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Saying nothing about Google/Waymo, it appears they're allowed to continue? Their self-driving technology seems far more advanced, I think it would be unfair to

Saying nothing about Google/Waymo, it appears they're allowed to continue? Their self-driving technology seems far more advanced, I think it would be unfair to punish all the players for the bad actions of a few. In particular, Uber seems to have been operating self-driving cars recklessly and in an attempt to "move fast and break things". When those things are people's lives, that's unacceptable. I'm all for interesting technology, but sometimes existing rules are there for a reason. I particularly hope this doesn't dissuade individual states from making leaps to embrace a particular technology. I think that's one benefit of the US: individual states have a lot of power to allow a new technology or permit testing that's illegal or in a gray area in the rest of the country. Arizona made a bet on self-driving technology. I applaud Arizona, even if the bet in this case might have turned out badly.

onetimemanytime 9y ago
Or maybe Uber got unlucky and they had to be suspended. I wonder how many miles they had and every how many miles does an accident happens with human drivers.
- EpicEng 9y ago
  It's been posted in related threads, bit many, many more human miles are driven per fatality. The problem is that the number of self driving car incidents is too low to reliably extrapolate out.
- Erlich_Bachman 9y ago
  Watch the video of the accident. Even though it's dark (llooks to have been manipulated afterwards), you can still judge the actual situations in terms of the position of the lights, and the car and pedestrian - to see that it was obviously the car's fault because it should have seen the pedestrian with the lidar, or if the lidar was deactivated - it should have driven with much lower velocity.
- ggg9990 9y ago
  Uber did not get unlucky -- they are simply an evil company. Their cars need human intervention every 13 miles as opposed to Google's every 5,600 miles -- they were not fit for the road but Uber let them out anyways. Uber should be shut down and the principals should get life without parole.
  - crististm 9y ago
    Fair judgment but where did you get those figures from?
    - icebraining 9y ago
      "As of March, Uber was struggling to meet its target of 13 miles per “intervention” in Arizona, according to 100 pages of company documents obtained by The New York Times" https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/technology/uber-self-driving-cars-arizona.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/technology/uber-self-d...
  - Aspyre 9y ago
    The numbers you are comparing do not measure the same thing.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      Care to expand on that?
spiderPig 9y ago
Which makes me think of it would be prudent for the government or military to invest in this tech as well. Companies like Northrop Grumman while being bureaucratic nightmares, take safety pretty seriously.
- zitterbewegung 9y ago
  This whole thing was started by a DARPA grand challenge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge Industry takes the lead after DARPA's investment which makes sense.
  - Someone 9y ago
    Started? The Wikipedia page you mention says ”Fully autonomous vehicles have been an international pursuit for many years, from endeavors in Japan (starting in 1977)”, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_autonomous_cars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_autonomous_cars lists attempts going back to the 1930s (1920s, if you take ‘radio controlled’ as a form of autonomy) The first DARPA grand challenge was announced in 2002 and held in 2004.
    - Fricken 9y ago
      The theory is that the chain of effect that led to where we are today with autonomous vehicle development began with the Big Bang, but it's generally agreed that the current development paradigm crystalized through the DARPA Grand Challenges in 2004, 2005 and the Darpa Urban challenge in 2007, though we also owe a great deal to deep learning, which Google didn't utilize in Autonomous vehicles until 2014.
  - MertsA 9y ago
    The urban challenge could very well be the best thing to ever come out of DARPA. Riding in the OshKosh truck going around some actual roads in rough conditions is when autonomous cars became "real" to me. In relatively little time they had it going down roads in the woods and driving at high speeds within a few feet of a fence. Now that truck seems clunky and primitive in comparison even just against what Tesla is doing on production cars just 10 years later. Autonomous cars in another 10 years time still feels like a pipedream but then again I would have thought the same thing about where we are today 10 years ago.
cbron 9y ago
Yes Waymo is still active. I live in the testing zone and see an enormous amount of their vans. About 1 for every 5 minutes of driving.
- Cheyana 9y ago
