were there other circumstances? Did she dart out suddenly into the car's path?
3
It doesn't matter. The woman was killed by A.I.
5
Of course it's HER fault! If it was a child that'd be ok too right? I mean hey...if a kid darts out and you mow it down, who cares... you were running late and there's ENTIRELY too many kids anyway....
2
We need facts before blaming car. Here in South Florida, the new Brightline fast train is being screamed at for three recent deaths of people hit by trains. Turns out they were committing suicide or drunk wandering on tracks.
4
Uber is one of the creepiest and most irresponsible companies around. Who gets into a car with a stranger? It's the first thing young kids learn from their parents. Each day there is another outrageous story of an assault or harassment by an Uber driver. In most states in the U.S., Uber is not held to the same stringent requirements as medallion taxi drivers in NYC or elsewhere. Where are the fingerprints?!
As if Uber's disregard for its passengers' safety is not enough, now these idiots are entering the self-driving arena? Really?
Most people are terrible drivers - inept or just plain negligent. And DMV needs to step up their game on suspending and confiscating drivers' licenses. However, allowing a piece of steel to drive on its own is just insane. And before anyone jumps down my throat to tell me it couldn't be any worse than the poor lot of drivers on the road already, tell it to this deceased woman's family!
10
Try reading the article first. It was the pedestrian's fault.
1
You may have a point. Then again, you may find that a passenger can't be "assaulted or harassed" by the driver of a self-driving car.
1
Which makes it ok....
Amazing! 1200 comments from people when we have virtually no facts about what happened.
6
1201. Welcome Brian! Oh wait, you have facts about facts. Huh. Turns out lots of other people are bringing facts and meta-facts to the discussion too. Now if you called out the large fraction of the commenters who are laying blame without the facts, well then you'd have a point. Of course it's already been made several times - but as one with facts about facts I'm sure you know that.
an autonomous tesla hit a parked fire truck this year...why was that not mentioned?
2
People who step in front of traffic are making this statistic, not the cars or the drivers. There is something Darwinian about this. I hope these things don't slow the implementation of level five autonomous cars as I hate driving.
2
Except that drivers are also ignoring crosswalks. I work at a hospital where a street has to be crossed between buildings.
Despite signs in the crosswalk to give pedestrians right of way, stepping into it is pretty much the only way to get cars to stop. And these are drivers who otherwise care for people. Not when they are on the road.
2
To me this indicates that these vehicles are not ready to be on the streets. I am very much surprised at the many responses that defend the autonomous vehicle.
5
So many questions here.
These autonomous cars have such a spotless record - how could this have happened? If there was also a human in the car how did they not keep this from happening? How could the car (even with its array of sensors) not even stop in time? Could it be that this woman came out of nowhere? Was she being negligent by jaywalking? Did the car fail? Was the human in the car not paying attention?
5
The more self-driving cars there are, the more they'll be involved in accidents.
But before we allow lots and lots of them, they need to be tested without human "dummies" on real roads; set up artificial dummies instead. Have them cross outside crosswalks or act distracted holding cell phones, the way real pedestrians do. Crossing a street illegally should not carry a machine-imposed death penalty.
I don't want either my family and friends or my fellow Americans to be guinea pigs while it is still not clear whether self-driving cars are significantly less likely to kill a pedestrian.
4
The real solution for getting around without having to drive is mass transit.
Why are we finding yet more ways to put low occupancy vehicles on the road? We should put that engineering prowess to use to improve public transportation.
21
Unpredictable behavior? Crossing the street not in a crosswalk? Really? To what driver is that unpredictable?
21
Just what we need, driverless cars. How about a cure for cancer, diabetes, ALS, etc.? My heart goes out to the family.
It's a known failure of AI that it cannot approach human cognitive thinking. How is this any different? I foresee lots of deaths. It's not bad enough that Uber is decimating the taxi industry, now it wants to get rid of drivers altogether. Outrageous.
11
Bonnie,they keep inventing things we do not want and nobody needs.
But anything really practical or worthwhile is absolutely beyond us -- like (say) a $3 EpiPen.
Instead of improving autonomous vehicles, we need to invest in better public transportation. It doesn't make sense to keep on investing in technology that continues to degrade the environment, when there are so many better alternatives that don't cause traffic jams, death, or air pollution.
22
As tragic as car fatalities are, I would like to see statistics on same number of autonomous vehicles vs human operated ones. If accidents and fatalities from autonomous are much lower (as in the expectation), then it's still better alternative for the "greater good".
Sure, would be wonderful to go "accident free", but even coming short of that goal - if it makes the roads, on average, much safer, we should not halt progress.
From other previous cases, all accidents resulted from human error. Even in this case, before all details are known - victim was jaywalking, late in the evening, thus with little visibility. There is a reason in some countries like Germany even jay-walking yields in a ticket.
1
We mustn't let Uber hide behind the human frailty of its employee or of the poor woman who was killed. These companies must be made to pay much more attention to safety. US regulation of self-driving vehicles is lax compared with EU regulation.
Instead of undue haste in getting self-driving vehicles onto the roads, how about the car companies first fix the electronic features that they CAN fix, like confusing and distracting infotainment screens and dangerous atypical arrangements of gear shifter positions.
3
"Who wants to be the last to give their lives for a test."
4
Plain and Simple ...you shouldn't GREENLIGHT a Product if it's NOT Ready.
As a Project Manager ...should have done a Risk-Assessment(Pros & Cons). ...Shouldn't have Taking sooo much Risk if you saw that there was too much Risk Involve.
Can't really blame the engineers and programmers. ...which probably might have seen this coming a mile away.
3
This is a tragedy. How many pedestrians were killed today by cars with drivers? How many last month? How many last year? I think the stats may look something like this:
Monday, March 19th
Driverless cars: 1 person killed
Cars with drivers: ~3,000 people killed
4
While I agree with your general sentiment, you are vastly overestimating pedestrian deaths if you think roughly a million pedestrians are hit and killed by cars each year. The real number isn't even remotely close to that.
1
@ Peter L.
Your comparison is absolutely meaningless:
A meaningfull comparison would be to say how many cars with drivers out of 100 cars on the street kill how many people over a given time period in a given area. Then you would have to calculate the same relation for driverless cars.
Probably the result would be, that it would take less driverless cars to kill 3000 people than it takes to reach this death rate for cars with drivers.
5
Peter, the number is 102 a day, nationwide, not thousands.
3
Why? Why do we need driverless cars? How does this stupidity advance human kind?
13
Fewer human drivers = more profit for transportation companies.
1
Seems like there might also be more profit for undertakers and cemeteries.
1
Dear Tired of hypocrisy: our Tech Overlords are committed to putting as many of us as possible out of jobs, so we can form a new underclass of permanently unemployed homeless people.
SOYLENT GREEN!
Self-driving cars and trucks cannot account for "unpredictable human driving or behavior." And in this case, the human sitting at the wheel of this self-driving car was also not doing his job; he is a guilty party in this accident, too. Until self-driving cars can adjust for unpredictability, they have no business being on public streets or highways. What is wrong with States that allow this?
7
A car cannot be semi-autonomous. Either the computer is in control or it isn’t, because in this world, when an accident happens, we determine “fault.” And some accidents will not be avoidable, because no matter how smart the car is it’s still government by Newton’s first law of motion. It can only stop so fast. The question is, how do lawmakers respond? I think that's going to determine a lot with respect to this industry going forward.
4
Why is the car being blamed? It's tragic but the woman was jay-walking. I am not saying everyone who jay walks deserves to be run over - but the car wasn't apparently programmed for it. Humans, whether we like it or not, have to change our behaviors as the number of autonomous cars increase in number - and they will because the genie is out of the bottle.
4
Asimov would disagree.
4
Uber should stop their self-driving trucks that are also operating in Arizona.
7
I have the same reaction to driverless cars as I do to most technology: Just because we can do it, doesn’t mean we should.
19
The human animal is by nature not prone to following rules, and that in itself, is the obstacle in making driverless cars, and trucks, safe, in you can't predict it, therefore, you can't program for it.
9
This is what happens when technology and convenience jump ahead of safety and regulations, and when our institutions fail to keep up with these changing realities.
1
I'm amazed at the rush to judgment at blaming self driving technology. We know she was not in the crosswalk. We don't know if she just ran out into the street in front of the Uber vehicle. Given the onboard driver couldn't prevent the accident, that is certainly a possibility.
4
So what? If it were a regular car, the driver would still be at fault. it's incumbent on the driver of a heavy, fast machine to make sure it's safe to do so. Don't blame the victim.
12
The state of Arizona made its citizens unpaid and uniformed test subjects in an experiment given free of charge to a for-profit company.
25
We are quite well-informed about the driverless test programmes going on here in Tempe. THe amount of publicity the programme gets and the amount of time and energy put into multiple civic awareness initiatives has made sure that people understand what is going on, and we are overwhelmingly in support of these vehicles being present.
James Atwood, familiar name in Tucson, the tech company who employs you?
8
Well I won’t be coming to your town anytime soon!
7
Autonomous cars= utter hubris.... The range of variables presented by very variable human drivers will be beyond the scope and speed of response of self driving vehicles...like the car that failed to yield..
What if there is a failed traffic light at an intersection and human inference is required to understand that problem.
Why did this car in autonomous mode miss spotting this woman...The fact that she was out of a crosswalk has nothing to do with it. A human driver would have stopped.
What was the driver at the wheel doing if the car was in autonomous mode???? Why didn't he stop? Coudn't he stop in time? Disengage in time?
Not for me!
9
We don't have anything CLOSE to all the facts to be able to decide who is truly at fault in this tragedy. There are hundreds of deaths every day across the U.S. from accidents involving non-autonomous vehicles. Many of them involve careful drivers doing their very best to avoid an accident. With the number of people on the roads in America, accidents are going to happen, regardless of whether or not the car is autonomous or not. Autonomous cars drive in a very defensive posture and are incredibly predictable, as they strictly follow all traffic laws without fail and make repeatedly predictable adjustments to "unexpected" situations.
2
James, 102 deaths per day, don't make up stats please.
3
I'm glad "their hearts go out." So many hearts have "gone out" for shootings and preventable accidents that it's amazing anybody has one left in their body. END THE DRIVERLESS CAR IDIOCY before we are all killed.
13
Agree. Uber's response shouldn't be sympathy for the family. It should be shame and guilt for causing a life to be lost.
11
Some guy or gal in Hollywood is probably making a pitch right from recent headlines: driverless cars across America attacked by Russian computer hackers and reprogrammed to release nerve gas in order to undermine the upcoming midterm elections. In a Twitter storm, the six agents remaining at the F.B.I. are taking the heat for the attack.
6
As tragic as this is, how many pedestrians get killed every year by human drivers?
I'm pretty sure it's a lot more than have been killed be self-driving cars.
1
That's faulty logic. Drivers already cause upwards of 5,000 pedestrian deaths every year. Adding to that number with driverless cars makes the pedestrian's plight even more dangerous. It's not an either-or scenario. It's possible to reduce that number drastically through safer infrastructure, slower speed limits, and other Vision Zero implementations.
5
How many other pedestrians dies today from inattentive drivers?
2
Give me a percentage per car on the streets and we can start comparing. Toddler logic.
I am more worried about the hundreds of thousands of patients using prescription drugs that have been marketed and sold with fewer independent clinical oversight studies which may be more an experimental study on the part of drug companies who are willing to pay out hundred millions in lawsuits for the billions they receive in profits at the expense of adverse effects of their drugs and the permanent damage or deaths such massive drug causes. It's much easier to photograph and document the blood and physical damage of vehicular accidents than it is to reveal the biological and emotional damage caused by drugs.
When Flextran was brought to Salt Lake County along with the crossing guards it believed and it has been demonstrated that deaths would occur and they did. But today, the accident have been minimized and year by year attributed more to human error than mechanical error though they occur. Improved traffic in Salt Lake County and the pollution from fewer cars have made some dents in the County's increasing population and business development.
The real visible collision between technology, convenience, and safety is beginning to emerge. This incident won't be the last.
1
I've held a drivers license for 50+years and have driven much over that time in NY City and throughout the country. As far as I am concerned the time for driverless cards should never arrive. It's like saying the solution to the gun violence problem is more guns. Let's improve transportation in other ways and reduce the number of cars while we're at it. IMO driverless cars are nothing more than metallic projectiles in the street - a very bad idea.
20
I don't agree with the comments that say this is not a big deal because more people get killed by human drivers. This argument ignores the fact that there are vastly more cars driven by humans than computers today. Until we have years of accumulation of evidence that robot driven cars are at least as safe as human driven cars, let's not rush them into public streets.
11
Human beings and animals do not strictly follow all rules, have you never ever crossed the road outside of a crosswalk, and that is why self driving cars are too dangerous because they demand that everyone else strictly follow all the traffic rules! Computers are not intelligent at all, they only blindly follow the rules, unable to adapt when the rules are broken!
9
Except the cars do adapt to the situations presented to them. They do not simply keep going without making choices. They drive in a defensive posture, are utterly predictable, and actually DO follow the rules, which, in the end, will prevent more harm than it causes.
We have only a paltry bit of the information. Even those of us who live just down the road from the incident only know the barest of details. Until the investigation is complete, we cannot say whether or not the car being autonomous had anything at all to do with the accident, especially since it was a car with a human backup behind the wheel.
