[LINK] Elaine Herzberg was an Anomaly, just an Artefact

[Nicholas English]

The difference is Jim that ‘granny’ wasn’t issued with a manufactures warranty or covered by the Consumer law that says a product must be fit for purpose.
The operator had no registered address for receiving a summons ...

Nicholas English
nik.english at gmail.com <mailto:nik.english at gmail.com>



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 aPhone (tada!!)



> On 8 May 2018, at 4:18 pm, Jim Birch <planetjim at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Yes, but this is what I don't get: don't software bugs in humans drivers'
> brains kill all the time?  My cousin and his wife were recently hit by a
> human-controlled vehicle*.  They were crossing in a crossing at a
> designated crossing legally with the "green man" and were hit by a turning
> vehicle.   The driver, a granny picking a kid from school and driving into
> the sun, treated them as artifacts or was suffering sensor failure.  All
> software contains bugs.  Software that is going to make judgement call on
> an array of complex data is absolutely going to get it wrong at times, just
> like people do.  There's no absolute fix for this.  The question for me is
> not whether AI cars are perfect.  There will be failures and we can
> reasonably demand that a cause will be identifiable.  My question is
> this: Would my cousin and wife be better off if the granny was driving or
> an AI system?
> 
> Jim
> 
> * Both survived, a broken bone and some soft tissue damage.  Near full
> recovery expected over time.
> 
> 
> 
> On 8 May 2018 at 09:41, Roger Clarke <Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au> wrote:
> 
>> Report: Software bug led to death in Uber's self-driving crash
>> Sensors detected Elaine Herzberg, but software reportedly decided to
>> ignore her.
>> TIMOTHY B. LEE
>> Ars Technica
>> MAY 7, 2018 10:12 PM UTC
>> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/05/report-
>> software-bug-led-to-death-in-ubers-self-driving-crash/
>> 
>> The fatal crash that killed pedestrian Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona,
>> in March occurred because of a software bug in Uber's self-driving car
>> technology, The Information's Amir Efrati reported on Monday. According to
>> two anonymous sources who talked to Efrati, Uber's sensors did, in fact,
>> detect Herzberg as she crossed the street with her bicycle. Unfortunately,
>> the software classified her as a "false positive" and decided it didn't
>> need to stop for her.
>> 
>> ...  [nice article] ...
>> 
>> 
>> [In the postmodern world, a new survival trait has emerged:
>> 
>> [Don't exhibit patterns that stand out from the crowd and are hard for
>> AI/ML to classify, because the patterns will either mark you for attention,
>> e.g. by law enforcement and national security agencies, or will be treated
>> as an artefact and ignored.  Both kinds of positives are survival threats.
>> 
>> [Elaine Herzberg's unclassifiability was presumably a walking human form
>> merged with a bike-profile, and the treatment by the software melange was
>> 'unclassifiable, hence treat as an artefact of the image collection
>> system'; so she wasn't detected as a pedestrian in the vehicle carriageway.
>> 
>> 
>> --
>> Roger Clarke                                 http://www.rogerclarke.com/
>> 
>> Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd      78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
>> Tel: +61 2 6288 6916                        http://about.me/roger.clarke
>> mailto:Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au                http://www.xamax.com.au/
>> 
>> Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Law            University of N.S.W.
>> Visiting Professor in Computer Science    Australian National University
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