  I drove down a main road here in Chandler, Arizona yesterday and saw three in five minutes. Based on all my experiences on the road with them in the last few months I’d say the chances of them having an incident similar to Uber are much less.
  - komali2 9y ago
    I actually trust the waymo cars more than regular ones now when I'm on my bicycle or motorcycle. Granted they are absurdly "cautious drivers" and can be mildly annoying to be stuck behind in a car.
    - konschubert 9y ago
      This is the thing that makes me most excited about autonomous vehicles.
      - B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago
        Amen. One day they they'll write "Strangely, they killed <this many> per year with cars and did not even bat an eye."
    - Zanni 9y ago
      This strikes me as a risk factor that no one is really discussing. We talk about the dangers of Level 3/4 autonomy, where the driver is still responsible for the car, but autopilot is doing most of the work, leading to a bored/disengaged driver who's not ready to react when it's actually necessary. We don't hear as much pedestrians taking it for granted that a car will stop for them, right of way or no, because of their experience with self-driving cars. Leading to the inevitable accident when they step in front of a human-piloted car who isn't paying attention / can't see them.
bitumen 9y ago
I think the public will probably feel the same way, but if this happens again with another company, I think there will be sustained backlash. Hopefully Waymo is as advanced as they’re advertising, and given what a terrible company Uber is by comparison, that doesn’t seem to be an unreasonable assumption. You know what they say though, once is a mistake, twice is a habit.
- foobarian 9y ago
  Hopefully Waymo has test drivers that actually pay attention.
  - galdosdi 9y ago
    Unlike Uber, Waymo has always said they do not believe (based on data and experience) "safety drivers" are a realistic safety measure, because normal human beings do not have the ability to concentrate hard on a task for 8 hours a day that they have absolutely no control/feedback upon. If this is not obvious to you, you have never tried doing such a task. Try it and you will change your mind immediately.
    - joejerryronnie 9y ago
      I believe the safety drivers are primarily responsible for getting the autonomous cars to resume driving again after they've stopped for some unknown reason, not to react in a fraction of a second to divert a disaster.
      - galdosdi 9y ago
        In practice, yes. In theory, as is obvious from all these comment threads, people seem to think the "safety drivers" (think about that name...) are there to actually, like, you know, improve safety.
      - Piskvorrr 9y ago
        That's the stated goal, I believe. I also believe that the actual task is "scapegoat." I sure hope the people taking this job offer are at least aware of this.
ducktoller 9y ago
There was a person at the wheel. That person wasn't paying full attention to the road. From the video of the crash, it looks like the woman at the wheel was looking at their phone. Why is no one acknowledging that this woman was responsible for taking over the wheel if necessary for any reason. When I have cruise control on, I take my feet off of the pedals and rest them on the floor. But if, say, a homeless person with a bicycle walks out into the middle of the road at night with a black sweatshirt on in front of my car, then I step on the brakes. And why is no one acknowledging that a homeless person walked out into the middle of the street at night in a black sweatshirt. I definitely don't know whether I, even if I wasn't on my phone like the car operator was, would've seen the person in the road with enough time to slam on the brakes. I might've killed that person walking across the road by mistake, too. Like millions of other people on the road every single day, the car operator was on their smartphone while they were at the wheel. And like 3-5 million other people a year, the homeless person walking across the street was killed in a car accident. The woman walking across the street and the woman at the wheel of the car broke the law. Uber didn't break any laws as far as I can tell. They were as responsible as any other company building self-driving cars as far as I can tell, too. I don't think it's fair to put the fault on Uber here.
- amelius 9y ago
  Cruise control is different because you still have your hands on the wheel.
  - ducktoller 9y ago
    A fully autonomous car is different, too. The person at the wheel when that woman was killed was responsible for stepping on the brakes if necessary. And when I have cruise control on, I'm also responsible for stepping on the brakes if necessary.
    - amelius 9y ago
      Yeah, but with cruise control, at least having your hands on the wheel forces you to pay attention. Really, I think Uber should have used tech to make sure the driver is alert. And test whether the driver can stay alert in a simulator. It's too easy to blame the driver.
qwerty456127 9y ago
