Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Reclining seat death

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Posted by Alan Plester (Member # 852) on 03-22-2018, 03:34 AM:

Has anyone read/heard about the tragic consequence to the 24yr old who lost his life whilst trying to remove his mobile from under a recliner in a VUE cinema in England? Of course there is now boatloads of comments that these chairs have no place in cinemas,& should all be removed,
Has anyone had an experience with one of these chairs before, & just how long have they been in theaters, without a problem.

Posted by Sam Graham (Member # 2889) on 03-22-2018, 08:19 AM:

Here's the story for reference...

Tributes paid to young dad who died after getting head trapped in cinema seat

Ateeq Rafiq suffered a cardiac arrest after an electronic footrest at the Vue Cinema in Star City, Birmingham, clamped down on his head on March 9.

The dad-of-one had been trying to retrieve his phone from under his VIP Gold Class seat when the accident happened. His distraught wife tried to help him along with staff at the cinema but he died a week later on March 16 at Heartland Hospital, despite paramedics managing to restart his heart following the accident.

A security guard who rushed to help Mr Rafiq said he was panicking and lost consciousness after a few minutes. ‘His poor wife was screaming his name as we tried to pull him back out. It was really horrible to witness,’ he said. A close friend of Mr Rafiq, who wanted to remain anonymous, paid tribute to him, adding: ‘Ateeq was only 24 years old. He was so young and had his whole life ahead of him. ‘His family have lost a son, a father, a brother and a husband. He left behind a lovely daughter who is only two years old.’ ‘He was a lovely, humble, down to earth guy who was always smiling. ‘He literally had everything to live for. ‘We are all devastated to have lost him so early and are in shock. We cannot believe it.’

Mr Rafiq’s sister-in-law Fatima Arzo said her family was struggling to cope with his untimely death. ‘We are grieving and completely in shock. My sister is in pieces,’ she said. ‘We are grateful to everyone who tried to help him, and at the moment we are praying and trying to come to terms with the fact we lost a loved one.’

A spokesman for Vue cinema confirmed Mr Rafiq’s death in a statement yesterday. ‘Following an incident which took place on Friday 9 March at our Birmingham cinema, we can confirm that a customer was taken to hospital that evening,’ he said. ‘We are saddened to learn that he passed away on Friday 16 March. ‘A full investigation into the nature of the incident is ongoing. ‘Our thoughts and condolences are with the family who have our full support and assistance.’

Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 03-22-2018, 11:40 AM:

I have to agree that powered recliners are a glactically stupid idea in a dark theater, in close quarters with lots of people moving around.

There would need to be so many safety devices, failsafes, limit switches and force detectors on such a chair that it would be prohibitively expensive to put such a thing in a movie theater.

I wonder whether there was some kind of remote switch or automation cue that causes the seats to reset at the end of the movie?

IMO, this is going to spawn one of those proverbial, "we will own your house" kinds of lawsuits.

If it doesn't... I think it should! [Wink]

Posted by Dennis Benjamin (Member # 1137) on 03-22-2018, 01:15 PM:

I am guessing these were powered recliners that go back to the upright position on thier own and/or by a central switch. If someone pushed a button to return it to the upright position, I am guessing they will be charged with involuntary manslaughter.

Posted by Harold Hallikainen (Member # 5405) on 03-22-2018, 01:56 PM:

Is a "return to unreclined" master switch common? If so, it seems like it should be in tbe auditorium so it can stopped if there is a problem.

Posted by Mitchell Dvoskin (Member # 751) on 03-22-2018, 02:54 PM:

I suspect that there is no "master switch", but rather a sensor in the seat that returns the seat to upright position when it senses that nobody is sitting in it.

Posted by Monte L Fullmer (Member # 2797) on 03-22-2018, 05:02 PM:

Might be a different story, but still follows the topic when you get motorized technology involved with human existence:

Heard that a self driven UBER vehicle with patrons in the cabin ran over a pedestrian, whom died later in the hospital.

UBER immediately discontinued this practice of self driven vehicles.

Monte

Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 03-22-2018, 05:41 PM:

One interesting fact that seems to get lost in that story is that to this point self-driving cars have apparently driven more miles without any fatalities than regular cars manage to do.

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 03-22-2018, 06:06 PM:

What's the proper naming convention for recliners? Deaths per flip? Or deaths per reclined inch?

And does anybody keep statistics of those regarding autonomous manually ("elbow grease") controlled recliners, fully automatic autonomous electric recliners, semi-automatic electric recliners and hive-minded electric recliners?

