First death involving self-driving car

Whoa, deep breath there. Killer cars mowing people down. That's a bit...purple. And if that's the tack you're going to take, we can't have a reasonable discussion as it just turns into people yelling at each other. One person has been hit, and an LEO has said it would be very difficult to avoid.

"No such thing as good enough" means no progress will ever be made. Every product has the capability to kill someone. According to the sticker on the back, the cupboard I keep my CDs in is going to give someone in California cancer. Engineers of current, human-driven cars know that their products will kill 1.25 people every 100 million miles. They do everything they can to avoid it, but it happens. AVs will be the same - at some point, talent/luck/engineering will run out and someone will pay a price.

Why is it irrelevant to compare the death rates? 

Of course profit is a motive. Safety wasn't a selling point in cars until the public decided they'd make buying decisions based on safety, so safety became a profit item and got more emphasis from the automakers. There's a story about that in one of the automotive history books - Iacocca, maybe?

I am curious. Can someone give a good explanation of how the autonomous vehicle programing is done?

This is my rudimentary understanding:

1.  Get access to a lot on processing power

2. Set up a neural network "learning" program

3. Equip a fleet of cars with the sensors you plan to use

4. Have human drivers use your fleet of  sensor equipped vehicles, data logging every subtle nuance you can record. (and if you are Tesla, you call it "Autopilot" and get your customers to pay extra for being surveilled)

5. Feed the mountain of "Training Data" you collected through your learning program. The program learns patterns of sensor data how to react to to them like the human drivers.

6. Take your resulting program, load it to a vehicle and try it out.

7. Eventually you put it out on public roads and add to your training data.

8. Repeat steps 4 through 7 to keep refining. 

Am I missing anything?

That's pretty close. There is some old-fashioned manual programming by humans involved, but it is mostly machine learning. And it's worth considering that the neural networks are pretty much a black box of magical question marks - the resulting programs are too complicated for a human to entirely comprehend:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604087/the-dark-secret-at-the-heart-of-ai/

Edit: Also you can apparently make some healthy optimizations to your neural network if you have a quantum computer.

In reply to Keith Tanner :

Truly, I re-read my last few posts and found nary an exclamation point or inappropriate CAPS.  I wasn't yelling.  But I agree that further discussion is probably unproductive. 

I'm no fan of lawyers in general, but in this case I could be okay with a lawsuit and big ol' monetary dope-slap upside the head of some of these deep-pocket tech firms.  I guess we'll see how it plays out.

kb58 said:

Then you won't much like the Netflix documentary "Dirty Money", as it really shows the dirty underbelly of capitalism. The things VW did, just, wow. I agree with your concerns, that the bottom line and shareholders are a very strong bias to bend, break, or just ignore what's right. Unfortunately, that same capitalism is what makes many of our cool products possible.

I agree the episode covering dieselgate did not make VW look good. However, notice that not once in that episode did they ever put the whole thing into context. They would give percentages above the limits, but always would leave out how low the limits are and that these cheater cars were cleaner than many vehicles driving all over the place. How much NOx did all the VW illegal diesels spew into the air compared to say an old dump truck that leaves a trail of thick black soot in the air as it passes by?  VW paid a huge price for a crime with no victims and not a single person can demonstrate that they were harmed. They just were guilty of making the government look foolish so they got hammered.

The rest of that series was similarly interesting. For example, the pay day loan king race team dude one really made me think he got shafted and wasn't as reprehensible as I was led to believe. He was basically a victim of the government. I'm guessing the filmaker meant this to show how greedy and unethical he was, but all it did was show that he figured out how to exploit loopholes and make a lot of money, but not sure if he did anything actually illegal.

The drug company and the drug cartel bank were interesting. Both pretty much showed how corrupt our country is and how ineffective the government is at doing anything about it (best case) or how complicit they are in the corruption (worst case). The drug company one was the one that seems the most egregious to me, but again, no crimes committed and no prosecution. Wall St, gets what they want and the government does their bidding. Same old same old.

Compare the drug cartel bank crimes to the payday loan episode and look at the disparity in how they were handled by the government. Mind blowing. Essentially there are multiple levels of justice and Scott Tucker was not in the club so he paid the price. HSBC is in the big boys club so they did thousands of times worse (to be generous) and yet were not even criminally charged with anything and no individual was ever held accountable.

The maple syrup one didn't keep my attention and I slept on and off through it, but I did watch it on a plane on a day when I got up at 2:30 am after getting about 3 hours of sleep and I haven't watched the final episode yet.

T.J. said:

I agree the episode covering dieselgate did not make VW look good. However, notice that not once in that episode did they ever put the whole thing into context. They would give percentages above the limits, but always would leave out how low the limits are and that these cheater cars were cleaner than many vehicles driving all over the place. How much NOx did all the VW illegal diesels spew into the air compared to say an old dump truck that leaves a trail of thick black soot in the air as it passes by?  VW paid a huge price for a crime with no victims and not a single person can demonstrate that they were harmed. They just were guilty of making the government look foolish so they got hammered.

