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Comment by eric_h | Hacker News Reader

> I have seen deer and possums by the side of the road

Both of those have eyes that act as reflectors and you can see their eyes well before you can actually see the whole animal.

This[0] suggests that the total time required for a human to avoid an incident like this is 3.6s (at 35 mph, casual googling suggests the car was doing 40). Even if we add 1 second of extra time to deal with it I'm not sure that makes the cut.

0) http://www.visualexpert.com/Resources/pedestrian.html

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Other people in the thread have pointed out the woman stepped out in a darker area between where the street lights are placed. Reflecting eyes are not the only way to detect an object. A person watching the road would have seen her dark silhouette contrasting to the next patch of light.

Also remember she was not a stationary object. She was in the act of crossing the road. Human eyes/brains are good at detecting motion in low light even if we can't 100% make out what the object is.

I have lived in Tempe and know that part of town well. There are apartments, gas stations, hotels, strip malls, fast food restaurants and a strip club. It's not a pitch black country road.

I know what you're talking about with the eyes, I spend a lot of time driving rural WA highways at night, but no. I have seen deer that had their heads facing the other way and were standing in the shoulder/ditch area. In conditions where i can definitely make out the shape of the deer and its location but the dash cam sensor misses it entirely.

Your last paragraph is a valid calculation if this were a case of a person stepping directly off a curb into the lane of traffic. However, it appears that they were probably standing on the median looking to cross, then stepped off into the left-most lane of traffic, an empty lane, proceeded across that lane towards the lane in which the car was traveling. In this sort of situation human intuition will recognize that a person standing on the median of a high-speed highway is likely to do something unusual. Particularly when you observe the visual profile of, as media has reported, a homeless person who is using the bicycle with numerous plastic bags hanging off it to collect recycling.

Driver didn't see this person because the driver was occupied with smartphone, only occasionally glancing up.

Also, has anyone here talked about the effect on the eyes of watching a (typically) bright white screen vs letting them adjust to the light of the night yet? This point deserves to be brought up.

Perhaps the video was intentionally darkened to simulate this effect. :P

I wonder if the driver is liable.

I'd like to have an interior view of what driver was actually looking at. It couldn't have been a FLIR monitor, for sure.. it seems more likely to be a phone held in the right hand? Bit hard to tell with the quality of the footage, but driver looked rather tired to boot.

If so (a hand held phone), in Australia that driver would be going to jail for culpable driving causing loss of life.

Here's a picture of the Uber car from inside. No FLIR, just GPS:

https://cdn.geekwire.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Front-_-...

A different picture from that article shows that under the GPS is the gear stick, an emergency button, and a cellphone charger.

According to the filename, those are iPads, which implies they could have been displaying anything (not just GPS).

It could have been anything readable. I got the feeling it was either a Kindle or something like that or maybe even a hardcopy of something printed or written on paper. This was just a hunch but I think it's being validated in my mind by the fact that there was no light seeming to shine on the driver's face but that's probably due to the night vision camera not picking up that type of light? I don't really know. My mind is filling in a lot of gaps here, I realize.

EDIT: Upon re-watching the video a third time and really paying attention to this I don't think there is any real way for us to know without confirmation from the driver them self or an official report on the incident. My mind was definitely deciding things that just aren't discover-able from the video itself.

Here we have it, I believe:

"Uber also developed an app, mounted on an iPad in the car’s middle console, for drivers to alert engineers to problems. Drivers could use the app anytime without shifting the car out of autonomous mode. Often, drivers would annotate data at a traffic light or a stop, but many did so while the car was moving"

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/technology/uber-self-d...

The whole project seemed designed for an outcome like this. Eg allowing app to be used whilst on the move, after reducing from 2 to 1 operators. Culpability ought to lie with Uber.

That's their only purpose. Nobody in their right mind could expect human observers to stay as alert as an actual driver when cruising for days with an AI that is good enough to not require interventions all the time. Passengers add nothing to safety, and an almost reliable AI will make anyone a passenger after a short while.

Completely agreed, but the law needs to take this into account. Human psychology can't just be ignored on this.

I think he is, at least, I've never heard of any law that removes responsibility from a driver if driving a self-driving car. I think this will also apply to empty cars, if they get into an accident, the owner is liable.

If I recall correctly the military has done a lot of studies on this.

>Also, has anyone here talked about the effect on the eyes of watching a (typically) bright white screen vs letting them adjust to the light of the night yet? This point deserves to be brought up.

Using bright interior lighting at night is something that we've known not to do for more than a century. If the driver couldn't be expected to see the pedestrian because the interior lighting or UX was too bright that is not something that does not reflect favorably upon Uber.

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