A self-driving Uber SUV struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona. It was in autonomous mode at the time of the collision, with a vehicle operator behind the wheel. Uber has suspended testing of its self-driving cars.
http://money.cnn.com/2018/03/19/technology/uber-autonomous-car-fatal-crash/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/uber-driverless-fatality.html
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/self-driving-uber-kills-arizona-171055918.html
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/19/594950197/uber-suspends-self-driving-tests-after-pedestrian-is-killed-in-arizona
https://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-suspends-driverless-car-program-after-pedestrian-is-struck-and-killed-1521480386
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/19/17139518/uber-self-driving-car-fatal-crash-tempe-arizona
https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/19/uber-self-driving-test-car-involved-in-accident-resulting-in-pedestrian-death/
I couldn't find any good analysis of the liability situation here.
(Score: 2) by srobert on Tuesday March 20 2018, @02:21AM (4 children)
... but won't stop it. I'm still concerned about the macro-economic impact of driverless cars. However, in terms of safety. This set back will only delay this research. Eventually, the driverless cars will be proven safer than their human counterparts. If human drivers want to delay this further, human drivers will need to stop driving drunk, stop driving enraged, pay more attention, and do everything possible to make no mistakes. I've been trying to do that but even then I've had some accidents and in the course of several decades some of them have been my fault. Driverless cars are inevitable.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday March 20 2018, @02:53AM
I'm an excellent driver [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Tuesday March 20 2018, @03:57PM (1 child)
[Citation needed]
Seriously, what's the basis of this claim, apart from optimism and the desire to talk up tech shares? At the moment, there are plenty of narrowly-defined "low-hanging fruit" party tricks like lane-keeping on a freeway or parallel parking that happen to demand the sort of technical precision and consistency that machines are good at, but low on things like human judgement/problem solving when faced with the unexpected. I believe freeway driving (on roads that have been designed from the ground up for safe driving at high speed with the minimum of obstacles) is one of the safest forms of driving (although when accidents happen they tend to be serious) c.f. driving around town and country roads. Parallel parking is just geometry when you have lidar and know the exact angle of your wheels (and I don't think it is the source of many accidents more serious than minor dents and broken lights) - an area in which humans are lacking.
Fact is, humans are rather good at driving - we're built for it with binocular vision and instinctive ability to judge velocities and trajectories - as long as we're not drunk, distracted, half-asleep or just plain stupid. Its a tough challenge for AI.
Seems to me that self-driving is about where speech recognition was in the 80s-90s - plenty of proof-of-concept but 30+ years later we're still mostly using keyboards (cue demonic cackle from Alexa). I'm sure it will come, but a quantum leap is required before its ready to take over from a human who is drunk/distracted/asleep/stupid (or otherwise unfit to be behind the wheel) and that's not a gulf that can be safely crossed via public betas.
Meanwhile, there are other ways to solve the drunk/distracted/asleep/stupid problem - like better public transport (which, e.g. stays on at weekends, he says having spent last weekend jumping through the hoops necessary to get to and from an alcohol-consumption venue via public transport) - which also makes it easier to avoid handing out driving licenses to people falling in the "stupid" category without effectively putting them under house arrest.
(Score: 2) by srobert on Tuesday March 20 2018, @11:35PM
No citation. Maybe it's just a hunch. I kind of hope you're right, because I don't know what's going to happen to the millions of people who drive to earn a living. Lately technology has been displacing people without much creating an equal number of comparable jobs.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday March 20 2018, @06:04PM
There's a fair chance that automated cars are already safer than the average driver. But they aren't safer than the average drivers believes themselves to be.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.