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Video suggests huge problems with Uber’s driverless car program

211 points by yohui 9y ago

golemiprague 9y ago
I don't know, I have seen the video, the woman literally jumps into the road in front of the car. Even if the lidar got the woman it was probably assuming she will not jump into the road in front of the car, a reasonable assumption that any driver would do. I don't understand what people expect, if the car have to slow for any person on the side of road it will not move at all.
aaroninsf 9y ago
Surprising no one. "win-at-any-cost" and "second place is first looser" (sic) do not cohere with safety.
sureaboutthis 9y ago
I have two problems with this article. 1) They make it appear that Uber is a car manufacturer. 2) Even though Uber has not been determined to be at fault, the author seems to want to make it that way anyway.
- vamin 9y ago
  The author is making a distinction between whether Uber was legally at fault (as stated in the article, likely not) versus whether the accident was avoidable. I agree with the author's position that the accident was likely avoidable.
  - femto 9y ago
    I think there is an argument for removing this ambiguity by making self driving cars automatically liable for all personal injury, whether the person be inside or outside the car. The only exception would be if the tester could prove intent by the other party, keeping in mind that a self-driving car will have extensive logs of its environment to use in such a defence. Supporting arguments include: 1) The physics of driving isn't random, so it could be said that there are no accidents in autonomous driving, only oversights. 2) It would set a minimum performance level by making it prohibitively expensive to have a dangerous car. Those who test responsibly would have a low enough injury rate that they could deal with the risk by taking out suitable insurance. 3) It would provide a strong incentive to make the best car possible and not to take expedient shortcuts. 4) Over time automatically liability would become irrelevant if it asymptotically forces the injury rate to zero. 5) We have an historic opportunity to create a culture that will eliminate the danger of cars. It might have an increased short-term once off cost, but a huge long term payoff in the reduction of health costs and human misery. If we miss this opportunity we will be stuck with the long term cost of an industry that will be competitively driven towards poorer performance, potentially against the will of the majority of players, by the actions of a few.
    - URSpider94 9y ago
      Your concept that there are no accidents, only oversights, is not correct. Say I’m crossing the street and I don’t see your car coming, because I look the wrong way or I’m distracted, or my view is blocked by the sun. You may not be able to avoid hitting me. Additionally, if we train self-driving cars to always give way to pedestrians who even look like they might cross the street, they’re going to have a heck of a time getting through cities. Kids are going to learn that they can trigger a squealing emergency stop by lunging towards the curb - great fun! What I think WILL happen is that autonomous cars will have to buy blanket insurance policies that cover their entire fleet. High accident/fatality rates will result in high insurance premiums, which will put bad actors out of business.
      - telchar 9y ago
        You're suggesting that self-driving cars may have to drive slowly and carefully in cities. I don't really see a problem with that. Pedestrians aren't frequently in the immediate vicinity of roads with limits higher than 35mph in my experience. Any human driver has to drive cautiously in the vicinity of pedestrians anyway, if they don't want to risk manslaughter. I'd want SDVs to do that too.
        URSpider94 9y ago
        Slowly and carefully, yes. Assuming that any pedestrian could leap in front of your car in violation of traffic laws - no. Where I live in California, there are two major streets with crosswalks in regular use, with speed limits of 40 mph or higher (and travel speeds of 50+ mph), within a quarter mile of my home.
      - femto 9y ago
        I think your first paragraph is written from the perspective of a human driver. The machine can predict based on physics. If anything a person who does not see a car will be more predictable, not less, as they will tend to be moving uniformly and not taking evasive action. Taking into account optimal (computer driven) car stopping distances, the maximum acceleration of a person and typical pedestrian densities, I don't think getting though cities would be an issue, especially outside the CBD. Even in areas with very high pedestrian traffic cars will be able to get though. In support of this argument, I offer today's "shared" pedestrian zones, where cars and people mix. Pedestrians have right of way, cars are limited to 10km/h, but the cars manage to get though without injuring anyone. Cars would naturally do high speeds on main roads with low pedestrian density and lower speeds (with very short stopping distance) at high pedestrian density. Why should children have a propensity to intentionally jump in front cars above and beyond anyone else? That's bias. If anyone intentionally jumped in front of a car then it would be covered by the exemption that I proposed: that the car would not be liable if intent could be proved. Based on the car's sensor logs it would be pretty easy to prove that someone intended to get hit. If the car managed to stop and the person ran away it would then be relatively easy to track that person down based on the logs and charge them with a crime. In any case, I think that that is a hypothetical situation which is unlikely to occur. For the vast majority of people self preservation would trump the desire to cause trouble by putting oneself in a terrifying and life-threatening situation, so I think it would be negligibly rare.
  - Guvante 9y ago
    I think even if you think the accident was unavoidable it is certainly damning that the car never attempted to stop.
  - chopin 9y ago
    In Germany, when an accident is avoidable, you are 100% at fault (as it should be) criminally and civilly. Isn't that the case in the US? I'd be astonished if that were the case. If you enforce your right of way and kill somebody, that's manslaughter in my book.
- hndamien 9y ago
  I think the standards are different in this case. While the pedestrian definitely should not have been where they were, and if this were an incident with a human driver, you would probably say the driver was not at fault, I think this is slightly different. They are on the road with conditions because what they are doing is somewhat experimental still. There is a safety driver for a reason that did not respond. A human driver may have collided but would have responded and potentially avoided a fatality (if not a collision). The benefits of autonomous driving completely failed on all counts in this case, which imply that being on a public road is far to early for Uber - suggesting some fault to lie with Uber or the regulators.
- TillE 9y ago
  Every engineer on this project at Uber knows very well that their car completely failed in one of its most basic expected functions. It's incredibly obvious, and a number of independent experts have said as much. I'd be fairly surprised if there's any real appetite at Uber to continue with this now. It was never anywhere near their core competency.
  - Silhouette 9y ago
    It was never anywhere near their core competency. Maybe not directly, but is Uber's current business model sustainable without some form of self-driving technology replacing their human drivers?
    - JimmyAustin 9y ago
      In the short term, yes, but the moment someone else gets a self driving car they’ll be destroyed.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
  - carboy0808 9y ago
    You are an actual idiot if you believe your last paragraph. The race for self driving cars is critical to any rideshare company long term, and is one Uber has invested billions into.
  - saas_co_de 9y ago
    Interesting question is if the LIDAR was not being used because of the settlement with Google and agreement not to use any of the contested tech.
  - tantalor 9y ago
