{"id":8155,"date":"2018-03-22T16:08:58","date_gmt":"2018-03-22T23:08:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ricobelled.com\/wordpress\/?p=8155"},"modified":"2021-01-25T23:52:21","modified_gmt":"2021-01-26T07:52:21","slug":"death-by-machine-part-deux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.ricobelled.com\/wordpress\/?p=8155","title":{"rendered":"Death by machine: part deux"},"content":{"rendered":"

Amazingly, two videos of the first fatal autonomous Uber crash have been released to the public. I’m sure we’ll have quite the extended debate over them, and the human ‘safety’ driver, who is supposed to make sure the machine doesn’t make mistakes, or at least take over when it does; this woman failed spectacularly, that’s for sure. She was simply not even looking out the window, instead looking down at something in her lap until a split second before the crash occurred. The most interesting legal question is how much liability she<\/em> has in this disaster.<\/p>\n

When watching the dashcam of the car, one thing becomes clear: the victim made a move that just begged for a correction in the population that only natural selection can provide. There’s most likely no way the car could have been controlled to NOT hit her, certainly not by a person, but probably not even by a machine with infinitely faster response. She just came out of the dark in THE most stupid place to cross, in addition hampered in her mobility by the bike she was dragging along. It seems hard to believe she didn’t jump in front of the car on purpose but let’s assume she didn’t. In my opinion it would be unreasonable to put the blame for her death on anyone or anything other than her.<\/p>\n

At the same time, there’s something very very interesting about the video and the little info about what happened that we do have. Apparently, the brakes were not applied at all! That the knucklehead behind the wheel didn’t is perhaps somewhat understandable, she had literally a fraction of a second, but for a machine that’s an eternity. Once she came out of the shadows, in those 2 frames, she’s clearly visible, and clearly in the path of the car. Did its sensors not notice her at all? Did it decide it was too late to start braking? Amazingly what the car was ‘thinking’ will be known, at least to the engineers with access to it. At the same time, I can’t shake the feeling that Google’s cars would have done better. In either case, it’s yet another data set, another set of circumstances that future Uber cars have in their experience.<\/p>\n

Finally, to all the doubters of autonomous vehicles: just look at how utterly relaxed and trusting the safety driver was. Amazingly, it has to be prove of how well this tech already works, and Google is significantly ahead in its capabilities. Dead lady or not, this tech is coming quickly; you can improve computers, but you can’t fix stupid!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Amazingly, two videos of the first fatal autonomous Uber crash have been released to the public. I’m sure we’ll have quite the extended debate over them, and the human ‘safety’ … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Death by machine: part deux”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,5,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ontheroad","category-science","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ricobelled.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ricobelled.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ricobelled.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ricobelled.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ricobelled.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8155"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.ricobelled.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8155\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9239,"href":"http:\/\/www.ricobelled.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8155\/revisions\/9239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ricobelled.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ricobelled.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ricobelled.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}