In the news

If the thread has killed three people something needs to be done about it.

We're they wearing helmets tho?

This comment from a USA based site is excellent. Obviously at no point has the driver looked back at this memory and thought that maybe they might have been at fault for identifying a risk, and then taking their eyes off the road for seconds at a time.

Let me tell you a story. Years ago, I was driving my E150 Econoline Van in a parking lot. The lane was wide enough for two cars to pass. And the parking spaces were perpendicular to the lane. Hopefully, you can picture in your mind the setting. It was mid-morning in the summer in Atlanta GA. No clouds. I was driving slow. Probably closer to 5 MPH than 10 MPH. There were no other cars in the lane. No cars approaching me. No cars behind me. However, I saw a man riding a bike approaching me well to the left of me. I looked at my pager (this was in 1997/1998). At that time, my wife and I worked out a code. 111 meant to come home now. We had a new baby and sometimes she needed me to come home and hold our son. So the pager went off. I glanced to see the code. Looked up and noticed the guy o the bike had cut right in front of me. I slammed on my brakes and stopped. Did not touch him. He was no more than 3 feet in front of me. For those of you who have never driven an E150 van, you need to know that my face is about 5 feet from the front bumper of the van. The man sort of leaned away from the van put is feet to the ground and sort of walked (with the bike between his legs) in front of my van. He then came around the front from left to right and squeezed between my van and the parked cars on my right. He had at most 3 feet to fit through.

Why did he make an abrupt left turn in front of a slow-moving van in a parking lot? Why squeeze between my van and the parked cars on my right when he clearly could have continued on his way easily on my left where he had 12 feet of unobstructed width of asphalt? If I had bumped him, you know what would have happened. Maybe he took a calculated risk and thought, heck getting hit by a van moving 5 MPH would of at worst resulted in a broken leg. Most likely he would had had a bruise. But the payout would have been $10 of thousands.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/19/17140936/uber-self-driving-crash-death-homeless-arizona#467594021

It's pretty clear that this woman was sent from the future to stop us from developing self driving cars. We can only guess why but it must be pretty bad. On the plus side human civilisation has built a time machine, although that may no longer be true now that we're slowing down development of robot cars.

"Cyclists can be so unpredictable!" complains a driver dicking about with his phone at the wheel.

Trolololo

I don’t know any of the circumstances involving this accident. But people do stupid stuff.

What like getting a page in a parking lot with no other traffic, but not stopping/parking to check the page.

Well, maybe not never, but...

Over the past few years, scientists, in a variety of ways, have tried to get a super computer to mimic the complexity and raw processing power of the human brain. According to biologists, the human brain has approximately 90 billion nerve cells which are linked together by, quite literally, trillions of connections called synapses. Taken together, this system of elaborate connections within the brain provides “hundreds of trillions of different pathways that brain signals travel through.”

In an effort to mimic this digitally, scientists a few years ago needed more than 82,000 processors running on one of the world’s fastest supercomputers to mimic just 1 second of a normal human’s brain activity.

More recently, a research study found that the human brain can hold 10 times as much information as previously thought. All told, scientists now believe that the capacity of the human brain is about a petabyte.

source: http://bgr.com/2016/02/27/power-of-the-human-brain-vs-super-computer/

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/tempe/2018/03/19/operator-self-driving-uber-vehicle-killed-pedestrian-felon/440501002/

The operator behind the wheel of a self-driving Uber vehicle that hit and killed a 49-year-old woman in Tempe Sunday night had served almost four years in an Arizona prison in the early 2000s on an attempted armed robbery conviction.

and?

not sure it means much in the grand scheme of things but

Colorado state law prevents individuals with felony convictions, alcohol or drug-related driving offenses, unlawful sexual offenses and major traffic violations from working for rideshare companies.

So technically she was operating as an uber employee illegally. Not that it has any bearing on the accident -that I can see anyway

Then how come the police are interviewing the driver and accepting their excuse that the victim suddenly appeared? It's a strange case, the police can't seem to decide who was actually in control.

Yet still a basic calculator can out do most human brains at what it's designed for with very little processing power. Humans and computers work differently and each are obviously better at certain things. Driving a car with limited data about your surroundings might be something that the brain might be pretty good at compared to a computer, but that brain needs about 2 decades of general experience, plus more of actual driving to get any good at it. Computers are getting that experience now, will be able to share it directly between themselves and can have more than 2 eyes and ears taking in data, especially if they use all the sensors on other nearby computers. They may have less power in some ways, but also don't need to worry about what to have for tea, whether they slept properly, what their phone just did or the existential pain of being.

but also don't need to worry about what to have for tea, whether they slept properly, what their phone just did or the existential pain of being.

