At an All-Hands Meeting, Uber CEO Said The Company Deserves Some Fault After Its Self-Driving Car Killed a Pedestrian (businessinsider.com) 122
During an all-hands meeting at Uber earlier this week, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and the head of the self-driving car unit, Eric Meyhofer, were questioned by employees over the culture at the self-driving unit. An anonymous reader writes: They asked about allegations of infighting and dysfunction in the unit prior to a tragic accident that killed a pedestrian, based on Business Insider's newly published investigation. (The investigation found that engineers were pressured to "tune" the self-driving car for a smoother ride in preparation of a big year-end demonstration of their progress, but that meant not allowing the car to respond to everything it saw, real or not.) What followed was a strange couple of minutes in which the executives told odd stories and quoted wrong statistics leading up to Khosrowshahi admitting, several times, "we have screwed up."
[...] Khosrowshahi showed his support of his senior leader by saying some negative things about Business Insider. And then he said, "we did screw up" and that "we are radically changing how we develop, how we test, etcetera. So we've gone through changes. We have screwed up." Sources tell Business Insider that Khosrowshahi had not been paying much attention to the self-driving car unit in his first year because he was so busy fighting fires with Uber's main business, but that this is changing now. On Tuesday, Khosrowshahi indicated as much saying, "A year forward from all the controversy that we saw last year, we are better, stronger. And I think ATG is going through that same journey," he said.
[...] Khosrowshahi showed his support of his senior leader by saying some negative things about Business Insider. And then he said, "we did screw up" and that "we are radically changing how we develop, how we test, etcetera. So we've gone through changes. We have screwed up." Sources tell Business Insider that Khosrowshahi had not been paying much attention to the self-driving car unit in his first year because he was so busy fighting fires with Uber's main business, but that this is changing now. On Tuesday, Khosrowshahi indicated as much saying, "A year forward from all the controversy that we saw last year, we are better, stronger. And I think ATG is going through that same journey," he said.
OOps we're sorry (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: OOps we're sorry (Score:1)
Better QA is needed. Test by having developers jump out in front of their test vehicle doing 70 mph. If they don't want to, they obviously need to improve their software development process.
Re: OOps we're sorry (Score:5, Informative)
Bullshit. Long disproven statistic.
Cars with lane assist and auto brake have lower accident rates on divided highways than humans in all driving. Which has been turned into the lie you repeat.
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Can anyone supply a link proving or disproving that self driving have a lower rate of death than human driven?
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There are no 'self driving' cars today.
Musk initially made the claim about Tesla 'autopilot', it was roundly discussed on /. and shown to be clear bullshit.
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"Waymo self driving cars hit 10 million road miles they aim public debut"
'Self driving' is only a marketing term for robot cars with very limited possibilities.
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Google (or Waymo) might beg to differ.
Perhaps you meant "there are no self driving cars THAT YOU CAN BUY today."
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Waymo's director of 'self driving' cars recently said in an interview that 'level 5 self driving cars are impossible.'
Link: https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/21... [cnn.com]
The money quote: 'But L5 is impossible, said Krafcik.'
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Hornwumpus: "there are no self-driving cars"
Evidence to support: CEO says a self-driving car that can handle "all conceivable scenarios" is impossible. At least, any time soon.
The FUD is strong in this one.
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WTF?
The CEO of the leading 'self driving' car company says self driving cars are impossible. On what planet is that FUD?
Point to the self driving car? One of them? 'Self driving' does not mean 'smart cruise' or 'lane assist'.
There are NO self driving cars.
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'Self driving' cars have no human driver. That's what Uber wants. and they were ALL promising.
I bet you believe anything involving a neural net is 'AI', don't you?
Otherwise my 1960 is 'self driving', having one of the first cruise controls.
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One is admitting a truth against their own interest, the other is marketing their stock. You can find many similar promises, note the weasel word 'could'.
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"Are you seriously confused between "self driving car" and "self driving car that can handle all conceivable circumstances?"
Not all conceivable circumstances, just the ones humans regularly do.
But even if we really lower the bar, is there even a car today that can handle just one aspect of driving as well as humans regularly do ?
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My 1960 with cruise control is capable of that. Is it self driving?
Re: OOps we're sorry (Score:4, Insightful)
Waymo's director of 'self driving' cars recently said in an interview that 'level 5 self driving cars are impossible.'
Link: https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/21... [cnn.com]
The money quote: 'But L5 is impossible, said Krafcik.'