    > core competency 3 years ago Uber hired ~50 specialists from CMU to work on autonomous vehicles. I'd call that a core competency. https://www.theverge.com/transportation/2015/5/19/8622831/uber-self-driving-cars-carnegie-mellon-poached https://www.theverge.com/transportation/2015/5/19/8622831/ub...
- CydeWeys 9y ago
  The article addresses your second point: "Indeed, it's entirely possible to imagine a self-driving car system that always follows the letter of the law—and hence never does anything that would lead to legal finding of fault—but is nevertheless way more dangerous than the average human driver. Indeed, such a system might behave a lot like Uber's cars do today." It doesn't matter if Uber makes cars that are technically not at fault, if they're mowing over pedestrians at a rate significantly higher than human drivers then they should never be allowed on public roads. People mess up occasionally. The solution is not an instant death sentence administered by algorithm.
  - sureaboutthis 9y ago
    That paragraph is opinion of the author of the article which is my complaint. And, again, your second paragraph is an issue I also have. That people are stating that Uber is a car manufacturer.
    - CydeWeys 9y ago
      I'm not sure I understand your objection. If Uber's cars are killing people at a much higher rate than human drivers, then that's a huge problem. They shouldn't be allowed on the roads at all, as they'd vastly increase traffic deaths if widely used. Whether or not someone is at fault in a given accident only matters to the insurance company; that person is still dead. What is your counter-argument? That it doesn't matter if many more people die with Uber self-driving cars on the road so long as everyone who dies made a mistake? And whether Uber makes the entire car or not isn't germane to the discussion. They are responsible for the safety of said cars, which is what we're discussing here.
      - sureaboutthis 9y ago
        Your first paragraph, here, doesn't matter. He is stating opinion as if it were fact and what he said (not you now) isn't fact at all. Your second paragraph emphasizes my point. You,too, are stating that Uber is a car manufacturer, in whole or in part. Does Uber manufacture any parts of this car at all? The impression the opinion piece gives is that Uber manufacturers cars.
- saas_co_de 9y ago
  The other missing part is that it is the human driver who is responsible. This is a test vehicle and their job is to be ready to take over at any time as if they are driving. It seems unlikely that the Police will find any fault because they probably don't want to have to file a criminal charge against the driver, but that is who it would go against if there was fault.
  - Nomentatus 9y ago
    One more person who had no trouble taking the salary, but just didn't want to do the job. Fraud, on their part IMHO.
  - foobarian 9y ago
    It surprises me how downplayed this is. If you legally treat the Uber car as an ordinary car that happens to have a really fancy auto-assist, the driver should be on the hook. This person had eyes off the road for 5 seconds prior to the crash according to the article. There was a case some years ago in Boston where a subway rear-ended another one because the operator was texting. The driver was fired and probably would have been prosecuted if there had been fatalities. Taking eyes off the road for this long seems insane to me.
- Tobba_ 9y ago
  Yeah I'd be fairly concerned about them lying to or simply bribing the police too.
sitkack 9y ago
> We don't need redundant brakes & steering or a fancy new car; we need better software," wrote engineer Anthony Levandowski to Alphabet CEO Larry Page in January 2016. Looks like Uber has attracted Levandowski due to his cultural fit.
- comex 9y ago
  Hmm, but wouldn’t his priorities be correct in the context of this crash? There hasn’t been any suggestion (so far) that the crash occurred because some hardware component stopped working; rather, it seems like the software failed to identify the pedestrian in time. So better software seems precisely what was needed. Though I can imagine that better sensors might also have helped…
  - ddeck 9y ago
    The issue is not that he wanted better software, it's that he appeared willing to compromise safety to get it faster in order to beat his competitors to market, as is clear from the remainder of that quote: "To get to that better software faster we should deploy the first 1000 cars asap. I don't understand why we are not doing that. Part of our team seems to be afraid to ship." And from another email: "the team is not moving fast enough due to a combination of risk aversion and lack of urgency"
    - toast0 9y ago
      The rest of the quote is much more powerful. It's pretty irresponsible to ship 1000 self driving cars onto public roads at this point. (Regardless of who is shipping them) On the other hand, redundant steering and braking seem like probable overengineering. Brakes are already somewhat redudnant (dual section master cylinders were common in the 70s and are almost certainly in any modern vehicle), and better software could periodically verify they're working and if not, coast to a stop. Steering failure could be handled by engaging the brakes. Simultaneous failure is likely rare and catastrophic anyway -- losing a wheel and having the brakes pressure go with it can happen, and when it does, you put on your blinkers and hope you come to rest in a safe manner.
nasmorn 9y ago
Uber is the Blackwater of Silicon Valley
aylons 9y ago
"Move fast and break things" is exactly the opposite of what a responsible driver must do.
- dmix 9y ago
  Not sure how that could be the philosophy of any self-driving car company? That'd be extremely foolish. And regardless of the dumb things the previous Uber CEO has done in the past and the big deal people are making over a $150 license, they have still hired some of the best engineers in the world. You basically have to find the brightest-of-the-brightest to build AI... and Uber pays very well and puts plenty of effort into recruiting that talent. Not to mention the massive PR and monetary risks that are inherent in killing people with your products. That would make any company highly risk-adverse.
- telchar 9y ago
  I've been joking for at least a year that Uber's motto is "move fast and break people". I'm saddened that this has come to pass but not surprised.
  - fstuff 9y ago
    Actually their motto is "Safety third" https://jalopnik.com/safety-third-is-the-running-joke-at-ubers-self-driving-1793368132 https://jalopnik.com/safety-third-is-the-running-joke-at-ube...
bambax 9y ago
"Testing" of driverless cars seem to be the wrong way around. Software should try to learn from human drivers: watch them instead of being watched by them. The way it would work would be: the human is driving and the software is, at the same time, watching the driver and figuring out an action to take. Every time the driver's and the software's behavior differ, is logged and analyzed to figure out why there was a difference and who guessed better. But the way testing is currently going on, it seems millions of miles are wasted where nothing happens and nothing is learned.
- stouset 9y ago
  At some point you still need to switch roles. We’re at that point.
- c06n 9y ago
  > Software should try to learn from human drivers Yeah, that doesn't work though. Basically because you would need to have an excellent situation representation to really understand the drivers' reactions to outside events. But that does not exist. Perception and situation representation are key to mastering the driving task, and they both differ greatly between humans and machines.
  - Silhouette 9y ago
    Basically because you would need to have an excellent situation representation to really understand the drivers' reactions to outside events. But that does not exist. This is the #1 reason I'm sceptical about self-driving cars becoming ubiquitous any time soon. Clearly they have potential advantages over a human driver in terms of not being tired or distracted, better sensors and better reaction times, but their judgement in any given situation will always be a function of some predetermined inputs. It's a brute force approach. Until a self-driving car can recognise a pub door opening around throwing-out time where a drunk patron is about to stumble out into the road from a hidden position, or that it's about to pass a park and a nearby school just finished for the day so kids will be kicking balls around and running across the road to join their friends, or that the recent weather conditions make black ice likely and the cyclist it's about to pass doesn't seem very steady, and take corresponding actions to reduce both the risk and the consequences of a collision, it's going to take a lot of brute force to outperform an experienced and reasonably careful human driver. In short, reacting to an emergency 100ms faster than a human driver is good, but sufficient situational awareness and forward planning that you were never in the emergency situation in the first place is better.
