1) 10pm. Low traffic. Sodium arc lamps overhead.
2) No obstructions.
3) MUTHERFUCKING BIKE LANE.
4) Bike lane transitions into right-turn lane; bicyclists turning left must cross 2 lanes of traffic to get into the turn lane.
Check out the awesome LiDAR video from NYT.
Luminar's LiDAR can detect 10% reflective objects at 200m. 38mph is 17m/s. 200/17 is a shade under 12 seconds.
The Uber car had a little under 12 seconds to detect Ms. Hertzberg.
As a lay person / arrogant pedestrian, may I just say: what a shitty infrastructure layout. - When I backed out of street view and looked at sat. images, I 100% thought the paving stone X in the divider was a crossing point. Had to look around in street view to find the 'no crossing' sign. Why the fuck is it even there? Is it a decorative reminder of bygone times when pedestrians were a design constraint? - The necessity of a 'no crossing' sign would seem to indicate that they know people are going to want to cross there. Please don't walk on our affectation of a sidewalk. - In fact, you can clearly see a desire path at the X in Strava heatmap . - While you're there, notice that there seems to be a goodly amount of foot/bicycle traffic in the area. - They very cleverly neglected to put the no crossing signage by the sidewalks, i.e. the point of origin for anyone crossing. Instead, they're only placed on the median. Not exactly a high visibility choice. Especially at night. Fuck it, I'm already in the street. Might as well finish. - It's not like there's a constant in the universe saying that crosswalks can only fall in street intersections. But hey, I guess a poorly deployed no crossing sign is cheaper if not actually safer. Cryptonomicon by Neal StephensonRESPECT THE PEDESTRIAN, the signs say, but the drivers, the physical environment, local land use customs, and the very layout of the place conspire to treat the pedestrian with the contempt he so richly deserves.
Arizona is its own hell. The majority of the populated areas was laid out post-WWII when air conditioning was a given and cars were fully enclosed. As such, it's the goddamn surface of the moon from a pedestrian perspective. And they're super big on their shitty freeway concrete. Swear to god, nobody gives as much of a fuck what the pattern on a goddamn overpass is as the fucking Arizonians. I guess it's because the urban landscape is an undifferentiated hellscape of brown boxes and branding. Seen Rollerball? Imagine that as an urban design ethos and you have Arizona.
The footage is available : https://twitter.com/tempepolice/status/976585098542833664?s=21 I would have probably killed her if I was the one behind the wheel. I don't understand why the car's system doesn't detect her though.
That's some appallingly misleading footage. 1) It's that dark to a daytime camera. That's visible spectrum, not infrared spectrum, which you have to filter out if you don't want it in modern chips. What your average dashcam picks up in night is shit. 2) By the time that footage starts, LIDAR had her for seven seconds already. 3) She'd already been a stationary object (from the car's perspective) in the opposite lane for as long as it took her to cross a lane (at least six seconds, probably longer). 4) the interior footage is 100% infrared, and you can see the poor schlub sitting there no problem even though the only thing lighting him was the dash lights. So they have the infrared footage. Shit, they've got the telemetry from all four cameras, the LIDAR and the RADAR out front but what they're releasing is grainycam. And what does the infrared footage show? The poor schlub surfing his fucking phone. Because the car is driving itself. It is, after all, a "self-driving car." Trust me. You wouldn't have killed her. You would have seen someone lit by streetlight and headlights in the lane ahead of you and you would have slowed. You don't think a brand-new Volvo XC90 doesn't have headlights good enough to see the next lane over at 38mph? If yes, then Uber has done its job.
I mean, their ratio's still way better than humans, and for insurance companies, that's all that's going to matter. After all, they don't have to be perfect (indeed, perfect is fundamentally unachievable), they just have to be better than us. At the end of the day, I see this as "Cyclist killed crossing street at an area without any marked crossing points." The autonomous element is almost irrelevant. Indeed, there was a safety driver in the vehicle, behind the wheel, and they didn't do anything about the woman crossing the street either. Edit: this is not to say I think the cyclist is at fault. What I mean is that I see this as something that could, would, and does happen with human-driven vehicles and is (unfortunately) not even an especially rare occasion.
Utterly, completely and irredeemably false. One critical intervention per 200 miles means Uber's software is about to crash the car pretty much every time they fill up the tank. And a bicyclist walking her bike across the road at 10pm has a pretty good idea what she can get away with.I mean, their ratio's still way better than humans
After all, they don't have to be perfect (indeed, perfect is fundamentally unachievable), they just have to be better than us.
