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Look. It's generating bad press right now for your industry. I get that. I also think that in the long run your industry will be far safer than human drivers

Look. It's generating bad press right now for your industry. I get that. I also think that in the long run your industry will be far safer than human drivers. But now is not the time to post speculative bullshit like this. Would your car also have run into a school shooting unarmed? You weren't in that situation, you don't know all the edge cases, the best you can say is that you had a similar situation under controlled circumstances and reacted appropriately. This is publicly patting yourself on the back for a competitor killing someone. To say it's in bad taste is an understatement.

icebraining 9y ago
One fear is that Uber's mistakes will endanger the whole self-driving industry, by making people afraid. I'd say these companies are trying to separate themselves to avoid that.
- reificator 9y ago
  That doesn't make it the right time to publicly announce "we wouldn't have killed someone here, look how great we are".
  - wjnc 9y ago
    Near my hometown a Tesla crashed and the crash killed the driver recently. Guess who gave a statement within days blaming the driver for speeding? For a European that was quite the novelty (and probably illegal, although AFAIK deceased lack privacy protection since not a natural person).
    - ggg9990 9y ago
      Musk definitely goes too far with his response to any criticism of Tesla. It makes him sound a little like Trump — “I’m so amazing”
- thrownaway954 9y ago
  i know it will sound insensitive, but one person dying is not that big of a deal... heck 1000 people dying is only 10% of the amount of people that die each year for drunk driving[1] and you don't see liquor being pulled off the shelves. however i do see how people (including me) are sheep and can be manipulated into believing anything. taxis and trucker unions can use this an opportunity to condemn self driving vehicles. [1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/drunk-driving https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/drunk-driving
  - wpietri 9y ago
    That doesn't just sound insensitive. Watching the video, I'm convinced that person died for no good reason beyond Uber rushing tech out the door before it was ready. An alert human would have braked and swerved in that circumstance. People do die from drunk driving, and those drivers go to jail because they fucked up in a huge way. That's no reason to give Uber a dead-person mulligan. Indeed, it's a reason that some Uber exec should perhaps be wearing an orange jumpsuit over this. I'm all for self-driving cars, as done right deaths will go down. But that means we shouldn't introduce them until they are well-made enough that deaths actually go down.
    - Johnny555 9y ago
      Watching the video, I'm convinced that person died for no good reason beyond Uber rushing tech out the door before it was ready. An alert human would have braked and swerved in that circumstance. It's likely that the accident still would have been fatal, or at least the pedestrian would have been seriously injured if the safety driver was driving. Based on the video there was only a second or two to react from the time the pedestrian stepped out of the shadows, and human reaction time varies from 0.7 to 3 seconds [1]. One study found the average driver's reaction time is 2.3 seconds. [1] http://copradar.com/redlight/factors/index.html http://copradar.com/redlight/factors/index.html
      - jaclaz 9y ago
        >It's likely that the accident still would have been fatal, or at least the pedestrian would have been seriously injured if the safety driver was driving. Based on the video there was only a second or two to react from the time the pedestrian stepped out of the shadows, and human reaction time varies from 0.7 to 3 seconds [1]. One study found the average driver's reaction time is 2.3 seconds. Yes, but it is difficult to state that it would have been "likely" fatal, and even sevral fractures are IMHO a big improvement over death, the whole point is not about the "average" braking time (BTW that same study gives 1.64 seconds average for "steering away" which is probably what most human drivers would have done in a similar situation, instead of braking or instead of only braking), it is the peaks that count. I mean, it is about the (rightful) expectation that an automated system is safer (faster, more reactive) than the best you can find (not the average, the best) "in nature" among a random set of drivers, just like the state codes (correctly) take the worse case in the sample or however incereases the recommendation to three seconds. If you play the game suggested on the same site you gave a link to and deliberately count up to three before clicking, you get: Reaction time: 2916.00ms Reaction speed age: 89 years old Playing fairly, you are likely to get values in the range 300-500 ms. Here is another paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233039156_Brake_Reaction_Times_and_Driver_Behavior_Analysis https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233039156_Brake_Rea... that puts it back to around 1-1.5 seconds or however maximum at 1.8 seconds in the very worst cases.
- reaperducer 9y ago
  I imagine we'll see self-driving car horror movies soon. We've had them in the past (Christine, Trucks, Herbie the Love Bug), but the only thing Hollywood loves more than latching on to a trend (Emoji Movie) is blowing something out of proportion.
  - reificator 9y ago
    Just last year that was an arc in Ash vs Evil Dead. Granted it was self-driving thanks to a book inked in blood and bound with human flesh, but that's beside the point...
  - ggg9990 9y ago