You're taking that quote out of context. Read on and he clearly says that self-driving cars *are* going to be doing a lot of fully-automated driving, with no human involvement. The snippet you quoted is merely him trying to reassure the journalist that there will always be some place for human driving, some sorts of specialized driving that computers won't be trained to do. I suppose that makes sense; there is a lot of specialized driving that very few human drivers can do either.
The article goes on to point out that self-driving cars will initially "operate in designated areas on familiar roads", and then widen those areas, diminishing the need for human driving. This is obvious. It makes perfect sense to start in the most controlled conditions and then gradually widen the scope as experience is gained and problems are solved.
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That's enough to destroy the arguments of all the 'self driving cars will change everything' derpers, as well as the valuation and proposed future business model of Uber.
Self driving cars have no steering wheel. Everything else is 'driver assist', like cruise control.
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That's enough to destroy the arguments of all the 'self driving cars will change everything' derpers, as well as the valuation and proposed future business model of Uber.
Self driving cars have no steering wheel. Everything else is 'driver assist', like cruise control.
Nonsense. A car with a steering wheel but no one behind it is self-driving. That's what Waymo is doing.
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Waymo's CEO says that will _never_ happen.
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There are no 'self driving' cars today.
Then what is this story about? What exactly is Uber saying they need to have some responsibility for? One of their what killed a pedestrian?
Specifically what definition are you using for the term "self-driving car" and why are you using a definition that is different than the story?
Re: OOps we're sorry (Score:3)
You missed several zeros which make it seem like Teslas are way more dangerous than they are. The number is 130 million, not 130 thousand. 2 deaths in 130 million miles is pretty good. 2 deaths in 130 thousand miles is Thunderdome.
Re: OOps we're sorry (Score:5, Insightful)
Rather than do the hard work of improving their AI, they simply disabled obstacle detection for the appearance of progress. This was less of an accident and more of a completely avoidable mistake up the entire chain of responsibility. But why it surprises anyone that Uber, perhaps the most amoral company in the world, behaves this way is beyond me - and Arizona state leadership deserves some of the blame for inviting this company to test these products fully unregulated on its streets, knowing their corporate mentality.
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But why it surprises anyone that Uber, perhaps the most amoral company in the world, behaves this way is beyond me
Whoah whoah WHOAH there big guy. Uber? Most amoral?
They are bad, I will grant that. I will even go with very bad... but most amoral? Pharma and energy companies surely beat Uber for most amoral.
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Self driving cars already have a significantly lower rate of death/injury per mile than human driven cars.
To be fair, they mostly have a rate of zero deaths/injuries per mile but it takes a special sort of moron to ignore the obvious reason why.
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There are no relevant statistics on self-driving cars in the real world. This is because there are NO self-driving cars available in the hands of consumers which self-drive in complete control in all the same conditions (snow, ice, rain, darkness, etc) on all sorts of roads (rural, dirt, highways, freeways, under construction, traffic control devices out or missing, road routing changed without notice, detours, worn out lane markings, areas highly congested with pedestrians and children etc) that humans dri
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There are no relevant statistics on self-driving cars in the real world. This is because there are NO self-driving cars available in the hands of consumers which self-drive in complete control in all the same conditions (snow, ice, rain, darkness, etc) on all sorts of roads (rural, dirt, highways, freeways, under construction, traffic control devices out or missing, road routing changed without notice, detours, worn out lane markings, areas highly congested with pedestrians and children etc) that humans drive in regularly.
But you're assuming we can't break down those statistics and create more relevant apples-to-apples comparisons or at least put some bounds on how much that skews the statistics. I'm sure the insurance companies sit on more than enough data to know what the accident rate is on daytime, overcast highway driving in the summer by low risk drivers that are not found during the investigation to be drunk, drugged or anything like that. All you need is a few representative roads with traffic counters/license plate
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I don't doubt that we could gather that data over a couple of years and a few tens of thousands of observation points -- but I'm not aware that has been done.
Obviously only the data from observation points (or groups of nearly identical observation points) which observe a statistically significant number of cars in full self driving mode can be considered (which, today, would be remarkably few points and would leave out many adverse road conditions). The data would have to include if a self-driving car with
Re:OOps we're sorry (Score:4, Interesting)
My guess is that their board didn't learn a basic tenet of software development: when a system is malfunctioning, you fix it instead of disabling it.