James Attwood, it was the self driving Uber car that ran over the victim!
5
People get kill outside the crosswalks with actual drivers. And this car had a human behind the wheel. I would hardly blame anybody till after the investigation and to find why the human didn't avert the accident.
2
This argument is specious. If you are driving too fast or too distractedly that you can't avoid a pedestrian outside the crosswalk, a crash is your fault. Same goes for the self-driving car.
5
No it's not. I used to be a cop. We won't know until the investigation. She may have stepped directly into the path of the car, that even a car with a driver could not avert striking her. this should not be a reason to stop testing these cars.
Congress should act now and prohibit the further development and deployment of self-driving vehicles - not only because of the tangled liability associated with their possible lethality, but just as important, because they are job killers. Why in heaven's name would we as a country allow the development of a technology that will put millions of people out of work? Technology is not inevitable, and it is high time we bring Silicon Valley and Wall Street to account for their central role in the destruction of the American Workforce.
10
Why did we ever allow printing presses and put all those scribes out of work?
2
David Miller: when printing technology replaced scribes, there were NEW JOBS for the displaced workers in printing plants doing things like setting lead type.
Driverless cars simply displace workers but there are NO NEW JOBS whatsoever. Only robots, who require no salary, health insurance or pensions.
If I were a member of the family of the woman who was killed, you can be sure I would rain fury on Uber and sue them until they didn't have a single penny left.
I hope the family of this victim will sue both Uber and Arizona to the max, since both the company and the state appear not to value human life very highly.
10
And if the car wasn't at fault? What if the human attendant was? What if the pedestrian was. Autonomous car does not immediately mean the car was at fault, or that there was any chance the tragedy could have been avoided, regardless of whether or not there was a driver.
There are a TON of facts still not public and the investigation is still underway.
Tech company employee James?
5
You can't use visual only artificial intelligence. A self driving car needs a human safe form of radar.
4
I am skeptical that fully autonomous vehicles will work in my lifetime. They have to be far more than 99% effective because given the amount of driving they will do, you are in essence predicting a definite number of accidents per vehicle every year. This is something that does not happen with good human drivers. I have read other reports that these systems cannot stay in lanes when the road is wet and/or dark because the cameras can't see that well, and that they can not reliably recognize stoplights. The tech types say oh well we will just electrify and automate the roads to give the car's computers better information. That would be incredibly expensive and our road system is already underfunded. Other writers have noted how easy it would be to hold-up and unoccupied self-driving truck.
As regards the legal issues, we mostly operate under rules of negligence. If the accident was a result of the machine's imperfections then the liability will be on the machine makers and owners. If the negligence is sufficiently extreme there could be criminal charges although the designers and operators will try to hide under corporate cover.
4
Self-driving cars don't have to be perfect they just have to be better than human drivers, which considering how many people are killed in car accidents each year, as well as a certain number of pedestrians, isn't as impossible a goal as it might seem.
1
"...you are in essence predicting a definite number of accidents per vehicle every year. This is something that does not happen with good human drivers."
Yes it does. It happens every single day. This is precisely what risk-analysis is when it comes to car insurance companies setting rates based on driver and geographic profile.
James Attwood, you're waving your bias flag. How are you affiliated with this industry?
6
To get full protection of the law you have to be inside the crosswalk, period.
1
Self driving cars are very many years, more than 20 years, from being safe enough! The engineers at Volvo are now murderers because their self driving Uber car have killed a woman!
4
Interestingly, there is a new law in AZ that might allow Uber to face criminal charges. AZ declared corporations to be "persons".
5
The problem is not going to be self-driving vehicles, but human beings. It is going to be an extremely difficult task to program any self-driving vehicle to deal with every stupid human action that humans might engage in on the road. As a result, there will be accidents, just as there are now.
This article demonstrates two such incidents, a human not crossing in a crosswalk at night and a driver not yielding to the self-driving vehicle with the right of way. In both cases, a human driver may not have been able to react any faster to prevent the accident than the self-driving vehicle.
Government needs to get out ahead of the liability issue quickly, otherwise, the lawyers will kill a technology that will be inherently safer.
2
@Ron: Sorry, humans still far outnumber - and are infinitely more valuable than - these so-called "self-driving" vehicles. The safety of human life MUST outweigh all the $$$ that Uber (and other companies) are trying to make.
I wonder if you'd be so gung-ho for this technology if it had been YOUR loved one who was killed today...
7
Oh Look! Another lawsuit for Uber!
5
To all the noisy people and detractors: tens of thousands of people die everyday in this country alone because of recklessness of human drivers. So by your logic we should stop ALL humans from driving is that correct ?
3
Ch, really tens of thousands die daily in car crashes in THIS country? I'll look that stat up right now.
6
That would actually be logical, and I would love for that to happen.
Ch, the actual number of daily car fatalities is 102. That's WAY off tens of thousands.
2
At first glance, a sophisticated fleet of driverless cars should be able to operate more safely than those driven by people. That theory breaks down, however, when one recognizes that driverless vehicles rely upon the Internet of Things, which is notoriously vulnerable to hacking.
In response to the ongoing and unavoidable risk of being hacked, manufacturers are moving to a system of automatically downloaded security patches to be pushed out en masse as new security vulnerabilities are detected and corrected. As anyone who has experienced a blue screen of death on a PC, a bootloop bricking of their Android phone, or an iPhone reduced to a crawl after a forced over the air security patch can attest, that is hardly reassuring. Human error introduced through well intentioned official code is bad enough, but the consequence of a malicious party pushing out destabilizing code, possibly as an inside job, makes for a tempting terrorism target that will only become more alluring as self-driving vehicles become more common.
The struggle is real: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2017/07/28/chinese-group-hacks-tesla...
6
Did anyone think this would not happen? With that said, it's only the beginning. There will be software glitches, dirty sensors and, inevitably, hacking. There are some things better left in our own hands.
7
So, what are the implications of this for "corporate personhood"? We know that corporations have the rights of people when it comes to free speech, political contributions, etc. - that's the "good". But, corporations need to take the bad with the good, right? If it is concluded that Uber is negligent, how do we send Uber to jail for manslaughter? If this was human driver and he/she was found negligent, he/she could serve jail time. How do we punish the network of thousands of engineers and managers responsible for this particular, and fatal, Uber car?
7
First of all, these self-driving cars should be tested on testing grounds and not on public streets.The CEOs and engineers who have autonomous cars should then be the pedestrians who cross the roads on the testing grounds. Why should the public have to be the guinea pigs for these XXXX cars!
6
Some commenters who appear enthused by these vehicles seem to think the burden should be on the the doubters to prove the increased risk. But that's not the normal way we treat new technology, from drugs to bridges. The burden is inevitably and logically on the innovators to prove safety (in this case only the increased safety of course) before exposing us all to possibly greater danger.
6
Will someone PLEASE explain to me why: Why have "self-driving" cars? What is the point? How is this an improvement -- how is this progress? If you don't want to drive, take the train. Do the environment, and the rest of us, a favor. And, apparently based on what just happened, save a life.
9
If your going to ban self-driving cars because of one death, we should also outlaw human drivers--far more people are killed by human drivers each year than by self-driving ones.
4
Autonomous vehicles are objectively and factually safer than human drivers because they use LIDAR technology that allows them to see behind and through objects that are undetectable to humans at the point they’re detectable by the autonomous vehicle. The technology enables these vehicles to be virtually unaffected by human vision-impeding weather as well. Autonomous vehicles always follow traffic laws, they’re never under the influence, and they’re never distracted by their iPhone. At this point in time, the car’s algorithms are being honed in to anticipate unpredictable and anomalous human behavior (i.e. 1 in a million scenarios), so it’s not perfect yet. The average number of fatal car accidents per year in the U.S. is around 30,000 the last time I checked. This is only the 2nd (if I’ve read correctly) fatality we’ve learned of involving an autonomous vehicle since they’ve been introduced to public roadways. It’s important to look at the bigger picture.
1
@Jake: So that would make 2 fatalities out of how many driver-less cars? Per car, that is a FAR higher number than the number of fatalities caused by human drivers. So yes, it's important to look at the REAL big picture, which is that right now, driver-less cars are MASSIVELY more unsafe than regular cars!
3
If anything, this accident highlights the need for more self-driving cars.
There were two humans involved and at both were at fault. One jaywalking, the other not paying attention.
I don't see how you can expect a computer to get it right when two humans can't.
2
@Chase: What is needed is to remove the computer - in this case, all the driver-less cars - from the roads.
3
I don't see how you can expect a computer to get it right
Are you talking about automobiles or indexed pension funds?
2
I am dismayed by so many comments about careless, reckless (pun intended?) humans in response to a situation in which a human died. An accidental death is not merely a setback to technology. It sounds as if we are forgetting that technology was meant to serve humans.. Driverless cars are supposed to be safer than human-driven cars. They should be prepared for agents of unpredictability far beyond errant pedestrians and all-too-human drivers.
When we simplify this to a human vs technology debate, we are missing a bigger question: Why is so much time and money going into simply replacing human drivers? Cars were designed to be driven by humans. Why should automated transportation be carried out in a vehicle designed for the abilities and limitations of humans. There must be safer and more efficient modes of transport for both people and things. I am in favor of doing away with human driven cars as long as we also replace the antiquated machinery and infrastructure built specifically for the human driver.
4
Correction: Cars were “originally” designed to be driven by humans.
Phones were also designed to be permanently connected to your house.
You have a point, that few have noticed -- cars (as we know them) WERE designed for the last 120 years to be driven by people. The earliest cars looked like carriages (without the horse!).
A truly driverless vehicle would not look like a car. It would not need a driver's seat nor a steering wheel. The passengers could face backwards or sit along the sides. Such a vehicle might have things like TV screens to occupy the bored passengers. Or beds, so they could sleep on long trips.
If cars become autonomous, they won't be CARS (as we think of cars) anymore at all. Even the roads will drastically change.
Who has been wanting these things?---only the tech industry and tech "nerds."
Just because something -can- be done, does not mean it is inevitable or -should- be done.
If the tech world wants to do well by humanity and make $$$, they should be working on better and more efficient public transportation.
9
I know literally hundreds of people who are eager for there to be even more of these vehicles on the road than there are now. They are so limited in number and in service area, that we still rely heavily on unreliable humans to get us everywhere.
The notion of a human driver "ready to take over" is a fallacy. A lie. Autonomous vehicles take the human "out of the loop" placing them in a managerial mode. They are NO LONGER able to respond as quickly as if they are "in the loop".
This is very, very scary.
11
Once you think "someone else (a computer or whatever) is driving"....you stop paying attention. That is normal human behavior.
I've noticed it in MYSELF when I use cruise control on long drives.
Everyday I see people riding bicycles no hands, entranced by the stability of gyroscopic phenomena but oblivious of the fact that their own reaction times are so delayed that the bike could go out of control before they could get their hands on the handle bars. Reaction to touch is about a tenth of a second but to sight is more like a third of a second without distractions. It means that if something happens to disturb to bike the difference between having the bike in hand and coping with a spill is reaction time.
Before we get so excited about self driving cars, I think we need to make sure that drivers who must take over for an automated driving system can do so in time to avoid mishaps while neither the driving system nor the driver are in control.
2
"The Uber vehicle was in autonomous mode with a human safety driver at the wheel when it struck the woman, who was crossing the street outside of a crosswalk, the Tempe police said in a statement. The episode happened on Sunday around 10 p.m."
Assuming that the above is accurate, the UberCar control software doesn't seem to have passed the test of being able to see things that are out of place in/on the road/street/highway. This is one of the primary skills of driving a car.
Further more, it is well understood that the "state of the art" of self driving cars in 2018 can't really "drive" on anything but limited access super highways, raising the question: Why was testing on such a public road allowed?
Uber et al need to pay to set up non-highway driving experiences in the real world--not do the real world learning by failing at basic driving skills by killing non-participants.
Look, should it emerge that the dead woman had jumped into the traffic lane that was full of fast moving cars, then perhaps Uber isn't really at fault, but that's not what seems to be the case here.
5
These cars have been driving highly congested streets all around Arizona State University for MONTHS now, readily adapting to numerous "out of place" encounters, including stupid and/or intoxicated pedestrians not following the rules and other aggressive drivers cutting them off or running red lights.
Accidents are going to happen whether or not the cars are autonomous or driven by a human. The behaviour of an autonomous car is much more reliable and predictable, and in many cases much safer.
"...but that's not what seems to be the case here."
Yes, it is, according to the Tempe AZ Chief of Police.
James:
"These cars have been driving highly congested streets all around Arizona State University for MONTHS now,"
ASU, or any big university campus with roads, is hardly representative of driving--it is a highly limited example of driving near pedestrians and bicycles.
How about driving through the middle of Boston--not just around the Harvard campus in Cambridge. Or a really good example, you'll likely have to look it up: How about driving through the Dinkytown neighborhood of Minneapolis, not just through the adjacent U of Minnesota Minneapolis campus?
(Dinkytown is a real part of Minneapolis, well really St. Anthony, not simply a constructed housing area for the University.)
"Accidents are going to happen whether or not the cars are autonomous or driven by a human."
Here you are absolutely correct. And yes, people driving cars make mistakes too.
"The behaviour of an autonomous car is much more reliable and predictable, and in many cases much safer."
