As it is, we bash every crash and failure of such cars and may prohibit those from public roads while statistically they might be making our lives safer, not more dangerous. My 2c.
But when a system that is designed to autonomously detect infinite, non-discrete, random variables fails prevent a collision/incident, you have a failure. There is no grey area, Y or N. The hope is, the system is smart enough to determine exactly 'why' there was a failure (i.e. the system recognizes the input, a pedestrian in this case, but was not able to prevent collision due to the constraints of physics, or without a nominal increase for concurrent accidents). Still a failure, albeit a failure with a greater snapshot of heuristics and causality.
If Uber has such amazing technology that avoids accidents, they could deploy them as accident-avoidance for regular drivers. They could give normal driving control to the humans, and take over only if there is a potential of accident.
If you argue that these driver assistance technologies already exist, then you better not be comparing your magical AI on supersafe cars with sunny climate on well marked highways to the average driver on the average vehicle under average climate on average roads.
Another point to consider, is that the actual experience of autonomous driving may increase the likelihood for ‘manual intervention’ failures due to the system being able to react correctly most of the time!
Say, you claim your product works, on the average, for 80 years before breaking.
I believe you, buy it, and it promptly breaks within 2 years of operation.
Maybe I was unlucky. But high more likely, you were bullshitting me.
That's what we have here.
Human death rate: 1 death / 80 million miles
Uber's death rate: 1 death after 2 million miles
So yes, we can make judgement calls.
Sure!
Traffic fatalities in the US, human drivers: 1.25 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...
Uber's self-driving car fatality rate: 1 death per 2 million miles[2]
That is, Uber's state-of-the-art is an order of magnitude worse than human drivers.
I know, you'll complain about small sample size. The thing is, assuming Uber's cars match humans, the chances of a collision happening only after 2 million miles are very small, like pulling an ace of spades out of a shuffled deck of cards.
The point is, we do have the data, and the data does not support optimistic beliefs.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...
[2]https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/10/waymo-has-driven-10-mil...
In essence, because the people who control the data have an interest in revealing data that is superior to human performance, the lack of conclusive data on this leads to an inference that it isn't.
Without simultaneously reporting the identical data for human driven vehicles in a complete, accurate, and globally comprehensive way there is little that can be done with such data except use it to make political attacks on the technology.
As comparison: every single battery electric vehicle that has a fire is widely reported and disclaimed, impugning the technology as unsafe. The 10s of thousands of flammable fueled vehicle fires are completely unreported in the media.
*edit whoops don't know HN link formatting :)
Going further, I wish for more initiative to re-design infrastructure putting the safety of pedestrians, cyclists etc at the forefront. It is simply not safe for alternative transportation to share the road with vehicles, autonomous or otherwise. Coincidentally, if infrastructure were designed to limit or prevent the interaction between cars and non-cars, the problem of detection for autonomous systems becomes much easier. Unfortunately, society would rather prop up the free market with capital than invest in public works which benefit more than corporations and shareholders.