Horn – It may not seem the most important piece of safety equipment, and many big cities even limit how it can be used, but to be street legal every vehicle must have a horn that is audible for at least 200 feet. The horn can generally be any note or sound (even ones that play musical tunes are usually permitted), so long as the minimum volume requirements are met.
Not sure why the downvotes, this is a very good point.
If a requirement for being street legal is having a horn then the assumption is that the driver has the ability to press the horn. (like having a condom sitting on a shelf, it's not effective if not used).
Not programming the car to use the horn is basically the same as not making a button in the cabin which can activate the horn for a human driver. In that case it would be not road legal.
> Not programming the car to use the horn is basically the same as not making a button in the cabin which can activate the horn for a human driver. In that case it would be not road legal.
Isn't it more akin to having a working horn but a driver who never presses it? Would a human driver ever be prosecuted for not using their horn?
The difference is, though, that the human driver is always capable of pressing it, and you have no way of proving that they certifiably never do in any situation.
If a self-driving car isn't programmed to ever use the horn, though, then that's a different situation. It's easy to prove that it can't ever use the horn because it isn't programmed to do so. That's more akin to a normal car having a horn in it that isn't wired up.
> The difference is, though, that the human driver is always capable of pressing it, and you have no way of proving that they certifiably never do in any situation.
Why should that make a difference though? Imagine e.g. a truck backed into a car when the (human) driver didn't press the horn. Is the car driver liable? Whether the driver might have pressed the horn under other circumstances doesn't seem like it has any bearing on that question. We're judged on what we did, not what we might have done - shouldn't it be the same for the software?
Not quite. We're also judged on intent: "why didn't the driver press the horn? Was it because he was busy not-driving-into something else, because he was busy texting, or because the horn was not connected to the button?". If we were judged only on did/didn't, law would be a straightforward and uninteresting field of human endeavor.
>Whether the driver might have pressed the horn under other circumstances doesn't seem like it has any bearing on that question
Replace that with some other subsystem that is practically necessary for safe operation in a commonly encountered subset of driving situation requires manual activation and we require vehicles to have.
> Replace that with some other subsystem that is practically necessary for safe operation in a commonly encountered subset of driving situation requires manual activation and we require vehicles to have.
> Lights, wipers, brakes, seatbelts, defrost, etc.
> See the problem?
No, I really don't. I think a human driver would and should obviously be prosecuted for not using lights, wipers, brakes, or defrost in a situation that called for them (seatbelts have specific laws about them). It's not at all obvious to me that this would ever happen with the horn.
>No, I really don't. I think a human driver would and should obviously be prosecuted for not using lights, wipers, brakes, or defrost in a situation that called for them (seatbelts have specific laws about them). It's not at all obvious to me that this would ever happen with the horn.
The point is that code that can't use those systems is no better than them not existing which is not something we're ok with.
Society accepts that it's not unreasonable for whoever calling the shots (human or not) to misjudge a situation and not use some system when they should and that this may result in a crash.
Society does not tolerate a vehicle that does not have those systems. Code that cannot use those systems is effectively the same as not having them.
Yes, the human is liable in that situation. The car manufacturer does not become liable just because the human did not press the horn.
But if your car can only press the horn programmatically, and you never add the code to allow the horn to function, you don't actually have a horn, that's the vehicle's problem.
Driver needs to have the ability to press it. More correct analogy is driver with some physical defect that renders him incapable of pressing the horn, which would be illegal. They ask you to press horn in drivers exam .
You'd be surprised at what you can think about while sliding around. I drove down a very steep, ice covered hill towards a traffic signal. My luck - it turned red and there was no way I was going to get stopped. I flashed my lights on and off as I tried to brake, down shift and I blew right through that intersection. No accident - everyone saw my lights flashing and was alert enough to stay out of the way.
Someday a self driving car will me "smart" enough to honk the horn or flash the lights - or send out a panic signal to other self driving cars.
Sarcasm aside, who is deemed to be in control, who do you sue for the damage if this vehicle crashes in to you - isn't it the manufacturer that causes the crash (not in this case necessarily, I'm talking generally).
I own my vehicle, if you drive it and cause an accident aren't you primarily at fault.
Assuming normal circumstances (so not considering things like me letting a child drive, or letting you drive drunk, etc.). The person/persons in control of the vehicle are surely at fault - being the owner doesn't give you power to alter the programming and so you are powerless to avoid a crash.
The company directors, who instruct the system's programmers, are the one's able to avoid the crash by making the vehicle operate effectively.
There may be circumstance where a crash could not be avoided but there are going to be plenty when alternative actions - for which there is a strong rationale - would avoid a crash too.
> Generally, the owner of the at-fault vehicle is responsible.
Generally, the driver is at fault and liable if the driver violated a traffic law; if the accident resulted from a manufacturing defect, the manufacturer is (and potentially other participants in the stream of commerce are) liable.
The owner, as distinct from the driver, may be liable in certain cases, such as (IIRC) maintenance problems.
The absence of a driver reduces the difficulty of ascribing liability by reducing the possibilities.
The owner of the vehicle of course like anything else.
They may then in turn be able to sue the manufacturer for selling them something unfit for purpose.
That's not how this works even for normal cars. You don't sue by proxy. If a car malfunctions due to a defect then it's not the driver's responsibility to pay the injured parites unless you can also prove that they were somehow at fault by knowingly driving a dangerous car. In a normal defective car case the suit against the driver will be unsuccesful but the suit against the manufacturer might go through.
Actually, a defendant then suing a third party as described by the grandparent is a thing, called “contribution” [0], and I'm fairly certain there are cases where it's been applied in exactly the manner he grandparent describes involving automakers.
Even with human drivers, manufacturers are liable for harm caused by defects. (The driver also be liable for failure to maintain the vehicle in a safe state if the defect was something they reasonably should have known about, and in some cases a non-driving owner or the drivers employer might also be liable; legal liability often isn't exclusive.)
The Machine acted in a way that was not expected by the human driver.
This gets to a fundamental issue we will have in the transition to the utopian driverless future. Learning to identify and react to this new class of driver.
I am not sure that the truck driver had any expectations, as he acted as if he had not seen the shuttle.
The article sneers that "surely this situation is not so rare that the shuttle’s designers did not allow for it?", but of course it is not that simple - there are a great many cases in everyday driving where the projected motion of the vehicles would lead to a collision if nothing was done to stop it, and so it is clearly infeasible to react to all such situations as if nothing else will be done. The passengers of the shuttle recognized the impending collision because they understood that the truck driver had probably not seen the shuttle. Approximating these applications of our theory of mind is probably the hardest part about automated driving.
Safety can also mean avoiding / swerving / reversing.
I've had motorcycle lessons, one factor in those things is that their braking power is less than that of a car (less wheels, less stability, etc), so besides the emergency stop, you also learn how to do an emergency swerve - using the motorcycle's superior agility to avoid an accident. Just an anecdote. In this case, damage would've been avoided if the car had a horn and/or was more visible and/or had backed up and/or the truck had sensors.
Isn't it illegal to do stuff like "blocking an intersection" for instance?
What will a self-driving car do if for instance someone is driving in the opposite direction, towards it? Will it just continue driving, freeze, or get out of the way? Humans would likely get out of the way, even if that means "breaking the law" by going off-road or whatever. A self-driving car probably wouldn't do that, thus it would be the kind of "unexpected driving" that could really throw humans off, and may even cause more accidents than humans, in certain specific situations.
In such situations, an illegal action of another might force you into illegal behavior in any case: swerve, get out of the way into opposite direction, stop and block the intersection? (How is that causing an accident, if it's reactive towards another's reckless driving?)
Also, there are even deeper levels here. Going off-road in such a situation may not actually be against the law. It may look like it on the books, but when such a case is interpreted by judges and peers, they will certainly in some cases decide that swerving or going off-road was perfectly legal, for such a situation.
