Maybe I'm old fashioned, but if I'm going to die because of some mistake, I'd rather it be my own than someone else's:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/a...ess-car-fatality-means-for-self-driving-tech/

On the other hand, it seems unavoidable that this emerging technology will eventually have to face delicate moral issues:

There's also a moral dilemma at play, as a driverless vehicle may have to decide which lives to save in the event of a serious accident.

 

Bashing into the side of a semi that is turning left presents no moral to dilemma for me.

As a technical detail, that Tesla model S had a driver. He just wasn't paying attention.

John

 

http://www.teslarati.com/witnesses-details-deadly-tesla-accident/

Bobby Vankavelaar owns the home where the mangled Model S driving on Autopilot eventually came to a stop after colliding with a tractor trailer and killing 40-year old Joshua Brown who was behind the wheel. In a video published byABC Action News, Vankavelaar tells the news outlet that the Tesla traveled “hundreds of yards from the point of impact, through a fence into an open field, through another fence and then avoiding a bank of trees before being unable to swerve and miss a power pole that eventually stopped the car a few feet away.”

It looks like the car was still driving in autopilot after the driver was dead.

A former Navy SEAL dies while watching Harry Potter on a video screen in a Tesla Model S on autopilot.
Bravo Zulu dude.

 

My first impression is that an autopilot -- particularly one that controls the throttle -- should disconnect upon any impact. Even our model airplanes have kill switches to turn off the ignition in those that have ignitions.

What was Tesla thinking? Tesla does have an acronym for it: RUD

John

RUD = rapid, unplanned disassembly

 

Hello there,

Yes that's nuts. The excuse, as always, is to quote statistics and how 'good' they are over millions of miles driven, in this case.

What is amazing is this is exactly the failure mode i thought would happen. That's because i have noticed myself from years of driving that some cars and objects 'blend' into the background scene and so are hard to notice. You have to make extra effort to be sure there are no objects that are blending or else you wont see them at all. This happens mostly with dark objects like cars. For example, a dark gray car will blend right in with the color of the dark gray road surface if your viewpoint is such that the road surface scene makes up all or most of the car's background scene. I have seen this happen, where you have to look twice to actually notice there is anything there at all. This is especially true when it is near dark, where the other car doesnt have it's lights turned on yet. It also happens with other color cars too, such as green against a green foliage background. I wanted to start a website at one time that talked about this kind of thing and other driving safety tips.
In this case it was a white truck against a mostly white sky. If it had been a color truck, almost any color, the computer would have noticed it, but because it blended in so well with the background it was not seen.
I think the same could happen in the early morning when the sun is at a sharp angle to the earth surface and you are driving east. The sun could saturate the camera sensors and therefore show no images at all for a number of minutes not just a second or two.

So apparently it is all about imaging and how it is done, which is prone to failure. However, the driver is not supposed to be doing some other task while driving anyway they are supposed to be watching the road just like with any other car. The driver of this car went into "i can do anything i want to do while my car drives itself" mode and therefore did not follow the recommendations of the car manufacturer anyway so it's mostly their own fault.
The driver probably didnt realize that it is not made to drive itself with no attention at all from the driver, but to assist the driver, where the driver is still expected to pay attention.

Remember they claim that airplane travel is safer than riding in a car.
So bottom line is that they will eventually claim that the car is actually *safer* than other cars because they drive more miles without a problem than humanly operated cars !!

I dont know about you but i would rather get hit by a driverless car that never even stops after it's radiator is destroyed than a human operator that knows when to stop <insert gigantic sarcastic chuckle here>

 

Bashing into the side of a semi that is turning left presents no moral to dilemma for me.

As a technical detail, that Tesla model S had a driver. He just wasn't paying attention.

John

To split hairs just for the fun of it, I would say that there was a human in the driver's seat, but he wasn't a driver since he wasn't driving.

 

Something tells me that autonomous vehicles could be a huge boon to personal injury lawyers. Let a million lawsuits bloom!

 

If you are too lazy to drive use public transportation,its simple.

 

To split hairs just for the fun of it, I would say that there was a human in the driver's seat, but he wasn't a driver since he wasn't driving.

Let his insurance company try to claim that. It will lose.

John

 

http://isl.ecst.csuchico.edu/DOCS/darpa2005/DARPA 2005 Stanley.pdf

The Stanford 2005 DARPA vehicle

 

This has all the makings of a B rated Sci-Fi horror flick. The car continued to drive 200 to 300 yards until impacting a telephone pole. Would it have driven to it's programmed destination, carrying the dead driver, if it had not hit the pole?

"CARMAGEDDON" the movie.

 

It was just dumb luck there was an empty field.

The Florida Highway Patrol described the events:

When the truck made a left turn onto NE 140th Court in front of the car, the car’s roof struck the underside of the trailer as it passed under the trailer. The car continued to travel east on U.S. 27A until it left the roadway on the south shoulder and struck a fence. The car smashed through two fences and struck a power pole. The car rotated counter-clockwise while sliding to its final resting place about 100 feet south of the highway.

Here’s our birds-eye visualization of what happened based on the information released by the police:

http://electrek.co/2016/07/01/understanding-fatal-tesla-accident-autopilot-nhtsa-probe/

 

Bashing into the side of a semi that is turning left presents no moral to dilemma for me.

As a technical detail, that Tesla model S had a driver. He just wasn't paying attention.

John

But why wasn't he paying attention? Because he at the autopilot turned on and therefore didn't think he needed to pay attention.