I stand corrected. I will say I was speaking about the ratio of miles per dead human, and not about crashes, but I definitely take your point and now understand that the amount of human interference in autonomous cars is still significant. This is what needs sorting out, for me, regarding this specific incident. from the Scientific American article you quoted - What happened? Was this guy not paying attention? Was he trusting too much in the car? Was he acting like a passenger, and not a driver? In some ways, i consider this person to be responsible for Herzberg's death, and not the AI program. It's clear that Uber knows that its AI still needs to be babysat, and they had a babysitter. The babysitter, however, didn't do his job. Taking that metaphor further, if the "baby", the AI, managed to injure someone else (knock over a lamp which hit's someone, let's say), what would be the first question asked? "Why weren't you watching them?"Utterly, completely and irredeemably false.
An Uber employee was in the Volvo XC90 SUV acting as a safety operator but told police he did not have time to react to avoid hitting Herzberg
Gets political really quickly, doesn't it? On the face of it, if an Autonomous Vehicle (AV) can't run without a human minder, it's ultimately the responsibility of the human minder to keep people safe. But if an AV can't roll without a chaperone, what's the point of having an AV? veen could give you chapter and verse on this, but there are different levels of autonomy and everybody but google is going for the fuzzy middle where people are supposed to intervene if things go pear-shaped. Google argues (correctly, I think), that this is exactly the wrong way to go about it - because now you're not trying to determine whether you're safe or not, you're trying to determine if you know better than the car or not. And if the car is doing fine for an hour, we're naturally going to assume the car is fine for another hour. Waymo has crossed 4 million miles. Their record is, I believe, 4 million miles and one accident, that one accident being where someone backed into them. I personally don't expect that record to get much worse because Waymo is taking an extremely conservative, extremely data-intensive approach to "self-driving car." However, their cars aren't improvisational. They operate in markets the way restaurants operate in markets. Google's cars won't come to your city until they've driven the shit out of it. Uber has crossed a million miles but they've also been kicked out of California. Right now, US traffic fatalities sit at about 1.25 deaths per 100 million miles. Uber is at 100 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles, which puts them on par with back when these things were the shit: From an armchair analysis standpoint, it's going to be interesting what tack Uber takes here because at 38mph on a clear road, the human minder should have taken over. So does Uber blame their driver? Because that makes their program look like a sham. Does Uber take it on the chin? Because that makes them look incompetent. Does Uber blame the pedestrian? That sure seems where they're going. But that makes Uber look like a bunch of bloodsucking ghouls. Which they seem to be cool with based on past performance. From an emotional standpoint it fucking sucks 'cuz some lady was walking her bike across the street at night and got fuckin' creamed by a robot and now everybody is trying to figure out a way to blame the lady. It's like we want so much to believe in our bright and shiny future that we refuse to believe the tech ain't ready.
It's been like a year or so, and things might have changed, but I remember reading in a blurb somewhere that both Toyota and GM were looking at not releasing self driving cars until they could do so without having any human backup in place. For the arguments you make, one, by the time an emergency happens the human isn't ready to take over, and b, there's a legal grey area in that.veen could give you chapter and verse on this, but there are different levels of autonomy and everybody but google is going for the fuzzy middle where people are supposed to intervene if things go pear-shaped. Google argues (correctly, I think), that this is exactly the wrong way to go about it - because now you're not trying to determine whether you're safe or not, you're trying to determine if you know better than the car or not.
As far as I'm concerned, "self driving car" means I can hop in, say "Okay Google take me to work", crawl into the back seat, light a spliff and stare out the sunroof until the thing parks. There's an apocryphal story from my youth about a senior citizen who buys a Winnebago upon retirement, sets it out on I-40, hits the cruise control and wanders back to the kitchenette to make a pot of coffee. That's how autopilot works on a yacht: set the heading and the throttle and you're headed to the horizon. But then, it's pretty easy to do that stuff when you don't have to worry about traffic. Uber doesn't know what to do about traffic. They're shining it on. And now there's a dead lady. I don't want to see autonomous vehicles until they're impossible to get a DUI in because you, mutherfucker, are irrevocably a goddamn passenger.
I feel like even if you think the car might slow down, just don’t walk in front of it. Alberta has a bunch of crosswalks in the middle of roads that wouldn’t otherwise be a stop for a vehicle. They trip me out, I basically wave at the oncoming traffic before ever leaving the sidewalk. Other pedestrians don’t even slow down to look at traffic and it boggles my mind. They aren’t 14 year olds getting alcohol poisoning at a small town fair at the age were they are supposed to feel invincible. They are grown ass men and women who somehow still didn’t get the message that they aren’t invincible.
