Simply counting traffic fatalities suggests that crazy pedestrians causing unavoidable accidents cannot be common, even if every single pedestrian accident were both unavoidable and the pedestrians "fault" (although I'd argue that ethically it must be primarily the vehicles fault, but that's another story).
And that'ss with humans behind the wheel: lazy, distracted, slow to react fleshbags that we are.
I'm not sure that a truly unavoidable accident would occur even once a year in a fictional world in which all drivers were perfect and had millisecond reaction speeds.
What is obvious however, is that these situations are so rare as to be irrelevant. In practice accidents are avoidable by the driver of the vehicle - or at least avoidable to such an extent that it's not worth considering the other cases.
Also: although I personally don't object to some rational victim blaming I think it's a little distasteful that we're already speculating about how this must be the victims's fault, when there's simply not enough evidence to make that kind of determination yet. Let's not forget that part of the privilege of being allowed to participate in traffic implies a responsibility not to kill people even when they behave unexpectedly.
For some statistical perspective: if human drivers had as many fatal accidents per mile as uber has, then the average male driver would kill 1 person in his lifetime (men drive more). Clearly: that's absurd; people may cause too many accidents, but not nearly that many - and that's being rather charitable to uber's self-driving vehicles, since they have back-up drivers and thus don't count complicated traffic situations, and safety drivers, and thus may well have caused more accidents by themselves. So going purely by the unusual-ness of such an accident with so few miles, I'd say the initial assumption must be that this is likely a bug in uber's car, even if I'm sure there were contributing factors.
Edit: I guess it's not surprising wikipedia has stats on the influence of alcohol on fatalities, but it tops out at 4 times the legal limit - at which point human drivers are still safer than this (sample size of one...) uber record so far. :-/
> Simply counting traffic fatalities suggests that crazy pedestrians causing unavoidable accidents cannot be common
Of course not. I'm not saying they're common, merely that they exist. I do not agree with the idea that accidents would go away if drivers were just trying harder, though. There are legitimate unavoidable accidents, and there are also limits to practical human driving.
> Also: although I personally don't object to some rational victim blaming I think it's a little distasteful that we're already speculating about how this must be the victims's fault
To be really clear, I am not blaming the victim here. I have no idea what happened. I'm actually very inclined to blame Uber, though I recognize that's just my personal bias against them.
And that'ss with humans behind the wheel: lazy, distracted, slow to react fleshbags that we are.
I'm not sure that a truly unavoidable accident would occur even once a year in a fictional world in which all drivers were perfect and had millisecond reaction speeds.
What is obvious however, is that these situations are so rare as to be irrelevant. In practice accidents are avoidable by the driver of the vehicle - or at least avoidable to such an extent that it's not worth considering the other cases.
Also: although I personally don't object to some rational victim blaming I think it's a little distasteful that we're already speculating about how this must be the victims's fault, when there's simply not enough evidence to make that kind of determination yet. Let's not forget that part of the privilege of being allowed to participate in traffic implies a responsibility not to kill people even when they behave unexpectedly.
For some statistical perspective: if human drivers had as many fatal accidents per mile as uber has, then the average male driver would kill 1 person in his lifetime (men drive more). Clearly: that's absurd; people may cause too many accidents, but not nearly that many - and that's being rather charitable to uber's self-driving vehicles, since they have back-up drivers and thus don't count complicated traffic situations, and safety drivers, and thus may well have caused more accidents by themselves. So going purely by the unusual-ness of such an accident with so few miles, I'd say the initial assumption must be that this is likely a bug in uber's car, even if I'm sure there were contributing factors.
Edit: I guess it's not surprising wikipedia has stats on the influence of alcohol on fatalities, but it tops out at 4 times the legal limit - at which point human drivers are still safer than this (sample size of one...) uber record so far. :-/