matte_black 9y ago
Why don’t we require software engineers who work on self driving car software to go through licensing and certification. And then, if their code results in a death, they are liable and can have their license completely revoked, and they would be unable to work on self driving cars again.
- lhorie 9y ago
  My guess is that it's because the field is so new that there aren't really any experts that can define what are reasonable rules for said licensing and certifications
  - ghaff 9y ago
    They exist. They're required for some roles: https://insight.ieeeusa.org/articles/professional-licensure-for-computer-engineers-and-software-engineers/ https://insight.ieeeusa.org/articles/professional-licensure-...
    - Silhouette 9y ago
      But what qualifies the people administering those examinations to judge how good someone is at writing reliable software in safety-critical environments?
      - slavik81 9y ago
        The examiners don't judge that. They just check that you meet the educational requirements, that you did an apprenticeship under supervisors who have a good safety record, and that those supervisors think you are qualified. Then you get your license. If there's a safety incident relating to your work and you were acting recklessly, you may lose your license. That's the whole process. Repeat that over a long enough period of time and you tend to select for a more competent, safety-conscious group of engineers. Over the long term, its survival of the fittest. Reckless engineers have safety incidents and get barred from both working and from supervising new engineers. So, it tends to be the safer engineers who get to pass on their work culture to the next generation of engineers.
kristianov 9y ago
I hope on-road testing could be more like human drug testing. After all, both affect human lives.
- oldgradstudent 9y ago
  Drugs are tested under informed consent, not on unwilling third parties. Maybe testing of autonomous vehicles should be done off public roads (at least at this stage of development).
RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago
Are you suprised? Uber is a company that: * Flouted Taxi regulations * Living in legal gray zones in regards to contractors vs employees * Designed a system to avoid law enforcement * Performed shady tactics with its competitors * Illegally obtained the private medical records of a rape victim * Created a workplace where sexual harassment was routine * Illegally tested self-driving cars on public roads in California without obtaining the required state licenses. * Possibly stole a LIDAR design from a competitor Now their vehicle killed a pedestrian in a situation that the self driving vehicles should be much better than humans at (LIDAR can see in the dark, and the reaction time of a computer is much better than humans.) Uber has exhausted their "benefit of the doubt" reserve. Maybe, they need to be made an example of with massive losses to investors and venture capitalists as an object lesson that ethics really do matter, and that bad ethics will eventually hurt your bank account.
- Stanleyc23 9y ago
  if they are at fault they should be punished, but you do realize that the expectation for self driving vehicles is not to eliminate all car related deaths, right? edit: wow this triggered some people. somehow 'if they are at fault they should be punished' got interpreted as 'they are not at fault and should not be punished'
  - ubernostrum 9y ago
    The expectation is that a car that can "see" in a broader part of the spectrum than a human should have, y'know, detected a person in the street ahead, when there were no obstructions between the car and the person. There have been cars on the market for years now that can detect a dangerous situation ahead, even in the dark, and auto-brake. If they haven't caught up to several-years-ago's consumer model of car, then what on earth are they doing putting these things on public roads?
  - notahacker 9y ago
    I think it's fair to set the minimum expectation of not being much, much worse in a situation where decision making is utterly straightforward and where sensors ought to give it a significant advantage over humans. It also would appear that the vehicle fell well short of that minimum standard on this occasion.
d--b 9y ago
Uber's culture is bad for anything really...
etimberg 9y ago
Stuff like this is why P.Engs should be required in certain software fields
- diggernet 9y ago
  I'd upvote you to the top of the page if I could.
JohnJamesRambo 9y ago
"Uber announced that it had driven 2 million miles by December 2017 and is probably up to around 3 million miles today. If you do the math, that means that Uber's cars have killed people at roughly 25 times the rate of a typical human-driven car in the United States." Wow there goes that "safer than human drivers" argument.
- vcanales 9y ago
  /s ? It's a pretty unfair comparison, with 1 death on one side and over 30k on the other...
  - JohnJamesRambo 9y ago
    No because the rate is per million miles driven. It allows us to compare two different things. The sample size is one but it isn't looking great so far.
- reedx8 9y ago
  You can't just look at Uber to make a sweeping conclusion of all autonomous cars on the road. How many miles has Tesla, VW, Volvo, Waymo, Google, Ford, and Apple have?
- imh 9y ago
  Driverless cars are also being tested in relatively nice driving conditions. People, on the other hand, drive in all sorts of conditions. X deaths per Y easy driving miles is going to translate to many more than X deaths per Y representative driving miles.
  - jaclaz 9y ago
    >Driverless cars are also being tested in relatively nice driving conditions. People, on the other hand, drive in all sorts of conditions. I would add that people represent (as a whole) various kind of drivers, including the non-expert/fresh licensed, the elderly, the too sure of themselves, those speeding or not respecting road signals (or driving in connection with a crime), the emotionally fragile, those under the effect of alcohol or drugs, those tired by not having had enough sleep, etc., etc. The "model" for an autonomous vehicle should be instead a particular "perfect" subset, ideally it should replicate the behaviour of an hypothetical extremely prudent, healthy 30-something with some experience with safe driving, very familiar with the way his/her car handles, having had a nice night sleep, no use of alcohol or drugs, without any external pressure (to arrive in time, to do other chores apart driving) without a cellphone or tablet distracting him/her. If we could find this latter kind of drivers (should they actually exist) and isolate from the statistics the amount of incidents they caused, that would be the reference benchmark.
throwaway010718 9y ago
Machine learning and AI are data hungry algorithms and the concern is there isn't enough "emergency situation" data. Also a detector can not have both a 100% probability of detection and 0% probability of false alarm. You have to sacrifice one for the other and that is usually influenced by weighted probabilities and priorities (e.g., a smooth ride).
phyller 9y ago
"Uber recently placed an order for 24,000 Volvo cars that will be modified for driverless operation. Delivery is scheduled to start next year." Wow. The other driverless car players should be all over this lobbying to shut Uber down. If Uber massively deploys a commercial service with subpar quality in order to "win", and then those cars start getting into accidents, the entire field is going to be delayed by 10 years. The general public is not going to just think "Uber is bad", they are going to think "self-driving cars are bad". Politicians will jump all over it and we'll see very restrictive laws that no one will have the guts to replace for a long time. And honestly if that happens, that's probably what we would need anyway. If the industry doesn't want to be handcuffed they need to figure out some really good standardized regulations on sharing data with law enforcement, how to determine fault for self-driving vehicles, and what penalties there should be. That are fair and strict.