Judges might forgive a human who drove onto a sidewalk to avoid an accident, but they're not likely to be as forgiving of a manufacturer that programmed their cars to do the same thing.
I'm sure you've interacted with truckers before. They drive in a manner of "biggest object wins" (not all, but many, especially city delivery drivers). It's pretty common for cars, bikes and people to yield to trucks doing "strange" movements, even when the trucker doesn't have the right of way.
Rules of the road give less powered vehicles the right of way. trucks should yield to bicycles and pedestrians. Trucks flout these rules regularly.
--EDIT-- it seems my comments are being misunderstood. I am simply stating the law as it exists, and the orthogonality between land and sea in regards to these laws. I know that Newtonian physics conflicts with the land aspect of these laws.
Yes, because they have the right of weight... and strict timelines they often couldn’t meet if they did follow the rules to a tee.
If a truck driver can complete a run in an hour and only infrequently have an accident by bending the rules, why would a “maximize profit” company give them two hours so they could follow the rules properly?
It doesn't take twice as long to follow the rules. It also is in the companies best interest when it comes to costly collisions, insurance, disability payments, etc.
For semis with a route in-town, it can. They accelerate slowly, need a lot of room to make turns or merges, and are competing against much more nimble cars, bikes and pedestrians for that space.
One example I saw the other morning: a trucker pulls halfway onto the road to make a left turn, where there is no traffic control other than stop sign against them. This is against the rules; they should wait for a full opening to take that turn. However, if they attempt to wait for a full opening, it could take several tens minutes for that opening to appear. For one turn.
> It also is in the companies best interest when it comes to costly collisions, insurance, disability payments, etc.
As with everything, there's a cost/benefit ratio. One minor fender-bender every year to deliver even 110% the cargo in that year? Totally worth it. Not to mention, it's usually the driver who absorbs the bigger relative share of the cost, in terms of points on their licenses or being fired for their inevitable slip-ups while under pressure.
Something I read on Reddit a few years ago that tore away the blinders of risk management forced upon truck drivers: If a driver had the opportunity to avoid a head-on by swerving into the ditch, they won't take it. By intentionally swerving into the ditch, the blame of the wreck falls on their shoulders, and if the cargo is damaged, they've likely lost their jobs. I've since confirmed it with a few questions to truck drivers I know.
The default rules of the are basically "big class of vehicle takes precedence" and "speed takes precedence within a class of vehicles".
People yield to golf carts yield to fork trucks yield for semis which yield for trains which yield to container ships.
Traffic on slow roads crossing fast roads waits until it's clear. Stop signs codify this pretty directly. Even if you removed them it's pretty obvious who has the right of way in many cases.
The rules of the road are specifically for reducing ambiguity and managing traffic flow within a class of traffic and managing interactions between those classes. For example, the procedure for a (rule following) pedestrian crossing a busy road will be very different where there's a cross walk than where there isn't. The cross walk provides a specific exception where the right of way defaults to the lighter traffic.
However, people don't crashing stuff and there's many levels of redundancy built into "the rules" so it all gets a bit fuzzy and situation dependent. (e.g. the pittsburg left or an agricultural vehicle crossing a not too busy road)
Accordingly, if you as a pedestrian or cyclist (or golf cart driver) just cross into a busy street not at a cross walk people will stop for you giving the appearance of you having the right of way.
Maybe states including California and Maryland have the idea of an "implied" crosswalk. So the idea is if there's an intersection or a large amount of space between crosswalks, that pedestrians can cross with the same rights a zebra-stripe crosswalk would provide.
Stopping for the unexpected is pretty much expected. Lots of human drivers freeze up when confronted with a situation like this. I don’t see any lesson here other than that human drivers are atrocious and the fully autonomous future can’t come quickly enough.
In the utopian driverless future, the truck was also driverless and the two had communicated their intent minutes before the incident so it never happened in the first place.
In case of uncertainty they would both stop before a collision, because they both would have cameras that see all around them, rather then just backing into a blind spot.
> The Machine acted in a way that was not expected by the human driver.
This is why I've been saying it's not enough for a self-driving car to just be better than the "average human driver". It needs to be way better, maybe 10x better. Because these cars are likely not going to drive the way we expect a human to drive in many situations, which could end-up causing more accidents due to this conflict with how humans actually drive, even if the car is "technically" as safe as an average human driver.
> The Machine acted in a way that was not expected by the human driver.
Nope, the human driver was careless and did not look around, failing to notice the obstacle. If there was a human-driven car instead, we'd have never heard of it and the matter would have been resolved by regular insurance payments that happen every day in every city a thousand times. But since there's an automatic car involved now it is a philosophical conundrum. Nope, it's not, it's just some guy in a truck being careless.
Generally, not, though there are some exceptions. But that's not relevant here, because the bus stopped in an attempt to avoid/mitigate a collision with the truck, which was illegally backing into it's path, and the driver of the semi was cited for the violation.
That doesn't seem like a fair summary. A human-controlled truck slowly backed into it and hit it. The autonomous vehicle was unable to react to the situation, though all the humans in it had plenty of time to see this coming and react.
I'd rather that the software sense it's surroundings and make an assessment of risk for various possible actions. In this case, backing up a bit since there was no one behind it would have been the safest option.
And what if the truck keeps backing into it? Does the car just keep avoiding it forever? When is the truck driver expected to take responsibility for doing something technically illegal.
"Truck reverses into stationary object" is not really news.
I think there are too many possible risks of programming the vehicle to do anything except stop dead in an emergency situation - you rapidly get into very complex programming with all kinds of failure modes - e.g. what if the problem was a faulty sensor? The vehicle might try to avoid a non-existent threat by crashing into something else. Stopping is the safe thing to do. If you want to react, you rapidly have to make lots of moral decisions like (The Trolley Problem).
Briefly sounding a horn in an unexpected emergency stop situation is probably a good idea, particularly if it's a white noise type thing, rather than a siren, so that other road users can localise it's source quickly.
A horn needs to be a horn, add a white noise generator too, but the recognised noise and the one people are "programmed" to react to is a car horn.
Aside: emergency vehicles in the UK have stopped using the broad-band noise sirens AFAICT, I don't know why but the reason may be pertinent to any attempts to use it here? Actually, they often ride without the siren at all, which is completely ridiculous to me; they put it on at the junction meaning there's no time to get out of the way, if they used it continually you can hear them coming.
They're trained to look ahead, anticipate and adapt to the road conditions, judging when they need the siren and when they don't. This is important in built-up areas, because there's no gain in waking up people at 2am when you didn't actually need a siren to proceed safely.
When they're putting it on at a junction and you're already in it, they're not expecting you to magically disappear out of their way. They're expecting you to look at where they're going and stay out of their path. This might involve proceeding as you were going to in order to clear it for them. What they really want is to stop anybody else from entering it until they've got through.
Here, UK, they don't put it on at all during the day, travelling through built up areas, particularly Ambulances it seems.
When the sirens are used it's great because you can tell what road they're coming along (after a while, it was much better with the "squelch" sirens) and anticipate in good time.
Agreed, waking everyone at 2am is not needed generally, but howabout alerting people at 3pm.
You appear to have inside knowledge here, presumably there's been some change in policy on this in the last - I don't know - 5 years, where it's been chosen during normal daytime callouts not to use sirens if at all possible?
The argument for self-driving cars is that they will be better than a human driver. A human driver would backup, sound the horn, or both. If a self-driving car doesn't attempt these things, something is deficient.
A human driver can shout and gesticulate which will enjoin passers-by to engage with the situation - waving and shouting too. I've seen several slow speed (eg parking) accidents avoided this way. Perhaps these vehicles need a "I'm in danger" external indicator of some sort too?
