Uber Not Criminally Liable in Death of Woman Hit by Self-Driving Car

https://www.npr.org/2019/03/06/700801945/uber-not-criminally-liable-in-death-of-woman-hit-by-self-driving-car-says-prosec

by abhisuri97 • 7 years ago

215 325 7 years ago

npr.org

rb808• 7 years ago

The law around this is so important. When your car hurts someone, who's fault is it? What about if its completely self driving like this one? What if there is a bugfix which you didn't apply? What if a software upgrade causes a crash? Lane assist caused you to swerve into something?

So many grey areas.

ams6110• 7 years ago

When your car hurts someone, who's fault is it?

Fault is a loaded word. It's your liability. That's why you have insurance.

hcurtiss2• 7 years ago

It's not always the driver's liability. Sometimes the pedestrian is at fault.

dmix• 7 years ago

It will always be a grey area.

WillPostForFood4• 7 years ago

It is only grey as long as the law allows grey. Like some states have enacted no-fault insurance, it would be straight forward to create a no-fault framework for self driving cars. May not be a good idea as it may create bad incentives, but could be done.

MisterBastahrd• 7 years ago

"How much money does the defendant have?" seems to be the prevailing factor in assigning blame in criminal cases.

baroffoos5• 7 years ago

When your car hurts someone, who's fault is it?

If its anything like the current system it will be no ones fault unless rules were broken. Its fine to kill someone in your car as long as you weren't speeding or on drugs. I assume it will be the same with self driving cars unless there was some obvious rule violation.

NoPicklez• 7 years ago

Interesting reading the article, from a risk perspective I would think Uber would have assessed the risks associated with using an Uber self-driving solution. Particularly mitigating automated controls to stop the car in the event it detects an emergency, given it has this capability.

But I agree with the verdict, it's just strange that the vehicle has the ability to detect a potential collision but cannot apply emergency braking to prevent it.

mnm14• 7 years ago

Of course, the prosecutor is judge and jury in this case because they are not pressing charges. I'm almost certain uber would be held liable by any jury who heard that they intentionally turned off the braking that could have saved this woman's life. Then again, it is Arizona so it's not surprising that this is not even being prosecuted. Uber must be bringing in a ton of money to the state there to get off so easily.

jcranmer• 7 years ago

I'm not so sure. Uber's defense here amounts to blaming the safety driver for the crash. They can argue that their actions improved the safety of the self-driving car (by reducing erratic movements due to false positive) so long as the safety driver is performing their job properly. Absent a smoking gun email that says "yep, we know this is unsafe, we don't care" (basically the Ford Pinto scenario), I don't think a guilty verdict is near-certain.

jimktrains25• 7 years ago

While the system identified that an emergency braking maneuver was needed to mitigate a collision, the system was set up to not activate emergency braking when under computer control.
Instead, the car's system relied on the human operator to intervene as needed. "The system is not designed to alert the operator," the report notes.

How are the not negligent for this specifically?

henryfjordan• 7 years ago

The law doesn't require automatic brakes and alerts on cars. Think about how many clunkers those laws would make illegal. You can't hold Uber to different legal standards, but we can certainly say they were negligent from a moral standpoint

jimktrains25• 7 years ago

The law doesn't require automatic brakes and alerts on cars.

The law isn't written for the case when the car is under its own control. The driver is assumed to be in control of the vehicle. However, if the car is also _a_ driver, neutering its ability stop, or even ask for assistance, in an emergency should be tantamount to disability the human driver's brakes.

hcurtiss2• 7 years ago

A civil suit for negligence is still available, even when not criminally liable. Two different standards. See O.J.

Rapzid2• 7 years ago

If I had to review criminal negligence and pick a reason I would say that a standard of reasonable care has not been established that requires a car to be configured in a way that would have prevented the accident.

r00fus• 7 years ago

On one hand, I think Uber was reckless and wantonly created the conditions for this incident.

On the other hand, I don't want this to be the death knell for autonomous driving experiments.

On the gripping hand, it's possible that a large settlement might have been the best outcome from this tragedy for the family of the woman in question. They gain nothing from Uber's criminal liability. (edit: clarity)

dajohnson893• 7 years ago

FTA:

Uber, which declined to comment for this story, could still be sued in civil court and be forced to pay damages. The government could also potentially pursue criminal charges against managers or employees of Uber.

derekp73• 7 years ago

I saw a post on Reddit at the time of this incident, from someone who claimed to be a former Uber backup driver. The claim was that Uber was too strict with regards to cell phones, and that if you were caught interacting with your phone while on the job you were immediately terminated.

I'd like to know how true this is, and if there is a better source for this claim.

FireBeyond2• 7 years ago

The claim was that Uber was too strict with regards to cell phones, and that if you were caught interacting with your phone while on the job you were immediately terminated.

Why is that too strict? Distracted driving is rapidly becoming the biggest problem for MVCs.

tobyhinloopen2• 7 years ago

Did you read the article? The "driver" was watching a TV show, while instructed to keep eyes on the road

helthanatos• 7 years ago

Isn't most of the point of computers driving us so they can react to things we can't? I dont know why that bit would be turned off... Seems seriously problematic. Secondly, that looks like a really bad place to be pushing your bike at night.

baroffoos5• 7 years ago

When you are traveling at 60km/h+ no amount of computers can save you when even reacting instantly is not enough to slow down enough. Cars, self driving or not are extremely unsafe. Sure its a bad place to be walking at night but its quite problematic that we accept that walking around without looking both ways at every step is punishable by instant death.

ylbss• 7 years ago

We already accept this. You could also be looking both ways and be killed by a driver on their phone even with the right of way because drivers will not react in a predictable manner. We've accepted vehicles as being the #1 non-natural cause of death for years.

jimktrains25• 7 years ago

60km/hr isn't that fast when you have multiple seconds of time to react. The reason cars are unsafe is because driver's think they're better than they are. How many times have I seen snow covered cars this week? Or excessive speeding on snow and ice covered roads? How often do people drive on the highway without anywhere near stopping distance between them and the car they're tailgating at 80mph?

The actual car itself is actually an amazing reliable and safe machine. The people using them in extremely dangerous ways are largely just irresponsible.

lugg3• 7 years ago

If reacting instantly is not enough to slow down you were driving way too fast for the conditions, period. Defensive driving is a solved problem.

Unless you're talking about times where things really are out of the domain of the car - people jumping in front. But nobody really cares about that non problem.

Cars unsafe? Compared to what? Cheeseburgers? Most of the time when I drive, I don't die and I don't kill people. That seems pretty safe to me.

Regarding liability here in this case, I'm not sure where I sit, probably on the side where uber is liable. Their company, no amount of "it's new so it doesn't count" hand waiving will change my mind.

But the way I feel about this is my bias for strong consumer protections.

In curious what on earth the argument is that lets uber off the hook here.

ummonk• 7 years ago

The car did not need to slow down much to reach speeds where a collision with a pedestrian would not be fatal. And there were several seconds to react had the car been driven by an attentive human driver.

kylek• 7 years ago

Starting to think that autonomous driving should be limited to roads where people are already restricted from being near (e.g. freeways) until the technology is (rigorously) proven safe. Doesn't seem like it would take much to implement on top of the current technologies in the wild.