Perhaps this is true on say a clear limited access highway with good sightlines, so not the Taconic Parkway north of NYC, but you have basically no basis for making this assertion regards anything like a city or dense suburb.
I'm sure things will improve, in 25 years.
I'll take a guess here…
Autonomous cars, with no driver, and relating to only other autonomous cars on the road, would cause less accidents and less than the 32,000 road deaths which occur each year in the US.
I bet I'm right.
1
@Paul: I'm not interested in betting my life & the lives of my family, friends and loved ones on your guess, thanks. And I think you are quite wrong.
5
You might be betting your life.
Maybe they will reduce deaths. But which ones? Are they eliminating accidents a human would cause but causing accidents a human wouldn't? If so - is that what we're all involuntarily signing up for?
2
I'm a cyclists and those I my roads, too, so, no.
1
I don't know any more facts about this than any other reader, but I do know the intersection very well.
What you see in the photograph is pretty much how the intersection looks most any time of day, except (obviously) much more traffic during rush hour. People conjecture "maybe she darted out from between parked cars", but I don't know that I've EVER seen any cars parked anywhere near that intersection..... I'm not even sure parking is legal there.
The streets are quite wide (at least two lanes each way) and often divided at intersections, as you see in the photo. There are no businesses, driveways, etc. anywhere within hundreds of yards. The woman in the photo is walking away from the city center, and behind her about 200, 300 yards, the street crosses over a major expressway. Curry, left/right in the photo is a broad, long thoroughfare that basically parallels that expressway.
Nothing is around, no shops, etc.... and the woman in the photo is walking toward open parkland with many, many bike trails.
From what I know, it seems extremely extremely unlikely that this had anything to do with pedestrian congestion, parked cars, or even traffic, given that it happened late on a weekend night.
If it was NOT a driverless car, I'd include that the only business close to there is a music venue, theater, and would immediately suspect driver impairment. But, uh, not so much without a human driver.
4
Thank you for the extra information. It reminds me of roads Denver, CO. Even the vegetation and terrain are similar. You totally put a damper on the "darting from behind traffic" hypothesis.
I live in Phoenix, and I know this intersection well. There is a problem here. Too many pedestrians crossing in the middle of the street (not at an intersection), at night, wearing dark clothes. Our streets are wide and our blocks are long--so it stands to reason someone may want to cross without benefit of a cross walk. That being said; however, pedestrians do not look for oncoming traffic--whether it is in the street or coming out of a store into a parking lot (I witness this almost everyday). I am aware that pedestrians have the right of way (and it is a big deal here in PHX, as it should be), but let's think about this--an (avg) 150 lb person against a 1 ton (at least) car--human driver or self driving. Who loses???
"National Transportation Safety Board was sending a small team to gather information about crash". I am sorry, but the team should have been sent when they approved self-driving cars on roads without proper testing and not after the crash!!
These things ( like people crossing) can be easily simulated and can be easily tested in an artificial environment before they trying out in the roads. So you have no excuse! In clinical research, they do animal studies, Phase 1 and Phase2 studies before they try out a bigger Phase 3 study. One or two unexpected deaths are enough for the drug to be banned even if it saves 100's!
And lastly, we DO NOT know if self-driving cars will have lower accidents/lower injuries than regular cars. Let's not just assume it will be lower.
2
Autonomous vehicles have already proven themselves to be safer than human drivers. There are 30,000 fatalities involving human drivers per year in America. Human drivers aren’t getting any better. Autonomous vehicle technology improves by the hour.
As a pedestrian, I hope you'll forgive me if I wait a few more hours.
1
The difference between a driverless car and a life saving drug seems to have been forgotten.
There is no overarching"need" for a driverless car.
2
Companies are flocking to Arizona to avoid regulation? Really? This points out the need for sensible regulations in not just this, but so many areas of a complex society.
5
We don’t have to be perfect, we just need to be better than we are now.
The question is not whether the driverless car is accident-proof, but whether it is better than a human-driven car. Driverless cars will never be perfect. We fly airplanes and they have accidents and kill hundreds. It’s not perfect, but it’s way safer than a car.
How do autonomous and human-driven cars compare in terms of accidents per miles driven in the same cities and under the same traffic conditions?
One must keep in mind a few things regarding autonomous vehicles: the driver-less never gets in a road rage, always drives at or below the speed limit, city driving is extremely difficult given the number of variables around, and human-driven cars are one reason why driverless vehicles get into accidents.
3
Wrong. The robots have to be better than the best human all the time. You suggest there is some human average failure rate, but that is not an accurate statistical measure. Most humans are very competent drivers the vast majority of the time. A small fraction are very incompetent, a small fraction of the time. Those incompetents are statistical outliers that are so bad they skew the data set, and should be thrown out. No new tech should be compared to a drunk or distracted driver to judge its adequacy.
When one is injured, or their family killed by a robot, we cannot, as a society, ethically tell them they lost the statistical lottery, but this is the cost of profit for a few lucky investors (aka freedom), so, whaddayagonnado? You have to be able to say no human could have done better than that robot at that moment, because had the robot not been there, the baseline assumption is a competent human probably would have.
We need to keep in mind that not all autonomous driving companies have technology the same level of sophistication. Google's Waymo has driven millions of miles without any fatality, for example.
2
I’d be family, I’d sue that company so hard.
When multi billion company make experiments on us, they need to pay BIG time when they fail.
4
I need a driverless car in my garage as much as I need Alexa and the like in my home... which is zilch. We don't need everything Silicon Valley pushes our way. A cool invention doesn't equal A Need.
Anyway, what was the "human at the wheel" doing at the time?
Now excuse me while I pump some air into my bicycle tires.
9
I am so sorry about the death of this woman. I have very mixed feelings about driverless cars. A lot of cars are driverless now, due to checking out one's GPS location and talking/texting on phones. I know a lot of cars have adapted to this with handless controls over talking, changing radio stations, etc. Call me an idiot or a luddite, whatever. My feeling is that when one is driving a car, it should be kept in mind what I was taught many years ago in driver training: You are in control of a deadly weapon which can cause deadly results if one is not giving it their total attention.
I don't mean to be flippant, but if I could send my car to the grocery store, dry cleaner, with a list and have someone else load it up and the car drive itself back home, that would be amazing.
For all the people excited and in favor of this technology, I ask the question, "Would you put your kids in this car?"
2
I have put kids into these driverless cars. They are incredibly safe.
I believe the key sentence was the fact that the woman was indeed J-Walking and out side of the cross walk , that would make this event not so unusual from other accidents where people are hit j-walking .
1
@donald: The key item is that the driver-less car, in all its brilliant programming, in fact did NOT observe nor respond correctly to a person who was "outside of the cross walk." Any number of impaired human drivers could do the same; we don't need very badly flawed computer-driven cars to increase the number of terrible fatalities.
3
Except these autonomous cars often DO recognize the danger and avoid it. These things are all over the HIGHLY CONGESTED Tempe roads in and around Arizona State University. They make hundreds of adjustments on every trip they take to accommodate pedestrians and other vehicles, including ones that are behaving in non-traditional methods.
Accidents are going to happen. This was a tragedy. We still don't have all the facts to understand why it occurred though, or if there was ANY chance this could have been avoided.
Large companies often come out smelling like a rose after they cause individuals' deaths on the road. I've see a driver of a semi-tractor-trailer smash into a car and not even be charged. Is Uber in tight enough with the trial lawyers not to be sued out of existence for such deaths?
Now add drivers distracted by smartphones sending their large trucks into the first car they meet stopped by heavy traffic - it's already happening.
3
I take issue with this sentence:
"However, researchers working on the technology have struggled with how to teach the autonomous systems to adjust for unpredictable human driving or behavior."
The allegedly "unpredictable" behaviour isn't, in fact, generally unpredictable. What the autonomous vehicle pushers mean when they use the term is behaviour that their machines fail to predict.
3
I'm sure many more posts reflect this, but how many humans killed humans in the same time?
1
Hmmmmm. So she was jaywalking? People do that to me all the time in Boston. Not sure the car should be programmed to stop for that.
2
That’s an awfully flippant comment, given that a person was killed.
5
What will be the reaction where there is the first terrorist attack with a driverless uber? This can be a very dangerous technological advancement that can make matters far worse.
4
The wonderful, terrible, horrible thing is, nobody is responsible! Did Uber have to sign its life away on notarized statements that THEY are fully responsible and will never fight any claimant or prosecutor in a courtroom?
What a scandal.
2
The photo of the intersection is eloquent. Look at the scale - a lone human being, no other pedestrian in sight for as far as you can see, and she is crossing a very wide center median road that appears designed to accommodate large numbers of cars, with no crosshatching in the walkway, no walk lights or pedestrian crossing signals, no place for her to stand safely if she gets caught in the middle when the light changes. Everything in the frame says, walk at your own peril. Makes you think not just about the potential for accidents with driverless cars, but about how this country is designed and built to make cars the only plausible form of transportation, and discourage the exercise, oxygen, and freedom that we get from walking to our destinations.
4
Driverless or autonomous cars make sense in a country like the US which has bad or non-existing public transportation systems in most areas of the country except very large cities. Sooner or later a driver's license may be revoked or a driver may decide to not join in the daily hectic road traffic due to old age although the former driver is still able to get around if there was a public transport system like these exist in most of Europe and the Far East. The autonomous car would ensure that older or handicapped people remain mobile and independent. The alternative is to build public transport systems for which there appears to be neither appetite, funds nor enough passengers to guarantee a sufficient return on the infrastructure investments.
The victim was not in the crosswalk? A human driver would face no penalties for such an unfortunate accident.
The idea that self driving vehicles will end accidents due to human failures presumes that the programs will be able to act rationality and tirelessly whereas humans cannot. The trouble is that what is at work is people imagining systems which will work like Data in Star Trek, not people taking new systems which have proven to be like Data and putting them to work. Mindless automatic systems are mindless automatic systems, they have no awareness. They do things as designed and surprise the designers when they come up with things that the designers did not expect but it's more like a programmer being entranced by the patterns created by a simple mathematical formula than the observation of a new form of intelligence. Without any awareness of existence there really cannot be intelligent judgment being exercised.
1
Not sure I see the point of driverless cars, etc. - especially with companies that employ human drivers. How many jobs are being lost to humans because of this?
2
Tragic but I don't think autonomous vehicles promised a 100% accident-free future, just a significantly reduced one.
1
Self driving cars are safer until stuff like this happens or when a self driving car inevitably uses an outdated version of google maps and drives you into a building.
1
It used to be that "crash test dummies" were non-humans INSIDE the vehicle in controlled circumstances. Now it appears Uber has decided that EVERY random pedestrian is a potential crash test dummy OUTSIDE the vehicle for them! And Uber doesn't think they need the approval of those human beings whose lives are placed at risk.
This needs to be stopped, NOW!
5
It won't be long before politicians in the pockets of all the corporations that'll financially benefit from self-driving vehicles (and that's a very wide range of corporations, when you think about it) pass laws which very strictly limit liability associated with self-driving vehicles. Then, not long after that, they'll begin passing laws to mandate the phasing out of vehicles requiring drivers (with the argument, factual or not, that it's vehicles driven by humans that are the major cause of accidents involving self-driving vehicles). Of course, all the while, concerns about safety, vulnerability to hacking/interference, etc. will be given short shrift, leaving average people more vulnerable than ever.
A few more steps on our journey to dystopia.
2
No technology or human can save the distracted pedestrian who suddenly steps into the roadway. This investigation should be easy, as we all want to know whether the tech saw and reacted in/correctly, because everything is logged.
I'm still convinced that self-driving cars are this century's answer to New Coke. Ultimately, consumers are not going to buy them. Given the distracted driving all around me on the highway, I'm not entirely sure what is going to be best for automotive safety.
1
I know fully well autonomous vehicles are coming, and as my night vision diminishes, I look forward to living long enough to use autonomous vehicles, yet nothing gave me more pleasure then shifting gears on my old standard transmission beemer.
3
Replacing a clutch is the least painful repair for the performance fan. An 88-horsepower Honda Accord could do anything you wanted three decade ago.
1
We don't let blind people drive cars and they wouldn't want to why should we have machines drive cars. People have enough trouble driving themselves. We would be better off having devices in cars that disable internet and phone calls unless the car is stopped. Let's get real and get away from computers and driverless cars!
3
Car computer are not blind. And we can't disable Internet since we need tht for GPS and streaming music. Nor can we disable phones since we need them for emergencies, like hit and run and a stalking driver. Also, it is illegal to use your phone while the car in stopped at an intersection in California.
Too bad the collective "we" didn't get to vote on the concept of driverless cars. Throw in the job-taking robots, and pretty soon Big Tech will have us all parked in Lazy Boys with our remotes day and night.
4
There is a possibility (a strong one in my opinion) that the pedestrian's behavior was dangerous to herself whether the vehicle was autonomous or conventionally operated by a human. It's absurd for some to assume it's the fault of the vehicle. If someone jumps in the path of a freight train, do we outlaw freight trains?
3
Nowhere in the article did it say who was at fault.