- selestify 9y ago
  Could Uber be doing this on purpose? They're way behind on self-driving tech, so maybe if they can't have it, no one can.
  - phyller 9y ago
    Interesting thought. They do see it as an existential threat to their company, and if any company would do something like that it would be them. But that would be pretty low, basically purposefully killing people in order to protect their business model.
  - phyller 9y ago
    The more I think about this the more it makes sense in a horrible way. The important thing for Uber is that they are first to market. If they are first to market there are two outcomes: a) they are successful, they make more money with lower fares because they don't need to pay drivers anymore. They basically take over the market that they are already dominating, beating competitors into bankruptcy. The market explodes as it is cheaper to get on demand cars than to own your own. $$$$$ b) they are not successful. They kill a hundred people in a month or two. The self-driving car industry gets shut down, and for the cost of a few hundred million dollars in settlements they keep their current market dominance in the current industry, but have to keep paying drivers. $$ The alternative, they are not first to market, someone else is and immediately replaces Uber with a network of cheaper self-driving cars: a) Uber goes out of business b) They can somehow convince someone to license the tech or sell them the cars at a reasonable price, making them vulnerable and less profitable, with no market advantage.
buildbot 9y ago
I don't understand how there isn't a non-ML based piece of code that looks at moving radar and lidar returns and preforms an emergency brake, light flash, horn, or dodge if that vector would intersect with any confidence. Even slowing down to 20MPH can turn a fatal accident into an injury.
- KKKKkkkk1 9y ago
  What if it has nothing to do with ML? You see a point cloud that's moving toward your lane at a speed estimate of say 2 mph. If that's below the sensor noise threshold, you might classify the cloud as a stationary object on the other lane (say a stranded car). In that case, by the time you realize that this stationary object has somehow moved itself into your own lane, it is already too late.
  - AlotOfReading 9y ago
    You slow down anyways, because it will almost always improve the situation and reduce your liability. Secondly, if the vision is so bad that it can't identify objects in its lane or predict vectors, it's not ready for the real world.
    - cmsj 9y ago
      Yes! This is how a sensible driver would behave - not quite sure what's going on ahead of you? SLOW THE FUCK DOWN. The story in the linked article about an Uber whipping through an intersection at 38mph next to two stationary lanes, seems sufficiently conclusive to me that their self-driving system is not ruled by a sense of caution. Here in the UK, we have speed limits, but the rules of the road also call drivers to consider "appropriate speed" - you slow down in situations where you might have to react with very little warning. This ought to be extremely easy for an automated system - it can measure its braking distance with high accuracy, it can measure distances to objects around it with high accuracy, it can determine exactly which areas of the world around it it can't see, that could pose a threat with relatively low warning, so just fucking slow down. I've long been bearish on full autonomous driving because I consider there to be so many corner cases in real world driving where ad-hoc non-verbal communication is required to solve traffic flow, that the computers would never catch up. Now I wonder if their solution is to just plough through every problem at 98% of the speed limit and then disclaim responsibility.
pdkl95 9y ago
> We don't need redundant brakes & steering or a fancy new car; we need better software," wrote engineer Anthony Levandowski Any engineer with this attitude needs to learn the lesson of the Therac-25. The issues in the Ars article are very similar to section 4 "Causal Factors" of the report[1]. > To get to that better software faster we should deploy the first 1000 cars asap. Is that admitting that they do not have the "better software" and intend to deploy 1000 cars using "lesser software"? That's treading dangerously close to potential manslaughter charges if prove this willful contempt for safety to a court. [1] http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf
- iClaudiusX 9y ago
  I get the feeling based on comments here that there is a severe lack of ethical and critical thinking among engineers and developers. I recognize that this is only a vocal minority but the constant mantra of "move fast and break things", where getting rich at any cost is seen as a virtue, has made me extremely disillusioned with this brand of startup culture. Doubly so when people are trading stock tips on how to profit from tragedy by supporting the worst actors in the field.
  - KKKKkkkk1 9y ago
    "Move fast and break things" is the motto of Facebook. It means that Facebook engineers are encouraged to make user-facing changes without red tape. If you are claiming that some self-driving car company has "move fast and break things" as their motto, then you are being willfully deceptive.
    - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
      Have you not noticed that "move fast and break things" is essentially how the entire startup space functions? When a social media company does it, it's merely annoying. Do it with dangerous machines, and people die.
  - JKCalhoun 9y ago
    I'm not sure the "self-driving car industry" can survive these possible (inevitable?) future scenarios: • Self-driving car kills child • Hackers send self-driving car on wild ride • Empty self-driving semi found in warehouse lot, GPS pirates make off with entire cargo
ghfbjdhhv 9y ago
This event has me thinking about job of the behind-the-wheel backup driver. They get an easier job than a real driver, at the cost of potentially taking the fall if an accident occurs. I wonder if the pay is better.
- TylerE 9y ago
  I actually don't think it's really easier. Continuous attention is easier to maintain than hours of boredom only to have to react out of nowhere...maybe.
- icc97 9y ago
  It's an equivalent job to a train driver
  - mrguyorama 9y ago
    Train drivers have immense amounts of regulation and systems in place to verify that they are paying attention and actually driving the train:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sifa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sifa
    - icc97 9y ago
      Yes exactly, we should be applying similar rules to the self-driving drivers.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
icc97 9y ago
I thought the speed limit was 35mph, but the article claims 40mph.
joejerryronnie 9y ago
Why is everyone considering it a forgone conclusion that self driving cars will quickly become much, much safer than human driven cars? Yes, lots of people die every year in human driven car accidents. But it is equally true that our most sophisticated AI/ML can only really operate within very narrowly defined parameters (at least when compared to the huge sets of uncertain parameters humans deal with every day in the real world). Driving is perhaps one of the most unpredictable activities we can engage in, anecdotally supported by my daily commute. What if our self driving software never becomes good enough? How many more deaths are we willing to go through to find out?
speedplane 9y ago
I was at SXSW a few weeks ago and went to an Uber driverless car talk. They spent the first half of the talk discussing driver safety, it felt incredibly hollow. If you really cared about safety, there are far more immediate and impactful solutions then spending billions on self-driving cars. If they came out and said that they were doing it to make money or make driving easier, it would have carried more weight. But you just can't trust a word this company says.

