

Google blames a Human for its Robot Car Accident - canistr
http://allthingsd.com/20110805/google-blames-a-human-for-its-robot-car-accident/?mod=tweet

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joebadmo
Anyone else disturbed by the weirdly Luddite/anti-Google tone of this piece?
Is there some reason not to take Google's statement about the human driver at
face value? Is there really anything more to this story than: "A human quite
unremarkably crashed a car into another car, as happens millions of times a
year"?

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awaz
I am not disturbed. Why would a human driver be driving an automated car? What
is the security mechanisms that allow such cars to be in the streets? Isn't
there a need for independent monitoring for such experiments?

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ENOTTY
> Why would a human driver be driving an automated car?

Because Google cannot legally operate the car in the streets without a driver.
Therefore they put a driver there and it's on him to choose how to drive the
car.

> What is the security mechanisms that allow such cars to be in the streets?

The wonderful security mechanism of liability, lawsuits, and insurance.

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awaz
This is interesting. So Google can claim that 160K mile of automated driving
with the driver on-board and a single accident is blamed on the human.

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cma
How many times in that 160K miles were accidents prevented by vigilant human
override?

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ColinWright
Also submitted: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2850815>

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pavel_lishin
I love the random guesses in the comments, despite any actual facts in the
article. I literally don't know what caused the crash - did the human drive
have total control and bump someone?

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sliverstorm
It's like they are trying to say "look at what bad things can happen when
humans crash cars. Aren't you afraid of robots also crashing cars? Even though
Google's robots have never crashed cars, and thus already a better track
record than nearly every human?"

