9 ms·

Uber exec in March: “we shouldn’t be hitting things every 15,000 miles”

83 points by ProAm 8y ago

StargazyPi 8y ago
Surely this is corporate manslaughter at the very least? Systematically ignoring such dangerous problems should result in jail time for someone.
- candiodari 8y ago
  Why ? There is no such legal concept. Manslaughter is criminal law and criminal law only applies to people. In other words, either that woman watching hulu behind the wheel is responsible, or perhaps some other employee, but a person is. The corporation is a legal fiction that was not driving any car for the same reason the tooth fairy wasn't riding a pink unicorn next to it.
  - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
    If corporations don't have the responsibilities of people then they shouldn't have the privileges either.
    - eeZah7Ux 8y ago
      In US they have way more privileges, if anything.
      - candiodari 8y ago
        Look, there are 2 forces at work here in what we, as humans, seem to want: People, when working as employees, seem to really protest the idea of being held responsible for anything at all. This has lead to laws that state that employees are almost never responsible for their actions during work time (NOT legal advice, but generally speaking: if you aren't actively sabotaging your employer and it isn't a crime, your employer is responsible. Even if you are extremely negligent) (Large) corporations tend to be a lot easier to extract money from, and a lot more likely to play fair (ie. actually pay what they're convicted to pay) compared to humans. So even if an employee commits a crime during work hours, the employer takes "civil responsibility" (that's the part of the law where the principle "money (amount to be determined) can take the place of ANY legal conviction"). And criminal responsibility ? Frankly, usually, nobody cares, and employers are generally happy to just fire whoever it was on the spot. And yes, this is generally true everywhere in the justice system. If the court can trust that you will do whatever it deems necessary, you will get a lot more flexibility out of them. That doesn't mean you can just do anything (American courts especially have historically shown that there are circumstances where they will bankrupt a company if the facts are bad enough, to the point that it's a bit of joke) Given the above, of course it wouldn't be reasonable to extract heavy punishments against corporations when employees drive a truck through a kindergarten because they fell asleep at the wheel. This was a woman that was watching Hulu on her cell phone behind the wheel of a car who, we can be pretty sure, was very clearly told to be at any point ready to take over the driving. And, I mean, we've all seen the video of her during that accident ... WTF. I am wondering why you would demand the company be punished ? This is then further made problematic because actual punishments on companies tend to cause large job losses, large tax base losses, and may cause other companies to leave, further exacerbating the problem. So there's political reasons as well to not go too far.
  - darpa_escapee 8y ago
    > In other words, either that woman watching hulu behind the wheel is responsible, or perhaps some other employee, but a person is. Right. If a group of people came together with a scheme that caused car accidents at the rate Uber does, they'd be held liable and they'd receive conspiracy charges. Perhaps the same should happen to people who come up with such schemes behind the corporate veil.
  - snarf21 8y ago
    Citizens United gave them the constitutional right of free speech granted to citizens. The problem is that we let the corporations have it both ways. There are no easy answers but if I am a corporation of 1 person and commit manslaughter do you think it would be handled the same as Uber?
    - candiodari 8y ago
      That's an edge case. I would say no, because 1 person companies are not treated the same. Generally to get this sort of treatment it needs to be an employee that fucks up (meaning not the owner) and the company needs to guarantee it'll take civil responsibility (meaning pay up damages).
  - shittyadmin 8y ago
    Precisely - I think this falls to the classic problem of who to blame in accidents involving self-driving cars. Is the manufacturer at fault? The driver? Certainly statements like this suggest it could be argued in this case.
  - jnwatson 8y ago
    That's not true. Corporations are found criminally guilty in the US not infrequently. I'm not aware of any being convicted of manslaughter though. There's even a specific crime in the UK of Corporate Homicide.
aphextron 8y ago
