I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords

"Safety Driver". An ex-con and a trans freak show. Yeah no.

Changing the face of liability matters. Insurance companies are overjoyed.

I can't imagine more boring job than being a safety driver!
But we should stop focusing on "stupid" accidents only, we should to consider broader statistics as well (we should get some by now, so where are they?).
And here is my question: Should we accept technology which could reduce road fatalities by 70%? By 90%? By 99%?
Just a thought.

If it was me driving, I'd have hit her.
This whole episode is what I'm starting to refer to as "Picasso News". No matter what angle I look at it from, nothing makes much sense.

saw the video, it is not just uber at fault. When I walk on a dark road at night, I take care. It is difficult NOT to notice that a car is coming, the headlights usually are a clue. It was a straight road, at least for hundred meters near the scene. The woman did not even appear to notice that a car was coming, just where exactly did she think she was??

I don't like the idea of automated cars, too many risks go along with it. However, pedestrians crossing roads at night, well - what can I say - you've got to know what you are doing as well. The law of man is fickle, the laws of physics - not so much.

Here's the link to the Le Devoir article https://www.ledevoir.com/societe/environnement/523034/deux-importants-projets-industriels-echappent-au-nouveau-test-climat

So all these commercials being shown recently on TV showing drivers narrowly avoiding an accident because the vehicle's sensors picked up an object in its path are B.S. Good to know.

I’ve missed hitting plenty of animals at night that were closer than the poor woman.

People should be asking why this is being sold as unavoidable when it clearly was avoidable

How can they justify using a video shot at night as proof the collision was unavoidable. Anyone who has ever attempted to shoot video in nighttime bright/low light conditions notices that the camera aperture does a very poor job of capturing and displaying objects that are illuminated less then others, and displays that part of the image as black, even though you can clearly see these objects with the human eye. A camera video recording in nighttime road conditions clearly cannot reproduce what millions of years of evolution has done to make the human eye the best camera ever made, and should never be used as definitive evidence of anything. I am surprised that this video is being used this way and that the pedestrian was invisible to drivers on the road. From what I can see of the video, it is clearly a case of distracted driving caused by all the fancy dashboard autonomous displays.

The Three Laws of Robotics (often shortened to The Three Laws or known as Asimov's Laws) are a set of rules devised by the science fiction author Isaac Asimov. The rules were introduced in his 1942 short story "Runaround" (included in the 1950 collection I, Robot), although they had been foreshadowed in a few earlier stories. The Three Laws, quoted as being from the "Handbook of Robotics, 56th Edition, 2058 A.D.", are:
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.[1]

Does anyone else here see the irony in relation to those TV commercials about existing safety systems?

Instead of back-up A-I correcting a human driver's critical mistake, we have a back-up human failing to correct an A-I driver's critical mistake.

Anyways, we seem to have entered a brave new world where people actually die as a direct consequence of 'computer glitches'. If my last POS HP laptop was any indication of current industry reliability, we will see carnage on our streets.

So, if I use my self-drive car for say, 10 years, will the manufacturer start intentionally degrading the safety or performances modes in an effort to convince me to buy a new one. It's not like certain companies, like apple or microsoft, aren't know to do this?

The unintended as well as the intended glitches, errors, whatever you want to call them are endless. Of course, everyone will want to make money on this but no-one will want the liability of it. Don't worry, I am sure our gov't regulators will step up to ensure it is all safe, perhaps someone should ask CSA to start looking into it. This is the kind of graft and corruption that they live for....

I'm already dissatisfied with the performance of my automatic transmission. I can chose the gear I want better than the transmission. (Let's not have the F-1 conversation, shall we? We don't have the F-1 transmission, we have the 6 speed Ford/Chevy one that can't settle on a gear in the snow.)

There a reason for that. I'm actively driving the car, reading the conditions and planning ahead. The transmission doesn't plan ahead, it -reacts- to conditions. It is always behind the 8 ball, because it doesn't know what's going to come next. I do, that's why I downshift in a corner, or choose 3rd gear in the snow instead of second.

The self-driving car doesn't "know" what's going to happen. It can only react to conditions, it can't plan ahead for them. It is a machine. It can't know things.

This accident is a bad one. Two humans screwed up, the safety driver and the victim, AND the car did not react to the large object in the road in front of it. That's a major fail on the car's part. The thing has radar, it is supposed to be able to see stuff like a large solid object in the road.

The sales job is because this self-driving thing is coming, and it doesn't matter what we say. They're going to replace every human commercial driver with a robot, in the next 10 years, come hell or high water. It will take a violent insurrection to stop it.

And you know, there might actually be a violent insurrection over this. People hate these machines. I've driven behind them, they are the worst combination of little old lady and eco-freak safety nazi you've ever seen. They do not drive like a normal human. They drive like somebody you want to beat up.