JustSomeNobody2• 7 years ago

I still think the car was going too fast. Posted speed limits are for optimal conditions. Night driving is never an optimal condition so one should always drive slower than the posted speed limit.

vichu• 7 years ago

This is potentially precedent as a legal blocker for public adoption of self-driving cars. If I am to serve a 1 year prison sentence for faulty code or a deprecated LIDAR sensor, I don't see in what scenario I would be willing to leave my fate in the hands of a self-driving car manufacturer. Just as in the case of a chauffeur, if they are driving and commit vehicular manslaughter, I would not expect to be deemed guilty.

It seems to me that it would be the benefit of self-driving car companies to own up to liability as it is to their benefit of achieving widespread adoption. For example, Volvo is in line with this idea and has publicly stated that they would accept full liability in fully autonomous operation modes[0].

In this case, I do think that some liability lies with the driver - as they were tasked specifically with prevent situations like this. What is not clear is whether or not this task is even humanly feasible given reaction times, and based off of this, whether or not Uber has been criminally negligible. Given this, I am surprised that the prosecutor seems to have absolved Uber of any blame.

[0] https://www.media.volvocars.com/global/en-gb/media/pressrele...

Symmetry2• 7 years ago

I'd really like to see self-driving car liability treated the same way airline crashes are. Less "whose fault is this" and more "how can we prevent this same accident from ever happening again?" The second is the really important question and the one we need to keep answering to reduce the toll of driving deaths. This will mean the cars driving on our roads getting more and more regulated over time but I'm quite OK with that.

freddie_mercury• 7 years ago

Airline crashes absolutely are treated as "whose fault is this". That's why airline crashes usually have lots of lawsuits, with millions of dollars of damages, filed after they happen.

Every NTSB report has a "probable cause" section determining who or what was at fault. And then the FAA hands out fines and courts award additional damages largely based on that finding.

It is true that the punishments aren't handled by the NTSB but that's more about separation of concerns & departmental remits than anything else. Is separating out "fault finding" from "punishments" a good idea? Maybe? I honestly don't know.

bellerose5• 7 years ago

"how can we prevent this same accident from ever happening again?"

It would be nice if society adopted this with all crimes. It's not like we can prove we're any different than the low level design of a machine; when it comes to the "free will" ideology currently the justice system is designed around.

ndespres4• 7 years ago

Operators of vehicles need to be held personally responsible for the damages caused by putting their vehicles on the road, whether the vehicle is autonomous or not. Additionally there must be a responsibility for manufacturers to not create faulty products, but that can not absolve the "operator" of the product. It should not be said that the "operator" of a Volvo autonomous vehicle is not responsible for the actions of the vehicle under her control, simply because Volvo says they accept full liability. I think your chauffeur analogy is flawed. If I set cruise control in my car to 75mph in a 25mph school zone, am I not liable? It is not possible to delegate our personal responsibilities to machines, and wash our hands of it.

Volvo's acceptance of liability seems little more than a smart business decision- the cost of an insurance payout to the family of the deceased is less than the money they stand to earn in profit from selling autonomous vehicles. We can't allow this generous actuarial calculation to absolve the operator of such a vehicle of responsibility too. If you don't like it, take the train.

smallgovt6• 7 years ago

Why?

Klathmon2• 7 years ago

This is potentially precedent as a legal blocker for public adoption of self-driving cars.

I don't think it is because in this case the person was hired by Uber specifically to "drive" this car. They knew that the car is still an incomplete product, they knew that they were testing it, they knew that they were literally getting paid to keep this car from doing something like this.

That's very different than a random person using a self-driving car that they expect and were told is a finished product.

masklinn10• 7 years ago

I don't think it is because in this case the person was hired by Uber specifically to "drive" this car. They knew that the car is still an incomplete product, they knew that they were testing it, they knew that they were literally getting paid to keep this car from doing something like this.

Sadly, while that is in fact the task of the safety drivers in other automated car trials it wasn't the case here for uber, because the "safety driver" was given both the job of safety driving and of checking, controlling and classifying the automated system's information, ensuring they'd have to split their focus and would need to frequently context-switch between two completely different tasks.

Worse, this decision of Uber all but ensured this would happen: the automation system is more likely to lose its shit and need checking specifically in situations where the safety driver would be most useful.

mr_toad• 7 years ago

What is not clear is whether or not this task is even humanly feasible

Not watching TV while you’re supposed to be driving is a pretty low bar.

But apparently, humans can’t even be relied on to do this, even when it’s their one single job.

acdha3• 7 years ago

If you think it’s easy, go sit in the passenger seat without talking or using your phone and see how long you can maintain focus.

There are decades of experiments showing that boredom and fatigue are huge problems for this kind of work where someone is mostly idle except for rare events. It’s why the TSA mixes fake images into the stream on X-ray scans so people see things regularly and don’t zone out. Anyone smart asking humans to do repetitive work builds layers of safeguards in to keep people engaged – or in Uber’s case they just hope they can shift blame to the person in a bad design, which worked so far.

djakjxnanjak• 7 years ago

This person’s job would be more accurately described as “fall guy” than “driver”. Maintaining constant attention toward a system that works properly by itself for hours, with a response time of seconds to correct its mistakes, is not a reasonable task for humans. This guy’s role is to take a paycheck for doing virtually no work, at the exchange of taking the risk of being blamed if things go wrong.

usaphp• 7 years ago

If I am to serve a 1 year prison sentence for faulty code

I wonder why would a programmer go and work on a code when he is always in danger of going to prison for every mistake he makes. We all know that bugs in software happen and it’s impossible to write bug free code

Alex3917• 7 years ago

I wonder why would a programmer go and work on a code when he is always in danger of going to prison for every mistake he makes.

You don't go to prison for "mistakes", you go to prison for criminal negligence.

Given that you can go to prison for criminal negligence in any other profession (e.g. a dentist who exposes thousands of people to HIV), why would programmers be the one category of job that's exempt from criminal laws?

SiempreViernes• 7 years ago

If the programmer can’tbe bothered to put in enough verification effort to avoid being negligent, they should not be in charge of safety critical code. Plainly: don’t pretend there aren’t ways to ensure correctness of systems.

dodobirdlord• 7 years ago

We all know that bugs in software happen and it’s impossible to write bug free code

The go-to counterexample is the code that ran on the space shuttle, which took years and hundreds of people and $200 million to produce. I have been told that nobody has ever found a bug in the final production system. The development practices involved in creating it seem like they would make most software engineers want to curl up and die. One tidbit from the following link I found is that 60 people spent years working on the backup flight control system, intended to never be used!

https://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch4-5.html

cco• 7 years ago

Architects and engineers seem to go to work everyday knowing that if they are criminally negligent they could face prison.

