7 ms·

Now THAT explains a lot of that "she came from the shadows" and "a human driver could not have prevented this" and "The car didn't do anything wrong" bullcrap w

Now THAT explains a lot of that "she came from the shadows" and "a human driver could not have prevented this" and "The car didn't do anything wrong" bullcrap we've been reading from the Tempe Police right after the accident, as well as the quick release of the highly misleading (in terms of lighting situation) dashcam video. Don't bite the hand that feeds you...

xvf22 9y ago
Yup, I was wondering why the police put up such a strong defence even before an investigation. I suppose this may explain at least some of that. I wonder if the post crash emails will ever come out.
- panarky 9y ago
  The Uber-Arizona story is the American economic-political dystopia in microcosm. For-profit corporation helps elected politician maintain power. Elected politician uses the power of the state to promote the corporation and eliminate oversight that would have been in the public interest. All of this is done in secret, of course. The rubes who elected you don't need to know what their "representatives" are doing in their names. The politician wins, the corporation wins, and the public is the big loser.
shard972 9y ago
I'm not sure what you mean by don't bite the hand, I understand that the police would have a vested interested in defending uber but I couldn't imagine the police destroying their credability over some stupid little thing in the big scheme of things.
- Slartie 9y ago
  Imagine the police people having seen their governor (who effectively is their boss, as far as I know, so he is the "hand that feeds them") repeatedly be very, very protective and favorable towards Uber and the self-driving car testing program. Even if they never got an explicit order of the likes of "Courteously close your eyes when dealing with Uber!", they will be much more protective of Uber than they were if their boss was known as very critical regarding Uber. This is basic human instinct, and instinctive behavior often leads to decisions which might turn out to be obviously stupid in the long run.
- pjc50 9y ago
  That's .. not how credibility works for the police.
- jcranmer 9y ago
  I don't need to believe there was a conspiracy to protect Uber here. This spot apparently has a history of pedestrian crossing, and many police departments have a habit of assigning all blame to the pedestrian in a pedestrian/vehicle collision. This blame is reinforced by the driver's "evidence" (driver didn't see anything, but she wasn't looking) and the dashcam (can't see anything, but the quality is atrocious and not at all reflective of what most drivers would see). One thing we should take away from this incident is that we need to seriously push back on immediate "pedestrian's fault" rulings when police make them after a pedestrian/vehicle collision. It was readily apparent within hours that the story didn't add up, but people only paid so much attention because it's the first such crash involving an autonomous vehicle. The more interesting question is how that shockingly poor dashcam footage came to be. That quality is so poor that I find it hard to believe that Uber is actively using it as a sensor input. Hell, it's worse than most dashcams I've seen on Youtube...
  - mannykannot 9y ago
    I assume the poor dashcam footage came out because it fits the narrative they were all trying to push. I don't think there is any reason to believe it was the input to the driving system, but either way, it does not look good for Uber, and if it is apparently deliberately misleading, or, worse, has been tampered with, then that would take it to a new level. The release of the interior shot might have been an attempt to throw the 'safety' driver under the bus, so to speak, and while her inattentiveness was a very serious matter, it also does not look good for Uber.