2
"The police chief of Tempe, Arizona, where a woman was struck and killed by one of Uber’s self-driving cars Sunday, says the ride-sharing company is likely not at fault for the accident, following a preliminary investigation."
http://fortune.com/2018/03/19/uber-self-driving-car-crash/
We'll see the knee-jerk reactions from the fearful, of course, but, with millions of safe miles driven by these cars, we are already in a new world in which our children will be safer on the roads. We can't let accidents stop our development. Almost all new technology fails at some point and those failures often lead to death. Helicopters lose their engines, space shuttles blow up, cars regularly kill people because of mechanical failure.
Over 1500 people die from falling asleep at the wheel each year, but this one accident gets press coverage... It's anecdotal.
3
Sad as this incident is, it is going to be fodder for regressives the same way horse-driven carriage drivers might have tried to detract earlier automobiles. Authorities/NYT has not given any other details about the incident, e.g., exactly what were the circumstances when the accident happened in terms of right of way etc.
At the same time there should be strict regulation that defines the liability when such an incident happens. I don't like the fact the AZ has promised to be "regulation free" in this regard.
1
ch, good spin tech man. Autonomous bus crashed in the 1st hour in Las Vegas. Local man here died in back up driver's mode in his Tesla.
Do you have complete trust in you map apps and directions? Don't think so. Uber continues to remain in business, although nothing they do cultivates a positive business model. Why, maybe people who deny?
1
Also, I don’t know where you go but my maps app works right 99.99% of the time. Also, you shouldn’t be using the comments section of the NYT because it uses the advanced technology called the “internet”.
You have conveniently left out the million miles driven incident-free by autonomous cars dear detractor, as well as the incidents where the autonomous car was not at fault by the other party. This is the testing phase of the autonomous cars and incidents are bound to happen as they do in exploring any new technological paradigm which why we need some regulations for testing on public roads to strictly define liability in cases like these.
Also don’t forget the tens of thousands of people who die because of human-driven cars. By your logic ALL human driven cars should be banned am I right? It’s good people like you are not making legislation else we’d still be riding horses to work.
How frightening. I drove through that intersection just 10 days ago. My engineer friends with decades of experience tell me that not a single one of them would ever ride in a self-driving vehicle.
7
The human 'safety driver' was most likely on her phone.
7
How about comparisons of incidents of damage, injury, and death per miles travelled among various modes of control, most significantly under ordinary driving (including DUI driving) and autonomous direction (presumably not DUI)? Such regular stats would put things into perspective, one way or the other.
2
Was the person walking towards the road without looking? Most attentive drivers would have seen that and slowed down in anticipation, but is the Uber system intelligent enough to process human behaviour on the side of the road? One can’t just dismiss this as ‘it was the pedestrian’s fault’.
6
Is Uber guilty of involuntary or negligent vehicular manslaughter? Who is going to jail? Who is civilly liable? Criss-crossing lawsuits will fly.
These first verdicts will hard fought and precedent setting.
Back when I was an urban person, I learned to catch the eye of the driver of a car that might be a threat, even when I had the green light and/or the WALK sign, before I stepped out in front of it. See me? How would one know one has the attention of a robot?
It would have been useful as well if the NY Times had cited how many pedestrians are killed by human drivers each year.
2
Of course, this tragically provides a concrete data point for every skeptic to point out and say "I told you so".
I am sort of one of those "I told you so" people, but not simply because of this event.
To objectively assess in a statistically valid way what just happened, the total of "driverless hours" for vehicles would have to be compared to a statistically equivalent number of hours for vehicles driven by people and the statistically expected result the people driven vehicles produce.
Even if a statistical validation can be exhibited to mitigate the very valid concerns of people about this new technology, I still feel that we just don't have a strong enough or homogeneous enough technology infrastructure from town to town and state to state to safely support driverless vehicles.
This whole project just feels "rushed". I can't prove it, but at this point it just seems half baked and dangerous.
4
Uber is the prototype of the modern corporation.
Investors make billions, workers make $3.37/hour.
Now lets change all the laws.
1
Thanks for the information, but this article isn't about Uber drivers and how much (little) they make. It's about the risks of driver-less technology, whose AI operators earn $0.00 per hour.
1
The Wright brothers and Neil Armstrong are rolling over in their graves.... Sad day.
4
As if Uber hasn't wreaked enough havoc on our city streets, now their Selfie Cars kill people. I happily still use cabs when necessary.
3
The are more than 250 million automobiles in the US and ~ 110 pedestrian fatalities per day. (I don't find 2016-17 statistics for this.) I have no idea how many driver-less cars are currently being tested on the road but ~100-200 seems a high end estimate.
If this is the only pedestrian fatality caused by a self-driving car for an entire year we can extrapolate - 200 x 365 days = 73,000 cars/day - which is a 30-fold increased risk over human drivers. Yet we have states that are giving this technology a free pass. Why is that?
How about Google/Uber/GM etc build their own little city with mock pedestrian robots until these cars are at least as good as human drivers? Because the promise is that these cars will be FAR safer than human drivers - right? Isn't that the line? They are really far off from that ideal at present. I do believe in the promise of the technology just not testing it out on real people without their consent until it passes certain safety milestones.
1
You've got lots of numbers there, but Statistics 101 will tell you the dangers of extrapolating from such a small sample size.
1
mock pedestrian robots
- I won't trust that - the robots will be very predictable - since they will be programmed.....humans are more random
1
Maybe we should require all pedestrians to have driverless Segways?
Anyone know why we don't have nearly as many coal miners as we used to? Robots! Automation is taking away the most dangerous, depressing, lowest-paid, most inhumane jobs. Taxi drivers and truck drivers are next; in Japan, they already operate trains that way.
Just wait until we have robot bosses, robot cops, robot doctors, etc.
2
The dumbness of all this--monumental. In my imagination, it could only happen in the Trump Era that everything comes first--especially the opportunity for "making money," before serious, fundamental questions about the safety and security of human beings and other living creatures.
Would Trump himself go out by himself in a driverless car? Even armed with two guns? Or would he call for the automobile itself to be armed and fully trained to shoot first and ask questions later? Wonderful.
Truly dumb, and look at all the publicity we give to Musk and the others. Where IS this Society going, and with nobody responsible at the wheel?
1
I am personally extremely disturbed as well by the baseless fearmongering of many who have left comments here. This was unfortunate but one accident says nothing about the viability of current driverless car technologies. As others have said, there are currently about 37,000(!!!)+ deaths PER YEAR in the United States alone from crash-related fatalities, or an average of 101 per day, 94% of which are caused by human error.
The only hope we have of drastically reducing this huge tally of death is through driverless car technologies, which, though they are still developing, have in their limited time on the road been involved in far less fatal and non-fatal accidents per mile driven. No one is claiming that these technologies are flawless, and accidents, even fatal ones, are to be expected. But to damn a technology already proven to be safer than humans, that will save so many thousands of lives, because of fear generated by a single accident? That is what is truly frightening to me.
2
Self driving cars require self aware artificial intelligence in the real world or they become a severe hazard, worse than any persion.
2
Does the autonomous card in question get taken off the road and dismantled? (Much like the zoo animal that mauls an innocent bystander?)
What of the human 'safety' driver, was s/he distracted, asleep, drunk, intoxicated? Was any human intervention made to prevent the accident? Even after the collision occurred, was the human safety driver able to provide any comfort, call 911, or attempt to "flee the scene"? Witnesses? Who call 911 the human driver or the autonomous car?
Why would the autonomous car be dismantled? You are speculating too much when we don't know the details.
I tried to explain Mileena with the following example, typically wildlife that wound or kill human are often euthanized. Tiger mauls zoo visitor is put down. Dog attacks kids, likewise. Even some wildlife straying too far into the urban landscape is sometimes killed for the threat they pose.
Cars driven by humans are the #1 non-disease-related cause of death in the world. Every year, over a million people are killed by cars driven by humans. If a human had been behind the wheel, would the outcome have been different? Sometimes if you step in front of a car in the darkness of night, no human or robot driver is going to be able to save your life. Presently, one out of every 80 deaths in America is caused by a car driven by a human, but it's the things that are least likely to kill you that are the most scary, and it's their rareness that helps make them scary: terrorism, mass shootings, plane crashes, self-driving cars...
2
Perp walk the board of directors.
robots are taking over our lives. From customer service bots that are totally useless, to auto assembly now to self-driving cars.This is all about putting people who drive for a living out of work. The companies promoting this concept are driven solely by the bottom line.
4
Said the horse carriage drivers in the 1900s: “this is a plot by the car companies to put my horse out of work!”
1
So, can we assume crash data from the car will be available to authorities and experts to analyze and determine fault, if any? My understanding is the technology behind self-driving cars is proprietary and current law has no provisions mandating full access to their data and procedures.
It's possible an unwary civilian crossed inappropriately and recklessly in front of the car, and witnesses might corroborate the circumstances. I also wonder if these cars have dashboard cams or other visual recording devices to help settle legal issues. At the least, it seems these should be mandatory and footage automatically released to authorities and plaintiffs.
It's really impossible to draw broader conclusions from one fatality. Tens of thousands already die annually on our roadways. Comparative 'body counts', while grim, may be needed to settle the relative safety issue. Meanwhile, the states or feds should probably take a stronger role in vetting this promising technology, and leave less experimentation to be done on our streets.
The companies behind self-driving vehicles will probably get rich (or richer) once they are fully deployed. They and their shareholders can afford to take it slow and be fully transparent with their safety and crash data if that's what's needed to keep the public safe.
1
I understand from a public relaions point of view why Uber suspended testing of its self-driving car in light of this latest accident but for how long is this kind of overreaction going to continue? Does the public really believe that if self-driving cars worked properly they would never be involved in accidents? That's absurd considering how many careless, reckless and deliberately destructive humans there are out there on the road. Seems to be that right now the public is as prejudiced against self-driving cars as men used to be against female drivers in the early part of the 20th century. Get over it.
142
I read recently that the Google car had been involved in 9 (? I think it was) accidents and in every single one of them investigators had attributed the blame to the driver of the other vehicle.
Get these humans off the road now!!
6
I don't get it either. The person was crossing the street illegally. I guess the argument can be made that humans are better at handling unexpected and illegal actions by other people. That humans are better at improvisation that machines are.
5
A driverless care has as much intelligence as your imagination gives it. It has as much awareness of what it is a part of as does a light switch.
How about some company develop human-looking Androids that can go to work in driverless cars, cross cross-walks, and get killed so that human beings no longer have to leave their homes?
Has the world gone bloody crazy!??!
Sorry someone was killed. Nothing below is meant to be insensitive.
However, the solution is pretty obvious. Had both the pedestrian AND the safety driver been properly armed - something with STOPPING power - this would not have happened.
Uber needs to include top-grade, military style weaponry and pedestrians MUST NOT leave home without (at least) one.
Why?
I feel horrible for the pedestrian...but this event is the perfect metaphor. Someone out doing that most analog of activities - walking - getting killed by technology. We should be taking cars off the road, not attempting to make it more convenient to get on the road.
Decided to look up a few things. In 2016 rates of vehicle fatalities rose by 6%. The greatest rise in decades. It was primarily related to distractions. Pedestrian fatalities increased 11% to 6,000. 72% were not in crosswalks.
While this represents a tragedy, it is clear that distracted walking is a problem of significant significance.
1
as a driver the rule was simple: never ever touch a person with the car. Until tthe software get much better, pedestrians beware. And of course, midtown Manhattan is the ultimate test, Push, push, push if you can get away with it, it will be done by cars and people
1
When I was a kid, my mother always told me to make eye contact with the driver of a car or other vehicle before crossing in front of them, etc. That way, you knew that you had been seen.
Along with eye contact, there are many other cues that human drivers give off that allow others to infer their intentions. These cues form the basis of so-called defensive driving. (As mom said when I protested that I knew what I was doing, “It’s not you I’m worried about, it’s those other guys!”) But automata give no tacit signals — only programmed ones.
Surely all of this will be worked out over time, but the two-way nature of communication between and among human drivers (or drivers and pedestrians) is a factor that I’ve not heard discussed in the conversation about driverless cars.
My mom was right about so many things, maybe we can learn something from her here.
1
Autonomous cars cannot beat the physics. Even though an autonomous car reacts in milliseconds and can apply breaks in milliseconds once detecting an object, the car will still have a stopping distance dictated by physics. So if someone jumps in front of a moving car, he/she has a better probability of surviving than if a human was driving the car, but naturally, the car will take its time to stop.
2
These vehicles cannot drive defensively and won't ever match the human brain's ability to do so without some unprecedented level of artificial intelligence.
And what's the end game here, switching all personal transport to a an integrated network of autonomous vehicles that are constantly pinging each other to avoid collisions? Well that's fine, until the first cyber attack.
2
While I'm naturally inclined to blame flawed new technology when something like this happens, it is entirely possible that the pedestrian darted in front of the car so quickly that even a human driver would be likely to react too late.
Apart from the legal liability issues, what we find so unsettling about technology failures is the absence of any free-willed moral agent to bear responsibility for a mishap, an injury, or a death.
Does anyone know how many pedestrians were injured or killed by 'drivered' vehicles during the past 24 hours?
Dollars to donuts it's a multiple of 1.
1
Uber is a corporation, hence a person. Put it in jail!
4
Being able to react quickly to the unexpected, irrational behavior of others is one of the hallmarks of a good driver. The reality that both the Luddites and the tech lovers ignore is that AI will most likely be better than human drivers in some ways, but completely inferior in other ways.