Dylan16807• 7 years ago

The code wasn't faulty. The configuration was explicitly set to not brake, as far as I understand. If someone got in trouble here, it wouldn't be for programming.

wmeredith• 7 years ago

I know it’s glib, but just on the face of it, I find the idea of Uber taking responsibility for anything a laughable proposition.

roenxi3• 7 years ago

If I am to serve a 1 year prison sentence for faulty code or a deprecated LIDAR sensor, I don't see in what scenario I would be willing to leave my fate in the hands of a self-driving car manufacturer.

What if we came up with a reasonably objective test of driver skill and the car outperforms you?

This is and remains the standard argument - the car doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to beat a human having a bad day. If you are worried about the liability, maybe keep the car serviced and sit in the drivers seat and look out of the window instead of watching a movie. Tell the car to dive slowly maybe.

I feel sorry for the driver who is creating this precedent, but this is hardly a road block. The average human is not a great driver.

xutopia• 7 years ago

Blame the driver... of course the driver was told that the car drove itself... he was watching a show on his phone when it happened so Uber is putting the blame on him.

I don't think the driver was trained properly to drive in that semi-automated driving system. Is the fault lying with him or is Uber just trying to lay the blame on him to avoid paying anything.

jimktrains25• 7 years ago

Trains have had dead man's switches for nearly 50 years at least. You can't give people the job of paying attention if there is nothing to pay attention to 80%, 90% of the time. It's not reasonable to me to expect someone to be at peak alertness while doing nothing at all.

smileysteve2• 7 years ago

It is reasonable, however, that they not be watching a cell phone when they're being paid to be a backup driver.

The optics for the driver were really bad. They weren't just not paying attention, they weren't "just" eating and drinking (something accepted in American driving for the last 60 years), they weren't staring blankly into the desert, they didn't fall asleep. No, they were doing the one thing that has received the most public messaging for the last decade.

WillPostForFood4• 7 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Philadelphia_train_derail...

dead man's switches don't activate when the engineer is simply distracted.

smallgovt6• 7 years ago

> I don't think the driver was trained properly to drive in that semi-automated driving system

Any source to back up this claim?

fucking_tragedy3• 7 years ago

The car detected an obstacle, but had emergency breaking disabled by Uber, so it didn't stop. According to the article, the system didn't alert the driver of an obstacle despite detecting it.

To me, that's an insane failure mode.

mnm14• 7 years ago

Unbelievable. I wonder how many other self driving cars are out there designed to not brake even when they clearly detect an object in their path. It's ridiculous to rely on a human to intervene in such situations. This was a completely preventable homicide, yet Uber gets away with it. As I've said before, the easiest way to get away with murder is to commit it under the protection of a corporation. True, this is manslaughter, but the principle still stands. I bet they will go after the driver now and try to place blame on her despite her having an impossible job that should simply not exist because it can't be carried out. So they get away with manslaughter and a precedent is set for other car companies that no matter how negligent your system and operations are, you can kill people and get away with it as long as you find a patsy to sit behind the wheel and take the blame. With this kind of attitude, I hope self driving cars never make it to market. I no longer think they will be safer than human drivers because there is no incentive for these companies to make them safe, let alone safer.

zeroname3• 7 years ago

I bet they will go after the driver now and try to place blame on her despite her having an impossible job

What's impossible about watching the street and hitting the breaks if necessary, while testing a prototype self-driving car? I would say if you can't even do that, you shouldn't be in that seat.

This isn't the case where just one person is responsible. The system shouldn't have been configured that way. The driver should've been alert. The woman shouldn't have crossed the road like that. Everyone was negligent.

cgidriver3• 7 years ago

It happened because one company was greedy, and negligent, - and has the money to pay the bill. The question is, will the jury really make them pay.

hopler2• 7 years ago

The road should not have been designed like that, allowing high speed traffic at a pedestrian crossing. Cars are a dangerous incursion on human environments, akin to letting lions wander freely in town. The whole automotit ecosystem is morally liable, joint and severally, for this assault on human life, from collisions to pollution to the appropriate of public real estate.

mnm14• 7 years ago

Watching the road for hours at a time, day in and day out attentively is impossible. No human can do it. You're right that she shouldn't have been in that seat. No one should have as it's an almost impossible task. No one has that type of attention span or ability to react, especially when the situation is so boring. Humans can drive but even then, they will make mistakes. To expect there not to be mistakes or lapses of attention with no interaction is ridiculous. We are not built that way. Maybe some top athletes can do that, but even goalkeepers in soccer whose job is to watch the ball and stop it sometimes can't concentrate and they are selected based on this ability to only play 45 minutes at a time without a break. What tests did uber put this woman through before hiring her to make sure she was capable of the almost super human feat they asked of her? I bet none. The system could have prevented this crash easily but because the auto braking was turned off, it didn't. What kind of company tests a self driving car with the auto braking turned off? They should have known it would cause a collision sooner or later.

sneak2• 7 years ago

I’m not a lawyer, so forgive my ignorance, but how can a corporation be criminally liable for anything ever? It’s not like you can charge a corporation with a crime or put a corporation in prison. Corporations can’t commit crimes because they cannot act; only humans can.

snek• 7 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood

anateus• 7 years ago

The Ltd or LLC after many company names refer to the Limited Liability that those forms of companies confer, that protect individuals within them from personal liability. Corporations were intentionally a lot like people even before Citizens United. There's also a concept called Piercing the Corporate Veil that is intended specifically for penetrating through these legal protections in certain cases.

sneak2• 7 years ago

That limited liability is a civil one. How would you even charge a corporation with a criminal act, eg murder? Corporations cannot act, regardless of their personhood. Piercing the corporate veil, again, is a civil issue.

telchar• 7 years ago

The supreme court says corporations are people and have the rights of people (e.g. free speech). If they're people then they are subject to the criminal codes that people are subject to. I don't know how you carry out such punishments, ask the 5 guys who decided to make that the case.

dana321• 7 years ago

I know its bad having a machine-controlled car killing someone, but.. it will happen and we must accept it and my guess is that it will happen far less than with human operators in the long-term.

smallgovt6• 7 years ago

The problem is that deaths per mile driven are currently much higher for self driving cars than humans. We don't have to just accept it. Progress can be made while still being safe -- at least, safer than how the free market would act.

The NHTSA reports a fatality rate of 1.25 deaths per 100 million miles[2], twenty five times the [4 million miles] Uber has driven.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16620736

smileysteve2• 7 years ago

One of the issues is that the car's stock system was disabled;

steelframe• 7 years ago

The problem is that people deeply care about the reason a bad thing happened, much more than they care that a bad thing happened.

InclinedPlane3• 7 years ago

Your guess is a bad guess. It certainly is for Uber's self-driving vehicles so far.

This isn't a situation where laissez-faire is a good idea. If we want autonomous vehicles to be safer than human drivers then we need to ensure that is the case with proper regulation, audits, standards of testing, and liability.

We who work in the software industry should know better. Yes, you can make software to a very high standard, even high enough to bet your life on it. Is all software made that way? Will software be made that way without some sort of pressure to do so? No, of course not. Every shortcut will be made, technical debt will be piled like cord wood until it reaches the sky. And people will die.