You mean like the hazard (sic!) lights and the horn? Out where I live, having those functional are amongst the hard requirements for street-legal vehicles.
No it's a separate, more primal, layer of hazard indication that seems to shortcut the Bystander Effect and enlist aid. It can be initiated by non-drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists too.
So basically, self driving cars will be worse than human-driven cars until ALL cars are self driving cars? This is the first fully autonomous version of "No True Scotsman" that I've seen!
I don't think it is an instance of "No True Scotsman" to say that there are situations that self-driving cars may never be as good as humans at, but that those situations only occur because of the unpredictability of human drivers.
Self-driving cars don't have to be better than humans at everything in order to be objectively better drivers than humans. In 2010, 32,999 people died in car crashes in the US [0]. If self-driving cars are on-balance 1% better than human beings at driving, then 329 lives are saved.
This is the reason I believe that self driving thing is doomed.
Significant amount of humans will refuse to stop driving. Fair amount of them will make life of self driving things unbearable. Sizable part - on porpoise. Just to check how good a computer is.
Seriously speaking from perspective of a truck driver.
The reasons truck driver backed into thing are:
He couldn’t see it.
It wasn’t there when he started.
Horn and flash of lights would stop a human driver. When I back up a truck I use all my senses, since I can’t see much. Easiest fix for the robot thingy - add horn and lights. (And wait until all residents start complaining)
> I think there are too many possible risks of programming the vehicle to do anything except stop dead in an emergency situation - you rapidly get into very complex programming with all kinds of failure modes
Perhaps that limitation should disqualify AI from driving cars.
AI will need to be better than a good human driver, so these kinds of comparisons are not helpful. A good human driver would back up out of the way of the truck and/or sound the horn. If this is too hard for AI, then it is not ready.
AI needs to be better than the average human driver to drastically reduce accidents and deaths. We agree on the horn though, it should know when to honk at things.
A SDC needs to be better than humans on average to be a safer choice. It doesn't need to be perfect. Now, getting humans to acknowledge that and embrace that is the real problem.
Practically it needs to be perfect, because whoever makes the self-driving car will be liable every time it kills someone. And there's going to be millions of these things.
I'd love to show you the video, but it's been removed. It shows a Starship technologies sidewalk delivery robot attempting to cross the road, when a car making a right turn through the crosswalk hits it, in a low speed collision. The interesting thing is that the little robot attempted to make an evasive maneuver by stopping and quickly backing up to avoid the car. It ultimately failed, but at least it tried.
So Navya, the French company who has deployed several of these slow moving autonomous shuttle busses does not appear to have such sophisticated behavioral algorithms, in spite of entertaining ambitions of building proper robotaxis.
A small robot is a lot less dangerous when backing in response to an emergency than a car. The small robot can't accidentally drive over and crush something.
This feels like a really tricky question, actually -- what to do when an moving object is headed towards a stopped self-driving car?
It's easy to say the car should be smart enough to move -- but what if, as it moves in one direction, the object (like a truck trying to avoid the car) suddenly swerves in that direction too? Then does the car become responsible for the collision?
And of course, it feels like there could be a real-world version of the trolley problem [1] -- what if there are 5 occupants in the vehicle who will be killed by an oncoming truck, but in the only direction where it can move out of the way, it will have to run over a single pedestrian?
Glad I'm not the one having to make these kinds of programming decisions.
It can't know that the truck is going to kill the 5 passengers so it can't take aggressive preventative action, it has to do the conservative thing, which is to move as much out of the way of the truck as is possible without hitting an object.
Lay on the horn for starters. That's what I've done in a similar situation and it worked. Also, just back up a bit (also done that). It's not hard for a person or a self-driving car to ascertain that you're gonna get hit if you stay where you are but that if you back up a little bit while honking you buy yourself more room.
In this case, it was a low-speed incident and the trucker was at fault. If the car didn't have the option to move backwards or avoid the incident without damage or injury, staying put is the best option. I don't see a problem here. Unless of course the truck was out of control and would've crushed the car.
There should be an emergency exit option on cars like this though.
I would guess that it's not a tricky question at all for the company, because the public reaction to a driverless car being hit while stationary is very different from the public reaction to a driverless car being involved in a collision while moving. People accept the former as a cut-and-dried situation but treat the latter as a he-said, she-said situation where they're free to project their own biases onto the situation. (Was the computer really not at fault? Like the globalist media would ever tell it straight when it comes to robots putting people out of work. Tech companies are never held responsible. Et cetera.)
Also, this kind of story is new and interesting right now, so people will pay attention to the details, they'll make up their mind how to feel about later stories that they won't bother to read because it will be boring by then. It's amazing luck for the company to get in a "hit while stationary" story right at the get-go to help groove the narrative that driverless cars are safer than human drivers.
From a public perception standpoint it would be so helpful (dons tinfoil hat) that you could almost imagine them arranging some accidents of that kind. I think it would be a dumb chance to take, so I don't believe that's what happened, but I bet they're fist-pumping over their good luck.
There was someone on twitter who very effectively demolished all this "trolley problem" speculation by pointing out two things:
- the knowledge of the world held by cars is partial and probabilistic. As it is with real humans, only with very different obscure failure modes (see for example the "adversarial images").
- if you get into this situation, something has already failed. Either in your safety practice or someone else's. That reduces the predictability of the situation and also the predictability of what your actions will do in that case.
Put those two together and you realise that any kind of "deliberate" (in the sense that one can impart "intent" to a computer system?) running over of a pedestrian is indefensible, and that real situations don't admit of neat counter-factuals like this.
Yeah honestly I'd rather cars not have anything to do with trolley problems built in. Build in "Don't hit objects" with a fallback of "hit the brakes, horn, and do the robot equivalent of pray" if there's no swerve options available.
My main concern with putting in code to handle trolley problems is what happens if (when) this code is tripped as a false positive? Some person walking along minding their own business when an autocar swerves into them because something on its radar looked like a crowd of people teleported in front of it
Sorry, that's just repackaging the problem and pretending it's fixed.
The trolley problem is "there's something everywhere inside my stopping distance, we will inevitably hit something"; yours is only a possible solution for it: "Don't hit objects [evaluated as negative]" with a fallback of "hit the brakes, horn, and do the robot equivalent of pray [ok, gonna hit whatever is in front instead what's front left or front right]".
TL;DR: Saying "let's have this one hardcoded solution to the trolley problem" does not make the problem disappear.
It's not supposed to make the problem disappear. The problem doesn't exist frequently enough to do anything with.
How much code has to be put in for all of these edge cases? How much data needs to be learned to possibly and nowhere near reliably deal with these edge cases? How often will these edge cases occur?
It's not worth the false positives, not by a long shot. You cannot make self driving cars perfect, that's not possible. You just need to make them better than human drivers.
> The trolley problem is "there's something everywhere inside my stopping distance, we will inevitably hit something"
You assume humans make correct decisions when faced with that situation. Most of the time humans make incorrect decisions when faced with far less problematic issues.
"Swerve" is normally more reflex than thought. The number of times that drivers "swerve" to avoid something like an animal and then crash headfirst into oncoming traffic, thereby injuring humans, is non-trivial.
Do I? Nowhere did I bring that up. The TP is a model to compare the possible executions and their outcomes - and yes, human reflexes are not optimized for driving, thus the response is often "crash into other traffic/wayside obstruction", or even "oversteer, flip the car and become briefly airborne". I do agree that "just hit whatever is straight ahead" could be the optimal strategy in many cases, not sure if it makes sense to hardcode it.
Swerving seems like it will almost be more dangerous than slamming on the brakes. Never swerve is probably a better heuristic for when to swerve than the one that most human drivers are employing.
> what to do when an moving object is headed towards a stopped self-driving car?
Nothing. Whoever is controlling that moving object is responsible. So, provided the car is not stopped on railroad track (in which case - what they heck is it doing stopping on railroad track?!) it should just stay there and not add variables to the situation by jerking around.