Wrong, VW's diesel emissions cheating is expected to cause over a thousand early deaths (or about 0.4 9/11s, if you prefer):

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/volkswagens-diesel-emissions-scandal-premature-deaths-car-vw-mit-study-thousands-killed-a7609061.html

Not to mention the very real environmental harm.

T.J. said:

The rest of that series was similarly interesting. For example, the pay day loan king race team dude one really made me think he got shafted and wasn't as reprehensible as I was led to believe. He was basically a victim of the government. I'm guessing the filmaker meant this to show how greedy and unethical he was, but all it did was show that he figured out how to exploit loopholes and make a lot of money, but not sure if he did anything actually illegal.

I don't care how illegal it is, what that guy did was immoral, unethical and otherwise wrong as all hell. A lack of illegality makes his acts no less reprehensible in my opinion.

I'll have to see the rest of the episodes as soon as I can.

STM317 said:

In reply to Keith Tanner :

...

I guess that's where my biggest beef with the current state of things lies. They're trying to develop a product that people aren't really asking for right now.

Who isn't asking for this?  I love driving, but I'd pick up an autonomous car in a minute (if I could afford it) to drive me to work every day.  It's not a fun drive being stuck in a line of cars with no passing zones behind a schoolbus.  If I could sleep for an extra 20 minutes then?  Hell yeah, sign me up!   

How about after school activities?   Put the kid in the car and send them on their way. 

How many people really buy a Tesla purely for the electric part and not autopilot?

Driving to most people is the equivalent of washing clothes or doing dishes.  If there's a machine that they can have automate that process (or largely automate it), there'll be mass adoption.

In reply to GameboyRMH :

So, something like 0.01 of the deaths caused by older diesels out on the roads that are legal? (I just made that number up, I don't know the real number, but these illegal diesels are not really dirty compared to anything other than really low standards, certainly very clean compared to older diesels.

My point still stands, there are no victims. Expected deaths are not victims, they are a mathematical abstraction.

GameboyRMH said:

T.J. said:

I agree the episode covering dieselgate did not make VW look good. However, notice that not once in that episode did they ever put the whole thing into context. They would give percentages above the limits, but always would leave out how low the limits are and that these cheater cars were cleaner than many vehicles driving all over the place. How much NOx did all the VW illegal diesels spew into the air compared to say an old dump truck that leaves a trail of thick black soot in the air as it passes by?  VW paid a huge price for a crime with no victims and not a single person can demonstrate that they were harmed. They just were guilty of making the government look foolish so they got hammered.

Wrong, VW's diesel emissions cheating is expected to cause over a thousand early deaths (or about 0.4 9/11s, if you prefer):

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/volkswagens-diesel-emissions-scandal-premature-deaths-car-vw-mit-study-thousands-killed-a7609061.html

Not to mention the very real environmental harm.

T.J. said:

The rest of that series was similarly interesting. For example, the pay day loan king race team dude one really made me think he got shafted and wasn't as reprehensible as I was led to believe. He was basically a victim of the government. I'm guessing the filmaker meant this to show how greedy and unethical he was, but all it did was show that he figured out how to exploit loopholes and make a lot of money, but not sure if he did anything actually illegal.

I don't care how illegal it is, what that guy did was immoral, unethical and otherwise wrong as all hell. A lack of illegality makes his acts no less reprehensible in my opinion.

I'll have to see the rest of the episodes as soon as I can.

I think this marks the first time ever I've been in complete agreement with Gameboy.

In reply to WonkoTheSane :

You are the first person I heard of that is asking for it. You could always live in a big city and ride the bus and/or train instead of trying to save up for a Tesla.

T.J. said:

In reply to GameboyRMH :

So, something like 0.01 of the deaths caused by older diesels out on the roads that are legal? (I just made that number up, I don't know the real number, but these illegal diesels are not really dirty compared to anything other than really low standards, certainly very clean compared to older diesels.

My point still stands, there are no victims. Expected deaths are not victims, they are a mathematical abstraction.

The older diesels that were out on the road were accounted for. We had some idea how many people they were killing and it was made illegal to produce more of such machines. Volkswagen sneaked more death under the radar.

The estimated deaths are not a mathematical abstraction, they're an estimate of very real deaths that will simply be very difficult to track. Are you saying that a sufficiently stealthy death is no death at all? If I poison a town's water supply with something that will raise the odds of all the people in the town getting cancer by 1%, and RX Reven uses his mad stats skills to work out that 100 people will die early of cancer because of it, did I kill them or not?