1
This is why these types of vehicles should be illegal. Manslaughter has been committed and who will pay for the crime will be the question with these type of vehicle control systems. A bad sensor or piece of software for a human life. You have a long line of people responsible for this death from the engineer that designed it to the officials that allowed this to the driver. The public is the guinea pigs for their trial and this shows the disregard for human life shown here by every person or company involved. Money for murder? Occasional deaths for progress? Progress this is not.
1
So she was jaywalking, and Uber is now suffering the consequences. I understand it is a tragedy that someone died. It’s just unfortunate that it is now Uber in the limelight for someone’s stupid fatal mistake.
...and there we have it folks, the indignant outrage on Uber's behalf, that beautiful siren of a tech firm being maligned by the thoughtlessness of a real live human. How far has humanity sunk? Pretty low to only be concerned with the outcome for a company as compared to a human life.
5
Having been cut off by some moron coming within a foot of my front fender at 75 MPH on my way to work this morning (who then gave me the finger when I honked my horn), I have reached the point of eagerly awaiting the arrival of autonomous vehicles. I think people need to realize that autonomous vehicles can't prevent accidents entirely. We don't yet know exactly what happened here - if the car is driving at 50 MPH and someone literally jumps out in front of it while giving it no time to react, that person will be struck. What happened is sad but until the facts are known fault can't be assessed. But if the autonomous vehicle reacts as quick as, or faster, than a human operator, then it is better. The reality, however, is that there will always be situations where mere movement will increase risk. What concerns me is the ability of these vehicles to identify certain situations to be more cautious like a human does - a street where little children play, a street that ices up frequently, etc. But if the jerks like the guy I encountered this morning are removed from the roads, it's hard to see this not eventually being better assuming the glitches are properly worked out (and again we don't know what caused this accident).
195
Human error has caused all manner of tragedy in the world of transportation: from plane crashes to train derailments to your routine traffic accident. Over 37,000 deaths in the US in 2016 alone. But one commentator actually wrote that he or she would rather be killed by "human stupidity" than a robot car. And there you have it: people find comfort in the familiar and terror in the strange, even if the familiar is a drunk driver.
6
It's funny that you mention human drivers cutting each other off, because literally the only time I have ever seen a self-driving car (a Ford self delivery vehicle), it cut off about 20 human drivers.
The self-driving car was trying to turn right onto a highway. However, because these machines are currently incapable of predicting traffic patterns based on past experience (which humans can do), it did not move into the right lane soon enough. Thus, it ended up into the second from the right lane at a point in which there were already about 20 stationary cars in the far right turn lane. So what does the self driving car do? It slowly inches forward until it is next to the first car in the right turn lane, then it attempts to merge in front of the 20 cars that were already waiting in line. Unfortunately, the second person in line let it in. I really wish all 20 cars had acted like typical Miami drivers and refused to let the inconsiderate self-driving vehicle in.
3
I'm so sorry that your already-stressful commute has become even more unpleasant by the rude behavior by inconsiderate drivers.
Really, I am.
But machines will not make this better. Not for about 50 years. We just do not have the algorithms and processing power to give machines the power of life or death over humans. We DO NOT. Eventually, I think we will. However, do you want your neighborhood to be a Beta Test platform for these companies who claim to have the answer to "artificial intelligence"? As a 25-year veteran in computer science, I can say with some authority that there is NO WAY that a computer can replace the human brain for situational awareness, threat assessment, and reaction time. NO WAY. Maybe in 50 years, yes. But now, NO WAY.
4
" ...the woman, who was crossing the street outside of a crosswalk, ..."
And yet, there are still the Luddites who will have this prove the car, or Uber, or Arizona's laws, are to blame.
It’s time for these companies to stop experimenting on us. It’s criminal. Uber should be put out of business.
1
There were an estimated 40,100 motor vehicle deaths in the U.S. last year.
All caused by human drivers.
1
Photo caption: "... a night earlier"
I hope that future news articles wlll divulge the temporal component of the news more gracefully. When did this happen, and how many paragraphs down should that information be?
How many pedestrians were killed by human drivers yesterday?
The issue, especially for this family in Arizona planning a burial, is why, if self-driving cars are still in a testing mode, is every Arizonian potentially an unwitting participant in a state-wide autonomous-driven car experiment.
And why is this happening without any semblance of regulation?
Is it not possible for these cars to be tested via testing centers built by automakers and the corporations that use these cars?
Or, is it just cheaper and more cost-efficient to test them in the real world with real consequences, you know...like death?
While data suggests self-driven cars are safer than the average driver, they have not proven safer than the most experienced drivers. In terms of accidents, the most experienced human drivers are still better at this than self-driven cars.
What's more, the data for human drivers encompass all terrain, all types of weather, and every single state in America.
According to Scientific American, the data for self-driven cars come from Western states where the weather is good, and where the vast amount of data is taken from self-driving cars on multi-lane, unidirectional highways, where the task is to drive straight and stay in one's lane.
The point is that there is much more to learn.
Are self-driving trucks as safe as self-driving cars?
Are certain brands of self-driving cars less safe than others?
And should testing be continued in situations where human lives are at stake, and where these cars are not regulated?
2
Gee...nobody could seen the potential for that happening.....
1
We are all now guinea pigs.
1
Self-driving cars could be mediocre drivers and still kill fewer people than human drivers. And self-driving tech is already better than mediocre.
So bottom line: You're a safer guinea pig today with self-driving cars on the road, and you'll be safer still in the days ahead.
1
Robots might be useful tools to help drivers be better drivers, but no drivers at all? Tech industry hubris at its worst.
1
This won't stop automated vehicles, there is too much money flowing into them, and too many big players have bet too big on them.
This does present an opportunity to slow things down and ask some important questions. When automated vehicles are better at figuring out pedestrians and bicyclists, what are they going to be programmed to do about protecting them? It seems that the industry has been defaulting to protecting the vehicle occupants, even at the expense of the far more vulnerable pedestrians and bicyclists. I even one article proposing automated, utility pole-mounted "flying airbags" that would detect the potential for a pedestrian crash and would swoop down to protect the pedestrian. OR, why not put the airbags inside the metal vehicle (I know, they are already, right!) and have the vehicle automatically protect the pedestrian.
And does anyone know the race of the pedestrian killed? Is Uber using lighter skinned subjects to design and test these vehicles and their sensors?
Do we really need self driving (?) cars? Really? Is saving Uber corporation money really that important? Is expecting the user of automobile transportation to drive their car too much to ask?
Just because new technology makes some things possible doesn't mean it makes them sensible.
As for those people who are blaming the victim because she was not in the crosswalk: Jaywalking should not be punishable by death.
7
I think that jaywalkers are hit and killed by human-driven cars all the time. Death toll in traffic accidents is about 100/day nationwide.
2
Human drivers are killing hundred people every day in the US. Jaywalkers are often "punished" by death. Autonomous cars can save lives. I don't know what happened in this case but probably the poor woman walked in front of the car and there was not enough distance for the car to stop.
1
The phrase "crossing the street outside of a crosswalk" is almost meaningless. Did she dart out from between two parked cars immediately in front of the Uber car? Or was she walking slowly in a predicable manner in an otherwise clear area? I'm sure the video is captured somewhere, so we can answer this important question: Did the driverless car commit murder, or did the woman commit suicide-by-driverless-car? Or was it a some other combination of commonplace, typical, or rare events?
3
"The fatal crash will most likely raise questions about regulations for self-driving cars." Really?? These questions should have been raised addressed long before any such vehicle went on the road. I have found the relative lack of discussion about regulation and liability in these instances, which were predictable, bizarre in the self driving car dialogue. Maybe this will wake people up.
2
Before these cars came along, I never heard a single human being say:
"You know -- I think we really need driverless cars."
No one asked for them. No one wants them. Why in the world is this project going forward?
Especially with trucks -- truck driving is one of the last remaining jobs for men without college degrees that pays well. Why are we working to eliminate it??
~
3
For the same reason we eliminated tens of millions of farm workers by introducing tractors, harvesters, combines etc. This "project" goes forward if it makes the world more productive.
Is the Arizona governor going to explain to the dead woman's family his push for lax rules on driverless cars in Arizona. Money over safety - money over people. I guess he feels a few civilians lives are worth the money brought into the state by these tech companies. I bet the dead woman's family doesn't feel that way.
3
Self driving cars will be the death of us.
1
No, people will. Of the estimated 40,100 motor vehicle deaths in the U.S. last year, exactly zero were caused by self-driving cars. There's a risk in everything. Perspective and context are key.
2
What is disappointing here is that up till now, self-driving cars have had a relatively clean track record. Now if this is uber's fault or not, there is going to be a lot of negative press. The fact that Uber is the one who messed up instead of Google is probably going to be worse, given the fact that Uber has been in the news quite often lately and almost never for the right reasons.
1
Someday, self-driving cars may outnumber human-driven cars. But for now, people have to be sold on the concept. And part of the sales pitch for autonomous cars has been that they're safer than human-driven cars. For everybody but technology geeks, that's a leap of faith. And if that's the pitch, then OF COURSE every accident involving a self-driving car and the death of a person is going to get a lot of attention. Perhaps disproportionately so, but that's just how it is.
You can cite all the statistics in the world, about how these vehicles cause fewer fatalities per mile than human-driven vehicles, but the burden of proof right now is on the proponents of autonomous vehicles. So with each accident - and there will be more - there's going to be a backlash. That may have more to do with human emotion than with logic, but that's how it is, Mr. Spock. The logical response is to take human emotion, no matter how irrational it might be, into account and to do more off-road testing before rushing these vehicles onto the streets. If it's that good an idea, don't ruin it by trying to do much too soon.
3
You can't say there will be more accidents involving self-driven cars and ingnore the number of accidents by human-driven cars, Mr. Spock.
1
It was inevitable that someone was going to die (after all, there are 10+ pedestrian deaths every day). The difference here is that this was likely the most instrumented pedestrian death in history, and we'll be able to understand why it hit her. If Uber can figure out why it hit the woman and whether this was an oversight, hardware error, or perhaps unavoidable (did the pedestrian walk out between cars) we can move forward. From what we know from the article it's impossible to tell whether the death would have happened anyway had an attentive human been driving, but at least one other commenter has said that this intersection has a reputation for fatalities that implies that it needs a redesign.
The positive end result of autonomous vehicles should be fewer deaths and more opportunities for the disabled to manage on their own. The downside will be the elimination of some jobs and unfortunate injuries and fatalities on the way--We all enjoy, for example, a safe air transit system. Had we shut down all airplanes on the first fatality (or the first non-participant fatality) we wouldn't be flying at all.
3
I don't understand the rush and technologically deterministic thinking that driverless cars are the answer. Ithink this technology will work best in not replacing humans, but augmenting them - working with drivers to make driving safer. Many of us have new cars with all types of autonomous driving features like collision avoidance, lane departure, cameras and more. Speaking from my own experience, it is fantastic, and I have to imagine it could be proven to be effective in avoiding accidents, but is it ready to replace me or any driver?
Most importantly condolences to the family. Such a senseless death.
So, an inevitable worst case scenario, as dreaded as it was inevitable, has now happened. Politicians will demand a more conservative experimental process. The victim's family will sue, and win.
Yet just last week there was a similar moment -- and the response seems swept completely off the table of public discourse, as if it never happened at all!
Just days after a school in California follows the words of the US president, and stations an armed policeman in a school -- the gun accidentally goes off. It's exactly as the conservative (in the original sense of the word, eg, be cautious) nay-sayers warned. So why the crickets?
We all can agree that bad robots are scary -- but are they literally a million times scarier than anything ever??
1
40,000 people die every year on the road. If driverless technology can get that 100 we won't have 39,900 thank yous. We have 100 lawsuits.
We should move toward fully autonomous vehicles but the emotional fear of 'what if I'm in the 100' is going to delay this for years even after the technology is ready.
39,900 funerals because you don't trust the machines
13
Exactly. Last year over 5,300 pedestrians were killed by cars on streets. Why doesn't the Times have a story for each one of them. Are the drivers responsible being taken off the road?
The only argument for driverless cars is that they would reduce the number of fatalities on the road. That would be a nearly impossible hypothesis to test, and until nearly everyone can afford to own and operate a driverless car, I don't see the number of fatalities falling.
Wait until we have driverless drones and aircraft.
That is far from the only argument, but it is a good one. Being able to operate a car without a driver is game-changing. You don't need to stop at stop signs, for example, because driverless cars can talk to each other and settle on a proper speed for convergence. Your car can pick up your groceries at wal-mart, pick up your kids while you are still at work, driver uber for you while you aren't using it. It is, by far, the most expensive non-housing asset any of us own and we only use it for very few hours out of the day. Airlines operate their planes 14-17 hours a day. If you can use your vehicle while you aren't actually in it, the value of it actually goes up substantially.
Agree. Driverless cars are not only about reaction times and guaranteed attention, but also about anticipating potentially dangerous situations which is a much harder thing to machine learn (young child cycling on sidewalk, person looking at phone or with headphones on crossing the street etc.). Professional drivers are especially skilled at this.
