Uber's Uber-Idiocy
Did you hear of the deadly crash of the Uber self-driving car?
There is a lot of possible reasons why thhis could have happened. And it is still true that autonomous cars that are allowed to drive on the streets are safer then human-driven cars.
But of course that is only possible if you don't put in something really really stupid into the code.
Like Uber did.
I hope you have stable table, because you will need to for the heavy bang your head will make:
According to data obtained from the self-driving system, the system first registered radar and LIDAR observations of the pedestrian about 6 seconds before impact, when the vehicle was traveling at 43 mph.
As the vehicle and pedestrian paths converged, the self-driving system software classified the pedestrian as an unknown object, as a vehicle, and then as a bicycle with varying expectations of future travel path.
At 1.3 seconds before impact, the self-driving system determined that an emergency braking maneuver was needed to mitigate a collision (see figure 2).
2 According to Uber, emergency braking maneuvers are not enabled while the vehicle is under computer control, to reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior. The vehicle operator is relied on to intervene and take action. The system is not designed to alert the operator.
The pedestrian (who seems to have pushed his/her bike) also did everything wrong you could do, but for that very reason autonomous cars are expected to be safer - a human driving has very big problems seeing the pedestrian, the car's sensors not.
If you switch the mergency procedures off, of course...
let's say it was a pretty unfortunate miscalculation
No, let's say it was involuntary manslaughter I think is the english term.