There's a certain breed of arrogant pedestrian that crosses against the lights to prove they have power. The less money you have, the more likely you are to do it in affluent neighborhoods. As a driver you're supposed to be alert and you're supposed to yield the right of way to pedestrians. As a robot, same thing... but if your programming sucks, and you're banking on a human driver who doesn't notice...
You’re supposed to yeild the right of away, that’s not going to convince me to walk into a street in front of a car even when I have a crosswalk. People do it here when it’s icey or the road is covered in slush. I assume these people are poor because I assume they’ve never owned a vehicle and therefore don’t understand how much time it needs to stop especially in those conditions. Like the people who switch back into a lane right in front of a transport truck don’t really get it. Most people I know who have been hit by cars were hit from behind in some way because the vehicle wasn’t in its proper lane or paying attention to other vehicles. This scenario though, it’s one of those times that it really looks like the pedestrian could have avoided it by valuing their well-being.
What you're supposed to do has no bearing here. An autonomous vehicle needs to be able to operate where pedestrians misbehave, just the same as humans must. People do stupid shit because they think they can get away with it. Nearly 100% of the time they can. When they can't, they get signals from cars - they honk. They screech their tires. They swerve. Trust me - you do not want to live in a society where people blame the human when the robot crushes them where a fellow human wouldn't.
I think that’s the argument though, if a person had been driving the car would she be alive ? One of the guys I went ice climbing wth worked on AI, he told us about the driving courses he took in preparation for getting behind the wheel of the autonomous vehicles. I forgot to tell him about hubski, I regret that now. They were all about the kind of evasive manoeuvres we don’t learn in plain old drivers ed in case he had to take over last second. At first that made me think maybe with autonomous vehicles the way we teach people to drive could change. Instead of focusing on the basic’s we would have more time to focus on defensive and evasive driving techniques. Although I doubt that would stick around in their head and people would still get too comfortable. For everybody who always takes the right precautions using a machine in a workshop their are many more who cut corners. Now I’m thinking, how much safer does it have to be for us to trust autonomious vehicles over human drivers ? I think with human drivers we are able to blame one person but with the cars we wind up blaming all the cars even if statistically it is safer. We should obviously keep looking at the technology and trying to make it safer but will it ever be good enough ? And where does fault lie when an accident does take place ? Is it the cars fault or the human drivers for not paying attention and being able to take over ? Trust me - you do not want to live in a society where people blame the human when the robot crushes them where a fellow human wouldn't.
Yes. If a person had been driving the car, she would be alive. THAT is the argument: even with a reduced reaction time, inferior vision and molasses-slow processing, the human has evolved to see other humans. Lost in all this is the false equivalence about Uber/Tesla autonomy vs. Google autonomy. They aren't even vaguely the same. Google is trying to turn the entire world into a well-defined slot car track while Uber figures they can make a robot who knows how to drive. Uber is failing.
What's Tesla's next step? Last I knew "autopilot" simply meant "adaptive cruise control and lane assist." I have to hand it to Tesla's marketing department on that naming.Uber/Tesla autonomy
I figure he got comfortable like a lot of other normal drivers do, maybe it’s my paranoia but I think many drivers would have reacted poorly in his situation. A lot of people drive in predictable places and then they go traveling and they merge at 50 km/h directly in front of a semi going closer to 90 km/h while I sit on the on ramp thinking but I’m the one who hit my head, why are you like this ? Back in drivers ed my instructor randomly said “ I see a cop car, do you” and then went on a story about how he never got a ticket because he was always scanning. His main point was that a lot of people get comfortable and stop scanning and looking for the seemingly unpredictable. I do agree that the likelihood of the human safety driver being aware enough to intervene is low because they aren’t really engaged in the driving process before that point. They really seem like more of a false sense of security.
I'll wager that at 38mph, you wouldn't hit a raccoon. You wouldn't hit a porcupine. You sure as shit wouldn't hit a deer. A pedestrian? So some pedestrians do dumb shit. Homeless pedestrians in particular. I was coming around a 50mph curve once, at night, in the rain, only to find a black dude (a dark black dude) wearing camouflage fatigues pumping his wheelchair in the middle of the middle of three lanes right at me. He waved. He knew he was doing dumb shit, but he did dumb shit anyway. I didn't hit him, and neither did anyone in front of me. Neither did anyone behind me. Was he lucky? Hells yeah. But in general, people are lucky when it comes to cars. That's because humans have, deep in our understanding of the world, the notion that sometimes shit goes horribly wrong and we have to wing it. Robots don't wing it.