> bad actions of a few What bad actions? If you mean an AI car killing a person - that's hardly "an action", that's an accident. Classic human-driven cars kill people every day yet are allowed to continue operation. Do people really expect self-driving cars to be not just more safe than classic but actually 100% safe? By the way I myself don't drive at all and only use public transport (and a bicycle to ride the countryside). A major reason stopping me from driving is I can't logically understand how can I make sure I am not going to kill anybody if I drive at a speed considered normal (rather than something ridiculous like 15 km/h) and somebody may jump out right in front of my car suddenly (which is very very far from an impossible encounter). I am totally car-phobic yet I really doubt suspending self-driving cars operation can make the roads more safe. I trust AIs much more than humans when it comes to subjects like this - they can fail occasionally (especially in guaranteed failure situations like when a pedestrian emerges right in front of you all of a sudden) but are seemingly less prone to fail than humans are.
- jonathanstrange 9y ago
  One problem with these comparisons is the misinterpretation of statistical data. For general policy making statistics are useful, but for personal decisions you need to take them with a grain of salt and switch on your brain. Human traffic accident statistics include the totality of reckless drivers, street racers, and drunken idiots. Would you readily be a passenger when they drive? I wouldn't. At the same time, the statistics also include the calmest, best, and most reasonable drivers you've ever met in your life. I think it's reasonable to expect self-driving cars to always drive better than your average drunk college student with 1 year of driving experience and instead perform more like the best drivers you've ever met. So yes, self-driving cars should perform above the human average.
- knuththetruth 9y ago
  >What bad actions? Uber disabled the safety systems included with the car that was involved in the incident. They relied solely on their own, half-baked tech when these systems could have saved the life of person who was killed: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-26/uber-disabled-volvo-suv-s-standard-safety-system-before-fatality https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-26/uber-disa...
z3t4 9y ago
"always be hustling" is/was the Uber motto. " move fast and break things" is/was Facebook.
- galdosdi 9y ago
  True, but the concept still applies here. Uber has gained a well deserved reputation for being careless as long as what they are being careless with belongs to other people.
  - z3t4 9y ago
    Related talk by Bryan Cantrill (Principles of Technology Leadership) Watch the whole video, it's good! https://youtu.be/9QMGAtxUlAc?t=43m46s https://youtu.be/9QMGAtxUlAc?t=43m46s
- mtgx 9y ago
  Well, do these comments sound like "hustling" to you or more like "move fast and kill things"? https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/20/17144090/uber-car-accident-arizona-safety-anthony-levandowski-waymo https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/20/17144090/uber-car-acciden...
lern_too_spel 9y ago
Arizona did something reckless and stupid. Unfortunately, somebody other than the decision maker paid the price. Arizona stupidly allowed Uber to operate after California kicked Uber out and after seeing the videos of Uber cars running red lights in SF. For what? For a few temporary (the plan is to be fully autonomous quickly) low paying test driver jobs? The engineers making the big salaries stayed in California (or Pittsburgh in Uber's case). https://www.google.com/amp/amp.fox10phoenix.com/news/arizona-news/arizona-governor-to-welcome-uber-selfdriving-cars_ https://www.google.com/amp/amp.fox10phoenix.com/news/arizona...
- galdosdi 9y ago
  This is what's always confused me. The usual play is to suck up to a corporation in the hopes that a bunch of jobs or other investment will show up, but self-driving testing is kinda a perfect example of something that will not give any economic benefit to the testbed state at all. It takes very little local investment, and it's a temporary thing that will only yield benefit for the corporation doing the testing, and as soon as they have as much data as they want they can leave and use that data anywhere else. And if what Arizona hoped for is to get self driving taxis early, well, other states can simply let the sucker states like Arizona do the testing, then wait to legalize self driving till the day after it proves itself, thus reaping close to 100% of the benefits with close to 0% of the disadvantages. I honestly think Arizona politicians just blundered because they were following the typical playbook out of pure habit. I hope the explanation is not less innocent than that, but that's also very possible. Petty corruption is very common in USA state governments.
  - rkuykendall-com 9y ago
    A very common play is to remove all regulatory requirements for an industry that you know will provide next-to-no jobs at a cost to public safety, because it looks good to Republican voters. See: Coal.