These crashes seem to be caused by the "weird" way self-driving machines behave as compared to humans.
Perhaps we need some sort of placard that is legally mandated and easily visible (like the "student driver" placard) to let people around these vehicles be aware of them and expect different behaviors than "ordinary" divers.
What's weird about the actions of the self-driving vehicle in this case?
It detected that a truck was backing into it's path, and stopped in an attempt to prevent a collision. The truck driver didn't properly check his mirrors and continue backing up which resulted in the truck 'grazing' the front bumper of the car.
What exactly is a human supposed to do differently in that situation? Attempt to continue driving straight and potentially end up being t-boned by the truck instead?
Also, this vehicle looks super weird already. If the truck driver didn't see it, a 'placard' isn't going to make it more noticeable.
>What exactly is a human supposed to do differently in that situation? Attempt to continue driving straight and potentially end up being t-boned by the truck instead?
Surely something as basic as typical traffic patterns in a town have been simulated? Because a vehicle coming onto you seems to be as basic and mundane an everyday traffic event as you will get.
It's in self driving proponents own best interest to have stringent standards, because if the public loses faith its going to be an uphill battle.
Simply demonizing human drivers and hand waving away errors is too self serving to work.
To what end should a self driving vehicle back up or avoid a collision? You could essentially hijack a self driving car by boxing it in if it avoided all obstacles and impacts. Stopping seems to be the normal and best reaction to these sorts of illegal actions. At some point the driver in the wrong will need to take responsibility for doing something illegal.
Have you ever seen a car try to go through a yellow light, it turns red just a hair too soon, and the car decides to hit the breaks. Often times the car ends up well into the intersection and they have to back up, forcing the cars behind them to do so as well. I’m not defending the action of that driver who ends up in the intersection - they are obviously in the wrong. However, having a car stopped in the middle of the intersection is a dangerous situation, the other human drivers recognize that and reluctantly back up.
Driverless software must recognize situations like this and adapt in order to win the future. We will not go from manually operated cars to 100% driverless cars overnight. They will have to prove their worth and/or superiority alongside human drivers for a long time.
I have been on both ends of this situation, hitting a car behind me while trying evade a car backing into me and I have been backed into while stationary at a light and not having time to respond. In the end it's best not to try to back into traffic regardless. You just can't depend on traffic behind you to back up, especially if it is human driven, why would we expect an automated car to?
It's not the responsibility of vehicles behind that car in the intersection to fix things, human or otherwise.
You could also argue that a self driving car wouldn't be going as fast behind a car chasing a yellow light and could allow more room to handle this situation before it gets to that point.
Hard to judge this without seeing it. A human driver might of been able to anticipate what the truck was eventually going to do sooner so as to find a better place to stop. A human driver understands the difference between a truck backing blind and other vehicles.
> A City of Las Vegas representative issued a statement that the shuttle “did what it was supposed to do, in that its sensors registered the truck and the shuttle stopped to avoid the accident.” It also claims, lamely, that “Had the truck had the same sensing equipment that the shuttle has the accident would have been avoided.”
Note a subtle shift, with government now shilling for the driverless vehicles. That's the first time I've seen it; I suspect it won't be the last.
If anything this just highlights to me how much commercial vehicles need self driving tech (I guess I, lamely, agree with the mayor).
My office used to be in an industrial district. The trucks there scare me. They absolutely do not follow the rules of the road, and it's dangerous for everybody around them.
Stuff like this: just backing up and expecting everybody to move out of their way, or taking a turn too tight and expecting everybody at the light to back up, were almost daily occurrences.
Yeah, self drivers need to account for this, but the bigger problem IMHO is getting those trucks and their drivers either off of the road or in compliance with driving laws.
I'd say the shuttle's insurer should be partly responsible here. The Engadget article seems to show the shuttle stopping in the truck's blindspot.[0]
A reasonable truck driver would assume the driver of the other car would back up a little bit. But in this case, the car stopped where the truck couldn't see whether it was backing up or not, and wasn't programmed to understand the truck's movements at this angle.
So, software was responsible for:
1. Stopping too close.
2. Stopping in the blindspot of a truck.
3. Having no horn.
4. Not backing up or understanding fairly common motion by a truck.
True. Nevada appears to be a contributory negligence state, so the truck driver might be out of luck if that makes him mostly responsible. I guess we don't know if the Shuttle was, or could be, ticketed for something.
In most 'no-fault' states, though, I think the shuttle would shoulder some of the responsibility.
Ugh. This really worries me - not because I’m afraid of driverless cars but because this is the kind of “news” headline that will get anti-driverless car jerks all up in a righteous tizzy.
Title should be NO_TITLE because “doofus driving truck backs into something” isn’t news.
At the same time there are issues that need to be addressed / forced. I'm still waiting for mean spirited drivers to start bullying self-driving cars. For instance commuters cutting them off knowing they will stop to avoid an accident.
Which leads to another question. Will driverless cars report bad drivers to police? Making tech companies police informants... will laws be pass forcing this behavior?
Here's the logs of the aggressive driving, during the last 50 seconds. These logs entail a full 3d pointcloud showing that they were not responding to other drivers' potentially erratic patterns. Other driver came within 1 foot of car on multiple occasions. License plate is ABC123 and facial scan of user is $face .
User appears to have wronged our passengers with the following laws: $list
We're talking an open and shut case here. And every car with enough of these sensors could provide "dumps".
Great. Ambiguity creates accidents. "Are you walking? Should I stop!? Oh no you aren't walking I can go, oh wait you are I should stop."
How many times have you had that happen when you're driving and you see someone hesitantly about to jaywalk?
Also, as a cyclist, when a cyclist doesn't ride on the road and follow the laws it drives me nuts. Are you a vehicle or a pedestrian? Please don't be both.
> Will driverless cars report bad drivers to police?
Human driven cars can, and their are public ad campaigns encouraging them to, and its easier for a driverless cars to do something detailed data without interfering with driving, so I'd be surprised if they didn't.
The title needs to be changed to, "Human in truck, backs up and hits vehicle (self-driving)" ?
Because that's what happened. A human caused a wreck. Doesn't seem as scare-mongery now, eh?
A persistent vision system, like 360 radar would have been fully aware of a vehicle at any direction, and would have not hit them. A human on the other hand.....
Except they didn't back up, the bus hit the truck on its side. So the truck may have pulled out too quickly without care, but the bus should have picked it up.
The bus is 0% at fault. That's fully on the human driver. The bus have certainly done something in an attempt to prevent being hit by the human driver. That doesn't place any fault on the bus though.
There is no percentage for at fault it’s black or white, it should never be grey. If someone is going to back into you there is no law to honk or back up.
Stopping (which the bus did, turning what would have been a catastrophe into a graze) is a reasonable step to avoid a collision, and it's not clear from anything I've seen that a typical professional human bus driver would have been likely to do much more in the actual circumstance.
The point is that there is laws requiring you to honk and back up assuming its safe and reasonable to do so if it will avoid an accident. As with all ambiguous laws what is actually "safe and reasonable" is up to a judge should it get that far.
The shuttle did what it was supposed to do, in that it’s sensors registered the truck and the shuttle stopped to avoid the accident. Unfortunately the delivery truck did not stop and grazed the front fender of the shuttle.
This is the quote from the very article you linked to. The bus picked it up. The human driver hit it anyway. Obviously the bus' fault - it should have predicted that and stayed away from streets full with crappy drivers in trucks.
Counterpoint, as technical people, we can agree that there is probably a better solution to an impending accident rather than sit still like a deer in the headlights.
In fact, this article could start a discussion on if the risks of active accident avoidance measures (e.g. running a stop light at a clear intersection if you're about to be rear-ended) might cause more problems than they solve.