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 03-22-2018, 06:08 PM:

Yes, the pedestrian that was killed by the self-driving car stepped out in front of it, outside of a crosswalk, so it's completely possible the exact same thing would have happened if a person had been driving the car.

On the reclining seats....there is at least one company that offers a "return all seats to upright" control, and also a "recline all seats" control (to allow for sweeping underneath them) but I can't imagine said seats wouldn't have some kind of a device to shut down the motor in the event of a blockage.

Then again, I suppose the seats aren't designed with the notion that patrons will stick their heads underneath the footrests either.

Looks like the reclining seats just got a little more spendy.

Posted by Martin McCaffery (Member # 37) on 03-22-2018, 06:23 PM:

quote: Frank Cox
One interesting fact that seems to get lost in that story is that to this point self-driving cars have apparently driven more miles without any fatalities than regular cars manage to do.

I guess it depends on your source.
Blogger

quote:

There are 12.5 deaths per billion vehicle miles driven (1). This is the statistic that self-driving cars have to beat in order to be "safer."

Based on this(2), Uber has had about 3 million test miles (under mostly safer than average road conditions, but I'll leave that aside). They're now at 333 deaths per billion miles driven. Gonna have to go a few more days without a death before they're "safer." (This is not all robot cars, of course, but not all robot cars are meaningfully the same right now).

1) Wiki Source
2)Behind a paywall at Forbes.com

Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 03-22-2018, 07:00 PM:

Uber isn't the only outfit that makes/tests/drives autonomous cars, though. And none of the other makers (18 more other than Uber, apparently) have had any known fatalities either.

A fairer statistic would be to add up all of the miles driven by all of the makers and not just Uber alone. Plus one is a really hard number to use for this kind of thing -- had it happened during the very first mile driven their fatality rate would be 100%!

Posted by Martin McCaffery (Member # 37) on 03-22-2018, 07:59 PM:

I'm not going to make any claim of knowing anything about this, but I doubt all of the robocars in the world have approached 1 billion miles yet. And given most of those miles are probably on test track conditions, even if they could get anywhere close to 12.5/billion the stats would still be unfairly skewed in their favor.

Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 03-22-2018, 08:09 PM:

I am a big fan of computers, artificial intelligence and all that stuff. It's one of those things that really makes the circuits in my brain "light up" so to speak. [Smile]

However, the one place where I draw the line in the sand is that there MUST be a way for a human to take control and bring said machine(s) to a safe stop at any time it is necessary.

In the case of the "Chair of Death," there should have been a safety sensor or an emergency stop button to stop the mechanism when a person gets in the way of any moving parts.

Powered windows in cars have force sensors which stop and reverse the mechanism in case a person's head or arm gets in the way.

Why didn't that chair have such a thing?

Yes, I agree that the person who okayed the installation of those chairs without making sure that such safety mechanisms were in place and working should be charged with negligent manslaughter.

As I said above, this should be one of those "own your house" kind of accidents.

There are no excuses for this kind of crap! [Frown]

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 03-22-2018, 09:50 PM:

Agreed totally with Randy. That's why I don't like automatic transmissions and would always drive manual unless I had absolutely no practical choice in the matter. If you lose control of the engine for any reason, you always have the option of depressing the clutch and putting the transmission into neutral.

Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 03-22-2018, 11:00 PM:

I’ve never owned a car with an automatic transmission, either, just for the same reasons.

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 03-23-2018, 02:47 AM:

quote: Leo Enticknap
Agreed totally with Randy. That's why I don't like automatic transmissions and would always drive manual unless I had absolutely no practical choice in the matter. If you lose control of the engine for any reason, you always have the option of depressing the clutch and putting the transmission into neutral.

Why wouldn't you be able to put your automatic transmission into Neutral when you lose control over the engine?

Both the Toyota and Mercedes I currently drive do have AT, they both allow me to put the transmission into N while the vehicle is moving, the only thing that's blocked is the option to put it into "Park" or "Reverse". I'm not sure how that's determined, but I guess it will block above a certain speed/RPM combination, to avoid potential damage to the transmission.

Posted by Todd Cornwall (Member # 2205) on 03-23-2018, 09:44 AM:

Really? Now we're afraid of automatic transmissions? Cmon guys, this world is getting absolutely crazy. You're all running scared.

Posted by Mark J. Marshall (Member # 1409) on 03-23-2018, 12:28 PM:

quote: Marcel Birgelen
Why wouldn't you be able to put your automatic transmission into Neutral when you lose control over the engine?