Eagerly awaiting the day when there are hundreds of driverless Ubers on the road and some exec's decision to beta test in the field results in a Blues Brothers-esque pile of dead Ubers in the middle of the street.
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My guess is that their board didn't learn a basic tenet of software development
What makes you think board members or execs necessarily know anything about software development? Their job is running a business, correct? Wouldn't development be under the purview of the CTO and everyone below them?
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Execs should be in prison for murder.
If we are going to lock people up for incompetence, we will need a lot more prisons.
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If we are going to lock people up for incompetence, we will need a lot more prisons.
Maybe we can make a deal with Australia.
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MURDER?!?! Are you freaking kidding? It would be one thing if the pedestrian was mowed down in broad daylight in the middle of a crosswalk with the "walk" sign flashing. That is very much NOT what happened here. A human driver likely would've hit her too. Even though that person would only be about 10% at fault at most, would you put that person in jail for murder too?
I agree there should be some sort of consequence here, but sentencing someone to murder is absolute lunacy and you know it.
Re:OOps we're sorry (Score:4, Insightful)
This. This tragic episode was on the level of criminal negligence or manslaughter, but definitely not murder.
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You realize Uber put out a very misleading video of the conditions at the time?
Humans (driving prudently) would not have hit her. They would have seen her.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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Depends on the state. Criminally negligent homicide is 3rd degree murder in some.
It would land on the people that decided to disabled auto braking to produce a smoother demo.
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The dashcam video was misleading and implied that the intersection was much darker than it actually is. It is actually fairly well lit. Thus, a human almost certainly would *not* have hit her. The driver would have had to look down at a phone for several seconds to have done as badly as the Uber car did.
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So the code fell into the 'Death Race 2000' case? Having the right of way doesn't mean you can just go.
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So the code fell into the 'Death Race 2000' case? Having the right of way doesn't mean you can just go.
It's a self-driving car, they didn't say anything about self-stopping. It was driving, right up until the person hit the brakes.
We always forget some mundane detail.
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in Death Race 2000 it's own to drive down an sidewalk to rack up points
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A human driver likely would've hit her too.
Only if they're legally blind, in which case they probably shouldn't be driving at night anyway.
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$100M payout and 100M fine should cover it (Score:2)
$100M payout and 100M fine should cover it
Re:$100M payout and 100M fine should cover it (Score:5, Insightful)
$100M payout and 100M fine should cover it
Sorry, but that bullshit isn't good enough anymore. It sure as hell isn't a deterrent. Look at the banking industry.
Time to start shutting businesses down and looking at jail time for those who prioritize a "smoother ride" over a human life.
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Actually, it was carelessness or negligence by two people (the safety driver and the pedestrian).
It was malfeasance by others (the persons who ordered the safety feature to be shut off/tuned down and the programmers/techs who turned it off /tuned it down and should have known that would be dangerous -- the "{Hitler, TheBoss} told me to do it" doesn't work. That's not to say that a low level tech who may have been told to "Change the setting for Sensitivity to 5" is liable if they had no reasonable way to an
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Actually, it was carelessness or negligence by two people (the safety driver and the pedestrian).
I don't fault the safety driver. The safety driver was doing what she was supposed to do, logging information on a tablet. I fault the people who (a) turned off the anti-collision systems (two of them) and (b) tasked the safety driver with doing something other than acting as a safety driver (especially in conjunction with (a)).
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Agreed - if the driver was looking away per training and performing a task the employer told her to do.
However it was my understanding that the driver was likely viewing a personal entertainment video based on this [12news.com] news report:
If th
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Agreed - if the driver was looking away per training and performing a task the employer told her to do.
However it was my understanding that the driver was likely viewing a personal entertainment video based on this [12news.com] news report
I skimmed through the police report and based on page 64 it looks like you're right. Netflix and YouTube confirmed that she wasn't using their services but Hulu (after a mistake where they provided someone else's data), found that she was watching "The Voice" during the minutes leading up to the accident.
In the days after the incident I saw a news report that claimed she was doing work on her mobile device, but it looks like that wasn't true.
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I still fault the employer who created a task that it is essentially impossible for human beings to perform. It simply isn't possible to maintain full intensity attention for long periods of inactivity and then instantly spring into taking immediate high-stakes actions requiring fast response time.
The pedestrian was a homeless woman (Score:2)
As for the driver, maybe she should have caught it. Probably. But that doesn't change a god damn thing about how safety measures were turned off by engineers to impress their boss with the "smooth ride".
