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A self-driving Uber ran a red light last December, contrary to company claims
- tristanj 10y agoBack when this originally came out, Uber claimed "this incident was due to human error" [1]. Well technically, if you really twist the meaning of words, Uber could interpret this as "human error", considering: - It was "human error" that the programmers who designed the self-driving AI failed to properly implement red-light detection and braking. - It was also "human error" that the human driver in the front seat failed to notice the red lights and stop the car. Uber's statement is effectively true, if you hideously twist the meaning of words. I fully believe that's what they did in their statement. There's similar wordplay for the word "natural", i.e. claiming "All pollution is natural", because humans are part of nature and everything we do is natural, so all consequences of our actions are also "natural". Deceiving yet ultimately, effective. [1] Uber says self-driving car ran red light due to “human error” https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/14/uber-looking-into-incident-of-self-driving-car-running-a-red-light-captured-on-dashcam/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/14/uber-looking-into-incident...
- ars 10y ago> who designed the self-driving AI failed to properly implement red-light detection and braking. From the article it sort-of seems like that error is actually in the mapping software that didn't mark that intersection as having traffic lights, so the car didn't look for them.
- spike021 10y agoShouldn't a self-driving car always be passively looking for red lights? I mean, take a school bus for instance. They don't have permanent red-light fixtures, but if you're behind them they could enable the red light sign at any moment. If the self-driving car isn't always looking wouldn't that be an issue?
- mikeash 10y agoEven normal stoplights can be added or removed. If a car needs an accurate internal map of every single stoplight, it's doomed.
- ars 10y agoThat's the current status of self driving cars. And yes, I think they are doomed. At least for city streets - I expect them on specially instrumented freeways though.
- jayjay71 10y agoDelphi actively looks for traffic lights at every intersection with their self-driving technology, or at least they used to.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- olalonde 10y ago> That's the current status of self driving cars. Do you work in the field? I'm a bit skeptical about that. Waymo's self-driving car seems to do pretty well with things that aren't encoded in maps like road works and unexpected obstacles. I don't see why red lights would be exceptionally challenging to detect.
- Fricken 10y agoThe test driver failed to intervene, that's all. This is a non-issue, obviously Uber's autonomous vehicles are a work in progress.
- eli 10y agoIf it's a non-issue, why'd they lie about it?
- yabatopia 10y agoIt's Uber. It's in their DNA.
- atonse 10y agoYeah don't beta test your BETA on real drivers, even after the DMV has asked you to stop. Screw Uber. I hope the CA government comes down hard on them. But we all know Uber will find yet another slimy way to keep going. For the record, I'm the biggest proponent of autonomous cars and can't wait for that day. But companies that just put people in danger like this are not going to get us there faster. They're going to slow everything down by their carelessness and greed.
- dsl 10y ago> But we all know Uber will find yet another slimy way to keep going. Like moving the program to Arizona...
- edoceo 10y agoAnd Nevada, with stolen Google engineer!
- Fricken 10y agoI don't like Uber either, and I don't know what they were thinking testing in California without a permit, but they were otherwise doing the same thing all of the 23 companies with testing permits in California are doing. (Any fly-by-night operation can get an av testing permit in California so long as they meet some basic requirements. It costs $140 and the approval process takes 3 business days). The AI is expected to fail occasionally, so a human driver is onboard ready to intervene the instant that happens. The test driver wasn't paying attention, and the car ran a red light. It was a human error. Uber did not lie, they didn't mince words or twist the definition of things, the human driver just didn't do his job. Irrespective of all the other bullshit going on with Uber, this is a mistake that any test driver with any other company testing autonomous prototypes on public roads could have made. Just like with Tesla's Autopilot, any autonomous test vehicle is technically a level 2 vehicle, meaning the human driver is legally responsible for any traffic violation the vehicle makes.
- rhizome 10y agoUber's statement is effectively true, if you hideously twist the meaning of words. "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?"
- JeremyNT 10y agoThe full article from the NYT[0] which is the source for the information presented in the Verge post includes a quote indicating that Uber blames the operator for not manually stopping the vehicle. Their story is essentially that the car isn't ready to handle this scenario on its own and the operator should have known to intervene. [0] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/technology/anthony-levandowski-waymo-uber-google-lawsuit.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/technology/anthony-lev...
- falcolas 10y agoWhich could (and will) be said for any autonomous accident in the past and future. The NTSB takes a similar view: autopilot failures that result in aircraft crashes are still human error, since the human should have corrected. Still not very encouraging, since the driver in this case would have had seconds at most to identify and fix the error with a panic stop.
- g00gler 10y agoI don't think that's really a fair comparison if we're taking Uber at their word since the car is still a dev unit. It seems like a known problem, cars would not stop at any red light period and the driver just forgot to stop because he wasn't paying attention.
- robryan 10y agoThey also track disengages as a metric for progress right? So it could be that these drivers will if at all possible avoid taking over.
- searealist 10y agoThe anti Uber PR campaign is now in full swing.
- waisbrot 10y agoThey've worked so hard to present themselves as a honest, law-abiding company. Where could all these negative stories be coming from? It is really surprising that this is happening! But seriously, what surprises me is that they've basked in negative attention for so long, with so little effort to spin things their way and haven't been suffering any visible consequences in terms of hiring and funding. I'm not sure if that's just because everyone loves a winner, or if it's a measure of how annoyed everyone was at the pre-Uber state of taxis.