Obviously there are better solutions but the technology is immature at this point and is being hyped way beyond its capabilities.
The "autonomous" cars that work are basically little trains running on digital tracks with collision avoidance systems. They are no where close to being "intelligent."
But in practical terms, aren't human drivers basically simulating little trains running on analog tracks with collision avoidance systems?
The obvious solution in this case is to get rid of the human driver of the truck that collided with the autonomous vehicle, because he was demonstrating behavior that wasn't intelligent.
A human paying attention would honk before trying to move, most of the time, right? But a driverless vehicle may be able to do both at the same time to avoid an accident.
Yeah I watch people freeze and let people back into them all the time in parking lots while they furiously honk. I think you may be overestimating the abilities of the average human driver.
I did this. My neighbour backed into me. And I honked before he hit me but otherwise did nothing. To an observer it may have seemed ridiculous but the reason is simple: I assumed he could see me and it wasn’t until it was too late that I realized he wasn’t paying attention and was going to hit me. By then I had no time to put the car in reverse and move, only to honk.
Yep; I'm guilty. When I was a teenager, the first time someone backed into me, I was so surprised I got confused about what to do and consequently did nothing. And by the time I found the horn button it was too late.
I was so surprised that I just sat on the horn for about 5 seconds even though it was all over at that point.
So, now the makers of this vehicle can code some better evasion technique and consequently all future versions will benefit, very much unlike my children, who have a high probability of reacting just like me the first time it happens to them. (Sure, maybe I will teach them, but then again maybe not.)
I'm curious: Did you do some kind of sports back then? Soccer, basketball etc.?
I wonder if sports or videogames may teach people to react in stressful situations instead of freezing, since both of those require you to apply problem solving in split second decisions.
I rode bicycles a lot. Certainly when riding bicycles one must have split second and correctly made decisions.
My driver training involved simulated head on collisions where an instructor would get in another car and drive at me head on to train my response. So I had reasonable training. It was just that in a parking lot I never expected someone to just throw it in reverse and back into me without looking where they were going. It simply had never occurred to me that it could happen. So when it did happen I was so busy thinking about what I could do that I didn't do any of the things I could do (honk, or put it in reverse and back out of the way.)
Since then I've avoided dozens of accidents that were new and unique in their own way, but also I've been through a few situations and have now developed good instincts about what the options are in a given situation.
It's not unusual, by the way. Pilots train emergency scenarios for just this reason.
I don't disagree with what you're saying but 3/3 times I have honked my horn as someone was backing into me and they still hit me. Another time I was a passenger when it happened.
Out of all the hundreds of times I have warned someone "look out you doofus, you're about to hit me!" by honking the horn, I've had about two low-speed bruises. Most of the time a collision was averted - I drive in city traffic, mostly. #anecdata
> Except the driver-less shuttle didn't take any evasive action, the way a human would have.
Stopping was an evasive action, and since the result was a graze, it may have been moderately successful. While the people on the bus seem (from the article) to think there was time for more action, the perception of time under the adrenaline rush of an imminent collision may be misleading.
But a human facing an imminent collision, under the adrenaline rush, can often take more evasive action than there seems to be time for (if they don't freeze).
> the perception of time under the adrenaline rush of an imminent collision may be misleading.
This may be one of the more ridiculous excuses I've seen for self driving vehicle "screwups".
Is the argument actually computers can't take action instantly compared to a human? If so, then self driving cars may as well not exist.
It's well within a computer's capability to take evasive action for an accident like this far before a human driver - assuming sufficient sensor input. This is exactly the reason I want to see self driving tech rapidly accelerate - a car that has it's situational awareness 100% at all times, and thus can react instantly in a safe manner to any situation.
I understand the software is not up to that point yet - and your response is exactly what I fear the most. I see endless DoS attacks against self driving cars once they get even a remotely substantial percentage of the market.
If all programming reverts to "failsafe stop when things may be remotely potentially unsafe" we are going to see traffic problems of a proportion we have never experienced.
>> the perception of time under the adrenaline rush of an imminent collision may be misleading.
>This may be one of the more ridiculous excuses I've seen for self driving vehicle "screwups".
>Is the argument actually computers can't take action instantly compared to a human? If so, then self driving cars may as well not exist.
No, I don't think that's what the parent comment meant. It means that the people who said that it didn't take proper action (that were there) may have been mistaken in thinking there was more time to act than there was.
Not enough time for a computer to react, but enough time for people to think it could have? I seriously doubt that. Yeah, the average human driver might have also just frozen, or only honked, but the computer has excellent situational awareness (it had better if it's driving on public roads) so it knows if it can backup suddenly safely. A human would have to look over their shoulder. It should also honk the horn, I mean that's just low-hanging fruit to implement. Clearly they detected the truck and stopped, what's wrong with stop() && honk().
You suggested they could reduce the death rate from 7/bkm to 5/bkm. The uk is already at 3.5, if auto cars also changed that to 5/bkm that would be bad.
I don't know about you but people like machines/robots predominantly because they are efficient and don't make mistakes. Nobody is going to trust a robot car to pickup their kids if you tell them there is a 25% less chance that the car might end up in an accident compared to what it would be if it were to be driven by an average driver.
To your point, improving on the average doesn't require driverless cars at all. You ca get that today with just driver assistance technology, improving safety technology on roads, etc - all far easier problems to solve.
The anti-driverless car “jerks” (as you have labeled them) will get into a righteous tizzy no matter if events like this happen or not. However, I characterize your response as emotional, and I feel a data-driven response is what is appropriate. So far, autonomous vehicles have a better safety record than human-driven vehicles. That’s the message here. Clouding that with emotional responses and demonizing opponents only serves to distract from that fact.
These things will need to cope with the presence of real humans, or else it's never gonna work. See how far this attitude of "the computers would be fine if it weren't for the stupid pesky humans" takes you.
Modern journalism one, where you do not trust the reader to read the information and make their own conclusion, but instead must shove your viewpoint down their throats, for their own good of course.
> Now, it must be said that technically the robo-car was not at fault. It was struck by a semi that was backing up, and really just grazed — none of the passengers was hurt.
I get that it wasn't the Driverless car's fault, but this brings up an important use case that the driverless cars currently don't seem to be able to handle.
In an ALL-Human situation, what would've occurred is that the parked car (if it had a passenger inside) would honk at the car that is trying to back into it, or open the door and yell at the person trying to back up, and the accident would be avoided.
Driverless car doesn't (or didn't) honk even if it does detect something backing up into it. Hence the accident.
I fully expect every death caused by a self-driving cars to make national headlines in the next few years. Hysteria, whether justified or not, will set in and legislation will pass banning autonomous vehicles in the US.
Self-driving cars may have a faster reaction time, but they will never reach the level of human awareness of their surroundings while driving.
Let's see a self-driving car navigate through a construction zone, watch for instructions from a police officer who is directing traffic, or stop when kids are playing baseball in a yard and the ball rolls across the street. Answering, "well they'll have that capability someday" isn't a very compelling answer. Truly self-driving cars are dependent on technology that simply hasn't been invented yet.
How nice it will be sitting behind a fleet of self-driving cars dragging their asses down the highway at exactly the speed limit, or slamming on the brakes when a leaf flies in front of the sensors.
In addition to that, you think masses of people will be silent while losing their jobs because these robot overlords are taking the wheel?
> Self-driving cars may have a faster reaction time, but they will never reach the level of human awareness of their surroundings while driving.
Self driving cars can simultaneously see in 360 degrees with multiple types of sensors. They already see better than humans. Now they just need to understand better, which doesn't seem far off.
Maybe you just work for a bad self-driving car startup?
Doesn't seem far off. That is a fitting description - anything looks easy from the sidelines; specifically computers-understanding-context always seem to be just around the corner, for half a century now.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] thread"What Makes for a Street Legal Vehicle?"