    Damn, I’m already imagining them like the climate change movies where a 800-foot tsunami hits Manhattan. 200 million self driving cars have become hostile and are trying to kill the humans. The problem is that they have commandeered a group of friendly-looking Japanese humanoid robots to pump gas for them. One rogue humanoid robot is the one who will save humanity along with help from a 6-year-old girl with pigtails and a stuffed rabbit named Hopsy.
    - jsight 9y ago
      Who leaked our script? Ugh...
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - rasz 9y ago
    soon? havent you been watching new Xfiles?
wjnc 9y ago
I agree. But suppose the difference mentioned (1 sec) is true. That's such a large difference that what they call for (formal outside verification) sounds pretty reasonable. This debate will always be hard since it will involve deaths, with AI and video involved.
- reificator 9y ago
  You're right. Developing video games has taught me that a second is a long time. But we still don't even know that Uber didn't detect them that early. The CV system or other sensors could have picked out the pedestrian but something else went wrong instead. I tend to think that if Uber did detect the pedestrian, they would have said something by now. But perhaps they prefer the optics of not having seen her to the optics of seeing her but not braking at all. We simply don't know. Imagine that press conference. > Uber: "After examining the black box on the car we have determined that the car detected the pedestrian but failed to brake." > Reporter: "Was this because the pedestrian was a woman?" > Reporter: "Did the car do this to protect the life of the Uber employee inside?" > Reporter: "Was her credit score too low?"
  - 2474 9y ago
    This reminds me of a survey I had taken. I can't remember the survey publisher but it was related to self-driving vehicles. You were presented two pictures (e.g. a picture of school kids crossing a crosswalk and the other a picture of an adult male and female walking their dog across a crosswalk). Presumably you had to choose; would you swerve to hit the adults and dog or would you stay course and hit the kids. I know there is no moral compass for a computer system to determine what it should do in the scenario but I laughed at the quiz because I couldn't believe this is the kind of data that will feed machine-learning algorithms. It just feels bad.
    - lowbloodsugar 9y ago
      Getting data on an ethical dilemma. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
CupOfJava 9y ago
Why is it a 'similar situation'? They fed the same footage that the Uber system had access to.
- reificator 9y ago
  In the lab, yes. Presumably in real time. Presumably without configuring things differently than normal, except that they used a pre-recorded feed. Presumably without multiple attempts. Presumably without...
InTheArena 9y ago
Mobile-eye has a history of throwing partners and competitors under the bus (see Tesla). It's not just about bad events, it's part of their corporate DNA.
zer00eyz 9y ago
Except their technology was ON the car that was involved... they are part of the story - Uber turned their gear off in favor of their own.
- pdpi 9y ago
  The whole point is that uber is developing their own gear. Dunno about you, but for me giving two self-driving systems control over the car at same time seems like a recipe for disaster. Of course they turned off the other systems.
  - nmeofthestate 9y ago
    They certainly averted disaster, didn't they.
  - knuththetruth 9y ago
    All kinds of technology that’s less half-baked than Uber’s self-driving cars has redundant, decoupled safety systems. Might be better for Uber’s data collection to turn this off, but you really can’t argue it was safer. I don’t think we should be killing people because that works better for their business needs.
  - c22 9y ago
    Mobileye isn't a "self-driving" system, it's a collision prevention/mitigation system, like airbags or ABS. Leaving it on while a human controls the car hasn't been seen as a disaster.
    - bladers 9y ago
      first of all Mobileye does have a self driving system (their EyeQ4 chips is for Level 3-4 self driving). However Amon was referring to their EyeQ3 chip from 2014 which is installed in 24 million cars and have billions of miles
    - dogma1138 9y ago
      Tesla’s autopilot runs on MobilEye only AP 2 runs on NVIDIA.
zelon88 9y ago
It also seems to me that this experienced company is trying to setup road blocks to stifle competition and using this fatality as cannon fodder to support his arguments. How about we let whoever wants to research autonomous vehicles have at it, and we just throw the "Supervising driver" who failed in jail like he should be? I mean the guy had one fucking job: hit the brake pedal if you're going to crash into something. He failed. The car is an experiment. The driver is the only safety mechanism in that car that matters, and as usual with humans it screwed up.
Johnny555 9y ago
Missing from the article is the nature of the link to Mobileeye -- the Volvo cars Uber is using come with collision avoidance built-in, Uber disabled it. The Volvo collision avoidance uses technology from Aptiv, which in turn uses technology from MobilEye. So this isn't just a random company saying "we could do better", this is the company with equipment already on the car (though disconnected) defending their reputation.
jsight 9y ago
I believe that Mobileye has said the opposite in cases where their current technology would not have been able to respond as well. And their technology was on the vehicle being involved in the crash, but not being used. In the past, Mobileye has made it a point to be very specific about what their technology is and is not currently capable of. I don't see a problem with that.