- searealist 10y agoMost of the criticism of Uber boils down to calling them a bunch of "bros" or saying that they push back against legislation that you just admitted has had a positive effect on the world.
- toomuchtodo 10y agoThey break labor and transport laws flagarantly. And now traffic law. Enjoy your consumer excess before their VC runs out. Couldn't happen to a more deserving org.
- searealist 10y ago> They break labor and transport laws flagarantly. This was addressed in the second half of my post. Most people didn't really have a problem with this part for a long time.
- toomuchtodo 10y agoMy apologies! I was unaware we could pick and choose which laws we wanted to consider "real".
- waqf 10y agoBlogspam, the actual source is https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/technology/anthony-levandowski-waymo-uber-google-lawsuit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/technology/anthony-levand...
- nodesocket 10y agoI'm not defending Uber, but there seems to be a pattern of startups that at first everybody is in love with. The startup explodes and grows to become widely successful and morphs from startup to corporation. An incident happens, and then everybody jumps on the bandwagon and bashes them mercifully. Boycotts insue. Clone competitors pop up proclaiming to be "not-evil" and the cycle starts again. Let me backup my claim with examples: GitHub AirBnB Uber CloudFlare Who is the next unicorn to join the PR nightmare show?
- a_t48 10y agoGitHub is evil now? What did I miss?
- nodesocket 10y agoI don't think they are evil but... "GitHub Founder Steps Down After Harassment Probe" (https://www.wired.com/2014/04/tom_pw/ https://www.wired.com/2014/04/tom_pw/)
- rdtsc 10y agoNot evil but they went a bit off the deep went with their "diversity" story, and it turned some heads for sure. The technical director or somesuch (higher up manager) was writing stuff like "don't think we'll succeed teaching white, male middle managers empathy and compassion anytime soon so let's limit their scope of damage" Then their Social Impact director was giving presentations about how "Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women." So... I don't know, make up your own mind what that means.
- iopq 10y agoThey removed a repo because it was named "X for retards" instead of "X for dummies". All of the FORKS of that repo got nuked without notice. This is because the notice went to the original owner of the repo, not the owners of the forks.
- karmakaze 10y agoI was about to ask the same and the replies aren't clarifying the extent of the sentiment. The black bar is the only signal I've seen that they're 'going dark'. I also didn't realize that AirBnb is less liked. I still believe in the AirBnb/Uber model if not the current implementations. (btw, Uber is the AirBnb of transportation right, AirBnb started the model?)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- lindner 10y agoEven though this was clearly a red light being run, it was this AI's first offense, so we should just give it a warning and a stern talking-to....
- Animats 10y agoIt's clear how Uber botched this. That traffic signal is not at an intersection. It's a heavily used mid-block crosswalk.[1] It's a very well marked crosswalk, with six redundant full size traffic signals all visible in the direction the Uber vehicle was traveling. This indicates Uber's system only looks for mapped traffic signals. SF has a database of their traffic signals, and this signal is listed. It's object #902.[2] Apparently Uber gets their data from somewhere else. [1] https://goo.gl/maps/dzxEaaqWaAC2 https://goo.gl/maps/dzxEaaqWaAC2 [2] https://data.sfgov.org/Transportation/Map-of-Traffic-Signals/8xta-sna8/data https://data.sfgov.org/Transportation/Map-of-Traffic-Signals...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mattcantstop 10y agoI think I have personally ran three or four red lights or stop signs accidentally in my 18 years or so of driving. The fact that a self-driving car running a red light makes the news is exciting to me. We will be much safer with computers driving.
- dantiberian 10y agoThe news is not that it ran a red, it's that Uber lied about it and made it sound like it was a human that ran the red.
- orthoganol 10y agoSince some are saying "this is just one incidence" recall that there was a second blown red light around the same time in SF, and all this just on the first day of the program. There are also potentially other incidents that did not, by chance, have a bystander recording. Their autonomous driving has many years left in the development. I just hope they aren't pushing it on us now because they are pacing 3 billion in losses/ year.
- rwmj 10y agoIt's almost as if the software is buggy and they need to test it and fix the bugs. Which is why they have the human driver there to make sure things don't get drastically out of control.
- TillE 10y agoIf your software is that bad (can't recognize a red light), you should probably be testing in a simulator with pre-recorded video, not throwing your garbage code on the road where it can cause an accident.
- heisenbit 10y agoA little while ago I looked at micro services and the Uber story stuck in my mind (April 2016 numbers): - 2000 engineers - 1000 services - 8000 git repositories I can understand fast growth but on the services and git repository side considering that most of the engineers are new it struck me not as fast but more as out of control growth. At the beginning you may not control so much but you hire people that are disciplined. Later one needs a certain amount of structure. The stories from the legal front, financial front and handling of public relations are very consistent with what I observed on the technical side.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- tobeportable 10y agoThe pedestrian was already engaging on the crosswalk and would have required the car to stop too.
- caub 10y agoI wonder if it works well with pedestrian crossing the road in unusual locations or bikes in the traffic
- flexie 10y agoA human driven car runs a red light every second.
- beefield 10y agoI may have missed something, but why this is Uber's, not Volvo's fault? Is uber developing a proprietary driving system on Volvo's hardware?
- owly 10y agoUBER IS OVER! (if you want it)
- maplechori 10y agoskynet has become self-aware
- true_tuna 10y agoOh did Uber lie to deny responsibility for something? Who would have expected that?