    - scoggs 9y ago
      Yeah, they did not need to show the footage of her blatantly distracted away from the road. That was my biggest takeaway. I'm not sure who decided what footage got shown publicly but I immediately found that interesting to say the least.
      - JKCalhoun 9y ago
        I thought it looked a bit like they were throwing their human backup driver under the bus as well. Not cool.
- ramblerman 9y ago
  This is extremely naive, have you ever worked in organizations? I'm not being facetious, but a little top-down pressure can go a long way. This isn't about a grand conspiracy as much as it is about simple human nature, and the act to please those above you, keep your job, and move up yourself.
  - kartan 9y ago
    > but a little top-down pressure can go a long way "The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
    - jonafato 9y ago
      It's a bit misleading to post that quote without including the validity section as well. People are not as quick to abandon their ethics as the original results of that experiment suggest. In 2012, Australian psychologist Gina Perry investigated Milgram's data and writings and concluded that Milgram had manipulated the results, and that there was "troubling mismatch between (published) descriptions of the experiment and evidence of what actually transpired." She wrote that "only half of the people who undertook the experiment fully believed it was real and of those, 66% disobeyed the experimenter". She described her findings as "an unexpected outcome" that "leaves social psychology in a difficult situation." In the journal Jewish Currents, Joseph Dimow, a participant in the 1961 experiment at Yale University, wrote about his early withdrawal as a "teacher", suspicious "that the whole experiment was designed to see if ordinary Americans would obey immoral orders, as many Germans had done during the Nazi period."
baldfat 9y ago
I still see facts as: 1) Nothing was reflective 2) She was walking across the road between street lights in a random space. 3) If a person hit the woman it would not have been homicide or manslaughter even if we didn't know the driver was on their phone. I would say the pedestrian was legally more than 50% at fault in this horrible accident. http://www.alllaw.com/articles/nolo/auto-accident/driver-at-fault-pedestrian-car.html http://www.alllaw.com/articles/nolo/auto-accident/driver-at-...
- Filligree 9y ago
  The test for a self-driving car isn't "does it drive as well as a human," it's "does it drive as well as a self-driving car which normally beats a human should." This might sound like it makes no difference, but the car had LIDAR. That the scene was badly lit, whether true or not, is irrelevant; the car didn't use ambient light to see. If it could hit her under these circumstances, then it could just as easily hit her at noon.
  - zodPod 9y ago
    This is what gets me! I really wish they would talk about why the LIDAR didn't notice her. Was it off? Was it malfunctioning? Was there some other issue there? I've been puzzled about how it didn't see her!
    - FreeFull 9y ago
      The theory I've seen the most is that the LIDAR probably did detect her just fine, but Uber's software failed to act on the data.
    - thaumaturgy 9y ago
      According to Reuters, Uber had changed from a network of 7 LIDAR sensors on their vehicles to just one: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-selfdriving-sensors-insight/ubers-use-of-fewer-safety-sensors-prompts-questions-after-arizona-crash-idUSKBN1H337Q https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-selfdriving-sensors-...
  - 9y ago

