Toyota pauses Paralympics self-driving buses after one hits visually impaired athlete

"Tokyo police said that vehicle operators had told them they “were aware that a person was there but thought [the person] would [realize that a bus was coming] and stop crossing the [street]”, according to the Asahi Shimbun newspaper."

Absolutely classic case of ableds assuming disabled people will react in exactly the way they would. Not only did the designers of the self-driving system fail to consider it, but so did the safety monitors on the spot.

It's like the 'shared space' notion of drivers and pedestrians catching each others' eyes to negotiate who goes first, which completely failed to wonder "So how will a person with a visual impairment do that?"

I'm absolutely convinced we're going to have cases of autonomous self-driving vehicles hitting disabled people because we didn't trigger the human recognition functionality of its synthetic vision system - I've seen footage of an AI supposed to edge-detect people in a crowd and draw an outline around them that consistently every rejected parent with a buggy and I've absolutely no doubt would have treated wheelchair and scooter users identically, and possibly ambulatory disableds with mobility aids as well