You see one in a week, its a curiosity. You see one a day, its that thing you know not to get behind. You have your drive to work screwed up by a flock of these things every day, you're going to start being extremely aggressive with them on the road. Multiply by every driver younger than 60 on the road, that's an exceptionally hostile environment for self-driving cars. People are going to be brake-checking them, crowding them and not letting them merge. I strongly doubt they can handle it.

I see the entire corporate media lining up to smooth all this over far, far too quickly. Every news story I've read on the accident is blaming the biker and repeating the narrative that 'nothing could have been done' to avoid the accident. Well, you can't say that, because you can't relive the moment with a real human actively driving the vehicle.

A couple of points:
I guarantee that bike had reflectors on it that the headlights would have shined on and the driver would have seen. The packs too. There's more to this accident than this highly cut and compressed video. Also, wtf is the point in having a "safety driver" behind the wheel on their phone the whole time. Had she/he/it been watching the road, it probably wouldn't have happened.

Canadian Observer is right. We should have AI warning the human driver and/or his mistake, not the other way around. Human nature mitigates against the other way. If the AI has been doing all the driving, the human backup cannot possibly be as attentive as if he were the only driver. Quite the contrary. He may be playing with his I phone all this time, and not paying attention at all.

Fighter jets have much more complicated controls, and much more elaborate processors. But the pilot, admittedly much better trained and qualified, controls the plane, with the help of information from the processors, not the other way around.

Commercial airplanes have autopilots. But that is only used when the plane is cruising, when it is at high altitude with no other planes around it. I don't believe they are used in a holding pattern, for instance. Yes, there is instrumental landing, but only under conditions when the pilot cannot see (such as heavy fog) and has to rely on the radar where the ground is. The ground crew makes sure that the entire vicinity of the runway is cleared, as well as lighting up the runway as much as possible. I believe any commercial pilot will take over as soon as he can make out the runway.

TheTooner is right in his ironic declaration. The computer can only process information based on its algorithm, which cannot possibly be programmed against all eventualities. Even if the programmers can think of all of them, the onboard computer cannot possibly handle all of that in real time. For example, Humans have defeated computers in chess until recently. The computer is not a strategist. What it can do is look so many moves in advance, for all possible moves. If a human can launch a combination involving more moves than the computer can process, then it will not realize the danger. I believe the recent victories by computers is due to increased processing capability of the super computers used. If it can see as many moves ahead as the best grandmasters, then of course it will win.

I have no objections to AI being used on highways. That is as near the commercial airplanes cruising as possible. The variables are much less on a restricted access highway, and may be within the capability of the computer to take them all into account. The human driver should still be in control, especially in heavy traffic. However, basically using "autopilot" for most of the time in long distance driving will keep the human driver fresh for longer stretches.

I have also no objections to warnings as in a jet fighter, such as collision avoidance, in a city street scenario. But those warnings should be used, just as in a jet fighter, to assist human judgement, not instead of. Using videos of a dark road to excuse the AI is laughable. "Darkness" per se should not affect a self driven car equipped with radar, which generates its own radiation, in a different part of the spectrum. It should be able to differentiate a moving object, in the dark (in the visible spectrum), whatever it is.

Kenji is right in that most accidents are caused by drivers incapacitated in one way or another. The solution to that is remove those drivers as much as possible. Drivers under the influence of any chemical, not just alcohol, for instance. I should be extra careful in states that have legalized marijuana. Tests should be developed to detect those other chemicals in the blood stream. Have a separate test and license designation for limited access highways. Some people just simply do not have the reflex to handle emergencies at high speed. A virtual driving computer that tests those reflexes should be withing the budget of state highway administrations. Set realistic but enforced speed limits. Have the highway police be more vigilant against overaggressive drivers who are accidents waiting to happen. All patrol cars should be equipped with hood cams, and convictions should be open and shut. The penalty should be as least equal to driving under the influence. Do all of that, and the highways will be much safer. They may become so safe that even self driving cars can handle them.

It would be nearly impossible for a radar detection system to classify something as human - even with a super computer. It does not have the resolution. Certainly laser detection has the resolution but it does not "see" very far ahead (I've read about 75 m).

Not sure how fast the car was traveling but I think we need to be reminded just how limited these AI systems really are.

Did they check to see if the safety driver had his pants down around his knees when the accident happened? That is the obvious explanation.

the jaywalking in my town is worse than anywhere Ive ever seen.
these doped out 'walking dead', jeezuz murphy, right out into traffic. oblivious, death wish stuff.
really bad and getting worse on all but the very busiest 6 lane type streets.

cue the darwin awards !!!

https://jalopnik.com/uber-has-no-damn-business-testing-self-driving-cars-1823982487