Amazon's self-driving taxi Zoox under investigation by US after rear-end crashes
apnews.com"after two of its vehicles braked suddenly and were rear-ended by motorcyclists."
While sudden braking definitely contributes to it and is dangerous, this is mostly the fault of the drivers crashing into the self-driving vehicles even if they stopped without a good reason. And those vehicles are rather obvious, i.e. the driver following could have known that tailgating them at an unsafe distance is an even worse idea than with human drivers.
You can't just stop suddenly out of nowhere for no reason without signaling. In traffic it is obvious that people will be starting and stopping so there the fault is the person in the back, but on a country road with no traffic the fault is not so clear.
To your second point, nothing on those vehicles says "warning, no human in control" so I'm not sure how obvious it really is.
> You can't just stop suddenly out of nowhere for no reason without signaling.
You absolutely can; it's what you're supposed to do if a toddler runs out in front of the car, for example. Barring malfunctioning brake lights, if you rear end a suddenly stopping vehicle, you were at fault for following at an unsafe distance.
Most legislation about this (example: https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/vehicle-code/veh-sect-22109/) says stuff like "when there is opportunity to give the signal". Screech brakes, then signal.
In my jurisdiction, brake checking is illegal.
But it's pretty hard to enforce just for the reasons you mentioned. "I saw something on the road" is a fairly bullet proof defence which nobody can counter.
> for no reason
Kid in the street is a reason to stop suddenly
If you’re too close to a car stopping for no reason, you’re also too close to a car stopping for a good one. The physics are the same.
You are supposed to be far enough behind the vehicle in front of you that you have enough time to stop. Assuming something about what other vehicles will do is a great way to get into an accidents. There are a lot of humans that don't drive like humans.
A human tailgating doesn’t invalidate the fact that this was a bug that caused human harm. Both things can be true.
I always wondered how different our auto/road system would be if the NHTSA investigated each and every human driver crash as thoroughly and visibly as they seem to be interested in autonomous driving crashes--and instituted corrective regulatory action on human driving as heavy as we're likely going to see on autonomous driving. Apparently ~2M human crashes/yr in the USA is just a fact of life, but a handful of autonomous crashes/yr warrants investigation?
> ~2M human crashes/yr in the USA is just a fact of life, but a handful of autonomous crashes/yr warrants investigation?
Investigating is fine. You can’t patch every driver in America when you find an edge case; this is a good use of public resources.
What we should guard against is overreacting in response to these incidents. America by and large seems to be responding to this reasonably.
NHTSA absolutely does put tons of effort into collecting data and analyzing failures at scale.
Using this as an example of a huge alignment and priorities issue in "AI"...
Consider a kind of automobile crash for which driver of vehicle A is generally considered not-at-fault. For the sake of this discussion, let's say, a driver who gets rear-ended is generally considered not-at-fault (though I'm not sure that's the case -- just a simple example).
However, if you have an interest in the safety of occupants of vehicle A, who's at-fault isn't your top priority.
And there's never any occasion on which you do the math to say how you'd prefer your loved ones be possibly crippled or killed based on who would be considered at-fault.
OK, now suppose that you're an autonomous driving product developer. The decisions of driving behavior are different, and maybe your top priorities are to avoid bad PR and big payouts. So you'd have big incentive to take the at-fault PR and payout priorities into account when you're developing your autonomous driving sytem.
For example, your vehicle moving forward to strike something is probably very bad, for PR and payouts. But stopping abruptly, likely causing a vehicle behind to strike you, doesn't get as much of your attention, and/or doesn't weigh as strongly in your balancing.
Especially if the vehicle behind you is much smaller, like a motorcycle, so maybe your occupants don't even get whiplash, and the crushed motorcyclist would be considered at-fault (and generally motorcyclists don't get much public sympathy).
(The first examples I heard for autonomous driving were things like "There's an oncoming vehicle or obstruction, so do you choose to crash into it, probably killing/crippling the occupant of the vehicle you're driving, or to swerve into that pedestrian on the sidewalk, probably killing them. The PR calculus is different there, since consumers might secretly favor a system that prioritizes the safety of the buyer while increasing threats to others, without saying it out loud (see SUVs). But at the end of the day, the answer of how the autonmous vehicle drives, and who loses in driver decisions, might come down to the developer's very typical corporate priorities.)
This feels like the "self-driving car engineers are taking the trolley problem into account" fallacy. There is absolutely no code in these things taking into account the laws of at-fault traffic accidents in their locale. The basic problem of "1. get where you're trying to go, and 2. don't crash into things" is already hard enough. There is no "dive onto the sidewalk to avoid an out of control bus" algorithm, nor is there a system to count the people on the bus and the sidewalk and compare them, nor is there a physics sim examining potential future spinal integrity.
You know what the car does if there's a motorcycle in front of it? It brakes. You know what it does if there's a weird bus coming across lanes towards it? It brakes. Driving normally is a hard enough problem. Nobody's designing these things to handle movie car chases.
It’s a fine philosophical point, but far from practicality when we’re still trying to keep these cars from accidentally running into things.
The trolley problem was never an argument against mass transit.
> if the vehicle behind you is much smaller, like a motorcycle, so maybe your occupants don't even get whiplash, and the crushed motorcyclist would be considered at-fault
You’re describing tailgating. This isn’t even a trolley problem.
Jamming on the brakes for no reason is bad driving. Jamming on the brakes because something is in front of you is…that’s why we have brakes.
> since consumers might secretly favor a system that prioritizes the safety of the buyer
Secretly? I am happy to go on record: I would not get into a car that would ever consider anyone's life more important than mine. I would not let anyone in my family do so either.
> Secretly? I am happy to go on record: I would not get into a car that would ever consider anyone's life more important than mine. I would not let anyone in my family do so either.
Consumers in general.
Of course HN will even have people openly say things approaching:
"In my value calculus, it is only rational to swerve the vehicle to plow through a sidewalk full of photogenic preschoolers on a field trip, to maximize my chance of survival, and increase the likelihood of my genetic material propagating and out-competing that of others. Nature has always selected for behavior such as this, and it is only right. It repels me that others do not think this way, or are too weak to admit it, because they are inferior in intellect and strength of will! Hence why I and my spawn shall be the rightful leaders over them!"
Vigorous gestures and armbands are optional.
My gut feel is that most people either don't think like that, or -- to the extent they do think a little like that -- they're selective about where and how they voice it.