Don't Blame The Robots: Blame Us
Popular Science|November - December 2016

The Slack channel at the University of Pennsylvania’s human-machine interaction lab, where I work, is typically a steady drip of lecture reminders and wall-climbing robot videos.

Carla Diana
Don't Blame The Robots: Blame Us

But this past summer, news of the first Tesla Autopilot-related fatality turned the feed into a Niagara Falls of critical chatter. Graduate research assistant: “It’s a habit of all people launching products to claim things are working to keep people excited.” Postdoc research fellow: “Such failures are inevitable, at least until the technology improves. Tesla took the plunge first, and therefore is subject to increased scrutiny.” Student researcher: “If a driver was attentively behind the wheel, they wouldn’t have mistaken a tractor trailer for a road sign.”

It went on like that for days. All sides of the argument had merit. So I did my homework, reading about the accident— which claimed the life of an Ohio man driving a Tesla Model S with Autopilot active—in more detail. I wanted to understand how the system, among the most advanced public experiments in human-machine interaction yet, had gone so wrong. The man’s car crashed into a tractor-trailer crossing U.S. Highway 27A in Florida. According to Tesla’s initial incident report, the car’s emergency braking didn’t distinguish the white side of the truck from the bright sky.

Technically, that’s where the fault lay. The more important factor, to auto-safety experts and to Tesla, is that the driver also didn’t notice the looming collision. So he didn’t brake—and his car ran under the trailer.

This story is from the November - December 2016 edition of Popular Science.

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This story is from the November - December 2016 edition of Popular Science.

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