211 points by yohui 9y ago

I don't know, I have seen the video, the woman literally jumps into the road in front of the car. Even if the lidar got the woman it was probably assuming she will not jump into the road in front of the car, a reasonable assumption that any driver would do. I don't understand what people expect, if the car have to slow for any person on the side of road it will not move at all.

aaroninsf 9y ago

Surprising no one. "win-at-any-cost" and "second place is first looser" (sic) do not cohere with safety.

sureaboutthis 9y ago

I have two problems with this article. 1) They make it appear that Uber is a car manufacturer. 2) Even though Uber has not been determined to be at fault, the author seems to want to make it that way anyway.

vamin 9y ago
The author is making a distinction between whether Uber was legally at fault (as stated in the article, likely not) versus whether the accident was avoidable. I agree with the author's position that the accident was likely avoidable.
- femto 9y ago
  I think there is an argument for removing this ambiguity by making self driving cars automatically liable for all personal injury, whether the person be inside or outside the car. The only exception would be if the tester could prove intent by the other party, keeping in mind that a self-driving car will have extensive logs of its environment to use in such a defence. Supporting arguments include: 1) The physics of driving isn't random, so it could be said that there are no accidents in autonomous driving, only oversights. 2) It would set a minimum performance level by making it prohibitively expensive to have a dangerous car. Those who test responsibly would have a low enough injury rate that they could deal with the risk by taking out suitable insurance. 3) It would provide a strong incentive to make the best car possible and not to take expedient shortcuts. 4) Over time automatically liability would become irrelevant if it asymptotically forces the injury rate to zero. 5) We have an historic opportunity to create a culture that will eliminate the danger of cars. It might have an increased short-term once off cost, but a huge long term payoff in the reduction of health costs and human misery. If we miss this opportunity we will be stuck with the long term cost of an industry that will be competitively driven towards poorer performance, potentially against the will of the majority of players, by the actions of a few.
  - URSpider94 9y ago
    Your concept that there are no accidents, only oversights, is not correct. Say I’m crossing the street and I don’t see your car coming, because I look the wrong way or I’m distracted, or my view is blocked by the sun. You may not be able to avoid hitting me. Additionally, if we train self-driving cars to always give way to pedestrians who even look like they might cross the street, they’re going to have a heck of a time getting through cities. Kids are going to learn that they can trigger a squealing emergency stop by lunging towards the curb - great fun! What I think WILL happen is that autonomous cars will have to buy blanket insurance policies that cover their entire fleet. High accident/fatality rates will result in high insurance premiums, which will put bad actors out of business.
    - telchar 9y ago
      You're suggesting that self-driving cars may have to drive slowly and carefully in cities. I don't really see a problem with that. Pedestrians aren't frequently in the immediate vicinity of roads with limits higher than 35mph in my experience. Any human driver has to drive cautiously in the vicinity of pedestrians anyway, if they don't want to risk manslaughter. I'd want SDVs to do that too.
      - URSpider94 9y ago
        Slowly and carefully, yes. Assuming that any pedestrian could leap in front of your car in violation of traffic laws - no. Where I live in California, there are two major streets with crosswalks in regular use, with speed limits of 40 mph or higher (and travel speeds of 50+ mph), within a quarter mile of my home.
    - femto 9y ago
      I think your first paragraph is written from the perspective of a human driver. The machine can predict based on physics. If anything a person who does not see a car will be more predictable, not less, as they will tend to be moving uniformly and not taking evasive action. Taking into account optimal (computer driven) car stopping distances, the maximum acceleration of a person and typical pedestrian densities, I don't think getting though cities would be an issue, especially outside the CBD. Even in areas with very high pedestrian traffic cars will be able to get though. In support of this argument, I offer today's "shared" pedestrian zones, where cars and people mix. Pedestrians have right of way, cars are limited to 10km/h, but the cars manage to get though without injuring anyone. Cars would naturally do high speeds on main roads with low pedestrian density and lower speeds (with very short stopping distance) at high pedestrian density. Why should children have a propensity to intentionally jump in front cars above and beyond anyone else? That's bias. If anyone intentionally jumped in front of a car then it would be covered by the exemption that I proposed: that the car would not be liable if intent could be proved. Based on the car's sensor logs it would be pretty easy to prove that someone intended to get hit. If the car managed to stop and the person ran away it would then be relatively easy to track that person down based on the logs and charge them with a crime. In any case, I think that that is a hypothetical situation which is unlikely to occur. For the vast majority of people self preservation would trump the desire to cause trouble by putting oneself in a terrifying and life-threatening situation, so I think it would be negligibly rare.
- Guvante 9y ago
  I think even if you think the accident was unavoidable it is certainly damning that the car never attempted to stop.
- chopin 9y ago
  In Germany, when an accident is avoidable, you are 100% at fault (as it should be) criminally and civilly. Isn't that the case in the US? I'd be astonished if that were the case. If you enforce your right of way and kill somebody, that's manslaughter in my book.
hndamien 9y ago
I think the standards are different in this case. While the pedestrian definitely should not have been where they were, and if this were an incident with a human driver, you would probably say the driver was not at fault, I think this is slightly different. They are on the road with conditions because what they are doing is somewhat experimental still. There is a safety driver for a reason that did not respond. A human driver may have collided but would have responded and potentially avoided a fatality (if not a collision). The benefits of autonomous driving completely failed on all counts in this case, which imply that being on a public road is far to early for Uber - suggesting some fault to lie with Uber or the regulators.
TillE 9y ago
Every engineer on this project at Uber knows very well that their car completely failed in one of its most basic expected functions. It's incredibly obvious, and a number of independent experts have said as much. I'd be fairly surprised if there's any real appetite at Uber to continue with this now. It was never anywhere near their core competency.
- Silhouette 9y ago
  It was never anywhere near their core competency. Maybe not directly, but is Uber's current business model sustainable without some form of self-driving technology replacing their human drivers?
  - JimmyAustin 9y ago
    In the short term, yes, but the moment someone else gets a self driving car they’ll be destroyed.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- carboy0808 9y ago
  You are an actual idiot if you believe your last paragraph. The race for self driving cars is critical to any rideshare company long term, and is one Uber has invested billions into.
- saas_co_de 9y ago
  Interesting question is if the LIDAR was not being used because of the settlement with Google and agreement not to use any of the contested tech.
- tantalor 9y ago
  > core competency 3 years ago Uber hired ~50 specialists from CMU to work on autonomous vehicles. I'd call that a core competency. https://www.theverge.com/transportation/2015/5/19/8622831/uber-self-driving-cars-carnegie-mellon-poached https://www.theverge.com/transportation/2015/5/19/8622831/ub...
CydeWeys 9y ago
The article addresses your second point: "Indeed, it's entirely possible to imagine a self-driving car system that always follows the letter of the law—and hence never does anything that would lead to legal finding of fault—but is nevertheless way more dangerous than the average human driver. Indeed, such a system might behave a lot like Uber's cars do today." It doesn't matter if Uber makes cars that are technically not at fault, if they're mowing over pedestrians at a rate significantly higher than human drivers then they should never be allowed on public roads. People mess up occasionally. The solution is not an instant death sentence administered by algorithm.
- sureaboutthis 9y ago
  That paragraph is opinion of the author of the article which is my complaint. And, again, your second paragraph is an issue I also have. That people are stating that Uber is a car manufacturer.
  - CydeWeys 9y ago
    I'm not sure I understand your objection. If Uber's cars are killing people at a much higher rate than human drivers, then that's a huge problem. They shouldn't be allowed on the roads at all, as they'd vastly increase traffic deaths if widely used. Whether or not someone is at fault in a given accident only matters to the insurance company; that person is still dead. What is your counter-argument? That it doesn't matter if many more people die with Uber self-driving cars on the road so long as everyone who dies made a mistake? And whether Uber makes the entire car or not isn't germane to the discussion. They are responsible for the safety of said cars, which is what we're discussing here.
    - sureaboutthis 9y ago
      Your first paragraph, here, doesn't matter. He is stating opinion as if it were fact and what he said (not you now) isn't fact at all. Your second paragraph emphasizes my point. You,too, are stating that Uber is a car manufacturer, in whole or in part. Does Uber manufacture any parts of this car at all? The impression the opinion piece gives is that Uber manufacturers cars.
saas_co_de 9y ago
The other missing part is that it is the human driver who is responsible. This is a test vehicle and their job is to be ready to take over at any time as if they are driving. It seems unlikely that the Police will find any fault because they probably don't want to have to file a criminal charge against the driver, but that is who it would go against if there was fault.
- Nomentatus 9y ago
  One more person who had no trouble taking the salary, but just didn't want to do the job. Fraud, on their part IMHO.
- foobarian 9y ago
  It surprises me how downplayed this is. If you legally treat the Uber car as an ordinary car that happens to have a really fancy auto-assist, the driver should be on the hook. This person had eyes off the road for 5 seconds prior to the crash according to the article. There was a case some years ago in Boston where a subway rear-ended another one because the operator was texting. The driver was fired and probably would have been prosecuted if there had been fatalities. Taking eyes off the road for this long seems insane to me.
Tobba_ 9y ago
Yeah I'd be fairly concerned about them lying to or simply bribing the police too.