2
Very few of us are professional drivers. Watch any video on youtube that has subject line "autopilot saves" and ask yourself, honestly, 'could I have reacted faster than autopilot'? Some of the time autopilot senses the crash before it happens because it reads datapoints practically impossible for humans to learn. Plus, the AI that handles autopilot is cloud based, so each car is immediately privy to something another autopilot has 'learned'. There is no similar trick for humans, not in near real time. Those videos changed my entire perspective (plus, a friend has a model S that I drive occasionally), you can hear the drivers say out loud "I would never have seen that!" right after the event. It isn't perfect, but neither are we. Keep in mind, we are a general purpose computer. We drive, but we also work, satisfy our spouses, raise kids, have existential discussions about the meaning of life, drink, read Kant, learn about how magnetrons work, etc. A self-driving car only ever drives. A specialized computer is always better than a general purpose one that that specialized task.
"The state has largely taken an accommodating approach, promising that it would help keep the driverless car industry free from regulation."
Those pesky regulations! Not only can the victim's family sue Uber, they can also sue the state of Arizona.
1
As much as people want to embrace technology there are some advances that are just wrong any way you look at it. Society, with the help of technology, has and will continue to move in the direction of take all responsibility off the hands of individuals.
1
The Phoenix area is just a dangerous place for pedestrians. The intersections are poorly lit, if lit at all. Everyone drives like a maniac. The speed limit is 45 m.p.h. on what would normally be residential roads with bike lanes, most people drive 50-55 m.p.h. Everyday I ride my bike to work thinking this could be the last day. Seems everyone is blaming the self-driving cars, I actually think they are the cautious ones. Considering the prevalence of self-driving cars around here and how dangerous it is for pedestrians this tragedy was inevitable.
2
I'm not sure the argument that autonomous driving should be adopted because it will mean fewer deaths.
Suppose there are 100 people killed on the road today. Suppose you could eliminate that but instead you would kill 50 people randomly. Would you really think that's better? The number of lives is not the only determinant of what is better and what is worse.
6
Nationwide on average there are 100 people killed on the road today, tomorrow, every day.
Wait for Google. Procrastination, delayed gratification is good. Technology should be a 200% ready .. before any test run...
2
She “was outside of" the crosswalk ! Horrors! So now we have to stay within the lines to stay alive?
4
The law protects those inside the crosswalk.
You can look past even Uber for this incident to the officials who okayed it being let out onto the streets when they obviously know little about the actual science and any readiness. The wide eyed ambitions for Future World seem to have no problem with the lives it puts in danger to accomplish its vision before its ready for prime time. It stands to reason that if its killing people, you haven't done the quality control no matter how many excuses and explanations you come up with. I for one, don't want it allowed on my streets in the level of finished product it is. Its little more than another way to pamper ourselves when there are so many more priorities that should come first. Its just arrogance and their refusal to question their judgement. Get it outta here. Bring it back in another hundred years when you've figured it out.
1
Come on now, this is how it has always been. A lot of people have lost their lives mass testing piloted vehicles, a lot of planes have dropped out of the sky full of people when they were being long term tested. When cars first hit the road, people were killed left and right, mainly pedestrians. The auto industry went full bore advertising against 'jaywalkers' (jay used to be a fighting word insult) so much so that they word made it into law. Now, one person is hit and it is 'wide eyed ambitions etc etc'.
So self driving cars are just so people don't have to stop staring at their little screens between point A and point B. Claims that they will reduce accidents are rather ironic since car accident rates have *exploded* since everyone became addicted to the stupid little screen.
People have a lot of faith in machines being better than humans but who is there to judge that? Humans or machines? NYT recently had an interesting article on AI "explaining itself."
This whole self-driving scheme is going to benefit one group -- the lawyers!
People cross the street outside cross walk and against the light in downtown Chicago all day every day. Amazing there aren't more accidents but there aren't - humans aren't all bad. I wonder how a driverless car would respond to these conditions? It's obvious driverless cars are not ready yet, let's slow down.
2
I can see what is going to happen here.
People are going to call for laws for car safety. Of course, that's ridiculous because we all know, cars don't cause deaths but rather people do and cars are just innocent bystanders. In fact, there is a remote previously unknown constitutional provision protecting cars and giving cars rights. In fact, the real answer is to give pedestrians and bicyclists their own set of driverless cars rather than mere wheels and legs, and maybe some armor and air bags too. The street signs and sidewalks deserve them too
Based on this logic all cars with drivers should immediately be banned from all cities as pedestrians are killed everyday.
1
That's one HUGE lawsuit.
You may say that it's only one fatality in millions of miles of testing, so still a much lower fatality rate than human drivers, but that's missing the point.
The bar is higher for autonomous vehicles because they can perform better.
And one human life is too many.
And of course, to borrow a much used political phrase, the optics are terrible.
A thorough investigation as to what went wrong is in order.
The victim was crossing outside of a crosswalk, but that shouldn't matter. The vehicle is supposed to have realtime cameras covering a 360-degree view from the vehicle, AND supposed to have a much shorter reaction time than a human.
It may be that the victim stepped right into the path of the vehicle with very little time to spare, well under the vehicle's stopping distance, which depends on how fast the vehicle was moving, and road conditions.
In other words, there are some scenarios in which even the autonomous vehicle cannot be expected to react in time.
Nevertheless, the bar is higher, and to not do a full investigation and correct anything in the vehicle's software or hardware that may have contributed would be gross negligence at the very least.
2
"And one human life is too many." I agree, but right now there are 30000-40000 car deaths per year in the U.S. If self-driving cars could cut that number down by 80%, it would be foolish to not deploy them until that number is 100%.
2
I guess this incident will protect the jobs of Uber drivers a little while longer. Uber should take their show on the road in other countries like Russia for trail runs. They are not ready for prime time in America. I wonder which politicians were paid off in Arizona that allowed this to happen? Next up, a self-driving tractor trailers kills dozens.
1
PEOPLE NEED TO LEARN,WHEN THEY WALK, THEY CANNOT RELY CARS OR DRIVERS THAT THEY CAN SEE THEM. EVERYDAY I SEEN PEOPLE CROSS THE STREET WITHOUT LOOKING FOR CARS. THEY THINK OTHER CARS WILL SEE THEM.
3
This is truly a tragic outcome.
It's hard to believe that this outcome is a surprise to anyone.
Whatever calculations the scientists that made to convince themselves that a self-driving car would be safe, and presentations they put together to sell the idea, don't matter now.
Bad science is dangerous.
This woman's tragic death is a perfect example.
2
To those who think autonomous vehicles are a bad idea: no different than a rocket ship. A basically self-driving vehicle with a human overseer. Computer-driven and a better success ratio than that of human-driven vehicles.
It’s inevitable because it’s a good idea, and when all cars are computer-driven there’ll be far fewer accidents. I’d just like to see all computer-driven vehicles be electric. We can clean up our air in tandem with making transportation safer and more convenient. And not everyone will need to own a car anymore! Just call for one when you need it.
Most of the comments here are people acting as if they know 100% that the self-driving car was at fault. This is truly sad, but we need more information to determine what really happened.
2
Or that the accident wouldn't have happened if the car was piloted.
Some thoughts: 1/ My condolences to the victim's family 2/ At which time is the person in the car supposed to intervene? One can't test the self-driving technology if at the slightest hint of danger there's a manual override. Aren't we fooling ourselves with the supervising human? 3/ Uber has been in the news before with self-driving car incidents. Are they taking unnecessary risks to win the race? 4/ Is anyone setting standards for this technology? What performance is acceptable?
3
I walked away from this story, and came back to comment. As with commenters here, the hubris of Uber and the other companies and AZ, makes me seethe. Because someone DIED in an experiment! Some apologists compare this to the first decades of flight and airplane design. But they forget that FLIGHT was worth the risk because of the counties, states, countries and continents and islands that it helped link. FLIGHT was went through two formative wars. FLIGHT came after combustion engines had been tested on cars. FLIGHT's metallurgy and materials have been honed over a trillion man hours. FLIGHT's importance and expedience, are nowhere in the realm of being able to read a newspaper between two car destinations.
As a cyclist, the degree of nuances in communication and body language between myself and drivers of cars and trucks is something that a machine will never comprehend. Eg, in a two lane road, with the left queue turning left, what does it mean when I slow down, skim the parked cars, and drop my right arm and shoulder? Answer: that the cars in the right lane, can drive past the turning lane quickly and decisively with the extra 4 feet that I yielded. A HUMAN knows that I have become less assertive and that I can stop if the door of a parked car opens ahead of me. A HUMAN knows what getting "doored" at speed with her driving behind me would result in my death.
The state of Arizona as much as Uber and its driver killed this unfortunate pedestrian.
3
As a cyclist, I have almost been hit by real drivers who were actually aiming for me. Please, let us take the halo off the human race for a minute. No amount of 'nuance' that a human can perceive convinces me that a computer isn't normally a better pilot than a person. It isn't that people are awful, but we are emotional, dis-tractable to the extreme, and extra-ordinarily egotistical. Those three things don't exist with computers.
1
I should show yo want riding the bike path on Central Park West looks like at rush hour, or some of the roads here in New Jersey when people are commuting home. Know your traffic, know your roads, pay attention to engine sounds, the time of day, your visibility, I could go on for paragraphs. One day ago, I almost got hit by a 4x4, but I was listening for traffic when he shot three feet into the intersection. Alternately, know when to get off the road. 6AM? Riding easterly? 5PM Riding westerly? Then wait till high sun or get off the road!
You are vastly underestimating the impact that driverless cars can have on society. It's not just the convenience of being able to read during your commute. Over 1 million people are killed in motor vehicle accidents worldwide every year; that number has the potential to drop to virtually zero. Vehicle emissions are one of the top sources of man-made air pollution, autonomous vehicles can cut the number of cars on the road in half, easily. Autonomous vehicles can make the US freight logistics network incredibly fast and efficient by removing human truck drivers from the equation, that would lower the cost of pretty much everything you buy in a store.
It's horrible that a pedestrian died, and Uber should absolutely be held accountable. But to suggest autonomous vehicles aren't a worthwhile endeavor is misguided; it's not crazy to compare the societal impact of planes with the societal impact of driverless cars.
"Autonomous cars are expected to ultimately be safer than human drivers, because they don’t get distracted and always observe traffic laws. However, researchers working on the technology have struggled with how to teach the autonomous systems to adjust for unpredictable human driving or behavior."
-------
The greater part of learning how to drive safely is understanding how to operate the vehicle defensively and to be prepared for human unpredictability. How can this be programmed into a self-driving machine?
2
Two things, simply because they are struggling doesn't mean it can't be cracked. Defensive driving is the default mode for a computer. Defensive driving is just driving reasonably, when we complain people aren't driving 'defensively', it is normally because they are being reckless. Computers are only reckless by flaw, not be design, people aren't that binary. Show me someone who drives defensively, with no mistakes, in a percentage in the high 90s. You can't, but I can find a computer that will.
I sent this letter to the editor last week, now maybe the warning I expressed will gain traction:
It is understandable that the numerous entities developing and testing their autonomous vehicles (AV) vying for competitive advantage - in the absence demanding government requirements, will avoid the most challenging road and weather conditions. These are dealt with now by the driver's experience and ingenuity, where he or she draw on other similar events to improvise a solution.
Decrease in accidents for those who reach their twenties is not only hormonal, but the driver has experienced snow storms, broken traffic lights or a detour on a road that no longer meets current standards. The experienced driver also knows when it is safe to move slowly through a multi way stop sign - as the vast majority do, or when conditions require a full stop. At such intersections eye contact or its equivalent is too subtle for even the best algorithm. Obsolete signage only rarely followed can not coexist with a logic based autonomous network.
A mix of AV with human override could work. Driving is easily synthesized; safe, efficient driving in all conditions is a monumental challenge.
2
"...Autonomous cars are expected to ultimately be safer than human drivers, because they don’t get distracted and always observe traffic laws. However, researchers working on the technology have struggled with how to teach the autonomous systems to adjust for unpredictable human driving or behavior..."
Self driving vehicles may someday be able to have awareness of what they are doing but for now, they don't. A satisfactory algorithm must satisfy no case, one case, and the unlimited case and to do so in a finite number of steps. Algorithms have no ability to deal with uncertainty. These smart programs compare what they can detect and see what their database has and it if fits it does something that it has been programmed to do in response but what to do with incomplete information? They will make a dumb guess or do nothing. Some programs are written to try to accumulate knowledge from trial and error, but there is little executive function managing the process. For now these systems belong in research labs, not out in the real world where people live.
This effort by tech companies to corner the market on self operating vehicles is not intelligent. One of the safe guards in automated systems development are experts who can examine the latest great idea by eager people to see if they actually will work before any time and effort has been devoted, but in the case of safe driving systems it has been full ahead without any serious questioning of the rationality of the effort.
1
As so many have noted, the pedestrian may have entered the roadway such that no operator or machine would have sufficient stopping distance.
However, the simple fact that the pedestrian was outside a crosswalk (or on a country or suburban road with no sidewalk, or on a bicycle going the same direction as the car, or had tripped, hit her head, and was lying in the road motionless) is absolutely no excuse. The car, like any human being operating a car, should be expected to pay attention, observe, see, stop for or take all actions necessary and possible to avoid striking any person, car, bike, motorcycle, truck, or object in the roadway, illegally or not.
2
"Should be expected to pay attention, observe, see, stop , , ," And yet there are, on average, over 100 traffic deaths every day. Humans don't always pay attention, do they?
Several comments here about how many people human drivers kill.
