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New That didn't take long.
SAN FRANCISCO — A woman in Tempe, Ariz., has died after being hit by a self-driving car operated by Uber, in what appears to be the first known death of a pedestrian struck by an autonomous vehicle on a public road.

The Uber vehicle was in autonomous mode with a human safety driver at the wheel when it struck the woman, who was crossing the street outside of a crosswalk, the Tempe police said in a statement. The episode happened on Sunday around 10 p.m. The woman was not publicly identified.

Uber said it had suspended testing of its self-driving cars in Tempe, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/uber-driverless-fatality.html
bcnu,
Mikem

It's mourning in America again.
New I'll wait for the video
--

Drew
New Um, you doubt the veracity of the report?
bcnu,
Mikem

It's mourning in America again.
New No
But before blaming the technology, I want to see if this is something a human driver would have avoided.

I've seen photos of the scene, and it's a design nightmare: a sidewalk with a sign in it indicating "No pedestrians" so there's no marked crosswalk where it meets the street. On a curve. Just after a large overpass. And right where other signs are indicating two new turn lanes.

And some reports suggest the victim was pushing a bike and carrying one or more black trash bags, at night.


tl;dr - It's a shitty non-intersection that invites accidents.
--

Drew
New Local ABC affiliate video
https://www.abc15.com/news/region-southeast-valley/tempe/tempe-police-investigating-self-driving-uber-car-involved-in-crash-overnight

Dented hood and grill, mangled bicycle. Seems to be plenty of street lights, but it's hard to know.

These self-driving cars aren't ready for the real world. Pushing them out too early is going to get a lot more people killed.

Cheers,
Scott.
New Maybe
I see so many horrible drivers every day, I believe self-driving cars are already not the worst driver on the road. The tipping point comes when the SDC's are better than the average ability of the people using them.
--

Drew
New But they *WILL* be pushed out because Shareholders and Banksters need more MONEY.
Think of the glorious day when corporate taxi companies don't have to employ and pay those vile carbon based life forms as drivers!

Then, too, technology evangelists/apologists (see Airbus as earlier example) will always be there with their whataboutery as if their arguments had some validity.

Next up, robotic/AI health care. Who needs physicians, nurses, lab techs, orderlies, and so on when we can replace them with virtual people (who are better anyway, donchaknow - just ask a computer science major or take a poll on facebook)?

Just think of the savings to shareholders that will entail! It will be great. Honest. I promise.
bcnu,
Mikem

It's mourning in America again.
New Great reason to question the motives, but sometimes the "right thing" also make someone rich
--

Drew
New It won't be long before it's the only kind of car I'll be allowed to use!
Bring it on! :)
Alex

"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

-- Isaac Asimov
New Feh. Mass transit is and always was the answer.
Of course, that won't do for the coming generation of Facebookers who despise actual people and yick, never want to be actually near any of them!
bcnu,
Mikem

It's mourning in America again.
New Mass Transit?
Work like mine would be absolutely impossible in a mass transit environment.
New How so?
bcnu,
Mikem

It's mourning in America again.
New Re: How so?
I perform emergency service - I have to get to destinations that are not likely to be on any mass transit grid and get there fast. Many companies are paralyzed when the network is down, especially now that the phones are also on the network.

When downtime puts a company completely out of business - the cost is very high, in both expenses and possible lost customers.

And mass transit always involves a lot of waiting - waiting that neither I nor my clients can afford. Especially at route transition points.

I have to get there with a large amount of gear - because I have no idea what the problem is I will face, and I need a full tool kit (heavy), test equipment and a lot of replacement parts.

I also often have to take computers back to the office if they need extensive attention. I can't be sitting around at $100 / hour for hours and hours just waiting for updates and things.

The computer I will be delivering today, to replace the dead one I brought back yesterday - the Windows updates took nearly 8 hours.

Did I know I'd have to bring this computer (now in my junk pile) back to the office? No. I have to always be prepared for that.
New Okay, it doesn't work for ambulances either. But those are outliers.
The *vast* majority of people who are in their cars on the San Diego, Harbor, Santa Monica, Riverside, etc. on a twice daily basis don't really need to be there.
bcnu,
Mikem

It's mourning in America again.
New We also have to look at US geography
espcially when comparing with the "States" of the EU, generally the best showcase of what Bitchin-mass-transit Can be.

We are er, Hyarge . Still and all IMhO we bloody well Need sane modrin mass transit in all high-density/city+suburbs-wide area: such a monumental transfiguration would free the "free-"ways for folks in similar positions as Andrew's.

(Yeah.. after the s-f-Vulgarian siphons off all available deficit-spending to build his safe-to-Use nukes. And 100 other insanities. As we seep daily into The Swamp that is the mind-fluff of some 40% of the inmates.)