sitkack 9y ago

> We don't need redundant brakes & steering or a fancy new car; we need better software," wrote engineer Anthony Levandowski to Alphabet CEO Larry Page in January 2016. Looks like Uber has attracted Levandowski due to his cultural fit.

comex 9y ago
Hmm, but wouldn’t his priorities be correct in the context of this crash? There hasn’t been any suggestion (so far) that the crash occurred because some hardware component stopped working; rather, it seems like the software failed to identify the pedestrian in time. So better software seems precisely what was needed. Though I can imagine that better sensors might also have helped…
- ddeck 9y ago
  The issue is not that he wanted better software, it's that he appeared willing to compromise safety to get it faster in order to beat his competitors to market, as is clear from the remainder of that quote: "To get to that better software faster we should deploy the first 1000 cars asap. I don't understand why we are not doing that. Part of our team seems to be afraid to ship." And from another email: "the team is not moving fast enough due to a combination of risk aversion and lack of urgency"
  - toast0 9y ago
    The rest of the quote is much more powerful. It's pretty irresponsible to ship 1000 self driving cars onto public roads at this point. (Regardless of who is shipping them) On the other hand, redundant steering and braking seem like probable overengineering. Brakes are already somewhat redudnant (dual section master cylinders were common in the 70s and are almost certainly in any modern vehicle), and better software could periodically verify they're working and if not, coast to a stop. Steering failure could be handled by engaging the brakes. Simultaneous failure is likely rare and catastrophic anyway -- losing a wheel and having the brakes pressure go with it can happen, and when it does, you put on your blinkers and hope you come to rest in a safe manner.

nasmorn 9y ago

Uber is the Blackwater of Silicon Valley

aylons 9y ago

"Move fast and break things" is exactly the opposite of what a responsible driver must do.

dmix 9y ago
Not sure how that could be the philosophy of any self-driving car company? That'd be extremely foolish. And regardless of the dumb things the previous Uber CEO has done in the past and the big deal people are making over a $150 license, they have still hired some of the best engineers in the world. You basically have to find the brightest-of-the-brightest to build AI... and Uber pays very well and puts plenty of effort into recruiting that talent. Not to mention the massive PR and monetary risks that are inherent in killing people with your products. That would make any company highly risk-adverse.
telchar 9y ago
I've been joking for at least a year that Uber's motto is "move fast and break people". I'm saddened that this has come to pass but not surprised.
- fstuff 9y ago
  Actually their motto is "Safety third" https://jalopnik.com/safety-third-is-the-running-joke-at-ubers-self-driving-1793368132 https://jalopnik.com/safety-third-is-the-running-joke-at-ube...

bambax 9y ago

"Testing" of driverless cars seem to be the wrong way around. Software should try to learn from human drivers: watch them instead of being watched by them. The way it would work would be: the human is driving and the software is, at the same time, watching the driver and figuring out an action to take. Every time the driver's and the software's behavior differ, is logged and analyzed to figure out why there was a difference and who guessed better. But the way testing is currently going on, it seems millions of miles are wasted where nothing happens and nothing is learned.

stouset 9y ago
At some point you still need to switch roles. We’re at that point.
c06n 9y ago
> Software should try to learn from human drivers Yeah, that doesn't work though. Basically because you would need to have an excellent situation representation to really understand the drivers' reactions to outside events. But that does not exist. Perception and situation representation are key to mastering the driving task, and they both differ greatly between humans and machines.
- Silhouette 9y ago
  Basically because you would need to have an excellent situation representation to really understand the drivers' reactions to outside events. But that does not exist. This is the #1 reason I'm sceptical about self-driving cars becoming ubiquitous any time soon. Clearly they have potential advantages over a human driver in terms of not being tired or distracted, better sensors and better reaction times, but their judgement in any given situation will always be a function of some predetermined inputs. It's a brute force approach. Until a self-driving car can recognise a pub door opening around throwing-out time where a drunk patron is about to stumble out into the road from a hidden position, or that it's about to pass a park and a nearby school just finished for the day so kids will be kicking balls around and running across the road to join their friends, or that the recent weather conditions make black ice likely and the cyclist it's about to pass doesn't seem very steady, and take corresponding actions to reduce both the risk and the consequences of a collision, it's going to take a lot of brute force to outperform an experienced and reasonably careful human driver. In short, reacting to an emergency 100ms faster than a human driver is good, but sufficient situational awareness and forward planning that you were never in the emergency situation in the first place is better.