My wife's Alero allowed that too. Good thing. While driving down a multi-lane interstate at about 65 MPH the engine shut off. I was able to put it in Neutral, start the engine and put it back in drive without stopping.

We got rid of that car not long after that.

I agree the seats should have sensors that stop the motors. It seems silly that they don't. But maybe they malfunctioned...?

Posted by Jim Cassedy (Member # 4115) on 03-23-2018, 01:28 PM:

Look, this was an unfortunate tragedy. The guy had a wife & kids, etc.
But in the original article I read, it made clear that the seat didn't kill
him, he died later of a heart attack. So the death certificate is most
likely going to list cause of death as " myocardial infarction", and not
"head caught in theater seat", which generates a lot more online clicks.

Yes, I know he wound up in the ER because of the seat incident, but
that's not what killed him. We don't know his medical history. He may
have already had a bad ticker. This is exactly what happened to a guy
I worked with about 10years ago. There was a minor kitchen fire in his
apartment one night. The building was evacuated, but nobody, was
injured, and damage was confined to his kitchen.

But 12hrs later, he was dead. The stress of the incident caused him
to have a heart attack afterwards. He ate mostly a 'junk food' diet,
was a heavy smoker, and was noticeably overweight, all of which I'm
sure contributed to his demise. But- - it wasn't the fire that killed him.

And so, the way I see it, the hi-tech theater seat is innocent until
proven guilty.

That being said, it does seem odd that the seats didn't have some
sort of safety sensors or "emergency stop" function.

At one of the private screening rooms I work at, it's common practice
on days where there are two consecutive screenings, to have someone
go around and return all the seat arms to the "up" position. This takes
several minutes since there are about 150 seats.

Once, when a guy was in repairing the upholstery on one of the seats,
I asked why they didn't make some sort of simple spring-loaded solenoid
device which would automatically put all the seat arms up at the push of
a button. He replied something to the effect that his company had
considered this, but then decided that there were too many "liability issues"

Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 03-23-2018, 01:47 PM:

A short time ago, the fuel line on my VW Beetle froze up on a sub-zero winter morning. It would run for about 30 seconds and rumble to a stop.

Yeah, I was stupid for letting my tank get below half-full in the winter...water condensation, ya' know!

All it takes is a bottle of dry gas to clear it right up but I was only about a mile from home.

I was able to start the engine, drop the clutch, quickly accelerate to about 30 mph before it stalled, step on the clutch, let it coast, restart the engine and repeat the process five or six times until I could get the car home.

It was too cold to get out and push. Besides, I was driving alone. It would have been a PITA to push and steer at the same time! I couldn't leave the car on the side of the road on a busy street for more than a short time.

If I couldn't limp home like that, I probably would have had to call a tow truck.

Imagine if I was heading down a steep, mountain road and I lost my brakes? With a manual, there is a chance that I could put it into low gear and use engine breaking to stop the car before it goes over a cliff.

Yeah, it will blow up the engine and grind the gears into metal shavings but, at least, I would be alive.

If you want to talk about minutia, yes, we can argue back and forth all day but the real point is that, in ANY automated system, there ***MUST***MUST***MUST*** be a way for a human to take over and shut the system down in case of emergency.

Convenience? Efficiency? Ease of use? I'm all for it!
Machines can do many things better-faster-cheaper than humans! 100% in agreement!

All of this does NOT obviate the need for there to be an "Off Switch!"

How many science fiction stories, novels and movies and TV shows have been preaching this very thing since as far back as we can remember?

The idiots who designed the chairs in that theater forgot obey the warnings. Look what happened!

This is where I have the beef, not with self-driving cars and manual transmissions.

It's the fact that there MUST be an "Off Switch!"

HUMANS MUST RULE THE MACHINES! NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND!

Posted by Martin McCaffery (Member # 37) on 03-23-2018, 02:39 PM:

^^^
They're coming for you first [Wink]

Posted by Mitchell Dvoskin (Member # 751) on 03-23-2018, 03:03 PM:

quote: Frank Cox
And none of the other makers (18 more other than Uber, apparently) have had any known fatalities either.

What about the Tesla that while in self driving mode, thought a tractor trailer crossing an intersection was an overhead sign, and unsuccessfully tried to drive under it, killing the occupants.

My concern with self driving cars is how do they react is less than ideal driving conditions. A human driver has the potential swerve out of the way of an unexpected obstacle, or know to be careful in icy conditions, and avoid pot holes.

Further, it is still unclear who is libel for damages in an accident. The car's: Occupants? Owner? Manufacturer? Software Programmers? Nobody? Until this is clarified, these vehicles should not be on public roads.

Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 03-23-2018, 03:27 PM:

In the case of the crossing truck, the computer in the car might have displayed some kind of message and given the occupant the chance to confirm the decision, take over driving manually or to stop the car all together but, in the case where quick decisions need to be made, that would not be practical. Would it?

If it was my call, in the case of an accident, it would be the person who okayed the use of the faulted technology unless it can be proven that he could not have predicted the failure. Then it would fall down the pyramid to the next responsible individual. Maybe the engineer who designed it, maybe the programmer who wrote the software... and then, on down the line.

The way it works, today, is "bottom-up" instead of the "top-down" approach that I suggest.

Top-down would make those in charge hold EVERYBODY's feet to the fire because the boss is the one who will feel the pain if one of the underlings screws up.

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 03-23-2018, 05:28 PM:

quote: Randy Stankey
If you want to talk about minutia, yes, we can argue back and forth all day but the real point is that, in ANY automated system, there ***MUST***MUST***MUST*** be a way for a human to take over and shut the system down in case of emergency.

Ok, but that doesn't really answer the question why you would only trust manual transmission cars, because as I indicated, most automatic transmissions do have an "off switch" by simply putting them into neutral.

I'm also convinced that automatic transmission did eventually save lives. Automatic Transmission allows the driver to put his/her full attention to the road and keep both hands firmly on the steering wheel for example. It will be hard to get any objective numbers on that one though.

quote: Randy Stankey
If it was my call, in the case of an accident, it would be the person who okayed the use of the faulted technology unless it can be proven that he could not have predicted the failure. Then it would fall down the pyramid to the next responsible individual. Maybe the engineer who designed it, maybe the programmer who wrote the software... and then, on down the line.

I'm a little bit more with Musk on this, although he will not publicly admit it.

You can't make an omelet without breaking at least one egg. Obviously, you should not unleash potential killer software on humanity, but you can't create perfectly safe "self driving cars" in a lab environment. There are so many permutations out there, you can't possibly recreate them all inside a lab.

So, in order to get us along in the process of real, autonomous self driving vehicles, we have to take some risk. Obviously, the risk needs to be calculated. Still, in the great scheme of things, we know, sometimes stuff will blow up in our face.

Yet, in the end, a world full with self-driving cars will be a better world than today. I'm 30000% convinced in this world, there will be far less people dying from traffic accidents.

So, either we accept a few rough patches to get to this better world scenario or we will simply never get there at all.

Having written essential software for industrial, entertainment and theme park applications myself, I know what kind of responsibility you take onto yourself once you start writing this kind of software. Still, to make any real progress in this field, it should be the big companies above the engineering department who take the primary impact and try to absorb it as much as possible. Why? Because letting a car drive by itself is not just an ordinary piece of software, it's a highly complicated endeavor and we can use all the smart minds we can get on this. So, we should not scare them away with potential live-changing litigation for any single mistake, before they even started.

So, the big (car/automotive) companies investing in this technology should take the blame for anything that goes wrong and they should try to protect their employees from harmful litigation.

As for the reclining seat incident: The problem is that we don't know anything about what happened. For all we know, he triggered the seat himself by accident.

I've got a bunch recliners with a Ciar linear actuator inside of them. Most of those "professional" cinema recliners seem to use actuators from the same Italian manufacturer. They don't have any real fail-safe, the only thing that stops them is either a force bigger than they can handle or the lack of an input signal. Besides the switches themselves and the start- and end-switches, those recliners come with very few safety features.

Posted by Martin Brooks (Member # 1269) on 03-24-2018, 12:40 AM:

That self-driving UBER car did have a driver in it. How much attention he/she was paying is undetermined.

Just about any mechanical device can hurt someone if not used properly. Having said that, I have found at a Dolby theater that I attend that when I sit in the first row of a section that has a barrier in front, it is possible to get one's foot stuck between the seat and the barrier. Lowering the seat solves the problem.

Posted by Mike Croaro (Member # 3123) on 03-24-2018, 10:43 AM:

I don't like the idea of self driving cars.

Does anybody remember the short film "The Veldt" from the 1970's? Jason Bateman was in it. It was shown mostly in middle schools. It was a Ray Bradbury story about mankind living in the future with "automatic everything".

I think the world needs to view it again.

Mike

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 03-24-2018, 11:32 AM:

quote: Marcel Birgelen
Why wouldn't you be able to put your automatic transmission into Neutral when you lose control over the engine?