  - owenversteeg 9y ago
    Now, I totally agree with your comment that other states can let Arizona do the testing then reap the rewards. But at the same time, I think there can be other indirect benefits: Arizona getting known for being innovative, for example. Arizona was getting in the news a lot for positive self-driving tech things, and that's great. It's bad that they didn't vet Uber carefully enough and thus a woman died, but the general attitude of encouraging innovation even without direct, immediate benefits is a great thing.
galdosdi 9y ago
Actually, it may be an instance of a "tragedy of the commons" but I think the most strategically optimal move for a state when there are 49 others is to ban it and let "sucker" states do the testing, and then immediately legalize it as soon as it shows promise. Just like how I never upgrade to a new software version right away, letting the other "suckers" test it in production for me, creating value for me at their expense with no repercussions whatsoever, since the delay is very small. Another strategically effective move might be to charge corporations an appropriate fee to capture back the value of the data they are collecting by experimenting on public roads. Given how valuable driverless technology could be, the fees could be large.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- slivym 9y ago
  I don't believe this because whilst there are costs for the state of allowing self-driving cars, there are also massive upsides. The CompSci jobs that are involved in self-driving cars are highly sought after and by enticing testing of these cars Arizona is also likely bringing in high value tech jobs that would normally go to somewhere like silicon valley. Once they've established a center of excellence for that skill set it becomes self sustaining too. So you'll probably find that years after every state has self-driving cars Arizona still have more of those jobs.
  - rtkwe 9y ago
    For testing self driving cars on real streets though there's not really a big need for local developers if the company is setup well at all it can do it 99% remotely with just a barebones support staff onsite for installing the new software and sorting out integration issues which can also be done at their headquarters on engineering samples on their test tracks.
- losvedir 9y ago
  I had thought it was a brilliant move by Arizona. They were trying to be for autonomous vehicles like what Detroit was for cars back in the day, or Boston is now for biotech, or New York for finance. But I never thought through: which jobs are moving to Arizona? Autonomous vehicle production and maintenance? LIDAR and other sensor R&D? AI software development? Or is it just the test driver and the cars get developed elsewhere?
YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
>> Their self-driving technology seems far more advanced, I think it would be unfair to punish all the players for the bad actions of a few. It's very unlikely that Uber and Waymo have radically different technology. The two companies probably differe only in business and testing practices- i.e. the environments and the conditions in which they are willing to test their cars. Waymo simply seems to be more conscious about safety and therefore use its systems well within the safety limits of the technology. But, both companies have access to the state of the art (in the form of highly paid specialists) and you can't really expect one to be too far ahead of the other in terms of capabilities. Edit: I'm guessing all this by comparison with results generally in machine learning and machine vision. With the exception of a big leap forward with CNNs in 2014, most improvements you ever see in the literature are in the order of a couple of percentile points at most so most systems differe by a very small margin. The same should go for industry entities using this technology in self-driving cars.
- Lewton 9y ago
  I got the impression that Waymo has a ton of actual, human written, software on top of the ML core, "manually" handling a lot of edge cases. I doubt Uber has this
- cbr 9y ago
  In the literature you see small margins because many of the things that really matter in practice (data quantity, data quality, engineering) aren't generally of academic interest.
- tim333 9y ago
  >Google, said that in tests on roads in California last year, its cars went an average of nearly 5,600 miles before the driver had to take control from the computer to steer out of trouble. As of March, Uber was struggling to meet its target of 13 miles per “intervention” Quite a difference.
  - Aspyre 9y ago
    I know you're under the impression you are informed. These metrics, however, are not the same. You don't know what Uber's equivalent metric is at. That doesn't mean you should compare different metrics as if they were the same.
foobarbazetc 9y ago
You know who’s not applauding Arizona? The dead woman and her family. Turns out when you let corporations do whatever they want without oversight for a weird PR “win” against SF people can die.