matte_black 9y ago

Why don’t we require software engineers who work on self driving car software to go through licensing and certification. And then, if their code results in a death, they are liable and can have their license completely revoked, and they would be unable to work on self driving cars again.

lhorie 9y ago
My guess is that it's because the field is so new that there aren't really any experts that can define what are reasonable rules for said licensing and certifications
- ghaff 9y ago
  They exist. They're required for some roles: https://insight.ieeeusa.org/articles/professional-licensure-for-computer-engineers-and-software-engineers/ https://insight.ieeeusa.org/articles/professional-licensure-...
  - Silhouette 9y ago
    But what qualifies the people administering those examinations to judge how good someone is at writing reliable software in safety-critical environments?
    - slavik81 9y ago
      The examiners don't judge that. They just check that you meet the educational requirements, that you did an apprenticeship under supervisors who have a good safety record, and that those supervisors think you are qualified. Then you get your license. If there's a safety incident relating to your work and you were acting recklessly, you may lose your license. That's the whole process. Repeat that over a long enough period of time and you tend to select for a more competent, safety-conscious group of engineers. Over the long term, its survival of the fittest. Reckless engineers have safety incidents and get barred from both working and from supervising new engineers. So, it tends to be the safer engineers who get to pass on their work culture to the next generation of engineers.

kristianov 9y ago

I hope on-road testing could be more like human drug testing. After all, both affect human lives.

oldgradstudent 9y ago
Drugs are tested under informed consent, not on unwilling third parties. Maybe testing of autonomous vehicles should be done off public roads (at least at this stage of development).

RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago

Are you suprised? Uber is a company that: * Flouted Taxi regulations * Living in legal gray zones in regards to contractors vs employees * Designed a system to avoid law enforcement * Performed shady tactics with its competitors * Illegally obtained the private medical records of a rape victim * Created a workplace where sexual harassment was routine * Illegally tested self-driving cars on public roads in California without obtaining the required state licenses. * Possibly stole a LIDAR design from a competitor Now their vehicle killed a pedestrian in a situation that the self driving vehicles should be much better than humans at (LIDAR can see in the dark, and the reaction time of a computer is much better than humans.) Uber has exhausted their "benefit of the doubt" reserve. Maybe, they need to be made an example of with massive losses to investors and venture capitalists as an object lesson that ethics really do matter, and that bad ethics will eventually hurt your bank account.

Stanleyc23 9y ago
if they are at fault they should be punished, but you do realize that the expectation for self driving vehicles is not to eliminate all car related deaths, right? edit: wow this triggered some people. somehow 'if they are at fault they should be punished' got interpreted as 'they are not at fault and should not be punished'
- ubernostrum 9y ago
  The expectation is that a car that can "see" in a broader part of the spectrum than a human should have, y'know, detected a person in the street ahead, when there were no obstructions between the car and the person. There have been cars on the market for years now that can detect a dangerous situation ahead, even in the dark, and auto-brake. If they haven't caught up to several-years-ago's consumer model of car, then what on earth are they doing putting these things on public roads?
- notahacker 9y ago
  I think it's fair to set the minimum expectation of not being much, much worse in a situation where decision making is utterly straightforward and where sensors ought to give it a significant advantage over humans. It also would appear that the vehicle fell well short of that minimum standard on this occasion.

d--b 9y ago

Uber's culture is bad for anything really...

etimberg 9y ago

Stuff like this is why P.Engs should be required in certain software fields

diggernet 9y ago
I'd upvote you to the top of the page if I could.

JohnJamesRambo 9y ago

"Uber announced that it had driven 2 million miles by December 2017 and is probably up to around 3 million miles today. If you do the math, that means that Uber's cars have killed people at roughly 25 times the rate of a typical human-driven car in the United States." Wow there goes that "safer than human drivers" argument.

vcanales 9y ago
/s ? It's a pretty unfair comparison, with 1 death on one side and over 30k on the other...
- JohnJamesRambo 9y ago
  No because the rate is per million miles driven. It allows us to compare two different things. The sample size is one but it isn't looking great so far.
reedx8 9y ago
You can't just look at Uber to make a sweeping conclusion of all autonomous cars on the road. How many miles has Tesla, VW, Volvo, Waymo, Google, Ford, and Apple have?
imh 9y ago
Driverless cars are also being tested in relatively nice driving conditions. People, on the other hand, drive in all sorts of conditions. X deaths per Y easy driving miles is going to translate to many more than X deaths per Y representative driving miles.
- jaclaz 9y ago
  >Driverless cars are also being tested in relatively nice driving conditions. People, on the other hand, drive in all sorts of conditions. I would add that people represent (as a whole) various kind of drivers, including the non-expert/fresh licensed, the elderly, the too sure of themselves, those speeding or not respecting road signals (or driving in connection with a crime), the emotionally fragile, those under the effect of alcohol or drugs, those tired by not having had enough sleep, etc., etc. The "model" for an autonomous vehicle should be instead a particular "perfect" subset, ideally it should replicate the behaviour of an hypothetical extremely prudent, healthy 30-something with some experience with safe driving, very familiar with the way his/her car handles, having had a nice night sleep, no use of alcohol or drugs, without any external pressure (to arrive in time, to do other chores apart driving) without a cellphone or tablet distracting him/her. If we could find this latter kind of drivers (should they actually exist) and isolate from the statistics the amount of incidents they caused, that would be the reference benchmark.

throwaway010718 9y ago

Machine learning and AI are data hungry algorithms and the concern is there isn't enough "emergency situation" data. Also a detector can not have both a 100% probability of detection and 0% probability of false alarm. You have to sacrifice one for the other and that is usually influenced by weighted probabilities and priorities (e.g., a smooth ride).