In a vehicle with a mode selector that is not a physical lever operating switches and relays, this is at least theoretically possible. Visiting relatives in England a couple of years ago, Hertz gave me an "upgrade" to a high end Merc at Heathrow (translation: they foisted it on me because its fuel economy is so sh!tty that no-one else would take it), in which the transmission mode (P/R/N/D) was selected from a touchscreen on the dash. So if a software bug decided that it didn't want to let me shift from D to N, and then the handbrake cable snapped and all the hydraulic fluid leaked out of the master cylinder, the result could have been quite an impressive bang-ding-ow.

The was a lovely piece of polished mahogany on the center console where you would normally find the gear lever, but I'd have preferred the gear lever.

As for dystopian sci-fi about automation, the one I keep wondering if there'll be a movie adaptation of before long is E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops. It was a set book for English literature when I was in high school in the 1980s, when the information and communication technologies it anticipated were only just visible on the horizon.

The main problem with turning it into a movie would be that either you'd have to preserve the 1909 anachronisms and make it a Merchant Ivory-style costume drama, or strip them and update the setting, in which it becomes unremarkable.

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 03-24-2018, 12:20 PM:

The thing I don't understand about self-driving cars is, why are they trying to design them without a steering wheel? There's bound to be situations where you would NEED to maneuver the car manually...maybe on a road with a weird blockage like a fallen tree branch, or a huge pothole, etc.

Also what about snow-covered roads, gravel roads, roads without stripes, blind corners, and so on? I agree the self-drivers are the future, but taking out all the controls seems kind of stupid.

I'm sure in about 40 years, people will have say to each other, "Can you believe they used to have to DRIVE these cars around manually? How did they get any work done on the way to the office?"

Posted by James Westbrook (Member # 3690) on 03-24-2018, 01:45 PM:

Summation:
Autonomous device gets announced, tested and released to public.
Autonomous device kills somebody.
Outrage ensues. Fingers pointed in all the directions.
Humans co-existing with machines, history of. 101.

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 03-24-2018, 03:14 PM:

quote: Leo Enticknap
In a vehicle with a mode selector that is not a physical lever operating switches and relays, this is at least theoretically possible. Visiting relatives in England a couple of years ago, Hertz gave me an "upgrade" to a high end Merc at Heathrow (translation: they foisted it on me because its fuel economy is so sh!tty that no-one else would take it), in which the transmission mode (P/R/N/D) was selected from a touchscreen on the dash.

I've never seen a Merc with only a touch-screen drive mode selector, not denying it doesn't exist but it sounds rather awkward. The newer Mercs with AT do have mode selector on a stick behind the steering wheel, the stick in the center console has been gone for a few years now.

quote: Leo Enticknap
So if a software bug decided that it didn't want to let me shift from D to N, and then the handbrake cable snapped and all the hydraulic fluid leaked out of the master cylinder, the result could have been quite an impressive bang-ding-ow.

This sounds more like a bad scene from Final Destination 29, than a movie adaptation of "The Machine Stops". [Wink]

Yes, if multiple things fail all at the same time, things are looking a bit gloomy for you. Stuff should be designed that, as long as it is properly maintained, it should simply not happen...

Then again, I was somewhat in disbelief when, after a colleague had the windshield of his BMW replaced with a wrong model, the on-board computer would freak out at random intervals and block random functions. At one time, we couldn't get out of the car the normal way, because the doors refused to open, the only way to leave the car was via the windows... This got me scared a little, because the last thing you expect to block in a car is the functionality to open the doors from the inside...

quote: Mike Blakesley
The thing I don't understand about self-driving cars is, why are they trying to design them without a steering wheel? There's bound to be situations where you would NEED to maneuver the car manually...maybe on a road with a weird blockage like a fallen tree branch, or a huge pothole, etc.

From what I know, only Waymo is currently considering removing the classical steering wheel. It doesn't mean it will not return another means of manual steering, like a joystick for example.

Removing manual steering entirely, would require cars so smart, they can handle all unforseen circumstances themselves. This should include stuff choosing a correct parking spot at your destination, which is a pretty hard task to achieve.

quote: Mike Blakesley
Also what about snow-covered roads, gravel roads, roads without stripes, blind corners, and so on? I agree the self-drivers are the future, but taking out all the controls seems kind of stupid.

In theory, a self-driving car could even perform better on those condition than a human. Many of the current prototypes have much ore inputs than any normal human has and could process. One of those is lidar, which is laser based 3D mapping of the environment. The car could be better equipped in mapping what surfaces are drive-able than a human driver.