Horn – It may not seem the most important piece of safety equipment, and many big cities even limit how it can be used, but to be street legal every vehicle must have a horn that is audible for at least 200 feet. The horn can generally be any note or sound (even ones that play musical tunes are usually permitted), so long as the minimum volume requirements are met.
Ref: https://www.hg.org/article.asp?id=31563
If a requirement for being street legal is having a horn then the assumption is that the driver has the ability to press the horn. (like having a condom sitting on a shelf, it's not effective if not used).
Not programming the car to use the horn is basically the same as not making a button in the cabin which can activate the horn for a human driver. In that case it would be not road legal.
Isn't it more akin to having a working horn but a driver who never presses it? Would a human driver ever be prosecuted for not using their horn?
If a self-driving car isn't programmed to ever use the horn, though, then that's a different situation. It's easy to prove that it can't ever use the horn because it isn't programmed to do so. That's more akin to a normal car having a horn in it that isn't wired up.
Why should that make a difference though? Imagine e.g. a truck backed into a car when the (human) driver didn't press the horn. Is the car driver liable? Whether the driver might have pressed the horn under other circumstances doesn't seem like it has any bearing on that question. We're judged on what we did, not what we might have done - shouldn't it be the same for the software?
Replace that with some other subsystem that is practically necessary for safe operation in a commonly encountered subset of driving situation requires manual activation and we require vehicles to have.
Lights, wipers, brakes, seatbelts, defrost, etc.
See the problem?
> Lights, wipers, brakes, seatbelts, defrost, etc.
> See the problem?
No, I really don't. I think a human driver would and should obviously be prosecuted for not using lights, wipers, brakes, or defrost in a situation that called for them (seatbelts have specific laws about them). It's not at all obvious to me that this would ever happen with the horn.
The point is that code that can't use those systems is no better than them not existing which is not something we're ok with.
Society accepts that it's not unreasonable for whoever calling the shots (human or not) to misjudge a situation and not use some system when they should and that this may result in a crash.
Society does not tolerate a vehicle that does not have those systems. Code that cannot use those systems is effectively the same as not having them.
Having a horn and the ability to use it, but choosing not to, for whatever reason, is very different from not having the ability to begin with.
But if your car can only press the horn programmatically, and you never add the code to allow the horn to function, you don't actually have a horn, that's the vehicle's problem.
Driver needs to have the ability to press it. More correct analogy is driver with some physical defect that renders him incapable of pressing the horn, which would be illegal. They ask you to press horn in drivers exam .
Yes, that could happen. A driver loses control of his car on a slippery, wet roadway and doesn’t immediately honk to warn vehicles around him "Failure to worn." http://southfloridainjuryaccidentblog.com/2015/04/16/florida...
That said, it would be an unusual citation.
Someday a self driving car will me "smart" enough to honk the horn or flash the lights - or send out a panic signal to other self driving cars.
Sarcasm aside, who is deemed to be in control, who do you sue for the damage if this vehicle crashes in to you - isn't it the manufacturer that causes the crash (not in this case necessarily, I'm talking generally).
Generally, the owner of the at-fault vehicle is responsible.
Assuming normal circumstances (so not considering things like me letting a child drive, or letting you drive drunk, etc.). The person/persons in control of the vehicle are surely at fault - being the owner doesn't give you power to alter the programming and so you are powerless to avoid a crash.
The company directors, who instruct the system's programmers, are the one's able to avoid the crash by making the vehicle operate effectively.
There may be circumstance where a crash could not be avoided but there are going to be plenty when alternative actions - for which there is a strong rationale - would avoid a crash too.
Generally, the driver is at fault and liable if the driver violated a traffic law; if the accident resulted from a manufacturing defect, the manufacturer is (and potentially other participants in the stream of commerce are) liable.
The owner, as distinct from the driver, may be liable in certain cases, such as (IIRC) maintenance problems.
The absence of a driver reduces the difficulty of ascribing liability by reducing the possibilities.
Actually, a defendant then suing a third party as described by the grandparent is a thing, called “contribution” [0], and I'm fairly certain there are cases where it's been applied in exactly the manner he grandparent describes involving automakers.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contribution_claim_(legal)
The Machine acted in a way that was not expected by the human driver.
This gets to a fundamental issue we will have in the transition to the utopian driverless future. Learning to identify and react to this new class of driver.
The article sneers that "surely this situation is not so rare that the shuttle’s designers did not allow for it?", but of course it is not that simple - there are a great many cases in everyday driving where the projected motion of the vehicles would lead to a collision if nothing was done to stop it, and so it is clearly infeasible to react to all such situations as if nothing else will be done. The passengers of the shuttle recognized the impending collision because they understood that the truck driver had probably not seen the shuttle. Approximating these applications of our theory of mind is probably the hardest part about automated driving.
I've had motorcycle lessons, one factor in those things is that their braking power is less than that of a car (less wheels, less stability, etc), so besides the emergency stop, you also learn how to do an emergency swerve - using the motorcycle's superior agility to avoid an accident. Just an anecdote. In this case, damage would've been avoided if the car had a horn and/or was more visible and/or had backed up and/or the truck had sensors.
What will a self-driving car do if for instance someone is driving in the opposite direction, towards it? Will it just continue driving, freeze, or get out of the way? Humans would likely get out of the way, even if that means "breaking the law" by going off-road or whatever. A self-driving car probably wouldn't do that, thus it would be the kind of "unexpected driving" that could really throw humans off, and may even cause more accidents than humans, in certain specific situations.
--EDIT-- it seems my comments are being misunderstood. I am simply stating the law as it exists, and the orthogonality between land and sea in regards to these laws. I know that Newtonian physics conflicts with the land aspect of these laws.
If a truck driver can complete a run in an hour and only infrequently have an accident by bending the rules, why would a “maximize profit” company give them two hours so they could follow the rules properly?
One example I saw the other morning: a trucker pulls halfway onto the road to make a left turn, where there is no traffic control other than stop sign against them. This is against the rules; they should wait for a full opening to take that turn. However, if they attempt to wait for a full opening, it could take several tens minutes for that opening to appear. For one turn.
> It also is in the companies best interest when it comes to costly collisions, insurance, disability payments, etc.
As with everything, there's a cost/benefit ratio. One minor fender-bender every year to deliver even 110% the cargo in that year? Totally worth it. Not to mention, it's usually the driver who absorbs the bigger relative share of the cost, in terms of points on their licenses or being fired for their inevitable slip-ups while under pressure.
Something I read on Reddit a few years ago that tore away the blinders of risk management forced upon truck drivers: If a driver had the opportunity to avoid a head-on by swerving into the ditch, they won't take it. By intentionally swerving into the ditch, the blame of the wreck falls on their shoulders, and if the cargo is damaged, they've likely lost their jobs. I've since confirmed it with a few questions to truck drivers I know.
The default rules of the are basically "big class of vehicle takes precedence" and "speed takes precedence within a class of vehicles".
People yield to golf carts yield to fork trucks yield for semis which yield for trains which yield to container ships.
Traffic on slow roads crossing fast roads waits until it's clear. Stop signs codify this pretty directly. Even if you removed them it's pretty obvious who has the right of way in many cases.
The rules of the road are specifically for reducing ambiguity and managing traffic flow within a class of traffic and managing interactions between those classes. For example, the procedure for a (rule following) pedestrian crossing a busy road will be very different where there's a cross walk than where there isn't. The cross walk provides a specific exception where the right of way defaults to the lighter traffic.
However, people don't crashing stuff and there's many levels of redundancy built into "the rules" so it all gets a bit fuzzy and situation dependent. (e.g. the pittsburg left or an agricultural vehicle crossing a not too busy road)
Accordingly, if you as a pedestrian or cyclist (or golf cart driver) just cross into a busy street not at a cross walk people will stop for you giving the appearance of you having the right of way.