If autonomous vehicle technology is real, and if it can improve on human drivers, then let it be set to that standard from the start.

aasasd• 7 years ago

Funny enough, this is about the fifth attempt to post this story to HN, with different links. It's getting barely any response.

dajohnson893• 7 years ago

Those previous attempts were successful. Perhaps you mean, "attempts to get upvoted to the front page"?

smallgovt6• 7 years ago

Yea, he's saying it's suspicious that this didn't get more upvotes. I agree.

wand3r2• 7 years ago

Self-driving vehicle development has so many difficult problems to solve. The technology itself is extremely difficult to create and relies on this extremely complex compromise where vehicles are allowed (and are) operated by code but ultimately babysat by drivers.

I think self-driving technology is worth the risk and worth the large amount of property damage and human injury that comes with it. However, this is a societal issue and there needs to be some sort of referendum on this. While many parallels can be drawn with space travel, those projects were tightly contained and included individuals who were specifically trained and informed of the potential dangers--there is no way to really do this at scale for self-driving tech which necessarily demands an expansive ecosystem that can't be tightly controlled nor can consent be inferred from the unknown number of people involved in this experiment.

cgidriver3• 7 years ago

Indeed its worth the risk - but not at the cost of human life. And if the risk is being taken by a company, it has to pay for it - because it intends to reap the rewards? Not a woman or a negligent employee.

zeroname3• 7 years ago

And if the risk is being taken by a company, it has to pay for it - because it intends to reap the rewards? Not a woman or a negligent employee.

First of all, this is criminal liability. Uber may still be held financially liable in a civil court.

Secondly, liability needs to be decided on a case by case basis. In this case, the woman (not "a woman") shouldn't have crossed the road and the operator should have been alert.

Furthermore, why should a company be criminally liable for any negligent behavior of an employee? That's ridiculous.

zeroname3• 7 years ago

However, this is a societal issue and there needs to be some sort of referendum on this.

Why? Where's the referendum on allowing people to drive vehicles? People cause 99% of accidents in the streets, as of today.

umeshunni• 7 years ago

Also, referendums are terrible at creating anything meaningful - see Brexit or just about anything in the state of California.

gotocake2• 7 years ago

I think self-driving technology is worth the risk and worth the large amount of property damage and human injury that comes with it.

I’m guessing you don’t see your property or life as being worth sacrificing for this “noble” goal, right? I’m a little horrified at people who gleefully volunteer their fellow humans to suffer or die in the name of progress. If however you want to personally volunteer your person and property in the name of technological advancement, that would be a different matter.

saulrh2• 7 years ago

"Are you willing to risk your life to improve this" is a leading question. What I think you meant to ask is something more like "are you willing to improve safety with your daily risk or not". I am already risking my life on the road every day. Last month I was in a Lyft and the driver decided to go around a car that was blocking an intersection and in the process swung the front of the car though the path of an oncoming light-rail train. I've known a couple people that got hit by drunk drivers; they didn't sign up for anything at all. So what's the difference? There are multiple fatal automobile accidents per day per major metro area. At least make those deaths mean something.

In fact, we already do this. All over the place. Clinical trials. Yeah, those are more heavily regulated, but the possibility of relatively increased risk there is far greater - I would not expect a modern autonomous vehicle to be ten or a hundred times more likely to kill its passengers than a human driver is. How about legislation? The legislation on drugs that's ruining some states is nothing more than some politician spending their constituents' lives to signal their own perceived moral virtue to their party. Or maybe construction projects. Every time we put up a lighter, cheaper bridge we are saving time and money by risking the lives of every person that takes that bridge instead of finding a job on the near side of the river. Or allergic reactions to medications, including vaccines! Negative reactions to vaccines are incredibly rare, but you bet your ass that I will choose to bet that someone doesn't have guillain-barre instead of letting them spread measles.

Alternatively, excuse me while I fight dirty for a bit. Let's turn your argument around. I believe that it is effectively certain that autonomous vehicles will save lives in the long run. Slowing that down costs lives. So why are you so willing to spend those lives? What right do you have to spend the lives of the people who would have been saved by autonomous cars because you thought that it was more important to preserve people's right to get hit by drunk drivers today?

This is what civilization is. Just do the math.

wand3r2• 7 years ago

I’m guessing you don’t see your property or life as being worth sacrificing for this “noble” goal, right?

I said I personally think the risk/reward makes sense. So no, I wouldn't sacrifice my life or a non-trivial amount of property for this end. I meant at the statistical level-- I would enter a lottery with 1/n chance of the above for a working self-driving car in 5 years. I think the individual risk is low.

If however you want to personally volunteer your person and property in the name of technological advancement.

To some extent I am depending on where I am in the country or on the road. That was my point. I personally think self-driving cars could be a great thing for humanity BUT I think states/cities need to individually vote on this stuff as indicated by the reference to a referendum in my post.

Not everyone is going to want to be on the highway next to a car that some company is field-testing some pre-beta code that lulls Bob into some false sense of security that the car actually drives itself.

I think we agree with eachother, I think a conversation needs to develop about this at the city & state level. I am not claiming I have an armchair fix but that there needs to be a way to allow this tech to develop without insane regulation while promoting a candid narrative of the risks to constituents to decide.

Zarel• 7 years ago

On the other hand, you think the tens of thousands of lives lost to car crashes every year in the US alone are worth "sacrificing" for the noble goal of preventing blind people, children, and the elderly from leaving the house?

You seem to have no problem "gleefully volunteering" my life and health every time I want to cross a street, on the experiment of "will this driver remember to check for pedestrians before making a right turn".

Enemies of progress always seem to make arguments that criticize the status quo way harder than they criticize the attempt at progress.

userbinator3• 7 years ago

After all these stories I strongly believe that "self-driving, except when it's not" is even worse than manually driving, because supervising a computer is not too far from a driving instructor supervising a student driver; most of the time it's OK, but you have to be extremely alert to catch the times when it makes a fatal mistake. On the other hand, if you're "manually" driving, you are fully in control of and can anticipate the situation, thinking ahead with what's next. A self-driving car, like a student driver, won't tell you what it's going to do and ask whether that's OK --- it just does and you have to be very alert to instantly take control to correct when things go wrong.

Autopilots work in planes because the operators are extremely well-trained, and the reaction times needed are measured in seconds or even minutes. In a car, it's less than a second.

Rebelgecko• 7 years ago

I think there's actually some debate about how just the right amount of automation can be dangerous in planes. Automation works great in nominal conditions but can leave pilots unprepared to handle bad situations.

There was a really interesting article I read about this regarding the Air France plane that crashed a few years ago (I think it was this: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-...). Similar things even came to play with the recent Lion Air crash, although there was also a lot of negligence and crappy maintenance.

smallgovt6• 7 years ago

I wonder why Uber (and other self-driving car companies) don't have remote employees monitoring the road who can take over in case the appointed driver doesn't react quickly enough.