Also, we could optimize our roads for self-driving vehicles by putting stuff like RFID beacons into the road itself. That way, the car could determine exactly where the road is, even if it is covered in feets of snow.

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 03-25-2018, 12:18 AM:

quote: Marcel Birgelen
From what I know, only Waymo is currently considering removing the classical steering wheel.

I could be wrong but I seem to remember an article about the Google car that had no wheel but who knows.

As for the amazing ice and snow stuff, I'll believe it when I see it working. There are so many more variables to figure out when driving in the winter. The vision part is the easy part. What snow does to the roads and the vehicle is the tricky part.

I'm not saying all those problems and others won't be tackled and taken care of, but the fact is that most of the tests so far have taken place in large cities with good street markings in nice (maybe rainy) weather. Bring the Googlemobile to Forsyth, Montana and lets see how it does. It just seems that Ma Nature, crafty old broad that she is, every time you think you have her tamed, she throws another icicle at you.

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 03-25-2018, 03:11 AM:

quote: Mike Blakesley
I could be wrong but I seem to remember an article about the Google car that had no wheel but who knows.

Waymo is the current brand the Google Car stuff was moved to under the "Alphabet" holding, so we're talking about the same cars. [Wink]

quote: Mike Blakesley
As for the amazing ice and snow stuff, I'll believe it when I see it working. There are so many more variables to figure out when driving in the winter. The vision part is the easy part. What snow does to the roads and the vehicle is the tricky part.

Well, think about it. Even now we have cars that help people to stay on the road in bad weather conditions. Stuff like ABS, ESC/ESP has saved many lives over the years and it is generally improving.

A computer can evaluate hundreds of thousands of inputs a second and take split-second actions on any of these. That's beyond anything a human can do.

quote: Mike Blakesley
I'm not saying all those problems and others won't be tackled and taken care of, but the fact is that most of the tests so far have taken place in large cities with good street markings in nice (maybe rainy) weather. Bring the Googlemobile to Forsyth, Montana and lets see how it does. It just seems that Ma Nature, crafty old broad that she is, every time you think you have her tamed, she throws another icicle at you.

Waymo claims to have tested their cars in the most adverse weather conditions. Now, I don't know if that includes totally snowed over roads, but they have driven a hell of a lot of miles already.

Still, the biggest challenge doesn't even seem to be Mother Nature, but a factor that's far more incalculable and that's the other humans that share the road with those self-driving vehicles.

Where humans often use intuition to avoid potential trouble, machines have no such thing.

Consider a multi-lane freeway. To effectively drive on such a road, sharing a lot of traffic with you, you depend a lot on others sticking mostly to the rules. For example, you expect people to stay in their lane, if there's no reason to change.

Now, we humans often can see if another driver is going to change the lane and we can anticipate on it by e.g. adjusting our own speed. We can see he's been stuck behind this big truck for a while now, has already made a few tentative moves and he's going to pass it on the left any time now, on the same lane you're driving. Since this person is somewhat of an *sshole, he's not going to respect the considerable difference in speed between you and him and you're ready to give your brakes a good workout.

It's not an entirely unsolvable problem for a computer, but it is far more difficult. Whether or not to reduce speed in such a situation is far more difficult for a computer to decide, because there is no such thing as intuition. So, a computer will more often choose for the safer alternative of reducing speed, even if you would not do so yourself, based solely on your intuition.

You see this already in semi-automatic drive modes from manufacturers like Tesla. If you're on a multi-lane road and it needs to overtake some obstacles, you'll see it will often reduce speed before it does so. Simply, because their algorithm assesses the risk differently than you do.

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 03-25-2018, 01:13 PM:

quote: Marcel Birgelen
Waymo claims to have tested their cars in the most adverse weather conditions. Now, I don't know if that includes totally snowed over roads, but they have driven a hell of a lot of miles already.

I appreciate that, and I agree with your points, especially about intuition. I feel like this is something that can indeed be figured out, but it will take an amazing amount of onboard computer power and analytics to do it.

The most unfortunate fact about all this is that sometimes computerized stuff just doesn't freaking WORK. For no reason at all.

I have a fairly new (2016) Ford pickup which has "backup assist," which includes the camera, sensors, radar and whatever else to detect obstacles. If it's cold outside, sometimes -- NOT ALWAYS, but sometimes -- that particular system just refuses to work. It'll just emit an annoying beeeeeeeep until I either turn it off, or stop backing up. Then the next day, under the exact same conditions, without having cleaned the sensors and whatnot, the same system will work perfectly. I hear other similar stories about electronic "systems" frequently from other drivers during my work days (at the parts store).