That's something that people have been pointing out for years -- no matter what you say or do, as soon as you make it possible for people to shift their focus to something other than driving, many, if not most, people are going to shift their focus to something other than driving. You install back-up radar to tell people that something is behind them, and people are much less diligent about checking if something is behind them. It's human nature. It's like there's some conservation of thinking law at play -- make it possible for a machine to do someone's thinking, and the someone stops doing their own.

 

Something tells me that autonomous vehicles could be a huge boon to personal injury lawyers. Let a million lawsuits bloom!

Oh, you can bet on a whole new industry of lawyers blooming. Of course, there's already a bunch of laws being put in place to protect the makers of these cars -- without anyone asking why the makers of "normal" cars (and lots and lots of other things) don't deserve equal protection.

 

Yes that's nuts. The excuse, as always, is to quote statistics and how 'good' they are over millions of miles driven, in this case.

The statistics are increasingly not on their side. The U.S. traffic fatality death rate is right about at 1 per 100 million miles drive -- and that's in all kinds of conditions and all kinds of weather. Tesla touts that this is the first fatality in 130 million miles with the autopilot engaged -- but how cherry-picked are the vast majority of those miles. How often have people driven their Teslas with the autopilot on while driving in a blizzard or on a winding mountain road? Has anyone even tried to let one of these cars drive down Pikes Peak, even on a good day?

However, the driver is not supposed to be doing some other task while driving anyway they are supposed to be watching the road just like with any other car. The driver of this car went into "i can do anything i want to do while my car drives itself" mode and therefore did not follow the recommendations of the car manufacturer anyway so it's mostly their own fault.
The driver probably didnt realize that it is not made to drive itself with no attention at all from the driver, but to assist the driver, where the driver is still expected to pay attention.

And so what? That's just human nature. It really doesn't matter what the instruction manual says or even what the law says. If you make it POSSIBLE for a driver to pay less attention, then most drivers WILL pay less attention.

 

And so what? That's just human nature. It really doesn't matter what the instruction manual says or even what the law says. If you make it POSSIBLE for a driver to pay less attention, then most drivers WILL pay less attention.

Yes, they will.

It looks like the Model S stayed locked on the vehicle and therefore didn’t try to stop for the obstacle until the very last second, which of course shouldn’t happen. The Model S driver saw it coming but trusted the system:

“Yes, I could have reacted sooner, but when the car slows down correctly 1’000 times, you trust it to do it the next time to. My bad..”

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...ated-crashes-van-damaging-entire-end-car.html

 

Both the car and the driver deserved what happened to it/him.

How did you get this posthumous quote? “Yes, I could have reacted sooner, but when the car slows down correctly 1’000 times, you trust it to do it the next time to. My bad..” My powers in that area are much more limited.

The driver is at fault, no one or nothing else is. The only thing that I can fault Tesla for is not having a kill switch -- as in kill the engine. It did not cause the accident.

John

 

The statistics are increasingly not on their side. The U.S. traffic fatality death rate is right about at 1 per 100 million miles drive -- and that's in all kinds of conditions and all kinds of weather. Tesla touts that this is the first fatality in 130 million miles with the autopilot engaged -- but how cherry-picked are the vast majority of those miles. How often have people driven their Teslas with the autopilot on while driving in a blizzard or on a winding mountain road? Has anyone even tried to let one of these cars drive down Pikes Peak, even on a good day?

Ok, so they are doing what i said they would do already.

And so what? That's just human nature. It really doesn't matter what the instruction manual says or even what the law says. If you make it POSSIBLE for a driver to pay less attention, then most drivers WILL pay less attention.

Yes, it's human nature, no doubt there. But legally that may get them out of it, that's why i mentioned it. That's the answer to the 'so what' here.

 

Ok, so they are doing what i said they would do already.



Yes, it's human nature, no doubt there. But legally that may get them out of it, that's why i mentioned it. That's the answer to the 'so what' here.

Who's the "them" that "legally that may get them out of it"? Tesla and such? Only the laws that specifically shield them will get them out of it. History has shown time and time again that juries will look right past abject stupidity on the part of the person and assign blame to the manufacturer (and whomever else they can find with deep pockets). My dad's company, who manufactured industrial air compressors, was sued by the families of two guys that died while diving because the air being pumped down to them had oil in it. The guy that was the divemaster has built the compressor using junk yard compressors that my dad's company had built some thirty years earlier for a tire shop. The compressors were not oil-free to begin with (as is the case with nearly all compressors), but the suit claimed that since the pumps (which had been sitting in a junk yard for over a decade, mind you) hadn't been labeled as not being suitable for human breathing air, that they were none-the-less liable. The jury agreed.

 

How did you get this posthumous quote? “Yes, I could have reacted sooner, but when the car slows down correctly 1’000 times, you trust it to do it the next time to. My bad..” My powers in that area are much more limited.

From his Youtube video description.

Published on May 25, 2016
Just to make it clear: The Tesla Model S is the absolute best car in the world at the moment. Nothing comes close.

But, in this case there was a problem with the driving aids and also security systems: None of the safety-systems worked correctly:

1. The TACC, active cruise control did not brake as it normally does
2. The automatic braking system (AEB) did not make an emergency brake
3. The forward collision warning turned on way too late, it was set to normal warning distance
4. The TACC actually was speeding up just before I did hit the brakes

Yes, I could have reacted sooner, but when the car slows down correctly 1'000 times, you trust it to do it the next time to. My bad..

Yes, it was HIS bad.