So here's some numbers: Uber has 43 autonomous cars on the road. 1 just killed a pedestrian. That's a 2.3% kill rate. If we humans were this bad we would kill about 2.5 million (that's MILLION) people every year.
And by the way none of those would be people who opted into the trial that killed them.
1
Check your numbers. Accuracy indicates miles driven should be included? And counting all self-drive cars if comparing to all human-driven cars? Driving is dangerous, and don't we all opt in whenever we drive or ride?
2
Anyone ever see the Terminator movies? Self driving cars is the dumbest thing ever.
1
What geniuses let these vehicles drive autonomously without accounting for pedestrian unpredictability? I'd like to think that only Uber is this incompetent and irresponsible, but sadly all of the companies pursuing this technology seem to have ignored the fundamental problems of this technology in favor of blind optimism and profit.
I'm very surprised at how dumb these vehicles are. I have no confidence in the people creating these vehicles. This is indicative of everything in tech these days. People in tech are getting rich by eliminating their conscience and avoiding responsibility. This is truly a nation in perhaps irrecoverable decline. Life, democracy, ethics, morality, and everything else good has no value to these people.
Uber is definitely among the worst of all tech companies. I hope they are sued out of existence. The world doesn't need Uber.
1
Autonomous electric vehicles will prove to save lives despite today’s tragedy
First guns that kill, now cars that kill... good job, Trump!
1
These accidents should not have happened. They are the result of inexperienced and irresponsible people exposing the public to potential danger from an insufficiently tested technology. A more prudent approach would be to first try autonomous vehicles in less demanding situations, for example long distance trucks traversing highways in the mid-west where there is little traffic and few obstacles or pedestrians. We would be well served to have management of both Uber and the Arizona government turned over to more competent people.
The tech geniuses haven’t yet figured out how to cope with all the human foibles of pedestrians and the drivers controlling their own cars. And it’s questionable if they ever will. Until then, expect more accidents in a world where autonomous vehicles are programmed to observe all the traffic rules, while most humans do just the opposite.
1
So now cars are people, too? The word "self" implies so. This is beyond stupid. All of it. DEADLY stupid.
1
I'm sorry, but I really don't "get" this. Why drive at all? Just have lots of public vehicles with computer-assisted driving (like positive train control!!!!!!!)
There are too many private vehicles and Uber is making life unbearable for everyone. It's a horrible company, vicious to its employees, polluting and crowding cities--enough already!
3
Having "positive train control" on street vehicle would result in carnage. Just look at how good "Positive Train Control" worked last Christmas in the state of Washington.
"Why drive at all? Just have lots of public vehicles"
Sorry, Susan, not everyone lives in Brooklyn.
Sorry, but who thought self-driving cars were a good idea?
1
“Our hearts go out to the victim’s family. We are fully cooperating with local authorities in their investigation of this incident”
Typical Uber cut-and-paste response whenever there’s a newsworthy victim. These guys have to be the most blessed people in high-tech-startup, history - whether it be rapes, mass shootings, terrorism, or other unusual mayhem.
WITH a safety driver aboard. This is much to important to hire using White House standards.
1
Self-driving cars may become an excuse for people to drive drunk. Better to have cars whose artificial intelligence can back up a human driver than the human drivers serving as the backup. Our efforts might better be directed to improving the faulty mass transportation methods that already have the advantage of being on rails.
There was a huge outcry when the automobile began to replace the horse and carriage. And the printing press was supposed to be then end of civilization.
I could go on.
1
Please do not compare self driving cars with the printing press.
The latter changed the course of human history.
You're being purposefully obtuse.
Don't be that guy.
1
You are right Ian. There is no comparison between the printing press and self-driving cars.
My intent was to point out the hysteria surrounding both.
My obtuseness, I can assure you was not purposefully, but due to my lack of clarity.
If only guns were treated as equally as Uber.
1
The only problem with your statement is that Guns are not self shooting. You still need a person to pull the trigger.
Huh? You mean like shooting rifles without anyone behind the trigger?
Presently, Volvo automobiles has the technology which can spot a moose and hit the brakes for you automatically to avoid a collision. If this kind of anti-collision technology is available to Volvo, I would hope something similar would be in a self-driving Uber car. Just another quaint point of view.
1
This is a tragedy.
What was the human safety driver doing?
On a cell phone?
What we need right now is not more technology in cars; it is ways to keep distracting technology OUT of cars!
2
I can't help but wonder just how far Arizona's policy of "free from regulation" is going to go? Police reports that claim no fault of the driverless car? Or less than thorough investigations of the accidents?
I've got no problem with driverless cars. I do however have a problem with the pace of testing on public roads. I literally could not care less about corporate profit. If corporations are feeling pressured to show profits, too bad. This is one of those times when profit should be removed from the decision making.
2
All of this time, money and effort should be going into public transportation.
8
Who wants this technology? I don't understand the big push for this -- at all.
10
It has huge potential for:
- elderly
- impaired
- businesses
- families
etc.
It is truly game changing, more than the smartphone.
The impact will be huge (with of course, like any major impact, there will be downsides, e.g. jobs lost)
Ill tell you who wants this. Big company's like cab and trucking company's so they can stop paying real people to drive there vehicles. This will maximize there profits.
I live in Pittsburgh, where Uber has tested autonomous cars for nearly 2 full years. I see 10-15 autonomous cars a day, easy. I have ridden in them. I can honestly say that these cars always* follow the law:
- Autonomous Uber cars are always* precisely in the middle of the lane (equidistant on both sides from the car to the painted line)
- do not swerve
- keep the appropriate distance from the car ahead of it
- obey the speed limits
- never cross the double yellow (like human drivers passing a car about to parallel park)
- always turn into the correct lane when turning at a light (90% of Americans do not do this, accordingly to DOT)
They are safer. Much safer than human drivers. The vehicular world will be incredibly safer with autonomous cars. No question.
To answer your question, "Who actually wants this?" >> intelligent, innovative people who want the roads to be more safe.
4
The article that should be open to comments is the companion article about Arizona's decision to not regulate autonomous cars or blood testing laboratories. The Arizona Republicans' head long rush to eliminate any rules and regulations what would bear down (an old AZ expression) on business is the over arching story that deserves coverage and comment. You could add the ability of individuals to tear up the desert for water consuming orchards that create deadly dust storms in the process. The incompetence of the Arizona government (legislature and executive) would embarrass a third world county.
9
Maybe if a human was actually driving, she would have been hit and killed anyway. What is astounding is that any governmental entity would allow driverless cars on the roadway at all before they are truly foolproof. We clearly are not at that point.
1
Remember this incident when thes driverless cars are promoted by the assurance that a human can take over the controls at anytime to prevent an accident.
What was the human safety driver doing? That person should be charged with recklessness. If this person's job was to monitor the car in case of any malfunction or incidents, well, what was that person doing? This death could have been prevented.
3
This is entirely expected and will increase. Those responsible will offer thoughts and prayers to the test subject (us). Developing embedded control systems like this is something I did for 40 years and the self driving car problem is close to insoluble. As we see programs to handle the unexpected are far beyond the state of the art. The unexpected includes cyclists, pedestrians, animals, motorcycles, tractor trailers out of place, hacking, snow, mud on the sensor, and changes to road since the maps were updated. Tremendous pressure is put on regulators to get self driving cars on the road and pervasive enough so they cannot be removed. Hopefully self-driving cars will become the Segways of the future before the sidewalks, streets and highways become too dangerous for any of us.
2
More and more rampant fact lacking speculation. The more self driving cars, the more interconnected data inputs which increases safety. All these self driving cars will be communicating with each other and will be able to use not only their own sensory inputs, but the sensory input of every other autonomous vehicle on the road. This is a clear case of bias. An article gets written when a self driving car has an incident, but you don't read about every time an autonomous vehicle successfully navigates an unusual circumstance which they do daily.
This Luddite fear mongering from people who don't understand what they're talking about needs to stop. Tens of thousands of people die every year from human caused traffic fatalities. Autonomous vehicles have killed maybe a handful ever in years of testing. It's just madness that people somehow think human drivers are better.
1
What are the safety stats on self-driving cars? They are actually less safe then human driven vehicles. How will the self-driving cars handle the scenarios enumerated above? A fact based response would answer those questions.
The three laws of robotics per Issac Asimov:
1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2) A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
And Sean's rule of thumb: Look both ways before crossing and never trust a robot or a human.
6
Reduce the number of vehicles on the roads immediately by increasing the gasoline tax by $2 per gallon. There, solved it for ya.
2
Spoken by someone that lives in a city and doesn't have to drive to work too another town.
1
It's sad that there has been a fatality, and this certainly won't be the only one from autonomous vehicles (AVs). But this will not stop AVs from becoming common over the next 5-10 years. Before people start throwing stones, remember that over 30K people a year die in cars driven by humans.
But if it can't recognize a human being in front of it, crosswalk or not, this technology is nowhere ready for prime-time...AKA...testing on a public street. Just another manifestation of shoving personal responsibilities to someone else and calling it progress.
1
HANK -- Uber Technologies have been driving autonomous vehicles in the city of Pittsburgh with ZERO fatalities and ZERO at fault accidents for TWO YEARS RUNNING.
(do your research)
The technology is here. What shouldnt be here: Jaywalkers.
Scaremongering about robots seems to be all the rage these days. This was a TEST car with software under development. There was a person at the wheel whose JOB was to step in and avoid this. This leads to the question not of whether self-driving cars are (or will ever be) safe, or safer than human drivers (spoiler alert: yes, they will be), but rather whether self-driving cars can safely be beta-tested on public roads, even with safeguards like a backup driver whose attention may drift. And yes, even in a future with almost-perfect self-driving vehicles accidents will happen, especially when unpredictable human actions like a jaywalking pedestrian are involved.
1
The tone of this article seems to be, "no road system can exist, half human and half robot". If that is the case, i vote to to remove the human drivers, who been doing a fantastically bad job for a very long time.
If we really cared about the poor quality of human driving, we would have never repealed prohibition. Not to mention road rage - I guess our transportation officials just look the other way, when a human driver blows a fuse.
2
You computer geeks rolled this out too early..
6
Hope the passenger is let off with only a warning.
1
This was an accident - and terrible death - waiting to happen. Self-driving cars should only be used in circumstamces where there are no other obstacles- humans or other cars - which therefore limit their use. The AI simply isn’t there for the decisions and reactions necessary in driving a car in traffic. Can such a car recognize an ambulance siren blocks away to get out of the way? That an upcoming stretch of road is icy ? children about to run across the street ?
5
I live in Pittsburgh, where Uber has tested autonomous cars for nearly 2 full years. I see 10-15 autonomous cars a day, easy. I have ridden in them. I can honestly say that these cars always* follow the law:
- Autonomous Uber cars are always* precisely in the middle of the lane (equidistant on both sides from the car to the painted line)
- do not swerve
- keep the appropriate distance from the car ahead of it
- obey the speed limits
- never cross the double yellow (like human drivers passing a car about to parallel park)
- always turn into the correct lane when turning at a light (90% of Americans do not do this, accordingly to DOT)
They are safer. Much safer than human drivers. It boggles my mind when people believe they are more reckless than humans. The vehicular world will be incredibly safer with autonomous cars. No question.
2
We all knew such an accident was inevitable. The only question was when it would occur.
Do you want you life subject to some code written by a California twenty-year old kid?
2
A driverless car means no driver, or no "paid employee". That's all this is about.
1
That's exactly it my friend.
If you read the NYT from 1901 you would see the same comments about elevators. Automated elevators replaced elevators with human operators.
2
One of the reasons the Phoenix area is inundated with self-driving car and truck tests is the state government's "anything goes (for business)" attitude, which led to relaxation of liability laws and a mad dash by car testers out of California, which maintained strict standards. #ProfitBeforePeople
3
Driverless cars are such a dumb idea-can we please forget this invention altogether and just call it a msitake? Bad drivers are more than enough to contend with.
3
WHAT?? Uber is playing fast and loose with the law, and totally innocent bystanders suffer the consequences? This is totally new behavior for this company!!!
But seriously, who thought it was a good idea to let a black market company operate a self-driving vehicle? Maybe we can get some legislation to force them to make their cars be more identifiable so we can all duck and cover when we see one headed our way.
1
How many pedestrians are killed each day by.....human drivers? Plenty. Yet we do not become hysterical about human errors and there are plenty of errors!
Driverless cars are the future. And I dare say, most accidents will be avoided.
Fear is ridiculous when you look at the history of human drivers!
That said....my sympathy to the family of the pedestrian. How very sad.
1
Try them in South Florida.... See if the "self-driving" car will be able to keep up with the worse driver I have ever encounter in my life! If it passes the peak hours test, maybe I could get in one of them...
It was only a matter of time.
1
I would not be surprised if the investigation finds that the woman who died was at fault and may have been killed no matter he operator of the vehicle.
1
How could anyone put a self-driving vehicle on our existing roadways and NOT expect a bad outcome? What nonsense!
1
I am surprised that autonomous driving is just like that allowed. What about liability? In a country where microwaves must come with a warning to not dry pats inside, where every hair drier must be tagged with a page long warning to not use it while taking a shower...
It is always a tragedy when someone dies, and my condolences to the woman's family.
But as a society, as we examine this technology, we need to to a good hard look at the cold facts of this situation, starting with:
"...when it struck the woman, who was crossing the street outside of a crosswalk."
