Elaine Herzberg

Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America

by Angie Schmitt  · 26 Aug 2020  · 274pp  · 63,679 words

and some flowers stand alongside Mill Avenue, where the dense brick buildings of downtown Tempe thin out into desert and parking lots. Here is where Elaine Herzberg, a forty-nine-year-old homeless woman, was killed by a computer-piloted Uber car on March 18, 2018. She was the first pedestrian ever

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resort to unreliable witnesses and guesswork to reconstruct what happened—if anyone even bothers—but this was not an ordinary pedestrian death. The death of Elaine Herzberg was an international media event. The last moments of her life were recorded by a camera and turned over to police and federal investigators and

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instance, “I don’t want to be their real-world mistake.”7 Autonomous vehicle testing does raise a lot of ethical questions. Arizonans—people like Elaine Herzberg—did not explicitly consent to have a potentially life-threatening technology beta-tested on them and their families. In other fields—pharmaceuticals, for example—companies

The Long History of the Future: Why Tomorrow's Technology Still Isn't Here

by Nicole Kobie  · 3 Jul 2024  · 348pp  · 119,358 words

see what happens when they fail. The most significant failure to date is unquestionably the crash of Uber’s driverless car in March 2018, killing Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona. The 49-year-old woman was the first pedestrian to be killed by a self-driving car, sparking an investigation by the

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these flaws, but given that these systems are released to the world without checking for such biases, it’s clear that’s not happening. Consider Elaine Herzberg, the woman killed by that Uber driverless car. The system – or rather, the people who built it – didn’t expect a person to jaywalk in

The Road to Conscious Machines

by Michael Wooldridge  · 2 Nov 2018  · 346pp  · 97,890 words

doubts about the technology. On 18 March 2018, in Tempe, Arizona, a driverless car owned by Uber hit and killed a 49-year-old pedestrian, Elaine Herzberg, while in driverless mode. As is typically the way with accidents of this kind, there were a number of contributory causes. The car was travelling

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, it was too late to be able to do anything about it. Although the car’s sensors recognized that there was an ‘obstacle’ (the victim, Elaine Herzberg) which called for emergency braking, the software seems to have been designed to avoid doing this (suggesting some confusion, or at least, a rather strange

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to the outside environment. It may well be that she was too confident in the car’s driverless abilities as well. The tragic death of Elaine Herzberg was entirely avoidable: but the failure was human, not technological. It seems depressingly inevitable that there will be many more tragedies like these before we

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is a situation in which a person had to intervene to take over control of the car – what should have occurred in the case of Elaine Herzberg. A disengagement doesn’t necessarily mean that the person had to intervene to avoid an accident – far less a fatality – but nevertheless this data gives

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation

by Paris Marx  · 4 Jul 2022  · 295pp  · 81,861 words

stop the vehicle from plowing into the woman at nearly forty miles an hour. The bicyclist died at the hospital sometime later. Her name was Elaine Herzberg, and she was the first pedestrian reported to be killed by an autonomous vehicle. It is easy for a society conditioned to do so to

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into the roots of those problems instead of mistakenly believing that adding new technological solutions will address them. In the years following the death of Elaine Herzberg, there have also been concerns about the safety of Tesla’s Autopilot system. It was pitched as a fully self-driving system by Musk, but

Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

by Karen Hao  · 19 May 2025  · 660pp  · 179,531 words

has computed are not legible to humans. This has led to dangerous outcomes. In March 2018, a self-driving Uber killed forty-nine-year-old Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona, in the first ever recorded incident of an autonomous vehicle causing a pedestrian fatality. Investigations found that the car’s deep learning

User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work & Play

by Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant  · 7 Nov 2019

road for a few years until the night of March 18, 2018, when, in Tempe, Arizona, one of them, driving forty miles per hour, killed Elaine Herzberg while she was crossing the street.23 A week later, the Tempe chief of police said she suspected that Uber was not at fault.24

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values

by Brian Christian  · 5 Oct 2020  · 625pp  · 167,349 words

. In human affairs, however, this danger is very real. In the National Transportation Safety Board review of the self-driving Uber car that killed pedestrian Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona, in 2018, the analysis reveals that the “system never classified her as a pedestrian . . . because she was crossing . . . without a crosswalk; the

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car

by Anthony M. Townsend  · 15 Jun 2020  · 362pp  · 97,288 words

strike a pedestrian, in Tempe, Arizona, in the summer of 2018, a leading legal expert on AVs speculated that the company’s software probably “classified [Elaine Herzberg] as something other than a stationary object.” And a growing body of evidence indicates that computer-vision algorithms, like the ones employed in Tesla vehicles

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?” Ann Arbor, MLive, October 6, 2017, https://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/index.ssf/2017/10/can_ self-driving_pizza_deliver.html. 231“classified [Elaine Herzberg] as something other”: Ryan Felton, “Video Shows Driver in Autonomous Uber Was Looking Down Moments before Fatal Crash,” Jalopnik, March 21, 2018, https://jalopnik.com

A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next

by Tom Standage  · 16 Aug 2021  · 290pp  · 85,847 words

to disengage can be deadly. That happened on March 18, 2018, when an Uber AV, being tested in Tempe, Arizona, struck and killed a pedestrian, Elaine Herzberg, as she wheeled her bicycle across a four-lane road. Although it was dark, the car’s radar and lidar detected her six seconds before

Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It

by Daniel Knowles  · 27 Mar 2023  · 278pp  · 91,332 words

unit to a firm called Aurora. Lyft sold its own unit in 2021. An accident that killed a pedestrian probably pushed Uber to give up. Elaine Herzberg, a forty-nine-year-old, was wheeling a bicycle laden with shopping bags across the road when Uber’s adapted-Volvo plowed into her. Investigators