The problem with these driver-assisted self driving cars is that the driver is unlikely to be paying attention at any given time since the system is 99% reliable.

By adding remote monitoring, you could even have multiple people monitoring each car. It might be impossible to safely steer the car from a remote location, but they could surely activate the breaks and/or trigger other simple directives to drastically decrease a fatalistic collision.

Given that the average driver reaction time in a car collision is 2.3s [1], I doubt network latency would pose much of a problem, and cost surely isn't an issue for these companies. A remote person could also use the car's cameras to gain a superior field of vision (especially at night time) when compared to the in-car driver.

[1] https://copradar.com/redlight/factors/IEA2000_ABS51.pdf

rossdavidh• 7 years ago

From what I've seen/read, the more people are responsible for monitoring something, the less likely each one is to monitor it, sometimes to the point where more monitors can get a worse rate of catching problems.

Sort of like why the driver of a "self-driving" car is more likely to watch TV instead of paying attention to the road.

userbinator3• 7 years ago

If someone sitting in the vehicle can lose attention, there is not much hope for someone watching from afar on a TV (even if you're streaming at something like 4k 120fps --- which would be an immense amount of bandwidth to handle for each car --- it's still not much more immersive than watching someone playing a driving game.)

smallgovt6• 7 years ago

Maybe they can make it more like a video game, where you're constantly saving cars from collisions, and you don't know which is a simulation and which is real. Give them bonuses based on what percentage of collisions they successfully deter.

JustSomeNobody2• 7 years ago

... since the system is 99% reliable.

Where did that number come from?

edgartaor• 7 years ago

Let say that in the future every car it is a Self-Driving Car. Which are more reliable and accidents are reduced by 99%. How to deal with that 1%? Whose fault is it? The manufacturer? The developer?

rhacker• 7 years ago

There will plenty of money to pay for the 12500 people that die because of those systems. (WHO says there are currently 1.25M dead each year from road accidents, if that reduces by 99% we'll have 12500 dead). Even if that costs $20B per year in liability, a company like Alphabet/Waymo can pay for it by the amount of money they are making in the actual self-driving tech.

pmoriarty• 7 years ago

"There will plenty of money to pay for the 12500 people that die because of those systems."

How much is a life worth?

8bitsrule3• 7 years ago

A woman on a road was killed. By a car with no driver.

There was a person sitting in the driver's seat, but that person was in no way engaged in maintaining safe operation. That person was hired by Uber.

As the judge, therefore, I would certainly assign -most- liability to Uber for putting that screw-off behind the wheel in the first place. Uber's driverless car killed a woman.

The charge would be negligent homicide.

pkaye• 7 years ago

Uber, which declined to comment for this story, could still be sued in civil court and be forced to pay damages. The government could also potentially pursue criminal charges against managers or employees of Uber.

Looks like they still have a lot to deal with.

8bitsrule3• 7 years ago

Good. For Elaine's sake, and all other potential victims of overhyped tranport options, I hope that option will be pursued vigorously.

WillPostForFood4• 7 years ago

How do you feel about the Amtrak engineer being charged in the Philadelphia derailment? Does Amtrak deserve most liability for putting the engineer in charge of the train, or does the engineer deserve the blame for failing the most basic duties of their job?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr-gridlock/wp/2018/02/0...

8bitsrule3• 7 years ago

I'm not familiar with the details there. IIRC, the engineer was going around a curve much faster than it was rated for.

Whatever. Failing to detect that an employee is not fit to do a job which potentially jeopardizes many lives is a very serious failure. I might -want- to ask which executive the company will expect to do the time.

Airlines and railroads seem to prefer to blame their operators, particularly when the operators are killed and unable to defend themselves. In this case, however, the vehicle had no operator to blame.

grecy• 7 years ago

The charge would be negligent homicide

What even happens when a corporation is convicted of a crime like that?

A fine? Slap on the wrist? It's not like Uber can go to jail.

rayiner4• 7 years ago

In the six seconds before impact, the self-driving system classified the pedestrian as an unknown object, then as a vehicle, and then as a bicycle, a preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board explained. While the system identified that an emergency braking maneuver was needed to mitigate a collision, the system was set up to not activate emergency braking when under computer control.

The prosecutor made the wrong call here. This part is absolutely criminal negligence. Putting a “self driving” car out there that doesn’t have emergency braking enabled (apparently because it creates too many false positives) is an unjustifiable risk. Working emergency braking should be the first thing perfected, before the computer gets to control the car.

roenxi3• 7 years ago

The prosecutor has no doubt thought long and hard, and there is no evidence of a bad call here. We don't even have the benefit of hindsight yet.

The driver being criminally liable is a more powerful incentive. People will not buy & drive vehicles that have a reputation for getting their drivers criminally prosecuted. And the government can still regulate for high safety standards on self driving vehicles independent of criminal liability.

solveit6• 7 years ago

The driver being criminally liable is a more powerful incentive.

Too powerful. The driver should not be punished for correctly using a legally purchased vehicle. We don't apply that kind of standard anywhere else, and for good reason.

Plus, people would refuse to buy self-driving cars even if they were on average safer than human-driven cars because

1. Everyone thinks they're an above average driver 2. Illusion of control

So your proposal would cost lives in the future when self-driving cars actually are safer.

GreaterFool• 7 years ago

I'm not so sure. If the car was driverless then yes. But they put a human operator precisely to handle these sort of situations.

They could put eye tracking system in place to make sure the operator pays attention! If the driver doesn't pay attention the car should slowly stop.

Expecting people to always do the right thing is a recipe for disaster.

tyingq2• 7 years ago

Eye tracking or not, I suspect humans aren't cut out well for that sort of task. At least not without some pretty specialized recurring training.

Waymo is claiming things like 30,000 miles between needed interventions. Even if that's 100x higher than reality, that's hours of watching and boredom waiting for a few seconds of action.

masklinn10• 7 years ago

They could put eye tracking system in place to make sure the operator pays attention! If the driver doesn't pay attention the car should slowly stop.

Except where normally there is a safety driver focusing on driving and an oversight passenger tasked with looking at and checking the automation's feedback, for cost reasons Uber had given both tasks to the "safety driver", forcing the driver to often stop paying attention to the road to check automation warnings & classify events.

michaelmrose4• 7 years ago

This is exactly backwards from reasonable.

Ultimately systems will require no intervention for very long periods of time punctuated by very quick precise actions that most people are terrible at in the best possible scenario but that computers will be very very good at.

If you task the user with doing the right thing in 5 seconds time after thousands of hours of inactivity a sizable portion will react after the entire affair has come and gone and those are the lucky ones. The remainder will act 3 seconds into the crisis and screw everything up.

