@dasgeh 176787 wrote:
I get that everyone is judging the woman. From the video, it seems like it was very dark out and she picked a horrible place to cross. But as has been mentioned, this is a video, and it may not have been so dark out. This may be a spot that people cross at all the time. There doesn’t seem to be another car on the road, and she made it across 2 other wide lanes of traffic. If the Uber-car had braked just a bit a while back or just changed lanes, she would have been fine. It is entirely possible that people cross there all the time, and just expect that the one car on the road will brake a little, or change lanes, or do whatever possible to avoid the collision.
It’s also possible that it was this dark out, and she’s the only one who crosses there. I just don’t think we know enough to know it’s her fault.
Whether the video looks dark or not is somewhat immaterial, as the sensors in self-driving cars see differently than we do. In addition to the visual spectrum they use both passive light outside the visual spectrum (IR) and active LIDAR (and sometimes other spectrum). Given that she was a pretty good sensor target with little background clutter, I suspect this was an algorithmic failure rather than a sensor failure (“the car saw something but didn’t react to it” rather than “the car didn’t see it”). A sober, alert human driver paying attention would have done better. But an imperfect human driver – someone texting while driving or my son driving home at 10 PM (which is the time of the accident) after a 14 hour shift at the hospital? Maybe not.
This is a tragic outcome, but I wouldn’t write off “self-driving cars” as a whole because this particular prototype did poorly compared with what an ideal human driver would have done.