It really never ceases to amaze me the level of protections we have in this country for corporations, and the amount of personal insulation that the members of those corporations receive from their actions. If I had hit someone with my car like that I would be sitting in jail right now. I'm not arguing that we shouldn't push things for the sake of science, but the level of willful negligence displayed by tech companies on every front these days is just staggering because of it. It's the default attitude. You see it an absolutely everything, from illegally dumping millions of scooters everywhere in public, to arbitraging the subversion of well established social contracts that in some cases took decades or centuries of literal blood and sweat to work out, like labor rights (Uber) or urban zoning (AirBnB) etc.
- poslathian 8y ago
  Tax reform proposal: the limited liability shield is incredibly inexpensive, bordering on free ($600/yr here in MA). On the other hand, it’s insanely valuable. Let’s generate tax revenue by charging fairly for this incredible gift to business operators. In lieu of system wide income taxes, we can charge a percentage of revenue in return for limited liability protection. Don’t like the tax? Chance it, and shareholders can take legal responsibility for the actions of their organizations.
  - Traster 8y ago
    Well let's call it what it is. You want a revenue tax on corporations. The obvious point is: high turnover businesses that make profits through volume would pay a disproportionate tax - a tax which ostensibly is to do with liability insurance, but doesn't correlate with the things that are likely to incur liability.
- berberous 8y ago
  >>"If I had hit someone with my car like that I would be sitting in jail right now." This is tangential to your point, but in many (I'd guess most) parts of this country, that is not true. Unless you are under the influence, distracted driver's frequently kill others, and the cops don't press charges, chalking it up to "mistake".
datpuz 8y ago
Sounds like they're "moving fast and breaking things"
- trhway 8y ago
  in their case it is "moving fast and killing people"
conbandit 8y ago
What is the average number of miles per accident for humans? Is it less than 15000? If yes, this is still good.
- opjalkjdfowmfl 8y ago
  AI should be safer than humans... not vice versa..
  - justtopost 8y ago
    Citation desprately needed. I would theorize the opposite.
- pranjalv123 8y ago
  The average driver drives like 13,500 miles a year [1]. The average driver files a claim for collision once every 17.9 years [2]. That makes human drivers 16 times safer than Uber self-driving cars. This is concerning for people who think self-driving cars are right around the corner! Improved algorithms would need to avoid 94% of the collisions that self-driving cars currently get into in order to have the same failure rate as humans. [1] https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/moneybuilder/2011/07/27/how-many-times-will-you-crash-your-car/#728bbe864e62 https://www.forbes.com/sites/moneybuilder/2011/07/27/how-man...
  - lsc 8y ago
    this is the thing about most of what we're doing with machine learning. It gets exponentially harder the closer you get to 100%; most of the things we use machine learning for where it works pretty well, 99% is really pretty great. 99% won't cut it for self-driving cars. Which isn't to say that self driving cars won't get there, just that the fact that it looks like we are almost there doesn't mean as much as you'd think; we still have the really hard bits in front of us.
  - conbandit 8y ago
    Looks like there's still a lot of work left on that front. I was trying to get some context for the 15000 miles number.
ChuckMcM 8y ago
And that is going to put a crimp in their IPO plans. This sort of corporate malfeasance, pursuit of product in the face of a clear and present danger to the public, is the sort of thing plaintiff attorneys use to drain sad corporations of all their capital to operate.
DanFeldman 8y ago
> Miller also suggested that Uber might want to drastically scale back its testing program. "I suspect an 85% reduction in fleet size wouldn’t slow development," he wrote. The vehicles create a firehose of data for the engineers/devs to deal with when there's large fleets. Things are ignored, and you have to dedicate more and more time to create good tools to filter through anomalies, incidents, and disengagements. With a smaller fleet, they'd see less problems come up but perhaps be able to diagnose and act on more of them.
cjhopman 8y ago
I expect that his recommendations are a good indication of how seriously Waymo takes safety.
macawfish 8y ago
I've told so many people that I don't use Uber and why. It just goes in one ear, right out the other. Consumer society in the US has no sense of culpability. I don't mean that in the sense that I'm somehow superior. I'm involved in this too. "business as usual" has so much momentum. It'd help if lawmakers backed up educated advocates, but the lawmakers are at this point bought by lobbies.
- brokenmachine 8y ago
  I think there's a sense of powerlessness in general. Nothing actually represents the people. It's a race to the bottom. I vote with my wallet as well, but I don't think the majority of people even consider that. Even if I'm not making a difference, at least I feel better about what I'm doing.
thunderbong 8y ago
That is why you don't run tests in a production environment

