<story><title>Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-selfdriving-uber/self-driving-uber-car-kills-arizona-woman-crossing-street-idUSKBN1GV296</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>IgorPartola</author><text>I am definitely not. Their version of the future is too damn bleak for me.&lt;p&gt;Your fear is very much grounded in reality. US lawmakers tend to be very reactionary, except in rare cases like gun laws. So it won&amp;#x27;t take much to have restrictions imposed like this. Granted, I believe some regulation is good; after all the reason today&amp;#x27;s cars are safer than those built 20 years ago isn&amp;#x27;t because the free market decided so, but because of regulation. But self driving cars are so new and our lawmakers are by and large so ignorant, that I wouldn&amp;#x27;t trust them to create good regulation from the get go.</text></item><item><author>orbitur</author><text>&amp;gt; I won&amp;#x27;t be surprised if someone at some point wears a stripy outfit, and the car thinks they are a part of the road, and tries to explicitly chase them down until they are under the wheels. Or if the car suddenly decides that the road continues at a 90 degree angle off a bridge. Or that the splashes from a puddle in front is actually an oncoming car and it must swerve into the school kids crossing the perpendicular road.&lt;p&gt;Are you working on the next season of Black Mirror?&lt;p&gt;In all seriousness, my fear (and maybe not fear, maybe it&amp;#x27;s happy expectation in light of the nightmare scenarios) is that if a couple of the &amp;quot;weird and terrifying&amp;quot; accidents happen, the gov&amp;#x27;t would shut down self-driving car usage immediately.</text></item><item><author>IgorPartola</author><text>This is what&amp;#x27;s going to happen. If you&amp;#x27;ve ever seen a machine learning algorithm in action, this isn&amp;#x27;t surprising at all. Basically, they&amp;#x27;ll behave as expected some well known percentage of the time. But when they don&amp;#x27;t, the result will not be just a slight deviation from the normal algorithm, but a very unexpected one.&lt;p&gt;So we will have overall a much smaller number of deaths caused by self driving cars, but ones that do happen will be completely unexpected and scary and shitty. You can&amp;#x27;t really get away from this without putting these cars on rails.&lt;p&gt;Moreover, the human brain won&amp;#x27;t like processing these freak accidents. People die in car crashes every damn day. But we have become really accustomed to rationalizing that: &amp;quot;they were struck by a drunk driver&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;they were texting&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;they didn&amp;#x27;t see the red light&amp;quot;, etc. These are &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot; reasons for bad accidents and we can not only rationalize them, but also rationalize how it wouldn&amp;#x27;t happen to us: &amp;quot;I don&amp;#x27;t drive near colleges where young kids are likely to drive drunk&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;I don&amp;#x27;t text (much) while I drive&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;I pay attention&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;But these algorithms will not fail like that. Each accident will be unique and weird and scary. I won&amp;#x27;t be surprised if someone at some point wears a stripy outfit, and the car thinks they are a part of the road, and tries to explicitly chase them down until they are under the wheels. Or if the car suddenly decides that the road continues at a 90 degree angle off a bridge. Or that the splashes from a puddle in front is actually an oncoming car and it must swerve into the school kids crossing the perpendicular road. It&amp;#x27;ll always be tragic, unpredictable and one-off.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TallGuyShort</author><text>&amp;gt; except in rare cases like gun laws&lt;p&gt;They&amp;#x27;re still very reactionary in that, which is precisely why it isn&amp;#x27;t very effective when a subset of them do react: there are plenty of smart things that could get proposed, but the overlap between people who know what they&amp;#x27;re talking about and people that want the laws is exceptionally small, so consequently dumb, ineffective stuff that has no chance of passing anyway gets proposed. What does get proposed is a knee-jerk reaction to what just happened, and rarely actually looks systemically at the current laws and gun violence as a whole. Example: the Las Vegas shooting prompted a lot of talk of bump stock bans. Bump stocks are so rarely used at all, nevermind in violence, and they will generally ruin guns that weren&amp;#x27;t originally made to be fully-automatic very quickly if they&amp;#x27;re actually used for sustained automatic fire. Silly point to focus on suddenly. After the Florida shooting last month so much focused on why rifles are easier to obtain than handguns. And it&amp;#x27;s because overwhemingly most gun violence is handguns. Easily concealable rifles are already heavily regulated at the federal level for that very reason.</text></comment>