What you are describing is the worst possible combination of man and machine wherein you let the machine handle the part the human could easily handle and you task the human with the part they are worst at to ensure maximum carnage.

taejavu• 7 years ago

I don't disagree, but I've heard these self driving cars are extremely over cautious, and tend to hold up traffic because they're waiting for a safe time to turn across a lane, for example. I imagine this level of caution would needlessly trigger the emergency brake quite often, and likely cause more accidents and injuries than it prevents.

kevinventullo• 7 years ago

So then shouldn't the answer be not to disable the e-brake, but to conclude that the tech is not ready for testing in public where pedestrians' lives are at stake?

rsj_hn11• 7 years ago

Arizona law is pretty friendly to motorists. Generally speaking, you're not supposed to jaywalk and when you do, you are taking your life in your own hands and the car that hits you is not liable. It's even worse for the pedestrian -- even at an intersection if you walk quickly onto oncoming traffic you do not have the right of way and are responsible for anything that happens to you. It's just not the case that the car is assumed to be at fault in situations like these -- the pedestrian is assumed to be at fault. The pedestrian is not automatically given the right of way and is basically never given the right of way outside of an intersection. This is different than the laws in other states like California.

Situations like drunk driving can make a difference, but in this case that's a hard claim to make. Maybe if the car was swerving out of its way to hit her, you could make that case. But arguing that it wasn't doing enough to stop -- that's a tough sell given AZ law. The car had the right of way, it was not acting maliciously, and she walked right in front of it. According to AZ law, asking the car to make what might be a dangerous last second swerve into another lane or slamming on the breaks to avoid hitting her is not a legal obligation as these are unsafe maneuvers. There might be another car behind them or other cars/pedestrians alongside them so the law in AZ doesn't require these types of high risk actions to avoid hitting pedestrians that walk right in front of oncoming traffic.

Moreover this person was jaywalking at night in an area without street lights, without even bothering to look both ways, across a median, wearing a black hoodie, through a high speed road right in front of a car that had proper headlights and was going a steady speed.

Anyone familiar with AZ law knew that Uber wasn't going to be charged. You may think the law itself is wrong and that cars should be legally required to take last second high risk evasive maneuvers. These are all tradeoffs to which reasonable people will disagree, but changing the law is the job of the Arizona legislature and not of the prosecutor, who made the correct decision, even if it seems like the wrong decision to you.

argonaut2• 7 years ago

Minor correction: the area was actually very well lit with street lights. The Uber dashcam video was just poor quality so it gave the impression it was really dark.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03/police-chief-said-uber-...

Phlarp• 7 years ago

Is AZ a significant outlier in this regard? Is AZ different enough from say, California, that Uber was incentivized to test in AZ as a way to mitigate liability exposure in the event of fatal crash?

I was always curious why they were testing there as opposed to somewhere closer to HQ.

Pristina• 7 years ago

Yeah. Not to mention the really nice dinners Uber lawyers took the prosecutor to to discuss the case.

bryanrasmussen• 7 years ago

I can of course see how they are not criminally liable under Arizona law where the Automotive laws are pertinent... but, what if someone turns off safety features of a device and then someone is killed if those safety features had been on - would that be manslaughter under Arizona law?

Dahoon3• 7 years ago

They would have a hard time testing their cars like this a lot of other places. No wonder they picked Arizona. Around here (I'm in Scandinavia) if a car hits something other than another car it is always the drivers fault, jaywalking pedestrians or not. It is the responsibility of car drivers not to hit softer things - full stop.

This and traffic in Paris are the real tests of self driving cars.

ironic_ali• 7 years ago

The car had the right of way, it was not acting maliciously, and she walked right in front of it. According to AZ law, asking the car to make what might be a dangerous last second swerve into another lane or slamming on the breaks to avoid hitting her is not a legal obligation as these are unsafe maneuvers

My mother has dementia and until she was put into a secure home she had a habit of wandering. On three occasions she was picked up by police after midnight crossing the road.

Your defense of laws protecting drivers is fine, but doesn't cover outliers like my mother who would have been knocked down at least, killed at worst. Is that ok for laws to protect the driver/AI driver from running over pedestrians who have lost their personal safety faculties?

Neil44• 7 years ago

I would imagine that Arizona law is at least part of the reason why these trials were being done there, and not somewhere else.

agumonkey• 7 years ago

Man it must be hell to drive interstate and remember all the differences

AnthonyMouse• 7 years ago

The problem is that a false positive causing emergency braking is also dangerous. So you'd be trading one instance of the car not emergency braking when it should against however many instances of it dangerously doing so when it shouldn't. That isn't an obvious call even before you consider that the human driver can cause the car to brake when it should but can't cause it to not break when it shouldn't.

The only real solution is to get the false positive rate down. Which is why they still have human drivers until they do.

parcec3• 7 years ago

You hit the nail on the head. People often jump to reactions without looking at bigger picture.

It is entirely likely that Uber engineers evaluated this scenario, and (correctly) decided that it was safer overall to turn off reactionary breaking - and have that function performed by a human in the driver seat. If they hadn't, these cars might instead have been brake-checking people at 100x the rate.

It's easy to say things like "Uber should have waited until better safety features were available", such as the eye tracking suggestions mentioned elsewhere in this thread. But features like that take time - especially if they're development-only features that would have no place in the final product. Every additional safety feature pushes FSD deployment back.

Globally, 1.25 million people die from car accidents annually. That's over 3,000 people per day. For every day that you delay mass adoption of FSD, you are accruing massive amounts of fatalities that could have been avoided.

FSD does not have to be perfect, it's development will cost innocent lives - but if you're optimizing for minimal loss of life, it's the correct thing to do. Reactionary policies do the opposite of what you intend them to do - they cost more lives in the long run.

adrianN5• 7 years ago

False positive emergency braking seems less dangerous than running over obstacles. Wouldn't the expected accident be a car crashing into the Uber's back? If the false positive rate is so high that the number of such accidents outweighs the lesser risk, then perhaps Uber shouldn't let the cars drive autonomously with that software.

usrusr• 7 years ago

False positives are only a tradeoff when someone is following. The single most important advantage that driving computers have over humans to make up for their inherent deficiencies is that they don't have to split focus. The computer has no need to check the rear view mirror before going all in on the brakes, it should at any time know the current risk of a rear collision and tune thresholds accordingly.

rayiner4• 7 years ago

The problem is that a false positive causing emergency braking is also dangerous. So you'd be trading one instance of the car not emergency braking when it should against however many instances of it dangerously doing so when it shouldn't. That isn't an obvious call even before you consider that the human driver can cause the car to brake when it should but can't cause it to not break when it shouldn't.

Yes, building a self-driving car is hard. But if you don't even have emergency braking working, then your technology is too underdeveloped to drive on public roads. Keep trying on the test track.

yellow_postit• 7 years ago

What definition would you use for “perfected” emergency braking—“As-good” as the median driver?

adrianN5• 7 years ago

I suppose perfect emergency braking avoids hitting all objects that are visible to the sensors sufficiently early, and hits objects with the minimum possible speed if they become visible too late, while never having a false positive.

avs7332• 7 years ago

I'm wondering if anyone else responding to you clicked on your profile and knows what you do or has equivalent experience from which to comment.

_pmf_• 7 years ago

Working emergency braking should be the first thing perfected, before the computer gets to control the car.

