FTA
In 2001, she was handed a five year sentence for attempting to rob a Blockbuster store with an imitation firearm, but was later freed in 2004.
Herzberg, who had drug convictions
FFS, why is any of this relevant? It’s like the story is going out of the way to smear both people involved in the incident when it seems pretty apparent to me that this was largely a technological failing.
Her name was Elaine Herzberg.
It’s not relevant, it’s just a convenient narrative when stacking their past on top of them not paying attention to the road. However, Uber hired this driver and apparently they cleared the background checks. There’s way more to be said here about Uber and their hiring process than the driver.
that it’s convenient for your narrative? Nope, that one occurred to me.
Part of the job of apologist is convincing arguments.
Nice theory, but the current outcome of nearly 40,000 deaths per year (US-only) and many, many more debilitating injuries suggest that human drivers are fucking terrible at doing what you suggest they can. And your final point simply underscores that. I see real human drivers looking at their fucking phones all the time.
Yet you presumably get into a car and drive yourself, or are prepared to be driven by others. Each of these actions are versions of the single most common action (not related to poor diet and exercise) we take that gets us, our family and our friends killed.
I’d say that’s a relative value judgement that is really hard to say, and irrelevant anyway. If something done terribly is the only way to do it, that’s the way it will be done if people really want it done. Medicine was done terribly for millennia, but there was no alternative but to suffer.
What’s meaningful is whether humans driving cars are better or worse than any alternatives, and until self driving cars are documentably better, there currently is no alternative other than public transit, feet or pedals. Does anyone have the comparative safety of cars and bikes per mile handy? A quick search could not yield it.
It’s not the only way. Driving dangerously is not the only option. There are many measures that we could adopt with a high degree of confidence of success that would dramatically reduce death and injury on our roads. But convenience and speed of travel dominate our thinking. We have traded better engineered and safer cars for increased speed, as much as for safety, just as we have traded better engines for more performance, not lower environmental costs. We have traded better roads for higher speeds, not just for increased safety. Here’s some low-cost ideas that would be almost certain to have benefit in terms of safety:
That we don’t adopt these sorts of measures is a cultural/convenience issue, not a technological one. What is meaningful is not really about human drivers Vs robot cars, but about the way we humans DO drive Vs the way that we COULD drive if we really cared enough. An alternative to public transit/feet/pedals in terms of risk reduction is for us to drive more safely. We overwhelmingly choose not to. We’re just fine with the carnage as long as it happens to someone else.
We’ve also arguably traded the increased speed of travel for distance, not for time saved. We live further than ever from our family, our friends, our jobs and our recreation.
Car/bike - on average it is about equal per hour of participation. So if I bike an hour to work, it’s about the same risk as someone driving an hour to work.
Sure thing.
I have a hard time with the delta in the variable. Not it’s existence.
Absolutely disagree. No ONE should ever make this decision for us.
You’re literally descriving the set of decisions made by people collectively and saying someone is in charge. That’s a nice fantasy, but my point is that collectively we’re rounding those individual choices in a certain direction. That ratio is changing back in the other direction lately. This means some individuals more and some other individuals less, but the sum looks to me, pretty clearly, that life is cheaper than it was in the 60s.
If we disagree it’s probably a matter of degree, with one of us valuing the lives of others more and the other, less.
In this situation the vehicle should have performed far better than a human driver, given that it is supposed to be able to “see” in the dark (LIDAR, IR sensors).
I’d wager humans are doing as good as can be expected. Driving is inherently hazardous. With 3+ trillion miles driven in the US every year, there are going to be accidents. 40,000 deaths is probably as good as it gets.
Faster processing, more sensors, car-to-car communications, seeing in the IR or ultraviolet are all better than human capabilities. But I think humans have the advantage due to our “general intelligence”. No matter how fast the processor, no matter how many sensors are added, etc., without a general intelligence, self-driving cars will never do better than humans.
I’m sure the root cause will be found for the Uber accident, and the appropriate fix rolled out.
Hopefully Uber will share that info.
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