In reply to T.J. :

I can't find the article right now, but I read that a cheating Dieselgate TDI was polluting roughly the equivalent of a late 90s TDI. There were 11 million cheating VWs running around. I doubt there were 11 million late 90s TDIs still running around.

Modern diesels can actually be dirtier than pre-emissions diesels when measured out of the turbo. The modern aftertreatments and emissions software are good enough at cleaning out NOx, Hydrocarbons, and particulates that they can run a "dirtier" combustion, which results in more power. This is how we get factory trucks with 900ft-lbs of torque vs the pre-emissions trucks with 1/3 that amount. Also, NOx is a product of high combustion temps. Soot is caused by excess fuel, which cools combustion temps. So, if you see a sooty truck, it's probably producing less NOx than a clean burning truck with no emissions hardware. The problem is, more fuel burned means more hydrocarbons and particulates, and those have their own issues as well. That's why modern diesel aftertreatments are designed to reduce NOx, Hydrocarbons, and Particulates instead of just one of those things.

T.J. said:

In reply to WonkoTheSane :

You are the first person I heard of that is asking for it. You could always live in a big city and ride the bus and/or train instead of trying to save up for a Tesla.

... I'm not even the first person in this thread to have asked for it ...

In reply to Nick Comstock :

So, if a dump truck emits 100mg/sec of NOx (which is a low number based on this https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3274/0fa6dd3bf672550ccb39007f9b06ca55bc85.pdf) and assuming it is going 45 MPH, then that comes out to just under 5 g/km. The VW diesels were measured around 1 g/km. So, if VW is guilty of 1000 deaths that haven't happened yet, dump trucks kill 5 times as many people per vehicle than VWs. How many VW diesels were sold in the USA? How many dump trucks are out there?

The numbers just don't add up to say that VW caused anyone any harm. If this was really about phantom early deaths, then older diesel trucks would all be made illegal overnight or their manufactures sued out of existence.  I'm not pro pollution or pro-VW here, they cheated and got caught. I just think the punishment in no way fits the crime.

Besides what is an early death? If someone dies 1 second before they would've without VW's NOx does that count?

Why have BMW and Mercedes not been charged for doing the same thing as VW? The documentary essentially says they have the same programing to pass official emissions tests and then run dirtier when not being tested.

In reply to STM317 :

I think we are saying the same thing, you just managed to say it in a less inflaming way. I lived through the late 90's and didn't die from the emissions. It wasn't a time known for smog like the 70's were. People lose sight that the amount of pollution put out by these VWs was relatively small. That is all I am saying. They got the giant hammer when there are lots of other bigger polluters out there that are in no trouble at all. That is why I contend they got in trouble for making the government look bad and not for anything related to the environment or harm inflicted on anyone.

Anyway, this has nothing to do with self driving cars killing pedestrians and I've tried to make the same point about VW in other threads, so I'll leave this alone and let this thread return to its topic.

In reply to GameboyRMH :

Ok, so why not ban all the older diesel vehicles and get them all off the road? Why are the people they kill acceptable, but the additional VW deaths not ok? I'm finished mucking up the self driving car thread.

The whole argument that the VW diesels are less of an issue than an old dump truck is completely stupid and irrelevant.  First, there are a lot more VW's driving around than old dump trucks.  Second, dump trucks tend to drive short distances and are frequently moved to job sites on another vehicle.  Finally and most importantly, just because regulation were more lax in the past is not an excuses for not just non compliance, not just deliberate non compliance, but criminal intent to hide the non compliance.  If GM stopped using woven polyester (or whatever it is) for the seat belt webbing and replaced it a long thin six ply toilet paper would you accept that they were unfairly prosecuted as a 57 Chevy didn't' even have seatbelts.  It's not a logical argument.

T.J. said:

In reply to Nick Comstock :

So, if a dump truck emits 100mg/sec of NOx (which is a low number based on this https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3274/0fa6dd3bf672550ccb39007f9b06ca55bc85.pdf) and assuming it is going 45 MPH, then that comes out to just under 5 g/km. The VW diesels were measured around 1 g/km. So, if VW is guilty of 1000 deaths that haven't happened yet, dump trucks kill 5 times as many people per vehicle than VWs. How many VW diesels were sold in the USA? How many dump trucks are out there?

The numbers just don't add up to say that VW caused anyone any harm. If this was really about phantom early deaths, then older diesel trucks would all be made illegal overnight or their manufactures sued out of existence.  I'm not pro pollution or pro-VW here, they cheated and got caught. I just think the punishment in no way fits the crime.

I can agree with most of this. Yes VW did cause real harm - nothing can wish away the pollution they released from affecting people's health - and perhaps older diesel trucks should indeed all be made illegal overnight. But I don't think the fact that there are relatively mega-murdering old trucks being given a free pass excuses VW's blatant rulebreaking for the purpose of killing for profit.