onetimemanytime 9y ago

Or maybe Uber got unlucky and they had to be suspended. I wonder how many miles they had and every how many miles does an accident happens with human drivers.

EpicEng 9y ago
It's been posted in related threads, bit many, many more human miles are driven per fatality. The problem is that the number of self driving car incidents is too low to reliably extrapolate out.
Erlich_Bachman 9y ago
Watch the video of the accident. Even though it's dark (llooks to have been manipulated afterwards), you can still judge the actual situations in terms of the position of the lights, and the car and pedestrian - to see that it was obviously the car's fault because it should have seen the pedestrian with the lidar, or if the lidar was deactivated - it should have driven with much lower velocity.
ggg9990 9y ago
Uber did not get unlucky -- they are simply an evil company. Their cars need human intervention every 13 miles as opposed to Google's every 5,600 miles -- they were not fit for the road but Uber let them out anyways. Uber should be shut down and the principals should get life without parole.
- crististm 9y ago
  Fair judgment but where did you get those figures from?
  - icebraining 9y ago
    "As of March, Uber was struggling to meet its target of 13 miles per “intervention” in Arizona, according to 100 pages of company documents obtained by The New York Times" https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/technology/uber-self-driving-cars-arizona.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/technology/uber-self-d...
- Aspyre 9y ago
  The numbers you are comparing do not measure the same thing.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Care to expand on that?

spiderPig 9y ago

Which makes me think of it would be prudent for the government or military to invest in this tech as well. Companies like Northrop Grumman while being bureaucratic nightmares, take safety pretty seriously.

zitterbewegung 9y ago
This whole thing was started by a DARPA grand challenge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge Industry takes the lead after DARPA's investment which makes sense.
- Someone 9y ago
  Started? The Wikipedia page you mention says ”Fully autonomous vehicles have been an international pursuit for many years, from endeavors in Japan (starting in 1977)”, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_autonomous_cars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_autonomous_cars lists attempts going back to the 1930s (1920s, if you take ‘radio controlled’ as a form of autonomy) The first DARPA grand challenge was announced in 2002 and held in 2004.
  - Fricken 9y ago
    The theory is that the chain of effect that led to where we are today with autonomous vehicle development began with the Big Bang, but it's generally agreed that the current development paradigm crystalized through the DARPA Grand Challenges in 2004, 2005 and the Darpa Urban challenge in 2007, though we also owe a great deal to deep learning, which Google didn't utilize in Autonomous vehicles until 2014.
- MertsA 9y ago
  The urban challenge could very well be the best thing to ever come out of DARPA. Riding in the OshKosh truck going around some actual roads in rough conditions is when autonomous cars became "real" to me. In relatively little time they had it going down roads in the woods and driving at high speeds within a few feet of a fence. Now that truck seems clunky and primitive in comparison even just against what Tesla is doing on production cars just 10 years later. Autonomous cars in another 10 years time still feels like a pipedream but then again I would have thought the same thing about where we are today 10 years ago.

cbron 9y ago

Yes Waymo is still active. I live in the testing zone and see an enormous amount of their vans. About 1 for every 5 minutes of driving.

