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Comment by jryle70 | Hacker News Reader

I believe all other driveless tests work the same way, with sensors but requiring human driver at all time. Would you also consider Waymo, Cruise, et al, negligent?

The technologies are not ready. They are being tested. Aircraft get to such a safe state like today after so many iterations and improvement, both in technology and process.

A terrible tragedy happened in this case. Hopefully it will help save a lot of lives in future.

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There is a difference between putting technology out there that is "not ready" and putting technology on the road that fundamentally doesn't do the basic things that a car must do, such as brake for pedestrians. It's an unfortunate but avoidable tragedy if a self-driving system fails due to a computer bug. Here, Uber disabled the self-driving system's emergency braking function: http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-uber-arizona-nts.... As far as I know, Waymo at least is at least theoretically capable of braking for a pedestrian in autonomous mode.

The overwhelming majority of vehicles on the road today don't break for pedestrians. Just a few models of cars sold in the past few years have features to automatically engage braking.

https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/where-automakers-...

> Would you also consider Waymo, Cruise, et al, negligent?

Absolutely. We know from centuries of evidence that humans are profoundly bad at monitoring 'mostly autonomous' systems. Waymo/Uber know this as well, they just employ the driver as a convenient way to offload legal liability while they test unproven and unsafe technology on the public without consent.

Waymo seem to have gone to quite some effort to make the failure modes of their tech as benign as possible, preferring to stop the car and make the safety driver take control rather than risking it and hoping they'll step in. They may also have safety drivers that are simply a lot more engaged in actively monitoring what the car is doing even when it's not doing anything that requires them to intervene, based on the reporting I've seen lately.

If these technologies, as you say, are not ready (I think you are right), what are they doing on public roadways?

The main issue is that one can't really consider the technology ready for real world testing until said real world testing is done.

That's obviously not true. Real-world testing should be the last phase, after the car has succeeded at simulations. They're building a mock urban environment near my home for just this purpose.

Tests by definition can be failed. If you couldn't fail, then what's the point?

You can pass all the prerequisites, but none of that guarantees that it doesn't fail at the real world testing phase.

All that said, in this specific case, Uber absolutely hadn't passed all the prerequisites and shouldn't have been given any permission to be on real streets.

Well, what you're calling "passing the prerequisites" is no different than "being ready." It's the same as medicine testing; they don't go straight to giving the drug to patients.

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