83 points by ProAm 8y ago

Surely this is corporate manslaughter at the very least? Systematically ignoring such dangerous problems should result in jail time for someone.

candiodari 8y ago
Why ? There is no such legal concept. Manslaughter is criminal law and criminal law only applies to people. In other words, either that woman watching hulu behind the wheel is responsible, or perhaps some other employee, but a person is. The corporation is a legal fiction that was not driving any car for the same reason the tooth fairy wasn't riding a pink unicorn next to it.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  If corporations don't have the responsibilities of people then they shouldn't have the privileges either.
  - eeZah7Ux 8y ago
    In US they have way more privileges, if anything.
    - candiodari 8y ago
      Look, there are 2 forces at work here in what we, as humans, seem to want: People, when working as employees, seem to really protest the idea of being held responsible for anything at all. This has lead to laws that state that employees are almost never responsible for their actions during work time (NOT legal advice, but generally speaking: if you aren't actively sabotaging your employer and it isn't a crime, your employer is responsible. Even if you are extremely negligent) (Large) corporations tend to be a lot easier to extract money from, and a lot more likely to play fair (ie. actually pay what they're convicted to pay) compared to humans. So even if an employee commits a crime during work hours, the employer takes "civil responsibility" (that's the part of the law where the principle "money (amount to be determined) can take the place of ANY legal conviction"). And criminal responsibility ? Frankly, usually, nobody cares, and employers are generally happy to just fire whoever it was on the spot. And yes, this is generally true everywhere in the justice system. If the court can trust that you will do whatever it deems necessary, you will get a lot more flexibility out of them. That doesn't mean you can just do anything (American courts especially have historically shown that there are circumstances where they will bankrupt a company if the facts are bad enough, to the point that it's a bit of joke) Given the above, of course it wouldn't be reasonable to extract heavy punishments against corporations when employees drive a truck through a kindergarten because they fell asleep at the wheel. This was a woman that was watching Hulu on her cell phone behind the wheel of a car who, we can be pretty sure, was very clearly told to be at any point ready to take over the driving. And, I mean, we've all seen the video of her during that accident ... WTF. I am wondering why you would demand the company be punished ? This is then further made problematic because actual punishments on companies tend to cause large job losses, large tax base losses, and may cause other companies to leave, further exacerbating the problem. So there's political reasons as well to not go too far.
- darpa_escapee 8y ago
  > In other words, either that woman watching hulu behind the wheel is responsible, or perhaps some other employee, but a person is. Right. If a group of people came together with a scheme that caused car accidents at the rate Uber does, they'd be held liable and they'd receive conspiracy charges. Perhaps the same should happen to people who come up with such schemes behind the corporate veil.
- snarf21 8y ago
  Citizens United gave them the constitutional right of free speech granted to citizens. The problem is that we let the corporations have it both ways. There are no easy answers but if I am a corporation of 1 person and commit manslaughter do you think it would be handled the same as Uber?
  - candiodari 8y ago
    That's an edge case. I would say no, because 1 person companies are not treated the same. Generally to get this sort of treatment it needs to be an employee that fucks up (meaning not the owner) and the company needs to guarantee it'll take civil responsibility (meaning pay up damages).
- shittyadmin 8y ago
  Precisely - I think this falls to the classic problem of who to blame in accidents involving self-driving cars. Is the manufacturer at fault? The driver? Certainly statements like this suggest it could be argued in this case.
- jnwatson 8y ago
  That's not true. Corporations are found criminally guilty in the US not infrequently. I'm not aware of any being convicted of manslaughter though. There's even a specific crime in the UK of Corporate Homicide.

aphextron 8y ago

It really never ceases to amaze me the level of protections we have in this country for corporations, and the amount of personal insulation that the members of those corporations receive from their actions. If I had hit someone with my car like that I would be sitting in jail right now. I'm not arguing that we shouldn't push things for the sake of science, but the level of willful negligence displayed by tech companies on every front these days is just staggering because of it. It's the default attitude. You see it an absolutely everything, from illegally dumping millions of scooters everywhere in public, to arbitraging the subversion of well established social contracts that in some cases took decades or centuries of literal blood and sweat to work out, like labor rights (Uber) or urban zoning (AirBnB) etc.