Cheyana 9y ago
I drove down a main road here in Chandler, Arizona yesterday and saw three in five minutes. Based on all my experiences on the road with them in the last few months I’d say the chances of them having an incident similar to Uber are much less.
- komali2 9y ago
  I actually trust the waymo cars more than regular ones now when I'm on my bicycle or motorcycle. Granted they are absurdly "cautious drivers" and can be mildly annoying to be stuck behind in a car.
  - konschubert 9y ago
    This is the thing that makes me most excited about autonomous vehicles.
    - B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago
      Amen. One day they they'll write "Strangely, they killed <this many> per year with cars and did not even bat an eye."
  - Zanni 9y ago
    This strikes me as a risk factor that no one is really discussing. We talk about the dangers of Level 3/4 autonomy, where the driver is still responsible for the car, but autopilot is doing most of the work, leading to a bored/disengaged driver who's not ready to react when it's actually necessary. We don't hear as much pedestrians taking it for granted that a car will stop for them, right of way or no, because of their experience with self-driving cars. Leading to the inevitable accident when they step in front of a human-piloted car who isn't paying attention / can't see them.

bitumen 9y ago

I think the public will probably feel the same way, but if this happens again with another company, I think there will be sustained backlash. Hopefully Waymo is as advanced as they’re advertising, and given what a terrible company Uber is by comparison, that doesn’t seem to be an unreasonable assumption. You know what they say though, once is a mistake, twice is a habit.

foobarian 9y ago
Hopefully Waymo has test drivers that actually pay attention.
- galdosdi 9y ago
  Unlike Uber, Waymo has always said they do not believe (based on data and experience) "safety drivers" are a realistic safety measure, because normal human beings do not have the ability to concentrate hard on a task for 8 hours a day that they have absolutely no control/feedback upon. If this is not obvious to you, you have never tried doing such a task. Try it and you will change your mind immediately.
  - joejerryronnie 9y ago
    I believe the safety drivers are primarily responsible for getting the autonomous cars to resume driving again after they've stopped for some unknown reason, not to react in a fraction of a second to divert a disaster.
    - galdosdi 9y ago
      In practice, yes. In theory, as is obvious from all these comment threads, people seem to think the "safety drivers" (think about that name...) are there to actually, like, you know, improve safety.
    - Piskvorrr 9y ago
      That's the stated goal, I believe. I also believe that the actual task is "scapegoat." I sure hope the people taking this job offer are at least aware of this.

ducktoller 9y ago

There was a person at the wheel. That person wasn't paying full attention to the road. From the video of the crash, it looks like the woman at the wheel was looking at their phone. Why is no one acknowledging that this woman was responsible for taking over the wheel if necessary for any reason. When I have cruise control on, I take my feet off of the pedals and rest them on the floor. But if, say, a homeless person with a bicycle walks out into the middle of the road at night with a black sweatshirt on in front of my car, then I step on the brakes. And why is no one acknowledging that a homeless person walked out into the middle of the street at night in a black sweatshirt. I definitely don't know whether I, even if I wasn't on my phone like the car operator was, would've seen the person in the road with enough time to slam on the brakes. I might've killed that person walking across the road by mistake, too. Like millions of other people on the road every single day, the car operator was on their smartphone while they were at the wheel. And like 3-5 million other people a year, the homeless person walking across the street was killed in a car accident. The woman walking across the street and the woman at the wheel of the car broke the law. Uber didn't break any laws as far as I can tell. They were as responsible as any other company building self-driving cars as far as I can tell, too. I don't think it's fair to put the fault on Uber here.

amelius 9y ago
Cruise control is different because you still have your hands on the wheel.
- ducktoller 9y ago
  A fully autonomous car is different, too. The person at the wheel when that woman was killed was responsible for stepping on the brakes if necessary. And when I have cruise control on, I'm also responsible for stepping on the brakes if necessary.
  - amelius 9y ago
    Yeah, but with cruise control, at least having your hands on the wheel forces you to pay attention. Really, I think Uber should have used tech to make sure the driver is alert. And test whether the driver can stay alert in a simulator. It's too easy to blame the driver.

