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Because they're death machines

Uber pulls its driverless cars off the road after bicyclist mowed down in Arizona



Uber pulls its driverless cars off the road after bicyclist mowed down in Arizona OK, that's me talking, not Uber and certainly not the car manufacturers who are making the death machines. But what they're admitting with their actions is that they haven't figured out how to make them safe:
Uber Technologies Inc. halted autonomous vehicle tests after one of its cars struck and killed a woman in Tempe, Arizona, in what is likely the first pedestrian fatality involving the technology.
The 49-year-old woman, Elaine Herzberg, was crossing the road outside of a crosswalk when the Uber vehicle operating in autonomous mode under the supervision of a human safety driver struck her, according to the Tempe Police Department. After the incident, which happened at 10 p.m. local time on Sunday, she was transferred to a nearby hospital, where she died from her injuries. "Uber is assisting and this is still an active investigation," Liliana Duran, a Tempe police spokeswoman, said in an emailed statement. Uber said on Monday that it was pausing tests of all its self-driving vehicles on public roads in Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Toronto and the greater Phoenix area. “Our hearts go out to the victim’s family," a company spokeswoman said in a statement. "We are fully cooperating with local authorities in their investigation of this incident." Companies including Alphabet Inc., General Motors Co., Uber and Baidu Inc. are investing billions of dollars to develop autonomous-vehicle technology because it has the potential to transform the auto industry, transportation in general and the way cities work. One analyst has estimated Alphabet’s Waymo unit is worth at least $70 billion. The fatality in Tempe could slow testing, delay commercialization and undermine such optimism.
What it should do is end the whole idea entirely. It may very well be that no party was at fault, and that's the whole problem. If the car didn't have the ability to drive itself, then a human being would have been at the wheel with his feet on the pedals, giving the car at least a fighting chance to stop before hitting and killing the woman who was walking her bike.

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If it's the first death involving a pedestrian, it's only because there aren't that many driverless cars on the road yet. Let them proliferate as much as some people want, and you're going to see that number explode. Much speculation surrounding this accident has focused on the fact that the victim wasn't crossing at the crosswalk. Supposedly the driverless cars are programmed to recognize when they're approaching a crosswalk - which is supposed to add to the safety of pedestrians - but they have no notion of what to do if someone tries to cross the road outside the crosswalk. Yeah, that's jaywalking. Usually the penalty for that isn't death. The very fact that Uber felt the need to employ a "safety driver" tells you they're not 100 percent convinced of the safety of the driverless cars. Nor should they be. There's no way to do a realistic simulation that can show what will happen when the driverless cars operate in large numbers on roads built for driver, and in the midst of driver-controlled cars, bicyclists and pedestrians. One can only imagine the things that will go wrong, and then they'll send the cars back to the University of Michigan testing grounds to "find out what happened" while people are being buried. Here's a question: The need cars have to be driven by a human . . . why is that a problem that needs to be solved? Humans don't always drive that well, but at least they possess the senses that make them fully capable of operating a vehicle safely, even if they often don't. A human being can get rip-roaring drunk and get behind the wheel of a car - and I've long believed those convicted of DUI should do serious prison time on the first offense - but even serious drunk would have had a chance of stopping that car when Elaine Herzberg tried walking her bike across the street. The "autonomous car" has no concept of why it should stop, so it doesn't. Why do we need these cars? What possible benefit are we missing out on if we just keep making cars that people have to drive? This is insane.

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Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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