<story><title>Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street</title><url>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-selfdriving-uber/self-driving-uber-car-kills-arizona-woman-crossing-street-idUSKBN1GV296</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>IgorPartola</author><text>I am definitely not. Their version of the future is too damn bleak for me.&lt;p&gt;Your fear is very much grounded in reality. US lawmakers tend to be very reactionary, except in rare cases like gun laws. So it won&amp;#x27;t take much to have restrictions imposed like this. Granted, I believe some regulation is good; after all the reason today&amp;#x27;s cars are safer than those built 20 years ago isn&amp;#x27;t because the free market decided so, but because of regulation. But self driving cars are so new and our lawmakers are by and large so ignorant, that I wouldn&amp;#x27;t trust them to create good regulation from the get go.</text></item><item><author>orbitur</author><text>&amp;gt; I won&amp;#x27;t be surprised if someone at some point wears a stripy outfit, and the car thinks they are a part of the road, and tries to explicitly chase them down until they are under the wheels. Or if the car suddenly decides that the road continues at a 90 degree angle off a bridge. Or that the splashes from a puddle in front is actually an oncoming car and it must swerve into the school kids crossing the perpendicular road.&lt;p&gt;Are you working on the next season of Black Mirror?&lt;p&gt;In all seriousness, my fear (and maybe not fear, maybe it&amp;#x27;s happy expectation in light of the nightmare scenarios) is that if a couple of the &amp;quot;weird and terrifying&amp;quot; accidents happen, the gov&amp;#x27;t would shut down self-driving car usage immediately.</text></item><item><author>IgorPartola</author><text>This is what&amp;#x27;s going to happen. If you&amp;#x27;ve ever seen a machine learning algorithm in action, this isn&amp;#x27;t surprising at all. Basically, they&amp;#x27;ll behave as expected some well known percentage of the time. But when they don&amp;#x27;t, the result will not be just a slight deviation from the normal algorithm, but a very unexpected one.&lt;p&gt;So we will have overall a much smaller number of deaths caused by self driving cars, but ones that do happen will be completely unexpected and scary and shitty. You can&amp;#x27;t really get away from this without putting these cars on rails.&lt;p&gt;Moreover, the human brain won&amp;#x27;t like processing these freak accidents. People die in car crashes every damn day. But we have become really accustomed to rationalizing that: &amp;quot;they were struck by a drunk driver&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;they were texting&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;they didn&amp;#x27;t see the red light&amp;quot;, etc. These are &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot; reasons for bad accidents and we can not only rationalize them, but also rationalize how it wouldn&amp;#x27;t happen to us: &amp;quot;I don&amp;#x27;t drive near colleges where young kids are likely to drive drunk&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;I don&amp;#x27;t text (much) while I drive&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;I pay attention&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;But these algorithms will not fail like that. Each accident will be unique and weird and scary. I won&amp;#x27;t be surprised if someone at some point wears a stripy outfit, and the car thinks they are a part of the road, and tries to explicitly chase them down until they are under the wheels. Or if the car suddenly decides that the road continues at a 90 degree angle off a bridge. Or that the splashes from a puddle in front is actually an oncoming car and it must swerve into the school kids crossing the perpendicular road. It&amp;#x27;ll always be tragic, unpredictable and one-off.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>makomk</author><text>US lawmakers are very reactionary in the case of gun laws too, it&amp;#x27;s just that gun owners usually have enough political pull to block them from successfully getting laws passed. (The current campaign for gun control is 100% a reactionary response to whatever&amp;#x27;s been making the biggest news headlines. For example, the vast majority of US gun homicides are carried out with handguns, yet gun control supporters seem to think it&amp;#x27;s absurd they&amp;#x27;re more tightly regulated than AR-15s - which are relatively rarely used to kill anyone and have more mundane uses for things like hunting - just because the AR-15s are in the headlines. The US&amp;#x27;s most deadly school shooting was done with handguns too.) In fact, I&amp;#x27;d argue the reactionary nature of US lawmaking is important to understanding why &amp;quot;sensible&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;common-sense&amp;quot; gun control laws are so strongly opposed in the first place.</text></comment>