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

[Kim Holburn]

For the number of miles driven, self(?) driving cars are very safe.  Did we expect there never to be any accidents?  Not going to happen.

If self-driving cars or at least some particular type of them can be shown to have half the number of accidents that human drivers have, wouldn't that be an argument for the safety of self-driving cars?

The other point is that a "granny" is unlikely to learn to be a better driver, in fact the opposite is most likely, but self-driving cars are likely to get better over time.

Kim

> On 2018/May/08, 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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-- 
Kim Holburn
IT Network & Security Consultant
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