It just seems like if carmakers could get these basic, comparatively simple systems to work 100% of the time first, they'd go further toward getting the confidence of the public in self-driving cars.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 03-28-2018, 08:20 AM:

quote: Mike Blakesley
If it's cold outside, sometimes -- NOT ALWAYS, but sometimes -- that particular system just refuses to work. It'll just emit an annoying beeeeeeeep until I either turn it off, or stop backing up.

This illustrates why automated systems that are designed to be relied on to carry out safety-critical functions that require intelligence-based decision making, are an order of magnitude more difficult and expensive to create than ones that are either not safety critical, or don't have to be totally relied on (in other words, the system is designed with the expectation that a human can and will take over if necessary, and will also be able to judge if and when it becomes necessary; or that the consequences of the system failing are non-serious enough for that risk to be considered acceptable).

In the case of your backup assist system, I'd guess that the designers went so far and no further with the hardware and software development, because they were inventing a labor-saving aid, not a safety critical automation system, and therefore they didn't have the budget needed to create a system that was 99.999% guaranteed to work in all weather and all traffic situations. Say, 80%, was as close as they were aiming for, and expected to achieve, because you can always back the vehicle up yourself if needs be.

However, when you're in a situation in which the car's owner expects to get in, tell it where to go, have a nap and then wake up at their destination, the engineering challenge suddenly becomes a very different one.

The really scary aspect of all this to me is when the boundary between those types of system (ones that have to be relied on to operate autonomously, and those that don't) get blurred. Air France Flight 447 is a particularly scary example: it appeared that none of the (human) pilots had been properly trained to understand how the autopilot acts when it no longer knows the plane's airspeed reliably, and possibly didn't know how to fly the plane out of trouble manually in zero visibility (total darkness and complete spatial disorientation outside) and without knowing their airspeed reliably. Their training and expectation was quite simply that what happened would never happen, and therefore that it was unnecessary to know how to deal with it if it did.

Posted by Dave Macaulay (Member # 813) on 03-28-2018, 10:43 AM:

General Ludd here.
There are fewer reasons than for flying cars, but - like flying cars - level 5 autonomous vehicles are not possible here.
Our landscape has been designed around cars - there are basically no places in North America where cars and roads don't dictate planning decisions.
Cities and towns in North America are designed for cars and people to coexist. Level 5 autonomous vehicles have unavoidable problems with driving in cities although they could potentially work on superhighways (in most weather) but what happens when they need to go off the "interstate" into town?
They will always have to avoid hitting people. People are both stupid and smart. In a 100% autonomous vehicle city or town people are smart enough to very quickly realize that they can walk across any street any time, that the cars have to stop to avoid hurting them. And stupid enough to do it all the time. Traffic would be paralyzed.
The only answer is to have all roads sealed off from pedestrians. That's already done in some parts of the world for major city arterials but I mean every road in every urban/suburban setting. The cost of redesigning every city is insane.
Not. going. to. happen.
There is one overpowering reason that even level 4 autonomous vehicles are unlikely - a driver has to be driving to pay attention to the driving environment. Expecting a person who - with no reason to watch the road - is reading, sleeping, screwing... whatever, to take command immediately when the autopilot sounds an alarm due to some situation it can't handle - likely something dire - ridiculous. Check the video from the fatal collision (this is a level 4 vehicle) : this person is being paid to stay alert and be ready to take control of the vehicle instantly, that's his only job, and he knows that cameras are continuously recording him so he'd better stay sharp because jobs that easy are hard to find.
And? He fails, looks away from the road for long periods, but happens to look up a moment before impact - probably because some alarm has sounded when the autonomous system realized the collision was imminent (there was no sound on what I saw). Yeah. Great plan.

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 03-28-2018, 02:50 PM:

It will be interesting to come back and read this thread in about 15 years and see how the various predictions have played out.

Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 03-28-2018, 04:48 PM:

That Uber car/pedestrian accident was an abject failure on all fronts.

From what I saw in the video that damn car didn't even slow down!

We can't blame the victim. She had crossed two lanes, pushing her bicycle. The car should have had plenty of time to detect an imminent collision.

Self-driving technology just is NOT ready for Prime Time.
Unless there is a technology improvement, several orders of magnitude greater, I don't think it ever will be. That car was just not able to detect such an incident.