xvf22 9y ago

Yup, I was wondering why the police put up such a strong defence even before an investigation. I suppose this may explain at least some of that. I wonder if the post crash emails will ever come out.

panarky 9y ago
The Uber-Arizona story is the American economic-political dystopia in microcosm. For-profit corporation helps elected politician maintain power. Elected politician uses the power of the state to promote the corporation and eliminate oversight that would have been in the public interest. All of this is done in secret, of course. The rubes who elected you don't need to know what their "representatives" are doing in their names. The politician wins, the corporation wins, and the public is the big loser.

shard972 9y ago

I'm not sure what you mean by don't bite the hand, I understand that the police would have a vested interested in defending uber but I couldn't imagine the police destroying their credability over some stupid little thing in the big scheme of things.

Slartie 9y ago
Imagine the police people having seen their governor (who effectively is their boss, as far as I know, so he is the "hand that feeds them") repeatedly be very, very protective and favorable towards Uber and the self-driving car testing program. Even if they never got an explicit order of the likes of "Courteously close your eyes when dealing with Uber!", they will be much more protective of Uber than they were if their boss was known as very critical regarding Uber. This is basic human instinct, and instinctive behavior often leads to decisions which might turn out to be obviously stupid in the long run.
pjc50 9y ago
That's .. not how credibility works for the police.
jcranmer 9y ago
I don't need to believe there was a conspiracy to protect Uber here. This spot apparently has a history of pedestrian crossing, and many police departments have a habit of assigning all blame to the pedestrian in a pedestrian/vehicle collision. This blame is reinforced by the driver's "evidence" (driver didn't see anything, but she wasn't looking) and the dashcam (can't see anything, but the quality is atrocious and not at all reflective of what most drivers would see). One thing we should take away from this incident is that we need to seriously push back on immediate "pedestrian's fault" rulings when police make them after a pedestrian/vehicle collision. It was readily apparent within hours that the story didn't add up, but people only paid so much attention because it's the first such crash involving an autonomous vehicle. The more interesting question is how that shockingly poor dashcam footage came to be. That quality is so poor that I find it hard to believe that Uber is actively using it as a sensor input. Hell, it's worse than most dashcams I've seen on Youtube...
- mannykannot 9y ago
  I assume the poor dashcam footage came out because it fits the narrative they were all trying to push. I don't think there is any reason to believe it was the input to the driving system, but either way, it does not look good for Uber, and if it is apparently deliberately misleading, or, worse, has been tampered with, then that would take it to a new level. The release of the interior shot might have been an attempt to throw the 'safety' driver under the bus, so to speak, and while her inattentiveness was a very serious matter, it also does not look good for Uber.
  - scoggs 9y ago
    Yeah, they did not need to show the footage of her blatantly distracted away from the road. That was my biggest takeaway. I'm not sure who decided what footage got shown publicly but I immediately found that interesting to say the least.
    - JKCalhoun 9y ago
      I thought it looked a bit like they were throwing their human backup driver under the bus as well. Not cool.
ramblerman 9y ago
This is extremely naive, have you ever worked in organizations? I'm not being facetious, but a little top-down pressure can go a long way. This isn't about a grand conspiracy as much as it is about simple human nature, and the act to please those above you, keep your job, and move up yourself.
- kartan 9y ago
  > but a little top-down pressure can go a long way "The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
  - jonafato 9y ago
    It's a bit misleading to post that quote without including the validity section as well. People are not as quick to abandon their ethics as the original results of that experiment suggest. In 2012, Australian psychologist Gina Perry investigated Milgram's data and writings and concluded that Milgram had manipulated the results, and that there was "troubling mismatch between (published) descriptions of the experiment and evidence of what actually transpired." She wrote that "only half of the people who undertook the experiment fully believed it was real and of those, 66% disobeyed the experimenter". She described her findings as "an unexpected outcome" that "leaves social psychology in a difficult situation." In the journal Jewish Currents, Joseph Dimow, a participant in the 1961 experiment at Yale University, wrote about his early withdrawal as a "teacher", suspicious "that the whole experiment was designed to see if ordinary Americans would obey immoral orders, as many Germans had done during the Nazi period."

baldfat 9y ago

I still see facts as: 1) Nothing was reflective 2) She was walking across the road between street lights in a random space. 3) If a person hit the woman it would not have been homicide or manslaughter even if we didn't know the driver was on their phone. I would say the pedestrian was legally more than 50% at fault in this horrible accident. http://www.alllaw.com/articles/nolo/auto-accident/driver-at-fault-pedestrian-car.html http://www.alllaw.com/articles/nolo/auto-accident/driver-at-...

Filligree 9y ago
The test for a self-driving car isn't "does it drive as well as a human," it's "does it drive as well as a self-driving car which normally beats a human should." This might sound like it makes no difference, but the car had LIDAR. That the scene was badly lit, whether true or not, is irrelevant; the car didn't use ambient light to see. If it could hit her under these circumstances, then it could just as easily hit her at noon.
- zodPod 9y ago
  This is what gets me! I really wish they would talk about why the LIDAR didn't notice her. Was it off? Was it malfunctioning? Was there some other issue there? I've been puzzled about how it didn't see her!
  - FreeFull 9y ago
    The theory I've seen the most is that the LIDAR probably did detect her just fine, but Uber's software failed to act on the data.
  - thaumaturgy 9y ago
    According to Reuters, Uber had changed from a network of 7 LIDAR sensors on their vehicles to just one: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-selfdriving-sensors-insight/ubers-use-of-fewer-safety-sensors-prompts-questions-after-arizona-crash-idUSKBN1H337Q https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-selfdriving-sensors-...
- 9y ago