One week ago today

[mickey]

A 17 year old kid was driving 2 or 3 miles from here.
He was reading a text message on his phone
and drifted into the wrong lane hitting a semi head on.
R.I.P.

The text was from his mother telling him to hurry up or he would be late.

Can you imagine having to live with that for the rest of your life???

[Mossman]

Oh man....

[Frozensoda]

Fuck, man.
Did you know the family?

[mickey]

Fuck, man.
Did you know the family?

Nope. I heard it from a mutual friend who has known the parents since first or second grade.

[LancerTheGreat]

I just wonder if she still values punctuality as much after this or if she realized it doesn't matter if you're a little late as long as you're there.

That's a damn shame, r.i.p.

[tonebender]

That's a tragedy. He should not have read the text. It's possible she may not have had known he was on the road. If she did know he was on the road she should not have texted. I resisted texting as a form of communications for a long time and then I finally came to see some inherent value. It is also a very distracting and dangerous thing to do when driving, operating machinery or anything else where safety requires your attention. RIP

[BatUtilityBelt]

Sad, but happens a lot. No texts need to be read while you're driving.

[nomadh]

Horrible.. not the mothers fault I'd guess still the guilt will shred her. we thought this was the situation when a son of our neighbor went head on into a barrier. We were all convinced but It turns out that time of day the sun blinds you and there was talk for years about how dangerous it was and so many kids driving to school not knowing how to deal. I had nightmares about about my kids for about a week.
So sorry for the family.

[ID10t]

I'm jaded but not insensitive. How about the semi driver? Just doing his job and someone hits him head on.

[mickey]

How about the semi driver? Just doing his job and someone hits him head on.

That's about the size of it. All in a day's work in that job, I guess?

[jtcnj]

sorry to hear.
EVERYONE knows and has been bombarded with the "dont text or talk" while driving public safety message.
I will quickly glance at a text if on my way home to see if it is my wife "please get bag of ice" or other such message, but keep my focus on the road.
I do agree it can be dangerous.

Maybe the cell phone companies should be held liable if someone misuses their product resulting in tragedy.
I dont agree but thats an argument being made in other discussions.

[Chocol8]

Meanwhile, driverless car technology isn’t ready for mainstream because it is only 1,000x safer than human drivers and the car companies will be sued into bankruptcy if they sell anything less than 1,000,000,000x safer than a human driver.

[PoodlesAgain]

Most cellphones could easily sense certain kinds of motion, and then suggest allowing an automatic mode to text dictation or handsfree. all being user-controlled via pre-settings.
If a phone can do what it does with pictures, it can certainly do that.

[mickey]

I think @jtcnj has the right idea.
If the Service provider/phone manufacturer had liability in cases like the one mentioned in the op,
they would find a way to keep such things from happening.

[ID10t]

With the hope that nobody interprets me as being insensitive to the 17 y/o, his mother, or the poor truck driver....I've probably worked and called more trauma deaths than most people here on the forum.
If you make something idiot proof, they will build a more powerful idiot.

Extrapolating from lyrics of a "Cole Trains" song, "if you don't want to be embarrassed, don't do embarrassing things."
It was avoidable, like many things, it's still a tragedy.

[uwmcscott]

Most cellphones could easily sense certain kinds of motion, and then suggest allowing an automatic mode to text dictation or handsfree. all being user-controlled via pre-settings.
If a phone can do what it does with pictures, it can certainly do that.

We could certainly ( and probably will ) perfect auto driving technology, and the technology to do what you suggest above already exists.

To me though, it just keeps taking us farther and farther down the road of avoiding personal responsibility. Mowing and vacuuming robots so we don't have to get our ass off the couch and walk a few steps. Appliances that order our groceries for us and tell us when they need repairs. Computers and apps that automate just about anything you can imagine.

This is a horrible story but an all too, common one. Whether it's texting ( or drinking ) while driving, in the end a lot of it boils down to choices made by individuals And if we continue to go down the road of relying on others/technology to make them for us ( or to blame others after something goes wrong ) we will eventually weed ourselves out.

[BatUtilityBelt]

Meanwhile, driverless car technology isn’t ready for mainstream because it is only 1,000x safer than human drivers and the car companies will be sued into bankruptcy if they sell anything less than 1,000,000,000x safer than a human driver.