The pedestrian had no idea that the oncoming car didn't have a driver paying attention. What is a reasonable person's expectation? She expected that the car had a driver. She expected that, if she misjudged her crossing, the driver might have swerved or slowed down or stopped. The car did not behave like a reasonable person would have expected it to.

The driver failed. As all airplane pilots are trained from day-one, the Pilot in Command has ultimate responsibility for everything that happens in and around his aircraft. And, so it goes for the driver of a car. He has ultimate responsibility no matter what technology is supposed to be doing for him. It's HIS ass in the driver's seat. It's HIS ass that's on the line!
Yet... He (she?) was using the phone to read Facebook or something! FAILURE!

The people at Uber who put this self-driving car on the road... FAILURE!

The people who engineered and promoted this self-driving car... FAILURE!

It was a failure before it even started!

People wonder why?

Glactically STUPID!

Posted by Carsten Kurz (Member # 5396) on 03-28-2018, 05:19 PM:

quote: Randy Stankey
We can't blame the victim. She had crossed two lanes, pushing her bicycle. The car should have had plenty of time to detect an imminent collision.

I wouldn't go as far as blaming the victim, but from the video, I do not understand why she proceeded crossing the road - it was dark, she must have noticed the car by it's lights alone. Did the car appear unexpectedly for her? On the video and pictures, I see neither a pedestrian crossing that would have allowed her to assume the car would stop, nor a visual obstruction - it looks light a straight road passage?

- Carsten

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 03-28-2018, 06:15 PM:

To be fair, it's pretty hard to expect a person to sit there, doing absolutely nothing, but still being responsible for the entire operation of the car. After about 10 minutes of being completely bored, of COURSE the typical person's going to start looking at their phone (or out the side window, or at a newspaper, or at their companions). I enjoy driving, but I would hate driving under those circumstances. What a drag it would be.

Until a self-driver simply never NEEDS intervention from a human while on a roadway, mass acceptance will still be uneasy at best (well, until everybody now over 30 is dead).

Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 03-28-2018, 06:24 PM:

Self-driving cars are just not within the horizon of possibilities that we have today.

The technology needs to get better by orders of magnitude.

We need to completely redesign our cities and the roads between them.

We need to have a population that understands the technology and how to use it.

It just ain't gonna' happen.

Promotion of the growth of technology and the research efforts needed to do that are another subject all together.

But, at this point, I believe that self-driving technology needs to be shelved until we progress a lot farther.

It's not ready for Prime Time.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 03-30-2018, 08:34 AM:

For these reasons, I predict that level 4 and 5 autonomous driving will be allowed on freeways and some other roads on which non-motorized traffic is either segregated or almost non-existent (e.g. state highways across the desert), long before it's allowed on inner city and suburban streets.

In the same way that shipping containers are now moved long distances by rail, but transferred to and from a big rig trailer at depots for the short distance between the railhead and the origin and destination points, I wouldn't be surprised if something similar happens for road traffic. The vehicle would be driven by a human as far as the freeway on-ramp, or in the case of a big rig, to a lot next to the on-ramp, where the driver gets out. The human in a private car puts the car into autopilot as it enters the on-ramp, and can then relax until it's time to leave the freeway. The big rig drives itself to a lot next to the off-ramp closest to its final destination, where a human driver boards and takes it the last mile.

Posted by Lyle Romer (Member # 1266) on 03-30-2018, 04:03 PM:

Leo,

Your description is pretty much what Cadillac's new "Super Cruise" is. It allows fully autonomous driving with hands off the steering wheel but only on freeways. Not just only on freeways in general but only freeways for which they have highly detailed 3D maps.

It forces the human driver to take over in adverse weather conditions and construction zones.

I think there are just too many variables on local/city streets to be handled by a reasonably priced autonomous vehicle. If you put enough sensors and computing power in the vehicle along with advanced AI it would probably work fine. The issue is the cost of the vehicle with all of that hardware on board.

Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 03-30-2018, 05:09 PM:

In rural areas, you are not necessarily driving on actual streets and roads either. Maybe a trail but if the trail is washed out or overgrown then you'll find a different way around it. Is mudhole in front of me passable or will I get bogged down (not to mention covering my truck with mud). I might be better off getting out to move that tree branch on the left over a bit so I can go around it. Or maybe I should back out and try coming in from the east side instead.....

If I didn't have a steering wheel and a gearshift and if I was sleeping, drunk or dead when I got to that location, what happens now?

Posted by Martin McCaffery (Member # 37) on 04-01-2018, 12:19 PM:

I had no idea this was a thing, but hey, LA. Now you can have a lethal theatre seat in your own home!
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