Just another day in the Land of the most odious of the Pecksniffs..
New There's no reason not to do it, other than infatuation with the car because reasons
The vast majority of journeys are short - basically commuting or local shopping. An interesting indicator of this is that most crashes take place within a mile or two of the driver's home.

No-one apart from the idiot fringe is suggesting that all personal transportation be replaced by mass transit. There are lots of people whose journeys are ad hoc, and these people need personal transportation.

HOWEVER

Most people could go to and from their place of work via mass transit, if only it existed. This would vastly reduce the number of vehicles on the road, especially at peak times.

Look at London and NYC - these are places where sure, you could drive to work if you wanted, but that'd be stupid, because the mass transit infrastructure exists at a point where for most people, it's the better option not to.

You don't have to build out a London-style underground system - just regular buses, trams and trains will do.
New Disagree
We have about 80 years of contruction over vast areas that place suburbs around cities. The majority of the well paying jobs are distant from the housing. And distant in a manner that a 45 minute car commute would turn into a 3 hour multipoint public transportation nightmare. Your attempt to compare to your tiny island's reasonable solutions to our geography does not mesh.
New Re: Disagree
Well, you're fucked then :)
New Also
45 minute commute? Fuck that shit right in the ear.

I get grumbly when an additional 10 minutes means I spent half an hour getting to work.
New 45-60 for me.
Typically 40 on the way home depending on when I leave. In Detroit, which has nothing for mass transit worth talking about.

In DC I had a 1.5 hour commute by bus and subway and it was great: plenty of time to read, relax, whatever.
Regards,
-scott
Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
New Yeah, I enjoyed my nyc commute.
Wife dropped off at train (5 min from house). 5 minute wait, then 72 minute ride. 10 minute walk through nyc.
Reverse was a PACKED train though, hot and sweaty, and then maybe a bus ride home.

Time on the train was spent reading and listening to music.

BUT: I justified the time spent on the commute as worth it because they were paying me stupid money. And the job was fun. I doubt I'd have the same calculation now.
New 54 miles 40-45 minutes 3.5 hours 1 way public transpo the a 2.5 mile hike. no thanks
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman
New Perhaps they need a permanent techie employee!
Alex

"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

-- Isaac Asimov
New Only one of my clients is big enough for that.
For the rest of them, hiring me at $100 / hour when needed is still one hell of a lot cheaper than having a techie on payroll.

Fortunately, the main reason for smaller companies to have a permanent techie went away some years back.

For a while Microsoft was graduating a lot of hot shot techies who went into small businesses and sold them the whole Microsoft business suit, including Microsoft Exchange Server and Active Directory. Fortunately, all those Exchange Servers have died off long ago.

I have only one client now using Exchange Server, and he outsources it to a company that does have full time techies 24 hours a day. I can't recall any of my clients having active directory any more.
New Suit instead of suite? Was that intentional? If so, I like it. :0)
I was a Microsoftie in those days and occasionally made a little money un-fscking some of those very "Small Business Server" installations you're referring to myself.
bcnu,
Mikem

It's mourning in America again.
New A fun thing about Microsoft Exchange Server.
At least back when I had to deal with it, Exchange Server generated huge amounts of .tmp files, so many it saturated the hard disks of the day.

Simple - you just go into that directory and delete all the .tmp files.

Ha! Ha! gotchya! One of those .tmp files is essential, and if removed Exchange Server will never run again! All your email is inaccessible (IMAP was little used back then).

When this happened to one of my clients, I turned the problem over to an exchange specialist. They didn't even try, they just set him up with a regular hosted POP account.

This partially explains why most of those Exchange Servers in small businesses disappeared.
New Another fun thing.
I had a client (this was a long time ago) who'd first installed Exchange 4.x or 5.0 as part of one of those Small Business Server suites. They wanted to upgrade to a full Exchange 5.5 (IIRC) stand alone server. I quoted 4 hours to do the job (chiefly because I never quoted anything less than 4 hours and all my work then was always NTE). The client balked. I told him that if he was going to have his help desk tech do it, make sure he's careful because, for instance, the default for the upgrade is to set the server up as an open relay and they had their exchange server outside the firewall. I was told it wouldn't be a problem because "we're just a little company. No one will know we're on the Internet." Then, two weeks later, the same guy called me in a panic. He said he'd been "interviewed by FBI agents who were interested in all the child porn that was arriving in Australia or somewhere" that had bounced off their exchange server. That mess took me *and* my partner a while to clean up.
bcnu,
Mikem

It's mourning in America again.
New Yeah, I ran into the open relay problem myself.
Fortunately, not much damage was done - just their Internet service provider cut them off.

More fortunately, I didn't install that Exchange Server so they couldn't blame me. It was a hassle to fix.