This is why I've been saying it's not enough for a self-driving car to just be better than the "average human driver". It needs to be way better, maybe 10x better. Because these cars are likely not going to drive the way we expect a human to drive in many situations, which could end-up causing more accidents due to this conflict with how humans actually drive, even if the car is "technically" as safe as an average human driver.
Nope, the human driver was careless and did not look around, failing to notice the obstacle. If there was a human-driven car instead, we'd have never heard of it and the matter would have been resolved by regular insurance payments that happen every day in every city a thousand times. But since there's an automatic car involved now it is a philosophical conundrum. Nope, it's not, it's just some guy in a truck being careless.
Generally, not, though there are some exceptions. But that's not relevant here, because the bus stopped in an attempt to avoid/mitigate a collision with the truck, which was illegally backing into it's path, and the driver of the semi was cited for the violation.
My was a generic response to this generic comment.
> Saved a click: it stopped.
Apparently, simply having the ability to stop does not make a self driving car better than a human. It should evade, or at least honk.
I think there are too many possible risks of programming the vehicle to do anything except stop dead in an emergency situation - you rapidly get into very complex programming with all kinds of failure modes - e.g. what if the problem was a faulty sensor? The vehicle might try to avoid a non-existent threat by crashing into something else. Stopping is the safe thing to do. If you want to react, you rapidly have to make lots of moral decisions like (The Trolley Problem).
Briefly sounding a horn in an unexpected emergency stop situation is probably a good idea, particularly if it's a white noise type thing, rather than a siren, so that other road users can localise it's source quickly.
Aside: emergency vehicles in the UK have stopped using the broad-band noise sirens AFAICT, I don't know why but the reason may be pertinent to any attempts to use it here? Actually, they often ride without the siren at all, which is completely ridiculous to me; they put it on at the junction meaning there's no time to get out of the way, if they used it continually you can hear them coming.
When they're putting it on at a junction and you're already in it, they're not expecting you to magically disappear out of their way. They're expecting you to look at where they're going and stay out of their path. This might involve proceeding as you were going to in order to clear it for them. What they really want is to stop anybody else from entering it until they've got through.
When the sirens are used it's great because you can tell what road they're coming along (after a while, it was much better with the "squelch" sirens) and anticipate in good time.
Agreed, waking everyone at 2am is not needed generally, but howabout alerting people at 3pm.
You appear to have inside knowledge here, presumably there's been some change in policy on this in the last - I don't know - 5 years, where it's been chosen during normal daytime callouts not to use sirens if at all possible?
Self-driving cars don't have to be better than humans at everything in order to be objectively better drivers than humans. In 2010, 32,999 people died in car crashes in the US [0]. If self-driving cars are on-balance 1% better than human beings at driving, then 329 lives are saved.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...
Seriously speaking from perspective of a truck driver.
The reasons truck driver backed into thing are: He couldn’t see it. It wasn’t there when he started.
Horn and flash of lights would stop a human driver. When I back up a truck I use all my senses, since I can’t see much. Easiest fix for the robot thingy - add horn and lights. (And wait until all residents start complaining)
All you have to do to cement a driverless-car hegemony is to stop issuing new driver's licenses. 50 years later: no more drivers.
Some people love driving, and some people love riding horses, but you don’t see many horses on city streets today.
Perhaps that limitation should disqualify AI from driving cars.
So Navya, the French company who has deployed several of these slow moving autonomous shuttle busses does not appear to have such sophisticated behavioral algorithms, in spite of entertaining ambitions of building proper robotaxis.
To name just two potential issues that the "bus should have moved" people are ignoring:
1) What if there were pedestrians around?
2) What if moving the bus created an incursion into a stream of fast-moving traffic without warning?
Both of those could result in consequences far worse than the (apparently minor) fender-bender that actually occurred.
I agree that sounding the horn would be a good idea.
It's easy to say the car should be smart enough to move -- but what if, as it moves in one direction, the object (like a truck trying to avoid the car) suddenly swerves in that direction too? Then does the car become responsible for the collision?
And of course, it feels like there could be a real-world version of the trolley problem [1] -- what if there are 5 occupants in the vehicle who will be killed by an oncoming truck, but in the only direction where it can move out of the way, it will have to run over a single pedestrian?
Glad I'm not the one having to make these kinds of programming decisions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
There should be an emergency exit option on cars like this though.
Also, this kind of story is new and interesting right now, so people will pay attention to the details, they'll make up their mind how to feel about later stories that they won't bother to read because it will be boring by then. It's amazing luck for the company to get in a "hit while stationary" story right at the get-go to help groove the narrative that driverless cars are safer than human drivers.
From a public perception standpoint it would be so helpful (dons tinfoil hat) that you could almost imagine them arranging some accidents of that kind. I think it would be a dumb chance to take, so I don't believe that's what happened, but I bet they're fist-pumping over their good luck.
[1] http://www.radiolab.org/story/driverless-dilemma/
- the knowledge of the world held by cars is partial and probabilistic. As it is with real humans, only with very different obscure failure modes (see for example the "adversarial images").
- if you get into this situation, something has already failed. Either in your safety practice or someone else's. That reduces the predictability of the situation and also the predictability of what your actions will do in that case.
Put those two together and you realise that any kind of "deliberate" (in the sense that one can impart "intent" to a computer system?) running over of a pedestrian is indefensible, and that real situations don't admit of neat counter-factuals like this.
My main concern with putting in code to handle trolley problems is what happens if (when) this code is tripped as a false positive? Some person walking along minding their own business when an autocar swerves into them because something on its radar looked like a crowd of people teleported in front of it
The trolley problem is "there's something everywhere inside my stopping distance, we will inevitably hit something"; yours is only a possible solution for it: "Don't hit objects [evaluated as negative]" with a fallback of "hit the brakes, horn, and do the robot equivalent of pray [ok, gonna hit whatever is in front instead what's front left or front right]".
TL;DR: Saying "let's have this one hardcoded solution to the trolley problem" does not make the problem disappear.
How much code has to be put in for all of these edge cases? How much data needs to be learned to possibly and nowhere near reliably deal with these edge cases? How often will these edge cases occur?
It's not worth the false positives, not by a long shot. You cannot make self driving cars perfect, that's not possible. You just need to make them better than human drivers.
You assume humans make correct decisions when faced with that situation. Most of the time humans make incorrect decisions when faced with far less problematic issues.
"Swerve" is normally more reflex than thought. The number of times that drivers "swerve" to avoid something like an animal and then crash headfirst into oncoming traffic, thereby injuring humans, is non-trivial.
If an autonomous vehicle does better than this at all, it's a win.
Nothing. Whoever is controlling that moving object is responsible. So, provided the car is not stopped on railroad track (in which case - what they heck is it doing stopping on railroad track?!) it should just stay there and not add variables to the situation by jerking around.
Perhaps we need some sort of placard that is legally mandated and easily visible (like the "student driver" placard) to let people around these vehicles be aware of them and expect different behaviors than "ordinary" divers.
It detected that a truck was backing into it's path, and stopped in an attempt to prevent a collision. The truck driver didn't properly check his mirrors and continue backing up which resulted in the truck 'grazing' the front bumper of the car.
What exactly is a human supposed to do differently in that situation? Attempt to continue driving straight and potentially end up being t-boned by the truck instead?
Also, this vehicle looks super weird already. If the truck driver didn't see it, a 'placard' isn't going to make it more noticeable.
Honk
It's in self driving proponents own best interest to have stringent standards, because if the public loses faith its going to be an uphill battle.
Simply demonizing human drivers and hand waving away errors is too self serving to work.
Driverless software must recognize situations like this and adapt in order to win the future. We will not go from manually operated cars to 100% driverless cars overnight. They will have to prove their worth and/or superiority alongside human drivers for a long time.