They do have a problem with the terrible pain in the diodes down their left hand side though.

Calling it stupid is quite odd.

Well it was stupid enough to kill a person - something I've managed to avoid doing in my 10 or so years of driving.

Just because some humans are bad at driving doesn't mean that a computer will automatically be better. One day perhaps, but almost certainly not in our lifetimes. They will be nowhere near powerful enough to adequately process that data for decades if not centuries.
Security is a huge risk too. If cars are all talking to each other then they can be hacked and used as weapons, perhaps in a terrorist attack. That will be a 'when', not an 'if'.

If by some chance driverless cars are developed to such a degree that they do take over the roads, can you imagine how road laws designed for humans might change?
A robot's in charge of each car now, so maybe urban speed limits can be 100mph, and all the traffic lights can be removed. Of course you've no chance of being allowed to cycle on that road. Or even cross it. That would be way too dangerous.

If the problem we have is too many cars doing too many journeys, the answer is not a car. It's more likely to be reliable fast internet, enabling de-urbanisation and remote working.

After all, we don't even have driverless tube trains yet, and those buggers are on rails.

I think they're already better than most humans at what most driving should involve, and that's without a lot of the interconnectedness which would easily make them vastly superior. Processing what humans see in a way humans do might well be some way off, but processing what they can sense in a way to make them safer and better at most normal driving situations isn't. Just not being drunk, high, angry, distracted, old, bored, only able to look in one direction, makes them better than a lot of people. I'm sure you're a wonderful driver, computers being good too doesn't take that away from you. I've taught enough people to drive to know which I'd prefer though.

After all, we don't even have driverless tube trains yet, and those buggers are on rails.

You know that 5 year old sitting at the front of the DLR going broom broom?
He’s not actually driving it...

(Sorry to good to pass)

technically

I would hazard a guess that the part of uber being worked for part of the rideshare business, or a different business entirely.

Corporate structures can be ridiculously complex, and I would imagine uber's is more complex than most, given it's global spread & pedigree.

The other points you raised may be valid, but don't mean that the technology shouldn't be developed. Lots of stuff could be used as a weapon, developing it properly means trying to prevent that, but not just giving up on things because of potential misuse. I'd like to hope that any redesigns of space to accommodate self driving cars would benefit cyclists and pedestrians. Those in the cars would likely already be getting everywhere faster, especially at peak times due to better traffic management, actual higher speeds seem unnecessary in an urban environment.

That the woman who was killed was homeless reminds me of a recent conversation I had with a libertarian tech bro friend.

We were discussing whether regulation will aim to stop manufacturers selling features to wealthier clients which are designed to save the driver above all other considerations. For instance Mr CEO is lounging in his $250,000 Tesla and is faced with hitting a bus full of schoolchildren, or a load of us poors. What's stopping the manufacturers from saving his bacon and killing everyone else for a considerable monthly fee?

It's anecdotal of course but my friend was quite sure that regulations to prevent this would not be forthcoming. I can paraphrase the crux of his argument as "look at who's making this stuff and how much money they have". It's just part of the bigger issue of increasing private sector involvement in what's deemed to be in the public interest, but I won't start on that.

We are at risk of trying to run before we can walk. We have some serious social issues to resolve before we hand the future over to a small corral of sociopathic billionaires. An unmanned Uber running down a homeless women seems a tragically apt symbol of this.

"Suddenly came out of the shadows" yet crossed two lanes before she was struck.

And the Victoria, Central, Jubilee and Northern lines. There is still someone at the front who closes the doors just like on the DLR.

.

Wow 8 murders in London in seven days and it's not even summer. It's going to be a right laugh when the clocks go forward. Probably 10 a week.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/stratford-stabbing-young-man-knifed-to-death-in-east-london-shopping-centre-a3794996.html

I think it’s a given that driverless cars will be safer than cars driven by humans. My biggest concern right now is electric cars being relatively silent in an urban environment and the danger that poses to pedestrians failing to look where they’re going, eyes on their phones etc. A recent well discussed accident in the Old Street area comes to mind.

This is a good read on where tech might be taking us

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/interesting-talk-md-daimler-benz-jonathan-brathwaite