I'm reminded of that recent plane crash caused when
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Yes, the pedestrian bears part of the fault (she was jaywalking at a minimum).
The safety driver's primary job was to intervene. What else are they there for?
Do we know who initiated turning down the sensitivity of detection? Maybe it was a boss who ordered engineers to do it because she figured any problem would be caught by a correctly functioning safety driver.
BTW, it appears the video originally released from the car camera (such as here [youtube.com]) showed little beyond the reach of the headlights and was oddly dar
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Drivers of automobiles do not have the right to mow down pedestrians whether or not the pedestrian is obeying the "jaywalking" laws.
And many modern cities such as Phoenix are designed so that it is basically impossible for people who do not have cars to transport themselves. By all accounts the design of that zone of Phoenix was terrible for non-auto-driving citizens and it was well known to all who drove through that area that people crossed at non-designated locations on foot and by bike. Why wasn't that
Re: $100M payout and 100M fine should cover it (Score:3)
You don't need to shut them down. Just need fines that are more expensive than the money saved from malfeasence. $100 million fine for a business pulling in $2.7 billion in revenue is just ridiculous. That's like me getting a $2k dollar fine for killing someone.
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Time to start shutting businesses down and looking at jail time for those who prioritize a "smoother ride" over a human life.
Oh. Who is going to do that, legislators? Like Congress? Because I've got some bad news for you about Congress and who pays them.
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In this case, Uber paid off the crackheads family in a few days.
People should be up on _criminal_ charges. Any PEs involved should lose their tickets.
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Lie bot!
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You can't expect it to be perfect
We don't expect it to be perfect, but Uber was unnecessarily reckless. They intentionally disabled safety checks. It is hard to imagine Waymo doing that. Waymo has WAY more road-miles than Uber, and has had no fatalities, or even injuries. Tesla has killed a few people, but they have WAY WAY more road-miles, and their fatalities were honest errors, not intentionally crippled software.
I understand why Uber is cutting corners. They are losing money and under pressure from investors, with no obvious path
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No, the person causing an accident is liable regardless of the level of liability insurance they have. If you have liability insurance on your car for $1M dollars and you cause an accident that kills a busload of people, you are liable for the other $99M of the court's ruling. If you don't have the money of course they can't get blood out of a stone but if you have assets, most of them (exceptions vary state by state) will be seized to satisfy the order -- as will most future income and assets obtained late
That explains it all (Score:2)
What hes actually saying is "We did what we have always and will always do. We compromised on due process, safety and regulations with the goal of getting more money. We're Uber, it's what we do."
Some fault but... (Score:2, Funny)
1 - The Arizona DOT made that road too wide, it took too long for the pedestrian to reach the other side safely
2 - CO2 pollution due to inefficient human drivers probably reduced atmospheric visibility
3 - The bike manufacturer for not having some sort of automatic lighting system built in
and many others
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1 - The Arizona DOT made that road too wide, it took too long for the pedestrian to reach the other side safely
Wait, WTF? The pedestrian doesn't have to reach the other side of the road — only the other side of the lane that the car is in. This is a transparently absurd deflection of responsibility.
2 - CO2 pollution due to inefficient human drivers probably reduced atmospheric visibility
Did he really argue smog? Because that's just not believable. Even with the low-quality dashcam (which had terrible night performance), you could clearly see the pedestrian several seconds before impact.
3 - The bike manufacturer for not having some sort of automatic lighting system built in
The intersection was well lit. Additional lighting would not have made any difference. Either the car sees t
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Actually, I was talking about the spot where the person jaywalked.
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The usual standard is whether a reasonable person would expect the outcome, given the inputs. A reasonable person would not expect a car to simply drive right over a pedestrian in the roadway, absent unusual conditions, such as being blinded by the evening sun, suddenly encountering the pedestrian just beyond a sharp curve, or having the pedest
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CO2 doesn't create smog [1] - NOx creates smog.
[1] In the short run that is. In the long run the endless Carboniferous rains start to fall...
you don't say... (Score:1)
Sick Safety Culture (Score:2)
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Life in the Big City (Score:2)
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No. (Score:2)
Did he explain why they artificially darkened the video they released of the crash? Fucking up the software is one thing. Pushing the limits to meet a deadline I can understand too.
Actively covering it up is where they crossed the line to evil and criminal.
Tempe Police Department is corrupt (Score:2)