It's not the responsibility of vehicles behind that car in the intersection to fix things, human or otherwise.
You could also argue that a self driving car wouldn't be going as fast behind a car chasing a yellow light and could allow more room to handle this situation before it gets to that point.
Note a subtle shift, with government now shilling for the driverless vehicles. That's the first time I've seen it; I suspect it won't be the last.
If anything this just highlights to me how much commercial vehicles need self driving tech (I guess I, lamely, agree with the mayor).
My office used to be in an industrial district. The trucks there scare me. They absolutely do not follow the rules of the road, and it's dangerous for everybody around them.
Stuff like this: just backing up and expecting everybody to move out of their way, or taking a turn too tight and expecting everybody at the light to back up, were almost daily occurrences.
Yeah, self drivers need to account for this, but the bigger problem IMHO is getting those trucks and their drivers either off of the road or in compliance with driving laws.
A reasonable truck driver would assume the driver of the other car would back up a little bit. But in this case, the car stopped where the truck couldn't see whether it was backing up or not, and wasn't programmed to understand the truck's movements at this angle.
So, software was responsible for: 1. Stopping too close. 2. Stopping in the blindspot of a truck. 3. Having no horn. 4. Not backing up or understanding fairly common motion by a truck.
[0] https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/09/las-vegas-self-driving-s...
In most 'no-fault' states, though, I think the shuttle would shoulder some of the responsibility.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/self-driving-bus-crash-ve...
Title should be NO_TITLE because “doofus driving truck backs into something” isn’t news.
Which leads to another question. Will driverless cars report bad drivers to police? Making tech companies police informants... will laws be pass forcing this behavior?
Here's the logs of the aggressive driving, during the last 50 seconds. These logs entail a full 3d pointcloud showing that they were not responding to other drivers' potentially erratic patterns. Other driver came within 1 foot of car on multiple occasions. License plate is ABC123 and facial scan of user is $face .
User appears to have wronged our passengers with the following laws: $list
We're talking an open and shut case here. And every car with enough of these sensors could provide "dumps".
What if driverless cars reported every jaywalker too?
How many times have you had that happen when you're driving and you see someone hesitantly about to jaywalk?
Also, as a cyclist, when a cyclist doesn't ride on the road and follow the laws it drives me nuts. Are you a vehicle or a pedestrian? Please don't be both.
We'd have a high-quality signal as to where existing marked crossings were inadequate?
Human driven cars can, and their are public ad campaigns encouraging them to, and its easier for a driverless cars to do something detailed data without interfering with driving, so I'd be surprised if they didn't.
The title needs to be changed to, "Human in truck, backs up and hits vehicle (self-driving)" ?
Because that's what happened. A human caused a wreck. Doesn't seem as scare-mongery now, eh?
A persistent vision system, like 360 radar would have been fully aware of a vehicle at any direction, and would have not hit them. A human on the other hand.....
https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/8/16626224/las-vegas-self-d...
The truck driver is primarily at fault in that scenario, but I would put the autonomous bus maybe 15% at fault for not backing up or honking.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/self-driving-bus-crash-ve...
This is the quote from the very article you linked to. The bus picked it up. The human driver hit it anyway. Obviously the bus' fault - it should have predicted that and stayed away from streets full with crappy drivers in trucks.
In fact, this article could start a discussion on if the risks of active accident avoidance measures (e.g. running a stop light at a clear intersection if you're about to be rear-ended) might cause more problems than they solve.
The "autonomous" cars that work are basically little trains running on digital tracks with collision avoidance systems. They are no where close to being "intelligent."
The obvious solution in this case is to get rid of the human driver of the truck that collided with the autonomous vehicle, because he was demonstrating behavior that wasn't intelligent.
Clearly this company's tech isn't up to par.
I was so surprised that I just sat on the horn for about 5 seconds even though it was all over at that point.
So, now the makers of this vehicle can code some better evasion technique and consequently all future versions will benefit, very much unlike my children, who have a high probability of reacting just like me the first time it happens to them. (Sure, maybe I will teach them, but then again maybe not.)
I wonder if sports or videogames may teach people to react in stressful situations instead of freezing, since both of those require you to apply problem solving in split second decisions.
Sorry for being off topic.
My driver training involved simulated head on collisions where an instructor would get in another car and drive at me head on to train my response. So I had reasonable training. It was just that in a parking lot I never expected someone to just throw it in reverse and back into me without looking where they were going. It simply had never occurred to me that it could happen. So when it did happen I was so busy thinking about what I could do that I didn't do any of the things I could do (honk, or put it in reverse and back out of the way.)
Since then I've avoided dozens of accidents that were new and unique in their own way, but also I've been through a few situations and have now developed good instincts about what the options are in a given situation.
It's not unusual, by the way. Pilots train emergency scenarios for just this reason.
I don't disagree with what you're saying but 3/3 times I have honked my horn as someone was backing into me and they still hit me. Another time I was a passenger when it happened.
Stopping was an evasive action, and since the result was a graze, it may have been moderately successful. While the people on the bus seem (from the article) to think there was time for more action, the perception of time under the adrenaline rush of an imminent collision may be misleading.
This may be one of the more ridiculous excuses I've seen for self driving vehicle "screwups".
Is the argument actually computers can't take action instantly compared to a human? If so, then self driving cars may as well not exist.
It's well within a computer's capability to take evasive action for an accident like this far before a human driver - assuming sufficient sensor input. This is exactly the reason I want to see self driving tech rapidly accelerate - a car that has it's situational awareness 100% at all times, and thus can react instantly in a safe manner to any situation.
I understand the software is not up to that point yet - and your response is exactly what I fear the most. I see endless DoS attacks against self driving cars once they get even a remotely substantial percentage of the market.
If all programming reverts to "failsafe stop when things may be remotely potentially unsafe" we are going to see traffic problems of a proportion we have never experienced.
>This may be one of the more ridiculous excuses I've seen for self driving vehicle "screwups".
>Is the argument actually computers can't take action instantly compared to a human? If so, then self driving cars may as well not exist.
No, I don't think that's what the parent comment meant. It means that the people who said that it didn't take proper action (that were there) may have been mistaken in thinking there was more time to act than there was.
A driverless car should be on par with the _BEST_ human driver, not the average driver, who as we know, gets into 6 million auto accidents per year.
To your point, improving on the average doesn't require driverless cars at all. You ca get that today with just driver assistance technology, improving safety technology on roads, etc - all far easier problems to solve.
What kind of writing is that?
I get that it wasn't the Driverless car's fault, but this brings up an important use case that the driverless cars currently don't seem to be able to handle.
In an ALL-Human situation, what would've occurred is that the parked car (if it had a passenger inside) would honk at the car that is trying to back into it, or open the door and yell at the person trying to back up, and the accident would be avoided.
Driverless car doesn't (or didn't) honk even if it does detect something backing up into it. Hence the accident.
Self-driving cars may have a faster reaction time, but they will never reach the level of human awareness of their surroundings while driving.
Let's see a self-driving car navigate through a construction zone, watch for instructions from a police officer who is directing traffic, or stop when kids are playing baseball in a yard and the ball rolls across the street. Answering, "well they'll have that capability someday" isn't a very compelling answer. Truly self-driving cars are dependent on technology that simply hasn't been invented yet.
How nice it will be sitting behind a fleet of self-driving cars dragging their asses down the highway at exactly the speed limit, or slamming on the brakes when a leaf flies in front of the sensors.
In addition to that, you think masses of people will be silent while losing their jobs because these robot overlords are taking the wheel?
Source: I work for a self-driving car startup.
Self driving cars can simultaneously see in 360 degrees with multiple types of sensors. They already see better than humans. Now they just need to understand better, which doesn't seem far off.
Maybe you just work for a bad self-driving car startup?