Agreed, but that makes it the lawmaker's criminal negligence, not Tesla's.

kakwa_• 7 years ago

Not having an emergency braking system should not have been a no no in this particular test. It was a prototype with probably many parts not working properly, that's why there was a human to check what was happening and act in case of issues. Here the driver is clearly at fault given that he was willfully not paying attention at the road.

There is probably some degree of responsibility on the side of Uber however:

* how this guy was recruted?

* was he trained and evaluated?

* is this kind of behavior quite common in test drives? if so, was it addressed?

* did Uber put in place at least a basic system to keep the driver engaged (like a switch you have to press every 30 seconds)?

Given the specifics I hope this ruling will not serve as a precedent, it's a bit too special.

Lastly, it raises another question: Car automation is unlikely to become perfect within the next few years, and even if it is, the legal responsibilities and liabilities cause issues. So it's likely a driver will be kept in the loop, at least for a decade or two. Given this statement, how do we design automation that keeps the driver in the loop? The driver must be aware of the car surroundings at all times so he can take over in case of an emergency. Consequently the automation must be designed to maintain him active, and naturally on alert (like a "manual" driver), an automation that is like "yeah, do nothing... humm, oops I don't know what I put myself into, please take over, you have 2 seconds to analyze the situation and take the correct actions or someone will die, kiss, goodbye" is not the correct answer.

Dahoon3• 7 years ago

Not having an emergency braking system should not have been a no no in this particular test

The car did have a working emergency braking system that the car was born with. Uber disabled that one too.

mnm14• 7 years ago

The state also made the wrong call in allowing Uber to operate such a vehicle on public roads and are clearly now trying to distance themselves from that decision by letting Uber off the hook. Both are guilty of criminal negligence but it's not like the state is going to prosecute itself.

jondubois• 7 years ago

I had the exact same thought.

> the system was set up to not activate emergency braking when under computer control.

So the parts that mattered the most where disabled? I bet that even the human operator did not know this.

Fricken• 7 years ago

No you don't understand, Uber didn't have self driving cars on the road, they had autonomous test vehicles. There was never any reasonable expectation that the test vehicle would perform perfectly in all situations, that's why there is a human monitor in the drivers seat. That human monitor is the final failsafe, it's the same with Tesla's Autopilot, and the same with any conventional car. When Rafaela Vasquez volunteered to drive the vehicle, she accepted responsibility for the vehicle. She was watching a television show when the accident occurred.

darkpuma2• 7 years ago

" there is a human monitor in the drivers seat"

Any system that requires a human to sit there bored for hours, waiting for seconds of action at any moment, is fundamentally flawed. The bipedal ape component is being used out of spec and the blame for that lays with the engineers who designed the system.

dTal• 7 years ago

  if(obstacleDetected()) {
      // emergencyBrake(); //TODO: fix
  }

Dahoon3• 7 years ago

  if(obstacleDetected()) {
      // emergencyBrake(); //TODO: fix
  }

  /* 
   VolvoEmergencyBrake();  
     Disabled. We don't need this.
  */

scotty79• 7 years ago

Putting a “self driving” car out there that doesn’t have emergency braking enabled ...

That's why they put in emergency breaking device with set of eyes, hands legs .... and movie streaming device apparently?

Negligence in that case is not bricking employees phone before putting him in the car. But nobody expects this from companies that hire drivers.

benj111• 7 years ago

I think even absent that, its still useful to have the trial, just to get all the facts out, to have the conversation.

No one knows what would have happened had this gone to trial, it would be better to find out sooner rather than later.

pteredactyl3• 7 years ago

My thoughts go out to her family. And the many many people who die every day because of reckless drivers and accidents. Driverless or not. Really sucks to lose someone due to no fault of their own (other than being there).

To add, driverless or not, most who kill others using a car are not criminally liable. Often times not even liable beyond what the state minimum is. Unless the victim sues for personal assets. So in California, that's 100k. Which is one of the lowest in the USA.

thoman23• 7 years ago

to lose someone due to no fault of their own

? She walked in front of a car on the expressway in the dark.

nkurz• 7 years ago

You have a reasonable point that the victim probably bears some responsibility for crossing in the middle of a block in the dark, but I'm pretty sure that it was a divided city street with a 35 MPH speed limit rather than what is typically thought of as an expressway: "the preliminary police investigation determined that the car was speeding—going 38 mph in a 35 mph zone when the crash occurred" (https://www.curbed.com/transportation/2018/3/20/17142090/ube...).

InclinedPlane3• 7 years ago

It was a well lit section of road (the dashcam video Uber released makes it look much darker than it really is, there is other video out there of the same section of road, you can find it on youtube) and it was a natural crossing point but a very poorly designed road/walk way. Almost any human driver who was paying attention would have spotted her from a big distance and avoided hitting her.

Video of the section in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XOVxSCG8u0

pteredactyl3• 7 years ago

I stand corrected.

ikeyany• 7 years ago

Just because she was the victim and passed away doesn't mean she wasn't ay fault. Where have people been getting this wrong information?

aedron• 7 years ago

I don't like that you are equating this with any other car accident.

Uber made a vehicle that can zoom around the roads unassisted. You can't just put something like that out there and disclaim responsibility by assuming that somebody will sit and be ready to brake at the right times. Even trains have a 'dead man's switch', where the train stops if the operator is unresponsive.

What they did was incredibly irresponsible, they have been running an experiment on public roads with the lives of the general public at stake. For this they need to be held responsible.

pteredactyl3• 7 years ago

I agree. I'm not saying they shouldn't be liable.

I had two points. One, expressing condolences to family. That sucks. And two, the laws favor cars and car drivers in accidents like these.

npip99• 7 years ago

None of the top comments make any sense to me. I simply don't understand them. Anyway, here is my understanding of the subject:

(1) Yes, Uber should have trained the driver better to look at the road. By trained, I mean there should have been a sticky note on the wheel saying "PAY ATTENTION OR YOU WILL KILL SOMEONE"

(2) Yes, The driver absolutely should have to pay some penalty for this, if Uber told him that he should have been paying attention (Which they most certainly did). Watching a video while in a self-driving car is IDENTICAL to watching a video in a normal car. Modern self-driving cars are NOT fully autonomous, and they SHOULD be viewed as IDENTICAL to cruise control for all legal considerations, and thought experiments. Most of the top comments, which are blindly attacking self-driving cars, are not making this analysis.

However, (1) and (2) do not justify the lack of logic displayed by most of the top comments here. There seems to be violations of

(a) There is no logical difference between a person accidentally killing someone, and the self-driving car accidentally killing someone. Actually, because the car is already known to not be fully autonomous, this already is a case of the person accidentally killing someone. However, even if the car is fully autonomous, we MUST be considering the ODDS of an accident. None of the other comments are doing this. There is always an odds of an accident, so a specific accident means absolute bullshit. Literally nothing. This post doesn't even mean anything. What SHOULD be posted is "Self-driving cars with humans at the wheel kill X people per road-hour. Human-only cars kill Y people per road-hour". If X > Y, then yes we have a fking problem. But without that information, we literally have nothing to even think about, or process.