icebraining 9y ago

One fear is that Uber's mistakes will endanger the whole self-driving industry, by making people afraid. I'd say these companies are trying to separate themselves to avoid that.

reificator 9y ago
That doesn't make it the right time to publicly announce "we wouldn't have killed someone here, look how great we are".
- wjnc 9y ago
  Near my hometown a Tesla crashed and the crash killed the driver recently. Guess who gave a statement within days blaming the driver for speeding? For a European that was quite the novelty (and probably illegal, although AFAIK deceased lack privacy protection since not a natural person).
  - ggg9990 9y ago
    Musk definitely goes too far with his response to any criticism of Tesla. It makes him sound a little like Trump — “I’m so amazing”
thrownaway954 9y ago
i know it will sound insensitive, but one person dying is not that big of a deal... heck 1000 people dying is only 10% of the amount of people that die each year for drunk driving[1] and you don't see liquor being pulled off the shelves. however i do see how people (including me) are sheep and can be manipulated into believing anything. taxis and trucker unions can use this an opportunity to condemn self driving vehicles. [1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/drunk-driving https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/drunk-driving
- wpietri 9y ago
  That doesn't just sound insensitive. Watching the video, I'm convinced that person died for no good reason beyond Uber rushing tech out the door before it was ready. An alert human would have braked and swerved in that circumstance. People do die from drunk driving, and those drivers go to jail because they fucked up in a huge way. That's no reason to give Uber a dead-person mulligan. Indeed, it's a reason that some Uber exec should perhaps be wearing an orange jumpsuit over this. I'm all for self-driving cars, as done right deaths will go down. But that means we shouldn't introduce them until they are well-made enough that deaths actually go down.
  - Johnny555 9y ago
    Watching the video, I'm convinced that person died for no good reason beyond Uber rushing tech out the door before it was ready. An alert human would have braked and swerved in that circumstance. It's likely that the accident still would have been fatal, or at least the pedestrian would have been seriously injured if the safety driver was driving. Based on the video there was only a second or two to react from the time the pedestrian stepped out of the shadows, and human reaction time varies from 0.7 to 3 seconds [1]. One study found the average driver's reaction time is 2.3 seconds. [1] http://copradar.com/redlight/factors/index.html http://copradar.com/redlight/factors/index.html
    - jaclaz 9y ago
      >It's likely that the accident still would have been fatal, or at least the pedestrian would have been seriously injured if the safety driver was driving. Based on the video there was only a second or two to react from the time the pedestrian stepped out of the shadows, and human reaction time varies from 0.7 to 3 seconds [1]. One study found the average driver's reaction time is 2.3 seconds. Yes, but it is difficult to state that it would have been "likely" fatal, and even sevral fractures are IMHO a big improvement over death, the whole point is not about the "average" braking time (BTW that same study gives 1.64 seconds average for "steering away" which is probably what most human drivers would have done in a similar situation, instead of braking or instead of only braking), it is the peaks that count. I mean, it is about the (rightful) expectation that an automated system is safer (faster, more reactive) than the best you can find (not the average, the best) "in nature" among a random set of drivers, just like the state codes (correctly) take the worse case in the sample or however incereases the recommendation to three seconds. If you play the game suggested on the same site you gave a link to and deliberately count up to three before clicking, you get: Reaction time: 2916.00ms Reaction speed age: 89 years old Playing fairly, you are likely to get values in the range 300-500 ms. Here is another paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233039156_Brake_Reaction_Times_and_Driver_Behavior_Analysis https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233039156_Brake_Rea... that puts it back to around 1-1.5 seconds or however maximum at 1.8 seconds in the very worst cases.
reaperducer 9y ago
I imagine we'll see self-driving car horror movies soon. We've had them in the past (Christine, Trucks, Herbie the Love Bug), but the only thing Hollywood loves more than latching on to a trend (Emoji Movie) is blowing something out of proportion.
- reificator 9y ago
  Just last year that was an arc in Ash vs Evil Dead. Granted it was self-driving thanks to a book inked in blood and bound with human flesh, but that's beside the point...
- ggg9990 9y ago
  Damn, I’m already imagining them like the climate change movies where a 800-foot tsunami hits Manhattan. 200 million self driving cars have become hostile and are trying to kill the humans. The problem is that they have commandeered a group of friendly-looking Japanese humanoid robots to pump gas for them. One rogue humanoid robot is the one who will save humanity along with help from a 6-year-old girl with pigtails and a stuffed rabbit named Hopsy.
  - jsight 9y ago
    Who leaked our script? Ugh...
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- rasz 9y ago
  soon? havent you been watching new Xfiles?