phyller 9y ago

"Uber recently placed an order for 24,000 Volvo cars that will be modified for driverless operation. Delivery is scheduled to start next year." Wow. The other driverless car players should be all over this lobbying to shut Uber down. If Uber massively deploys a commercial service with subpar quality in order to "win", and then those cars start getting into accidents, the entire field is going to be delayed by 10 years. The general public is not going to just think "Uber is bad", they are going to think "self-driving cars are bad". Politicians will jump all over it and we'll see very restrictive laws that no one will have the guts to replace for a long time. And honestly if that happens, that's probably what we would need anyway. If the industry doesn't want to be handcuffed they need to figure out some really good standardized regulations on sharing data with law enforcement, how to determine fault for self-driving vehicles, and what penalties there should be. That are fair and strict.

selestify 9y ago
Could Uber be doing this on purpose? They're way behind on self-driving tech, so maybe if they can't have it, no one can.
- phyller 9y ago
  Interesting thought. They do see it as an existential threat to their company, and if any company would do something like that it would be them. But that would be pretty low, basically purposefully killing people in order to protect their business model.
- phyller 9y ago
  The more I think about this the more it makes sense in a horrible way. The important thing for Uber is that they are first to market. If they are first to market there are two outcomes: a) they are successful, they make more money with lower fares because they don't need to pay drivers anymore. They basically take over the market that they are already dominating, beating competitors into bankruptcy. The market explodes as it is cheaper to get on demand cars than to own your own. $$$$$ b) they are not successful. They kill a hundred people in a month or two. The self-driving car industry gets shut down, and for the cost of a few hundred million dollars in settlements they keep their current market dominance in the current industry, but have to keep paying drivers. $$ The alternative, they are not first to market, someone else is and immediately replaces Uber with a network of cheaper self-driving cars: a) Uber goes out of business b) They can somehow convince someone to license the tech or sell them the cars at a reasonable price, making them vulnerable and less profitable, with no market advantage.

buildbot 9y ago

I don't understand how there isn't a non-ML based piece of code that looks at moving radar and lidar returns and preforms an emergency brake, light flash, horn, or dodge if that vector would intersect with any confidence. Even slowing down to 20MPH can turn a fatal accident into an injury.

KKKKkkkk1 9y ago
What if it has nothing to do with ML? You see a point cloud that's moving toward your lane at a speed estimate of say 2 mph. If that's below the sensor noise threshold, you might classify the cloud as a stationary object on the other lane (say a stranded car). In that case, by the time you realize that this stationary object has somehow moved itself into your own lane, it is already too late.
- AlotOfReading 9y ago
  You slow down anyways, because it will almost always improve the situation and reduce your liability. Secondly, if the vision is so bad that it can't identify objects in its lane or predict vectors, it's not ready for the real world.
  - cmsj 9y ago
    Yes! This is how a sensible driver would behave - not quite sure what's going on ahead of you? SLOW THE FUCK DOWN. The story in the linked article about an Uber whipping through an intersection at 38mph next to two stationary lanes, seems sufficiently conclusive to me that their self-driving system is not ruled by a sense of caution. Here in the UK, we have speed limits, but the rules of the road also call drivers to consider "appropriate speed" - you slow down in situations where you might have to react with very little warning. This ought to be extremely easy for an automated system - it can measure its braking distance with high accuracy, it can measure distances to objects around it with high accuracy, it can determine exactly which areas of the world around it it can't see, that could pose a threat with relatively low warning, so just fucking slow down. I've long been bearish on full autonomous driving because I consider there to be so many corner cases in real world driving where ad-hoc non-verbal communication is required to solve traffic flow, that the computers would never catch up. Now I wonder if their solution is to just plough through every problem at 98% of the speed limit and then disclaim responsibility.

pdkl95 9y ago

> We don't need redundant brakes & steering or a fancy new car; we need better software," wrote engineer Anthony Levandowski Any engineer with this attitude needs to learn the lesson of the Therac-25. The issues in the Ars article are very similar to section 4 "Causal Factors" of the report[1]. > To get to that better software faster we should deploy the first 1000 cars asap. Is that admitting that they do not have the "better software" and intend to deploy 1000 cars using "lesser software"? That's treading dangerously close to potential manslaughter charges if prove this willful contempt for safety to a court. [1] http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf

iClaudiusX 9y ago
I get the feeling based on comments here that there is a severe lack of ethical and critical thinking among engineers and developers. I recognize that this is only a vocal minority but the constant mantra of "move fast and break things", where getting rich at any cost is seen as a virtue, has made me extremely disillusioned with this brand of startup culture. Doubly so when people are trading stock tips on how to profit from tragedy by supporting the worst actors in the field.
- KKKKkkkk1 9y ago
  "Move fast and break things" is the motto of Facebook. It means that Facebook engineers are encouraged to make user-facing changes without red tape. If you are claiming that some self-driving car company has "move fast and break things" as their motto, then you are being willfully deceptive.
  - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
    Have you not noticed that "move fast and break things" is essentially how the entire startup space functions? When a social media company does it, it's merely annoying. Do it with dangerous machines, and people die.
- JKCalhoun 9y ago
  I'm not sure the "self-driving car industry" can survive these possible (inevitable?) future scenarios: • Self-driving car kills child • Hackers send self-driving car on wild ride • Empty self-driving semi found in warehouse lot, GPS pirates make off with entire cargo

ghfbjdhhv 9y ago

This event has me thinking about job of the behind-the-wheel backup driver. They get an easier job than a real driver, at the cost of potentially taking the fall if an accident occurs. I wonder if the pay is better.

TylerE 9y ago
I actually don't think it's really easier. Continuous attention is easier to maintain than hours of boredom only to have to react out of nowhere...maybe.
icc97 9y ago
It's an equivalent job to a train driver
- mrguyorama 9y ago
  Train drivers have immense amounts of regulation and systems in place to verify that they are paying attention and actually driving the train:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sifa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sifa
  - icc97 9y ago
    Yes exactly, we should be applying similar rules to the self-driving drivers.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

icc97 9y ago

I thought the speed limit was 35mph, but the article claims 40mph.

joejerryronnie 9y ago

Why is everyone considering it a forgone conclusion that self driving cars will quickly become much, much safer than human driven cars? Yes, lots of people die every year in human driven car accidents. But it is equally true that our most sophisticated AI/ML can only really operate within very narrowly defined parameters (at least when compared to the huge sets of uncertain parameters humans deal with every day in the real world). Driving is perhaps one of the most unpredictable activities we can engage in, anecdotally supported by my daily commute. What if our self driving software never becomes good enough? How many more deaths are we willing to go through to find out?

speedplane 9y ago

I was at SXSW a few weeks ago and went to an Uber driverless car talk. They spent the first half of the talk discussing driver safety, it felt incredibly hollow. If you really cared about safety, there are far more immediate and impactful solutions then spending billions on self-driving cars. If they came out and said that they were doing it to make money or make driving easier, it would have carried more weight. But you just can't trust a word this company says.