(b) Disabling the safety feature of the car is not a fk'ing concern, at all. Almost no cars have these features - only expensive ones do. Turning an expensive car into a normal car is NOT something you can be sued for, or is even something anyone should care about. Who is at blame for the situation is simply not dependent on this fact. I don't understand why people are discussing this aspect.

(c) Do you see the image? Maybe it's not showing it all. But as far as I can see there isn't a light there. Wtf is she doing crossing the road if there's no light there, without waiting for the cars? As a citydweller that is constantly found in the middle of streets trying to cross parts of the road that don't have stop lights, I just can't fathom ever being in her position. Maybe my city has less considerate drivers than her city, but if I tried to cross roads without a red light blocking cars, and didn't consciously give right of way to the traffic, I would die sometime this week.

(d) Many people seem to quote "self-driving system classified the pedestrian as an unknown object, then as a vehicle, and then as a bicycle" as "Oh this self-driving system is complete sh*t it's all Uber's fault". Makes no damn sense. As a side note, if you've ever worked with a neural net, especially with video as opposed to still photos, you already understand that the given sentence means nothing. That's just how they work, and there will always be milliseconds in-between frames where it reassigns the object's identification. But, anyway, this is not relevant. The self-driving part could have been completely off, or disabled. The car is SUPPOSED to be driven by the driver, and any deviation from that is the fault of either the driver, or Uber's training of the driver. Whether it's the former, or the latter, is exactly where and how suing should be directed and handled. Nothing else matters, despite most comments putting much emphasis on many other aspects of the situation.

InclinedPlane3• 7 years ago

Many dashcams do poorly in low light conditions, Uber's footage is not representative of what that section of road actually looks like. Compare it to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XOVxSCG8u0

Additionally, it DOES. NOT MATTER. Whether the section of road was well lit or not. Does not matter. Because the pedestrian was already well into the road when the Uber vehicle hit her. Cars, as many people familiar with them may be aware, have headlights, which are suggested to be used while driving at night. If you can't stop fast enough to avoid hitting something at the farthest limits of your headlights, then you are driving too fast for conditions, whether a human or computer is driving. As I said, this isn't the case because the dashcam footage is deceiving, but even if it were accurate, it is immaterial for this particular case.

perfunctory• 7 years ago

The Arizona Republic has reported that the driver, 44-year-old Rafaela Vasquez, was streaming the television show The Voice in the vehicle in the minutes before the crash.

I guess we shouldn't be surprised any more as even the drivers of the non-self-driving cars do the same sometimes. It's scary how often, when I look in the rear-view mirror, I see drives behind me looking down at their phones. This is one of the reasons I almost stopped driving.

gudok• 7 years ago

Interaction between humans and AI is far from perfect. It seems that it would be easier for the people to adapt to AI rather than the opposite. I feel that someday every traffic participant (including pedestrians) will be required to carry tracking device. These devices will communicate together and prohibit or allow actions, e.g. making a turn or crossing a road. Eventually they will make traffic rules as we know today, obsolete. No traffic lights, no road signs and no crossings anymore. Every action will controlled by the device. And, of course, they will automatically report and fine law-breakers.

Is this the bright future of the humankind? Or is this a setting for a new dystopian book?

Quarrelsome• 7 years ago

and this ladies and gentlemen is a major reason why the US is the best place in the world to do business and specifically bleeding edge stuff.

tobyhinloopen2• 7 years ago

UBER is not criminally liable, but THE DRIVER might be, since she was watching a TV show. Subtle but important detail. Looking at the comments, I suspect many comment without reading the article.

kbos87• 7 years ago

Let's take a look at some of the ingredients that led to this:

1) A pedestrian crossing the street likely expected an approaching driver to see them and slow down. Typical behavior on the part of the average pedestrian and the average driver, whether it's a misdemeanor or not.

2) An engineer at Uber made the decision to put tech on the road without emergency braking capabilities, likely using the justification that a safety driver would be there to intervene when needed.

3) A safety driver in an autonomous vehicle that behaves the right way 99% of the time grows complacent.

The pedestrian may have been jaywalking and the safety driver may have been abdicating their duties. The safety driver especially isn't an innocent actor here. But the party who has the most responsibility is by far the engineers and managers at Uber.

This set of circumstances was completely foreseeable, but they still decided to take the risk and put this technology out on the roads. I for one don't want to be a part of Uber, or anyone else's great experiments. Spend the money, spend the time, and figure this out in a controlled environment before subjecting the rest of us to the negative impacts of your selfish ambition. Someone at Uber deserves time in prison for this.

mannykannot2• 7 years ago

While I agree that disabling the emergency braking was a foolish and irresponsible decision, and the most important single technical failure leading to this tragic outcome, I don't see prison time as a reasonable response, as I doubt that there was a malicious disregard for safety. If the persons most responsible for that decision still think they did no wrong, however... I'm not sure what the ideal response would be.

Beyond that, I do not want to see an extension of the practice where low-level employees take all the blame for a corporate culture that encourages bad behavior.

dkarl• 7 years ago

Most driving is done by humans. Humans are terrible at it and kill people unnecessarily all the time. That's the standard to beat. Speaking as someone who rides a bike on city streets, I really don't give a shit how many people Uber kills, as long as it's less than human drivers would. This whole thread smells like Monday morning quarterbacking and people throwing aside reason under stereotype threat. (Techies are in love with technology, techies are in thrall to startup narratives and oblivious to social responsibility. Everyone's anxious to disprove that.)

In fact, the mistake Uber made here was relying on a human being to do a job that is routine and boring the vast bulk of the time but occasionally requires life-saving decisions that depend on attentive awareness of the surroundings. That's the same mistake our entire civilization makes a million times a day. The fact that the operator had fewer responsibilities than a normal driver probably magnified the problem, but it's the same problem that makes driving fundamentally dangerous. She thought she was doing a good enough job and then oops, guess not, somebody's dead.

That happens every day without robot drivers involved. The standards we hold autonomous driving technology to should reflect this insane status quo.

true_tuna• 7 years ago

Those cars were nowhere near ready to be on the roads. And given how fast the program spun up there’s no way the drivers were properly trained and vetted. I personally had several run-ins with the Uber cars in San Francisco before they got their California registrations revoked. I worked on 3rd in soma and saw them out as I would walk to lunch. They didn’t even try to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks during right turn on red (when pedestrians clearly have right of way). I had more than one near miss. I shouted at the driver and he grabbed the wheel in panic. He went around the block to try again and the car did exactly the same thing. It was like they were blind to anything smaller than a car. Uber knew it too, because the failure to yield was reported to Uber in person at their garage on 3rd and Harrison. Uber (and anyone who behaves like that) has no business running a self-driving program. If they start the program back up I guarantee they will continue to kill pedestrians. If you see one coming get away quick. I speak from personal experience and I’m not joking even a little bit.

Uber Not Criminally Liable in Death of Woman Hit by Self-Driving Car

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