wjnc 9y ago

I agree. But suppose the difference mentioned (1 sec) is true. That's such a large difference that what they call for (formal outside verification) sounds pretty reasonable. This debate will always be hard since it will involve deaths, with AI and video involved.

reificator 9y ago
You're right. Developing video games has taught me that a second is a long time. But we still don't even know that Uber didn't detect them that early. The CV system or other sensors could have picked out the pedestrian but something else went wrong instead. I tend to think that if Uber did detect the pedestrian, they would have said something by now. But perhaps they prefer the optics of not having seen her to the optics of seeing her but not braking at all. We simply don't know. Imagine that press conference. > Uber: "After examining the black box on the car we have determined that the car detected the pedestrian but failed to brake." > Reporter: "Was this because the pedestrian was a woman?" > Reporter: "Did the car do this to protect the life of the Uber employee inside?" > Reporter: "Was her credit score too low?"
- 2474 9y ago
  This reminds me of a survey I had taken. I can't remember the survey publisher but it was related to self-driving vehicles. You were presented two pictures (e.g. a picture of school kids crossing a crosswalk and the other a picture of an adult male and female walking their dog across a crosswalk). Presumably you had to choose; would you swerve to hit the adults and dog or would you stay course and hit the kids. I know there is no moral compass for a computer system to determine what it should do in the scenario but I laughed at the quiz because I couldn't believe this is the kind of data that will feed machine-learning algorithms. It just feels bad.
  - lowbloodsugar 9y ago
    Getting data on an ethical dilemma. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

CupOfJava 9y ago

Why is it a 'similar situation'? They fed the same footage that the Uber system had access to.

reificator 9y ago
In the lab, yes. Presumably in real time. Presumably without configuring things differently than normal, except that they used a pre-recorded feed. Presumably without multiple attempts. Presumably without...

InTheArena 9y ago

Mobile-eye has a history of throwing partners and competitors under the bus (see Tesla). It's not just about bad events, it's part of their corporate DNA.

zer00eyz 9y ago

Except their technology was ON the car that was involved... they are part of the story - Uber turned their gear off in favor of their own.

pdpi 9y ago
The whole point is that uber is developing their own gear. Dunno about you, but for me giving two self-driving systems control over the car at same time seems like a recipe for disaster. Of course they turned off the other systems.
- nmeofthestate 9y ago
  They certainly averted disaster, didn't they.
- knuththetruth 9y ago
  All kinds of technology that’s less half-baked than Uber’s self-driving cars has redundant, decoupled safety systems. Might be better for Uber’s data collection to turn this off, but you really can’t argue it was safer. I don’t think we should be killing people because that works better for their business needs.
- c22 9y ago
  Mobileye isn't a "self-driving" system, it's a collision prevention/mitigation system, like airbags or ABS. Leaving it on while a human controls the car hasn't been seen as a disaster.
  - bladers 9y ago
    first of all Mobileye does have a self driving system (their EyeQ4 chips is for Level 3-4 self driving). However Amon was referring to their EyeQ3 chip from 2014 which is installed in 24 million cars and have billions of miles
  - dogma1138 9y ago
    Tesla’s autopilot runs on MobilEye only AP 2 runs on NVIDIA.

zelon88 9y ago

It also seems to me that this experienced company is trying to setup road blocks to stifle competition and using this fatality as cannon fodder to support his arguments. How about we let whoever wants to research autonomous vehicles have at it, and we just throw the "Supervising driver" who failed in jail like he should be? I mean the guy had one fucking job: hit the brake pedal if you're going to crash into something. He failed. The car is an experiment. The driver is the only safety mechanism in that car that matters, and as usual with humans it screwed up.

Johnny555 9y ago

Missing from the article is the nature of the link to Mobileeye -- the Volvo cars Uber is using come with collision avoidance built-in, Uber disabled it. The Volvo collision avoidance uses technology from Aptiv, which in turn uses technology from MobilEye. So this isn't just a random company saying "we could do better", this is the company with equipment already on the car (though disconnected) defending their reputation.

jsight 9y ago

I believe that Mobileye has said the opposite in cases where their current technology would not have been able to respond as well. And their technology was on the vehicle being involved in the crash, but not being used. In the past, Mobileye has made it a point to be very specific about what their technology is and is not currently capable of. I don't see a problem with that.