qwerty456127 9y ago

> bad actions of a few What bad actions? If you mean an AI car killing a person - that's hardly "an action", that's an accident. Classic human-driven cars kill people every day yet are allowed to continue operation. Do people really expect self-driving cars to be not just more safe than classic but actually 100% safe? By the way I myself don't drive at all and only use public transport (and a bicycle to ride the countryside). A major reason stopping me from driving is I can't logically understand how can I make sure I am not going to kill anybody if I drive at a speed considered normal (rather than something ridiculous like 15 km/h) and somebody may jump out right in front of my car suddenly (which is very very far from an impossible encounter). I am totally car-phobic yet I really doubt suspending self-driving cars operation can make the roads more safe. I trust AIs much more than humans when it comes to subjects like this - they can fail occasionally (especially in guaranteed failure situations like when a pedestrian emerges right in front of you all of a sudden) but are seemingly less prone to fail than humans are.

jonathanstrange 9y ago
One problem with these comparisons is the misinterpretation of statistical data. For general policy making statistics are useful, but for personal decisions you need to take them with a grain of salt and switch on your brain. Human traffic accident statistics include the totality of reckless drivers, street racers, and drunken idiots. Would you readily be a passenger when they drive? I wouldn't. At the same time, the statistics also include the calmest, best, and most reasonable drivers you've ever met in your life. I think it's reasonable to expect self-driving cars to always drive better than your average drunk college student with 1 year of driving experience and instead perform more like the best drivers you've ever met. So yes, self-driving cars should perform above the human average.
knuththetruth 9y ago
>What bad actions? Uber disabled the safety systems included with the car that was involved in the incident. They relied solely on their own, half-baked tech when these systems could have saved the life of person who was killed: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-26/uber-disabled-volvo-suv-s-standard-safety-system-before-fatality https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-26/uber-disa...

z3t4 9y ago

"always be hustling" is/was the Uber motto. " move fast and break things" is/was Facebook.

galdosdi 9y ago
True, but the concept still applies here. Uber has gained a well deserved reputation for being careless as long as what they are being careless with belongs to other people.
- z3t4 9y ago
  Related talk by Bryan Cantrill (Principles of Technology Leadership) Watch the whole video, it's good! https://youtu.be/9QMGAtxUlAc?t=43m46s https://youtu.be/9QMGAtxUlAc?t=43m46s
mtgx 9y ago
Well, do these comments sound like "hustling" to you or more like "move fast and kill things"? https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/20/17144090/uber-car-accident-arizona-safety-anthony-levandowski-waymo https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/20/17144090/uber-car-acciden...

lern_too_spel 9y ago

Arizona did something reckless and stupid. Unfortunately, somebody other than the decision maker paid the price. Arizona stupidly allowed Uber to operate after California kicked Uber out and after seeing the videos of Uber cars running red lights in SF. For what? For a few temporary (the plan is to be fully autonomous quickly) low paying test driver jobs? The engineers making the big salaries stayed in California (or Pittsburgh in Uber's case). https://www.google.com/amp/amp.fox10phoenix.com/news/arizona-news/arizona-governor-to-welcome-uber-selfdriving-cars_ https://www.google.com/amp/amp.fox10phoenix.com/news/arizona...

galdosdi 9y ago
This is what's always confused me. The usual play is to suck up to a corporation in the hopes that a bunch of jobs or other investment will show up, but self-driving testing is kinda a perfect example of something that will not give any economic benefit to the testbed state at all. It takes very little local investment, and it's a temporary thing that will only yield benefit for the corporation doing the testing, and as soon as they have as much data as they want they can leave and use that data anywhere else. And if what Arizona hoped for is to get self driving taxis early, well, other states can simply let the sucker states like Arizona do the testing, then wait to legalize self driving till the day after it proves itself, thus reaping close to 100% of the benefits with close to 0% of the disadvantages. I honestly think Arizona politicians just blundered because they were following the typical playbook out of pure habit. I hope the explanation is not less innocent than that, but that's also very possible. Petty corruption is very common in USA state governments.
- rkuykendall-com 9y ago
  A very common play is to remove all regulatory requirements for an industry that you know will provide next-to-no jobs at a cost to public safety, because it looks good to Republican voters. See: Coal.
- owenversteeg 9y ago
  Now, I totally agree with your comment that other states can let Arizona do the testing then reap the rewards. But at the same time, I think there can be other indirect benefits: Arizona getting known for being innovative, for example. Arizona was getting in the news a lot for positive self-driving tech things, and that's great. It's bad that they didn't vet Uber carefully enough and thus a woman died, but the general attitude of encouraging innovation even without direct, immediate benefits is a great thing.