My boss pulled out in front of a bike once. Never saw it coming due to some hedges and the fact she was looking for oncoming traffic on the one-way street. The poor Bike Guy flew across the hood, his bike wrecked; fortunately he was okay. My boss was absolutely distraught; felt just terrible. Cops were called, reports were taken, tickets were issued. Bike Guy shouted righteous outrage the whole time.
Bike Guy received a ticket for riding the wrong way on a one-way street and had to pay damages for denting the car. My boss received nothing.
Bike Guy had to obey the law too...
We have nowhere near the amount information needed to pass any kind of judgment on this situation at the moment. How close was the car? Was the lady intoxicated, sleepy, on the cell phone? Was she hit as she entered or exited the street, or was in the smack in the middle? Did the car speed up or try to slow down, or neither? Was this street a two lane street, four lane, divided, residential, etc.? What was the speed limit? Was the woman alone or with other pedestrians?
In short, who was negligent: the AI, or the woman?
This is only breaking news in the "tip of the iceberg" sort of way...
456
Driverless cars are a great idea, because computers never ever ever ever EVER malfunction.
5
The pedestrian, I believe, cannot be wrong here. AI is in charge of a lethal weapon, not only depriving one person of a job, but also depriving another of life.
4
True, but isn't there a principle that the pedestrian always has the right of way?
8
And if you really believe that self-driving cars are the future, I have some Tesla stock to sell you, along with a bridge--and I prefer bitcoin.
2
I live in Scottsdale, one town north of Tempe, and these vehicles are literally everywhere. All day and night cruising the streets without incident. Now we have an accident, or an event - because I am not sure if these vehicles can be considered capable of an accident, only events. Regardless, this human death is tragic, but all progress has a cost. My heart goes out to the family of the victim, and I hope that self-driving cars will now be "more" aware based on this event. The future is here, and this event demonstrates the price we pay for progress. Countless lives will be saved as these vehicles advance to common place around the globe. The sooner the better.
1
But just how, exactly, did *you* pay the price?
1
If a pedestrian dies as a result of a driver of a vehicle being drunk, was texting, or was simply inattentive or if a malfunction in the computer programing in a self-driving car occurred, the individual is still dead, even if he or she had the right of way.
One time when I was on my bike, when I was a teenage, I had the walk light and the green light. I noticed a car approaching on my right, with his right turn blinker flashing. At first I assumed the car was going to turn, so I started out into traffic, but then I noticed that the car was not slowing down. He never made the turn, but rather, kept speeding straight ahead. If I had believed his turn signal only instead of not paying attention to the entire situation, I would have been killed. I would have had the right of way, but still dead.
I am not nor would I ever blame this victim who died. I just know that whenever I am out on my bike, or walking, or driving around, I am always cognizant of my surroundings and other drivers. People make mistakes. That is why they are called accidents. The tragedy comes when innocent people die, assuming they are safe and have the right away.
3
Ha! Good point. My father used to say: "tell them in the morgue you were right" meaning, of course, you have to keep your wits about you at all time with cars - especially as a pedestrian. If the car hits you, even if you had the right of way, you are going to be the dead one...no arguing with that!
2
Not so long ago an Uber self driving car was filmed ignoring a red light, witness reported similar incidents (lurching into intersection etc.). It seemed like Uber were/are trying to leap frog the gap with the competition like Google at any cost. This was a disaster waiting to happen.
16
The family should sue Uber for one tenth of the total valuation of the company. It would give Uber only 9 more deaths to put it completely out of business, and would incentivize Uber to think twice before continuing to experiment with driverless vehicles on public roadways.
Oh, and since companies are legally given the status of an individual, companies should also be tried as an individual, once convicted of felonies they should lose the right to operate within the U.S..
15
I think my comments above would be an effective way to insure companies are "self-regulating"...now that would be an advancement.
1
if 9 others sue, each would get 10% of the company as it was at the time of the suit. so, your math is not really correct.
1
Human drivers kill thousands of people per day. There are like 3 recorded instances of autonomous vehicles being responsible for traffic fatalities over years of testing. I'm sorry but this comment is just ignoring reality so much it's staggering.
1
I'm really surprised by the comments here, most of which seem to think it obvious that an autonomous vehicle would not be able to react to unpredictable human behavior as well as a good human driver. This is nonsense. Pedestrians, both jaywalkers and those obeying the law, are hit and killed by human operated vehicles every day all over this country. We don't know the details of this accident yet, but we do know that autonomous vehicles obey the law all of the time, and humans don't. We also know that autonomous vehicles observe and react to phenomena more quickly than humans. The simple fact is that if autonomous vehicles were to replace human operated vehicles tomorrow, the pedestrian death rate would plummet. We're not there yet simply due to trust, as well as infrastructure.
2
Well, they are barely a faint blip on the radar - the # of autonomous vehicles on the road. If we replaced all human operated vehicles with driverless, what would the accident rate be? I assume predictions have been calculated, but havent looked into it yet.
1
So sad to hear.
About 40,000 Americans are killed each year in traffic fatalities and a couple million more are injured. We are hearing of this tragedy because
a machine did it.
The real question is what will be the behavior of the occupants in a fully driverless car ( I suspect as a whole much riskier) when unusual events occur that may be read as immediately dangerous to a human but not to a machine. Will they seize control of the car or simply trust the machine?
1
I believe the point of the truly driver-less car is that the humans will not be able to take control - the car will drive itself totally??? So humans can do whatever they want whilst in the car - like on a train or plane... I heard pilot -less planes are next, actually....
I'm not being glib when I say it isn't a bad idea to move to a city where public transport is readily available. It's less stressful than worrying about a self-driving truck coming at you and it's greener.
3
Maybe it’s me, but if a taxi, uber, whatever came by to pick me up, I’d say: no way Jose.
1
Cue the overreaction by Luddites and market interventionists. My question: What was the "safety" driver doing?
4
Was Uber's technology sufficiently mature to merit these test-drives? Their corporate track record isn't one that makes me trust the company to do the right thing, or even the smart thing, if there's money or power at stake. One more possible reason to steer clear of Uber and give business to their competitors.
4
Why do we even need autonomous vehicles? This is a solution in search of a problem. I like driving; it's like a videogame. Yes, I like it more when there isn't traffic, but I'd rather be driving than, say, getting a root canal. When I don't want to drive, I take a bus, walk, carpool. If you don't have transit near you, organize rideshares or van pools. Pester your local government for transit - operated by real people. And yes, I think government should provide transpo for the disabled and elderly who live in places that lack transit - piloted by real people.
5
Or just get a self driving car and you don't have to deal with the hassle of public transportation, or ride sharing, or walking. I'd like to be able to read the news while my car drives me to work. I'd like to be able to go to the bar, have a few drinks, then call my car to come pick me up. Do we need them? No, but it's a quality of life improvement which is what our species always strives towards.
Our species always strives to exist in a vacuum? We're social.
Why do we even needs cars? I like riding horses...
In Europe, the driver is always wrong.
That chills things out a bit and leads to fewer casualties. Automobiles aren't licences to kill.
4
There isn't any driver. That's the problem. There's no personal liability. The cost of motor vehicle accidents is subsumed by a massive corporation with a profit margin to worry about. Accident liability becomes an operating cost hedged by insurance. In Uber's case, they'll probably ditch that cost as well. They just provide an app so vehicular homicide isn't their problem.
OK Andy, let me spell things out for you. This is a legal problem, but not for Europe. Europe is not the US, court judgements have already swept away Uber's attempts at pretending it is simply an intermediary; it is an employer and a taxi service. The Far West attitude might make over the Rockies, but it sinks crossing the ocean.
So, Uber, and its directors and officers, will be held responsible in civil and criminal courts. Yes, I said criminal courts, because in Europe, while excessive insurance pay outs may remain limited by the courts, the counter point is that corporate executives can be held criminally liable for deaths. I didn't simply say negligent death, but death. And companies can and are shut down by industry oversight. Trials can and are held in abstentia, in Europe as in the US, and failing to defend oneself can lead to a complicated life where international travel becomes impossibly risky with outstanding warrants...
Sounds like another planet, right?
"Our hearts go out to the victim's family."
Notable for two reasons:
1) It looks identical the the worn out excuses of the NRA to gun violence.
2) It's the first time on record that Uber executives claimed they had hearts.
5
Folks, self-driving cars are a bad idea being promoted by car companies teaming up with tech companies so they can make more money. They can be hacked and the occupant in many case has no control. They will be marketed and sold to the unwitting masses that all want to have "the next thing."
3
A non-driverless car can also be hacked and taken over. Google Jeep Grand Cherokee hack for more on that. Also would you like to cite a source about self-driving being promoted by car companies because nothing in that equation allows them to "make more money." Self-driving cars just mean a car company that doesn't have their own self-driving tech (and most don't) will have to pay a tech company for their tech. It will require extra testing and licensing which means less money. You Luddites need better arguments.
No, car companies will find a way to lease timeshares on autonomous vehicles, sucking everyone in to a subscription car, instead of purchasing a car that can be bought and then sold. That's definitely more profitable for them.
The significance of this death depends on the specific circumstances. If the pedestrian was acting in a way that's not unusual for many pedestrians to act, then it's incumbent on Uber to be transparent about how its self-driving cars respond or fail to respond to pedestrians' behavior. I'd also be interested in knowing how dangerous this intersection has been in the past for pedestrians...not just fatalities, but all collisions involving vehicles hitting pedestrians. If human drivers have been getting it right and Uber didn't, that's significant. There should be zero tolerance if self-driving vehicles can't equal or improve upon the performance of attentive human drivers. By the way, "attentive human driver" should be the standard against which self-driving vehicles should be judged. An inattentive or impaired human driver who causes accidents can lose his/her license or even go to prison. In the case of self-driving cars, the technology that replaces the human being should be held similarly liable. When the technology proves unsafe, it should in effect lose its license. But the real solution to unsafe driving is safe, convenient mass transit, controlled by trained professional human drivers. I'm concerned that self-driving vehicles may be just a cheap, easy, profit-producing half-measure for a problem that's solvable but requires a massive, nationwide investment in infrastructure, and a new willingness to give up our shared love of driving and its convenience.
2
When a Tesla driver was decapitated in his car in Florida a couple of years ago, he was watching a Harry Potter movie at the time because he had complete trust in the technology driving his car. He was a Navy Seal, so that may have conditioned him into trusting authority figures. I'm almost impressed that there have only been 2 people killed during all this testing. Thousands of people are killed by cars every day around the world.
However, the tone of the early assessment is shocking to me. It's not OK to imply that the woman was outside of a crosswalk as a mitigating factor. Self-driving technology needs to be held to the same standards and higher as human drivers. The technology will eventually be more reliable than distracted human drivers, but it won't be a bloodless path. Less hype and more testing please.
5
Connie--exactly right! Self-driving cars are supposedly more safe, but how much safer can they be if they can't even recognize (with a human right there in the car) a potential problem in the road?
If the victim was outside of the cross walk, it would be very unlikely that the driver, human or otherwise, would be found liable unless there was some other factor at play like excessive speed or intoxication and, even then, it's a tough case.
1
Why do we humans (Americans, especially) always look to technology to alleviate our own shortcoming? Being a safe driver requires that we act ethically, exhibit caution, show courtesy. Instead, we abandon all that so we could text, talk, rush, drive drunk, etc. and then seek solution in a scheme that is unworkable. Think about it: driving requires awareness, these autonomous cars are just a little more sophisticated that the Roomba vacuum that is constantly stuck under the coffee table.
For those who minimize this accident because this is 'just' one death, you do not understand what a system failure means. This 'accident' means something is very wrong with the technology, it does not means it is 100 times safer because because it is one versus the 100 human driver death/day. Go read Feynman's essay on the Challenger accident.
6
I right from the start do agree that this technology has no place in America.Many Pedestrians are killed so often by careless human drivers.Who is to tell what this Self-Driving vehicles might do once they are in unpredictable Conditions.Invest and research should go elsewhere.How many people have to die for this Global Car Manufacturers to
Understand that this works in Japan miniature cities.Not when you are next to an 18 wheeler truck.For goodness sake's not even our train and planes are 100% safe.
And you want to force and impose this new
Inconvinient Industry right in our faces.President Trump ought to tell Japan or any other manufacturer countries to keep their cars at home.There is already more than enough distraction already in a car with all the technology it has inside plus the cell phone,TV Screen.This is Bad.Really Bad for our way of life and our Society in General.
What's is it gonna be Next Pilotless Airplanes.
Wait till more die maybe just maybe will
People focus on perhaps things that really matter.Make the environment cleaner,repair our highways and The Fallen Infrastructure.
Thank You.
2
airplanes already have auto pilot. Fly the fiendly skies!
It's appropriate to suspend pending the investigation. Pedestrians often put themselves in harm's way and assume the human driver will slam on the brakes, but sometimes the drivers don't see them in time to prevent trajedy. You'd hope that a driverless car would do at least as well as a human driver would in this case, but we'll see.
1
Driverless cars should not be expected to be perfectly safe. They just have to be as safe as human drivers.
That's a low bar.
How many pedestrians were killed by human drivers today? How likely are we to halt human driving as a result?
4
the difference is that we may in fact halt the driving of a human as a result of a road accident. When there is a robo kill it puts the whole robo species at risk.