Be Excellent To Each Other

The article said that it made no attempt to brake but presumably this would have been after the collision anyway. Although these Uber things don't seem to be the best example of self-driving cars, requiring a lot of human intervention.

From viewing the videos, “it’s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode (autonomous or human-driven) based on how she came from the shadows right into the roadway,” Moir said. The police have not released the videos.

Mabye, but maybe the conclusion it came to is "I'm going to hit her."

Presumably they can do the maths now, right? As in "AI driven cars have killed one person per X miles, compared to I driven cars which kill one person per Y miles".

In 2016, 37,461 people died in traffic-related accidents in the United States, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. That amounts to 1.18 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled in 2016. Waymo, which has been testing autonomous vehicles on public roads since 2009 when it was Google’s self-driving car project, has said its cars have driven more than 5 million miles while Uber’s cars have covered 3 million miles.

So a woman ran straight out into the road unexpectedly? I assume that the car did react, but not in time, right?

Oh man, I think it should have avoided her.

I welcome our drunk driving speeding robot overlords.

Fixed.

Those figures lump all driverless cars together, though. Which you'd have to assume is something google/waymo would take exception to. They seem to be ahead of the Uber ones with their technology and haven't even killed anybody at all. Although to get figures on safety you would really need to know whether in any of those occasions where the human had to take over it might otherwise have been a really bad crash.

Uber’s robotic vehicle project was not living up to expectations months before a self-driving car operated by the company struck and killed a woman in Tempe, Ariz.

The cars were having trouble driving through construction zones and next to tall vehicles, like big rigs. And Uber’s human drivers had to intervene far more frequently than the drivers of competing autonomous car projects.

Waymo, formerly the self-driving car project of Google, said that in tests on roads in California last year, its cars went an average of nearly 5,600 miles before the driver had to take control from the computer to steer out of trouble. As of March, Uber was struggling to meet its target of 13 miles per “intervention” in Arizona, according to 100 pages of company documents obtained by The New York Times and two people familiar with the company’s operations in the Phoenix area but not permitted to speak publicly about it.

I mean, I didn't want to mention it as it feels harsh, but what the fuck is that sat behind the wheel of the car in the video.