Later their Exchange Server bombed and had to be re-installed. Unfortunately, they didn't remember their company code, which means none of their email could be accessed.

After some study, I found a severe security flaw in Exchange Server that allowed me to extract the company code. I published that on the Internet and got a few emails of thanks for all the time I'd saved for administrators.
New Systems guys at the law firm I worked at *turned off* the firewall
They were Windows guys through-and-through. Our ISP had provided a Solaris box that sat in our server room between our network and the world. Or it sat there until they decided that since they didn't know what it was doing it must not be needed so when upgrading some switches they left the yellow box out of the loop.

Shortly thereafter our clients started reporting that they weren't getting email that our attorneys said they had sent. A little investigation showed their systems were bouncing it because our domain had been blacklisted for spam. We were an open relay.
--

Drew
New The flaw in "safety by obscurity"
The bad guys can presume that a small company using that strategy doesn't have skilled enough support staff to understand the vulnerabilities and fix them. This makes them prime targets.

I've had a couple of clients asking me why their server hard disks were full.

I had one client telling me all the computers I'd supplied were way too slow and needed a serious upgrade. Problem was, those computers were working very hard - but they were working for someone other than the owners.

Yeah, obscurity is an open invitation.
New Permanent?
You mean 2 per site 24x7? If truly mission critical and no on-demand transportation. So at least 6 people full time plus vacation and sick coverage.
New Got it backwards
New Moi likes your reading-list..
New And here's the video
https://www.recode.net/2018/3/21/17149428/uber-self-driving-fatal-accident-video-tempe-arizona

I would have hit her, too. Frankly I'm surprised the vehicle didn't react faster, but she crossed at the worst possible spot - no crosswalk, away from streetlights. The operator will get some trouble for looking down, but people look down more than that adjusting the radio. (No, I'm not saying looking down is acceptable.)
--

Drew
New Drum has some good questions...
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/03/tempe-police-release-video-of-uber-pedestrian-collision/

There are a few things we can tentatively say:

- The pedestrian was crossing in shadow and was virtually invisible a second before the crash. It’s unlikely any human driver could have avoided this collision.

[ One should never outdrive one's lights. If you can't see, slow down. The car shouldn't have been driving so fast if it couldn't see far enough ahead - just like a human should slow down. ]

- But the Uber car also has lidar and radar. Why didn’t those pick up the pedestrian?

- Also: one second might be too short a time for a human to react more than minimally, but it’s plenty of time for a computer. Maybe the Uber car couldn’t have avoided the collision completely, but it doesn’t seem to have reacted at all. Why?


I'm sure Uber will do it's best to blame the poor woman who was run over, and the woman "backup driver", before blaming their oh so wonderful self-driving car...

:-(

Cheers,
Scott.
New Those, plus...
IMHO, the crosswalk issue is a red herring. In this case, it was a human, but there are plenty of other things out there that can enter the roadway without caring much where, or what the speed limit is. Some are sizable enough that a prang would not end well for the occupants of the car either.

Based on the images in Drew's post, there is nothing in the shoulder areas that would have hidden the woman from the car's sensors. I'd say Uber has a while to go before letting their junk loose on the public again.
New Agreed, but ...
Most of the comments I'm seeing online say that the typical human driver would have killed her just as dead. But also that the sensors we've been told self-driving cars are using should have easily seen her.

So in this specific scenario, the car was no worse than a human driver, but still so far from what we demand and expect from automation that we want them all grounded for the foreseeable future.
--

Drew
New Indeed
Being no less lethal than a human pretty much defeats the entire purpose.

(Interestingly, it also seems no better than a human in sticking to the speed limit...)
New Lidar vendor doesn't understand it either
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43523286

Basically "No else has this problem. It works as well in the dark as it does in daylight. Uber screwed something up."

And, of course, "there's really no need to halt testing over this." I guess their shareholders shouldn't suffer because of Uber's blunders. :-/
New New video ... they're evil, and screwed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRW0q8i3u6E

They used a shitty camera, tweaked the brightness before releasing, or both.
--

Drew
New Not shocked at all...
New Me neither. Lower quality camera === more profits for shareholders. Capitalism is evil.
bcnu,
Mikem

It's mourning in America again.
New Confused. What does that video show?
Here's the actual accident:

https://www.cnn.com/videos/cnnmoney/2018/03/19/uber-self-driving-autonomous-crash-arizona-pedestrian-dead-cnnmoney-orig.cnnmoney

I would have been able to avoid that EASILY at 48 mph which was the reported speed (at least in 1 article I read.) Hell, I've avoided deer in fog going about 65 at 1/2 the visibility.

