Except there is 100% of a way to determine if the car could have stopped with a human. It didn't. There was a person in the car the car did not stop. Just because it isn't a person driving does NOT change the damn laws of physics. What does conscience have to do with anything here? It was a robot, and if it was a person they ALSO would have chose to stop.

Your premise here is 100% false.

However, I DO agree with you that there is too much computer fuckery in cars these days in regards to their operation. That is why I went backwards in car tech.



And that LIDAR and computer are going to be 100x faster than a person.



Agreed, and it has nothing to do with the car hitting the person. The media was the one making this a thing, though there are liability things in other states regarding being in or out of a crosswalk.

Even in WA, pedestrians must yield the right of way to vehicles on the road...except in crosswalks....and even then, the ped can't jump in front of your car....

Exactly. As I said these laws are about LIABILITY. This just indemnifies the driver for someones mistake/dumbassery, as long as they did not do with with malice or ill intent.

So, honestly the crosswalk has zero to do with the autonomous vehicle as it is programed to stop REGARDLESS of where they are crossing. I will 100% state that the computer driven car would be more likely to stop in time than a human driver in a situation like we are discussing.

A computer can't judge a person walking out of a store front, straight towards the road.
A computer can't judge the risks of children playing ball on a side walk and prepare for the worse.
A computer cannot judge a probability based on good judgement.
Defend all you want, a computer cannot, and probably never will, have the ability to use emotions, conscience and reasoning. It merely reacts to inputs.
Whether a person could react to the pedestrian cannot be determined, where the human brain and all it's wonders come into play, wheare as the computer is reacting to supplied data of the moment.
Yes, a computer is needed to fly a stealth plane and do all sorts of other shit, and you can have a hundred sensors sending all the data you could ever want, you still don't have a sensor for common sense.

Yes! Exactly. People have intuition.

K, then why didn't the backup driver stop the car if humans are so infalible and better at judgment?

You are entirely right that a computer sucks at intuition. However, what it is great at is problem solving. Picking up shit coming up in front of it, a computer does much better than a person. Intuition has zero to do with this case, and could not have changed anything.

Fear Mongering is dumb.



That has what to do with the price of tea in China? (This accident.)

I agree with this as well. If a person was that close to the road the passing car should have been watching body language for signs of them moving into the traffic lane. Should motorists have to do this? No, but if you want half a chance not hitting homeless people you need to. These days I always cover my brake while passing them, and at the first flinch I start applying. Yes, I profile..

Yep...humans have intuition - a huge factor in avoiding accidents. I don't think you can program driverless cars to have that same intuition. I'm not saying the driverless cars are a bad idea altogether; I'm just saying that they'll be limited in their ability to foresee potential accidents and take precautionary measures to avoid them.

The problem is that technology is only at the point where it is capable of 'not causing' an accident - it is nowhere near evolved enough to 'prevent' accidents which is what the expectations are for self driving vehicles. Its going to take alot more than boolean logic and decision trees to do that.... some sort of AI... There are far too many variables and unpredictable events for any programming to account for --- there needs to be fuzzy logic incorporated. There is no way yet for programming/AI to mimic the ability of the brain to process all the environmental/situational inputs that happen when shit starts going bad - and to choose the best solution/least damage/no loss of life reaction to a situation for the conditions at the moment -- it can only choose from the 'predetermined scenario response'. Sometimes there is no 'good' solution, only a choice of the 'least hurtful/damaging' to the driver or others --- that going to be a difficult choice to make in programming.

Quick story --- I was cruising up the street doing ~40 - coming up to a cross street that had a stop sign - none for me.... saw a car kicking ass up to the stop sign... I realized that he wasn't going to stop - he was going to blow right thru.... instinctively I nailed the brakes, but realized he was going to t-bone me if I locked them up.... for some reason, I decided the best response was the nail the gas and try to blow past him. It was close, I almost made it past him - he clipped my rear bumper. That move saved me from a full side impact t-boning that would have totaled my car and possibly injured me --- only a cracked rear bumper covering. There is no way any programming would have chosen that response.

Probably texting a Girlfriend.....

Sleeping

Choking his Chicken

Or doing what ever the Train Engineer was doing when he hit the 30mph corner at 80.

He was channeling Jerry Garcia playing a Grateful Dead cassette, smoking a blunt, doing some lines, and sipping Champagne with the executives.

Driving that train
High on cocaine
Casey Jones, you better, watch your speed !!!

I'm seeing a lot of unfounded faith in the abilities of self-driving cars.

I've seen zero manufacturers claim they can even match the abilities of drivers never mind exceed them.

Get these beta testing death machines off the road until they are provably ready.

Been testing and developing software for nearly twenty years. Have yet to see a bug-free product. As long as people are developing software, there will be bugs due to outright mistakes or often just limitations in software design that are unable to deal with requirements/circumstances unforeseen by the code developer.

No way on God's green earth I would trust my safety to any self-driving car with the software developed by any unseen/unaccountable software engineers.

But how do you do that?

At some point, testing needs to be done in the real world. The same thing happens with software, drugs, airplanes, etc.