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Comment by madamelic | Hacker News Reader

What's crazy to me is that an "Other" object isn't flagged for a complete stop or a major alert to the "safety" driver. This seems like a major case for when the software should stop being autonomous, when it isn't sure.

Likely the story is that their software flags a lot of things "Other" without figuring it out upon closer inspection.

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For those who think "well, pedestrians don't belong on the road so this wasn't much of a bug" (because I'm sure there are some of those): just imagine the "other" was a large chunk of debris, or cargo fallen off a truck. The car would have crashed right into it.

There can be many obstacles on the road, stationary or non-stationary.

AI can get away with requiring humans to take control in emergency/unusual situations, but not when it is supposed to be "self-driving". The software at least needs to recognise problematic situations and request a safety override or come to a safe stop, it can't just shrug it off and move on.

Debris tends to be stationary most of the time. Sounds like the car could have handled that.

I agree with that ADS being shit. Objects, once identified, should be accounted for in later updates in some form. E.g. in the way of "pedestrian now behind truck next to me". How the hell can an object switch status back and forth, loosing all its history? This should make the system be extra cautious at the very least. But yeah, safety doesn't seem to have been that big of a priority.

Most of the time, yes. But if you've ever been in a mountainous region, you'll know that it won't be stationary all the time and that it's most dangerous when it's not.

There was an emergency braking feature that would engage when a collision was imminent. It fired 1.3 seconds before hitting Herzberg. But Uber had disabled that function because there were too many false positives, so the car just alerted the driver (who was not paying attention) instead. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr-gridlock/wp/2018/05/2...

1.3 seconds is definitely not enough for a human to engage brain. I agree the human should have been paying attention and might have spotted the problem sooner, but that alert is completely useless.

Alerting a human (who wasn't even in the driver's feedback loop at the time) 1.3 seconds before the collision? That is equal to "hey, look at this unavoidable crash that we're driving into!"

It is ridiculous to expect that the driver can be alerted and react in any kind of reasonable time frame unless they were already paying attention, in which case what use is a self driving vehicle?

They are supposed to be paying attention in these self-driving car tests. If the driver was negligent then they should be held at least partially accountable.

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