Don't be so confident AI is anywhere near as smart as you are suggesting there. It is not. I will trust my aware self over any AI for accident avoidance. In case anyone really wants to argue this, yes I am an expert. Self driving cars know how to compare data points and make guesses based on data points they have previously seen clustered. That does not make them intelligent, but it does make them appear intelligent - kinda like when your dog picks up on a word you didn't know he knew, but you would not trust him to drive you through a blizzard.

[BatUtilityBelt]

Most cellphones could easily sense certain kinds of motion, and then suggest allowing an automatic mode to text dictation or handsfree. all being user-controlled via pre-settings.
If a phone can do what it does with pictures, it can certainly do that.

I agree, and years ago I tried to approach several vendors to collaborate on a kernel-mode approach along those lines. Vendors don't want to enforce safety because it's not what they get paid for. They get paid for the texts, scam calls, popups, etc. They value those distractions.

[Chocol8]

Meanwhile, driverless car technology isn’t ready for mainstream because it is only 1,000x safer than human drivers and the car companies will be sued into bankruptcy if they sell anything less than 1,000,000,000x safer than a human driver.

Don't be so confident AI is anywhere near as smart as you are suggesting there. It is not.

I am not over estimating how smart AI can be, you are over estimating how incredibly stupid humans can be.

There are situations driver assist and self driving systems can’t handle well, but things like not going into oncoming traffic while checking a text is not one of them. Nor are many of the other stupid things humans do to cause fatal wrecks.

[BatUtilityBelt]

Meanwhile, driverless car technology isn’t ready for mainstream because it is only 1,000x safer than human drivers and the car companies will be sued into bankruptcy if they sell anything less than 1,000,000,000x safer than a human driver.

Don't be so confident AI is anywhere near as smart as you are suggesting there. It is not.

I am not over estimating how smart AI can be, you are over estimating how incredibly stupid humans can be.

There are situations driver assist and self driving systems can’t handle well, but things like not going into oncoming traffic while checking a text is not one of them. Nor are many of the other stupid things humans do to cause fatal wrecks.

I am not over-estimating the stupidity of some humans, that is a very real problem. But you are absolutely over-estimating the "smarts" of AI. And I back that assertion with a career of R&D including a good number of AI systems. Self-driving cars appear intelligent when they follow traffic, merge lanes, stop when they see obstacles. But when the data doesn't approximate patterns it already has responses for, it plows into the broad side of a semi, runs over a woman on a bike, or any number of other possibilities. And this is not a problem that can be overcome by iterative improvements of its approach. The term AI itself is misleading. It is not intelligence, it is data processing. Give me the advantage of survival instincts based on millions of years' evolution any day, because they can instantaneously react to things the likes of which we have never seen before. I don't care whether an autonomous Uber might be a statistically better driver than the worst moron on the road. The approach to that problem is to get the moron off the road.

[stratoagile]

What a shame

[andrewsrea]

That is sad. i wonder how many people in the US die from texting?

[tlarson58]

I am a strong proponent of the "It Can Wait" campaign.

[honyock]

My few year old iphone automatically went into safe mode when the gps senses movement like in a car/motorcycle/etc. I had to actively select I'm not driving.

Too many people on the road don't treat the automobile with the respect it deserves. It is basically a loaded gun any time you take your eyes off the road you are playing russian roulette.

Just like the chick who plowed into my truck parked on the street then lied and said a toy truck rolled from the rear seat under her foot. She broke the phone screen with her chin on the steering wheel, that doesn't happen unless you are staring into the screen texting. If anyone was walking their dog up the street they would have been maimed or killed.

[BatUtilityBelt]

Just want to give an example from today's news. This keeps happening to people who put all their faith in the self-driving mode even Tesla tells you not to trust.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/2- ... g-n1264470

Two people slammed into a tree with no other vehicles involved. Tell me an attentive driver would ever have the same accident. Like all the other self-driving car accidents, it will probably disappear from the news in days and be settled with a quiet case involving NDAs. That is why I speak up about it - because people trust (and then lose) their lives to it, and I want to reduce those numbers.