galdosdi 9y ago

Actually, it may be an instance of a "tragedy of the commons" but I think the most strategically optimal move for a state when there are 49 others is to ban it and let "sucker" states do the testing, and then immediately legalize it as soon as it shows promise. Just like how I never upgrade to a new software version right away, letting the other "suckers" test it in production for me, creating value for me at their expense with no repercussions whatsoever, since the delay is very small. Another strategically effective move might be to charge corporations an appropriate fee to capture back the value of the data they are collecting by experimenting on public roads. Given how valuable driverless technology could be, the fees could be large.

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slivym 9y ago
I don't believe this because whilst there are costs for the state of allowing self-driving cars, there are also massive upsides. The CompSci jobs that are involved in self-driving cars are highly sought after and by enticing testing of these cars Arizona is also likely bringing in high value tech jobs that would normally go to somewhere like silicon valley. Once they've established a center of excellence for that skill set it becomes self sustaining too. So you'll probably find that years after every state has self-driving cars Arizona still have more of those jobs.
- rtkwe 9y ago
  For testing self driving cars on real streets though there's not really a big need for local developers if the company is setup well at all it can do it 99% remotely with just a barebones support staff onsite for installing the new software and sorting out integration issues which can also be done at their headquarters on engineering samples on their test tracks.
losvedir 9y ago
I had thought it was a brilliant move by Arizona. They were trying to be for autonomous vehicles like what Detroit was for cars back in the day, or Boston is now for biotech, or New York for finance. But I never thought through: which jobs are moving to Arizona? Autonomous vehicle production and maintenance? LIDAR and other sensor R&D? AI software development? Or is it just the test driver and the cars get developed elsewhere?

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago

>> Their self-driving technology seems far more advanced, I think it would be unfair to punish all the players for the bad actions of a few. It's very unlikely that Uber and Waymo have radically different technology. The two companies probably differe only in business and testing practices- i.e. the environments and the conditions in which they are willing to test their cars. Waymo simply seems to be more conscious about safety and therefore use its systems well within the safety limits of the technology. But, both companies have access to the state of the art (in the form of highly paid specialists) and you can't really expect one to be too far ahead of the other in terms of capabilities. Edit: I'm guessing all this by comparison with results generally in machine learning and machine vision. With the exception of a big leap forward with CNNs in 2014, most improvements you ever see in the literature are in the order of a couple of percentile points at most so most systems differe by a very small margin. The same should go for industry entities using this technology in self-driving cars.

Lewton 9y ago
I got the impression that Waymo has a ton of actual, human written, software on top of the ML core, "manually" handling a lot of edge cases. I doubt Uber has this
cbr 9y ago
In the literature you see small margins because many of the things that really matter in practice (data quantity, data quality, engineering) aren't generally of academic interest.
tim333 9y ago
>Google, said that in tests on roads in California last year, its cars went an average of nearly 5,600 miles before the driver had to take control from the computer to steer out of trouble. As of March, Uber was struggling to meet its target of 13 miles per “intervention” Quite a difference.
- Aspyre 9y ago
  I know you're under the impression you are informed. These metrics, however, are not the same. You don't know what Uber's equivalent metric is at. That doesn't mean you should compare different metrics as if they were the same.

foobarbazetc 9y ago

You know who’s not applauding Arizona? The dead woman and her family. Turns out when you let corporations do whatever they want without oversight for a weird PR “win” against SF people can die.