poslathian 8y ago
Tax reform proposal: the limited liability shield is incredibly inexpensive, bordering on free ($600/yr here in MA). On the other hand, it’s insanely valuable. Let’s generate tax revenue by charging fairly for this incredible gift to business operators. In lieu of system wide income taxes, we can charge a percentage of revenue in return for limited liability protection. Don’t like the tax? Chance it, and shareholders can take legal responsibility for the actions of their organizations.
- Traster 8y ago
  Well let's call it what it is. You want a revenue tax on corporations. The obvious point is: high turnover businesses that make profits through volume would pay a disproportionate tax - a tax which ostensibly is to do with liability insurance, but doesn't correlate with the things that are likely to incur liability.
berberous 8y ago
>>"If I had hit someone with my car like that I would be sitting in jail right now." This is tangential to your point, but in many (I'd guess most) parts of this country, that is not true. Unless you are under the influence, distracted driver's frequently kill others, and the cops don't press charges, chalking it up to "mistake".

datpuz 8y ago

Sounds like they're "moving fast and breaking things"

trhway 8y ago
in their case it is "moving fast and killing people"

conbandit 8y ago

What is the average number of miles per accident for humans? Is it less than 15000? If yes, this is still good.

opjalkjdfowmfl 8y ago
AI should be safer than humans... not vice versa..
- justtopost 8y ago
  Citation desprately needed. I would theorize the opposite.
pranjalv123 8y ago
The average driver drives like 13,500 miles a year [1]. The average driver files a claim for collision once every 17.9 years [2]. That makes human drivers 16 times safer than Uber self-driving cars. This is concerning for people who think self-driving cars are right around the corner! Improved algorithms would need to avoid 94% of the collisions that self-driving cars currently get into in order to have the same failure rate as humans. [1] https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/moneybuilder/2011/07/27/how-many-times-will-you-crash-your-car/#728bbe864e62 https://www.forbes.com/sites/moneybuilder/2011/07/27/how-man...
- lsc 8y ago
  this is the thing about most of what we're doing with machine learning. It gets exponentially harder the closer you get to 100%; most of the things we use machine learning for where it works pretty well, 99% is really pretty great. 99% won't cut it for self-driving cars. Which isn't to say that self driving cars won't get there, just that the fact that it looks like we are almost there doesn't mean as much as you'd think; we still have the really hard bits in front of us.
- conbandit 8y ago
  Looks like there's still a lot of work left on that front. I was trying to get some context for the 15000 miles number.

ChuckMcM 8y ago

And that is going to put a crimp in their IPO plans. This sort of corporate malfeasance, pursuit of product in the face of a clear and present danger to the public, is the sort of thing plaintiff attorneys use to drain sad corporations of all their capital to operate.

DanFeldman 8y ago

> Miller also suggested that Uber might want to drastically scale back its testing program. "I suspect an 85% reduction in fleet size wouldn’t slow development," he wrote. The vehicles create a firehose of data for the engineers/devs to deal with when there's large fleets. Things are ignored, and you have to dedicate more and more time to create good tools to filter through anomalies, incidents, and disengagements. With a smaller fleet, they'd see less problems come up but perhaps be able to diagnose and act on more of them.

cjhopman 8y ago

I expect that his recommendations are a good indication of how seriously Waymo takes safety.

macawfish 8y ago

I've told so many people that I don't use Uber and why. It just goes in one ear, right out the other. Consumer society in the US has no sense of culpability. I don't mean that in the sense that I'm somehow superior. I'm involved in this too. "business as usual" has so much momentum. It'd help if lawmakers backed up educated advocates, but the lawmakers are at this point bought by lobbies.

brokenmachine 8y ago
I think there's a sense of powerlessness in general. Nothing actually represents the people. It's a race to the bottom. I vote with my wallet as well, but I don't think the majority of people even consider that. Even if I'm not making a difference, at least I feel better about what I'm doing.

thunderbong 8y ago

That is why you don't run tests in a production environment