And they have lider, ie: can see in the dark. This one is at LEAST manslaughter.
New Uber's makes it look unavoidable
The second video shows you have a clear field of view at the accident spot with plenty of range to spot a pedestrian approaching from the left.

Reporting about the speed limit has been confusing. Tempe PD originally said the car was doing 38 in a 35 mph zone. Streetview shows a 35 sign just before the river, but then a 45 sign just before the overpass.

Maybe Uber's AI is even more human: don't slow me down when I'm accelerating, fool!

(Although upping the speed limit just before you get to a complicated intersection should probably be added to the collection of roadway design gaffes.)
Expand Edited by scoenye March 24, 2018, 09:11:17 AM EDT
New It will be a brief pause before tests resume.
Alex

"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

-- Isaac Asimov
New Photos of the scene
The spot:



That sign for the two left-turn lanes is for the two lanes visible splitting off here.

And you see that big "X" that looks like sidewalks in the median?

Nope.

That is such piss-poor design. Of course people are going to try to cross there.
--

Drew
New A+ for actually sleuthing ..almost showing that,
neither ept human nor ""AI"" is likely to have seen the black-camouflaged perp In Time.
New Multiple faults.
However, most people look for one thing to blame. This is the very definition of "accident". If she'd crossed 5 seconds sooner or later, or the car was a little slower or faster, or a number of other subtle changes we might have had a near miss or no incident at all.

Wade.
     That didn't take long. - (mmoffitt) - (47)
         I'll wait for the video -NT - (drook) - (42)
             Um, you doubt the veracity of the report? -NT - (mmoffitt) - (30)
                 No - (drook) - (29)
                     Local ABC affiliate video - (Another Scott) - (28)
                         Maybe - (drook)
                         But they *WILL* be pushed out because Shareholders and Banksters need more MONEY. - (mmoffitt) - (24)
                             Great reason to question the motives, but sometimes the "right thing" also make someone rich -NT - (drook)
                             It won't be long before it's the only kind of car I'll be allowed to use! - (a6l6e6x) - (22)
                                 Feh. Mass transit is and always was the answer. - (mmoffitt) - (21)
                                     Mass Transit? - (Andrew Grygus) - (20)
                                         How so? -NT - (mmoffitt) - (19)
                                             Re: How so? - (Andrew Grygus) - (18)
                                                 Okay, it doesn't work for ambulances either. But those are outliers. - (mmoffitt) - (8)
                                                     We also have to look at US geography - (Ashton) - (7)
                                                         There's no reason not to do it, other than infatuation with the car because reasons - (pwhysall) - (6)
                                                             Disagree - (crazy) - (5)
                                                                 Re: Disagree - (pwhysall)
                                                                 Also - (pwhysall) - (3)
                                                                     45-60 for me. - (malraux) - (1)
                                                                         Yeah, I enjoyed my nyc commute. - (crazy)
                                                                     54 miles 40-45 minutes 3.5 hours 1 way public transpo the a 2.5 mile hike. no thanks -NT - (boxley)
                                                 Perhaps they need a permanent techie employee! -NT - (a6l6e6x) - (8)
                                                     Only one of my clients is big enough for that. - (Andrew Grygus) - (6)
                                                         Suit instead of suite? Was that intentional? If so, I like it. :0) - (mmoffitt)
                                                         A fun thing about Microsoft Exchange Server. - (Andrew Grygus) - (4)
                                                             Another fun thing. - (mmoffitt) - (3)
                                                                 Yeah, I ran into the open relay problem myself. - (Andrew Grygus) - (1)
                                                                     Systems guys at the law firm I worked at *turned off* the firewall - (drook)
                                                                 The flaw in "safety by obscurity" - (Andrew Grygus)
                                                     Permanent? - (crazy)
                         Got it backwards - (crazy) - (1)
                             Moi likes your reading-list.. -NT - (Ashton)
             And here's the video - (drook) - (10)
                 Drum has some good questions... - (Another Scott) - (4)
                     Those, plus... - (scoenye) - (2)
                         Agreed, but ... - (drook) - (1)
                             Indeed - (scoenye)
                     Lidar vendor doesn't understand it either - (scoenye)
                 New video ... they're evil, and screwed - (drook) - (4)
                     Not shocked at all... -NT - (Another Scott) - (1)
                         Me neither. Lower quality camera === more profits for shareholders. Capitalism is evil. -NT - (mmoffitt)
                     Confused. What does that video show? - (crazy) - (1)
                         Uber's makes it look unavoidable - (scoenye)
         It will be a brief pause before tests resume. -NT - (a6l6e6x)
         Photos of the scene - (drook) - (2)
             A+ for actually sleuthing ..almost showing that, - (Ashton)
             Multiple faults. - (static)

If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, maybe that's where your kid should be practicing the trumpet.
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