Considering how much money they were making and the premeditation involved, I don't think the punishment was disproportionate. I just hope that the main person responsible, Martin Winterkorn, doesn't get to enjoy his years of astronomical paychecks and obligatory CEO's golden parachute. He told everyone at VW that the emissions goals must be met at a unrealistic price or they were fired, full stop. Very similar to how the Wells Fargo scandal started.

WonkoTheSane said:

T.J. said:

In reply to WonkoTheSane :

You are the first person I heard of that is asking for it. You could always live in a big city and ride the bus and/or train instead of trying to save up for a Tesla.

... I'm not even the first person in this thread to have asked for it ...

Nope.  Several people in this thread have already stated that they would welcome them, some for themselves in commutes and or long freeway drives and many more saying they are  looking forward to them for the elderly sick etc.  That is also the case for every conversation on here re-autonomous vehicles.  While a few always cry 'No, no, no'  Many come forward to say they are a good idea, even if only for others.

Laws were enacted to reverse the course on increased deaths due to environmental factors. Laws were also enacted to clean up larger trucks. They couldnt enact laws retroactively to get what was on the road already (legally). 

VW cheated around the laws meant to change that course and you think its not something that should be punished?

In making laws, what is practical must be looked at (while it would be great for the environment to ban all internal combustion, it aint gonna happen! it would cripple our society).

you have a pipe in your water supply. Its made of lead. It causes health problems for x% of your population. There would be a big difference between a 100 year old pipe scheduled for replacement and a new one that a company just installed where the company used lead because it was cheaper for them to rather than what was contracted and required by law. Vehicles on the road wear out and grandfather off the road (think large numbers, not single cars that might stick around, we are talking large trends).  

Yeah, its hard to pull out a specific individual victim, but it doesnt change the contribution.  Nor does it change flagrant violation of laws meant to improve a situation.  Unless you think we shouldnt bother to try to change the situation?

STM317 said: They're trying to develop a product that people aren't really asking for right now.

No offense, but seriously?  Many on here and just about every enthusiast web site/forum are constantly bemoaning (unfairly I feel) the younger generations for wanting autonomous cars and not being interested in cars as a passion or a hobby.  Many young (and older/old) people don't understand why we don't have autonomous cars already.  There is a huge untapped market waiting for them to become practical, available and affordable.  Even the suggestion for those who don't want to drive to move to a city and use public transport would only be moving to the first deployment of mass autonomous cars for Uber/Lyft, Amazon, busses, taxis, Fed-Ex etc.  Even if there wasn't a massive pent up demand for the technology many of the  biggest game changers in technology weren't things people were begging for (which they are here)  Remember Henry Ford 'If I"d asked people what they wanted they would have asked for a faster horse'  I don't' remember wishing for the internet or smart phones either.  Disruptive tech often drives the economy to bigger and better things, kind of what built this country!

I cannot WAIT for self driving cars to be a reality if they deliver on the promise of easing congestion, preventing accidents, increasing convenience (go park yourself somewhere, pick me up at work at 5pm and go pay for yourself the rest of the day) and most of all, removing all the loose nuts from behind the wheels who aren't actively engaged in driving and just do it because they have to, not because they want to, texting the whole way.

As an adjunct to this discussion: There are always unintended consequences to change, both good and bad. Personally if I had a self-driving car, I'd get out more. The trip from my house to Yosemite is about 2 1/4 hours of drudgery  and perhaps 45 minutes of interesting roads. If I could take a nap and/or read a book over that 2 1/2 hours, I'd visit a lot more. Los Angeles? Fun to visit, but Highway 5 is a 6 hour mind-numbing suck. If the least desirable aspects of driving were removed from the experience, traffic, fuel consumption and such might get significantly worse in some ways. 

A different perspective on the future.  How many people here are bemoaning the passing of horses as the main form of transport for people and goods in our communities?  100-110 years ago cars were welcomed as a game changer, especially in big cities where horse manure in the streets was a massive logistical and health issue.  Cars were suddenly the clean (yes really!) fast and convenient way to move around.  100 year later horses are by and large toys for the ‘wealthy’.  As the coming generations are born and grow we will eventually see a shift away from human directed cars.  Will it matter?  Will our lives be less fulfilling?  You rarely miss what you never had, and I’m sure even once human directed cars are banned on the streets, which I don’t see in the country until the next century at the earliest, I’m sure they will still exist.  Look at the number of country club race tracks with garages that are popping up.  They will only increase.  Driving ourselves will evolve, change location and change usage pattern, but it’ll exist for a long time.

You'll excuse me if I'm laughing myself silly here.  If a self-driving car runs over a pedestrian, that's okay, price of progress, yadda, yadda, yadda.  But let somebody cheat on a sniffer test and it's OMG people are gonna die in 50 years, VW is worse than Hitler, oh, the humanity. 

Thanks for the yuks, guys!