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Uber's Self-Driving Cars Were Struggling Before Arizona Crash (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Uber's robotic vehicle project was not living up to expectations months before a self-driving car operated by the company struck and killed a woman in Tempe, Ariz. The cars were having trouble driving through construction zones and next to tall vehicles, like big rigs. And Uber's human drivers had to intervene far more frequently than the drivers of competing autonomous car projects. Waymo, formerly the self-driving car project of 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" in Arizona (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), according to 100 pages of company documents obtained by The New York Times and two people familiar with the company's operations in the Phoenix area but not permitted to speak publicly about it. Yet Uber's test drivers were being asked to do more -- going on solo runs when they had worked in pairs. And there also was pressure to live up to a goal to offer a driverless car service by the end of the year and to impress top executives.
Why does that sound so familiar?
Oh, wait. I'm a software developer.
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What I'm shocked about is that, of all companies, Uber would make morally dubious decisions in its race to profit off of a new market. I mean, when have they ever acted like that before?
Right. So it's perfectly okay for a "self driving car" to have a LIDAR that doesn't work, a radar that doesn't work, cameras that can't see at night and/or a neural net that doesn't work, and ultrasonic sensors don't work, and to have the "self driving car" rely on a person who's not been driving being suddenly instantly able to hop into "driving mode" during each of the once-in-every-1500-mile occurrences where the car tries to crash itself without warning. Got it! This is all totally okay.
Is your job to sit under bridges and jump out at unsuspecting travellers?
Victim was already crossing the road, in the adjacent lane, as the car approached. The condition was caused by a bad self driving car that should apparently never been on the road.
That the root cause was someone jaywalking doesn't change the fact that jaywalking happens and is a predictable event. It also suggests that the car is inadequately prepared for avoiding hazards. (It also doesn't change the fact that when you don't have crosswalks at reasonable intervals people will improvise.)
That's a baldface fucking lie, and you know it. Uber has come under massive criticism from day 1 for shamelessly and egregiously breaking livery and employment laws in nearly every jurisdiction in which they have established themselves.
Now their half-baked AI implementation has killed someone, and you want to beg off criticism of blatant criminality as merely political grandstanding? These mobsters deserve every ounce of criticism they get regardless of who is in office.
Jaywalking doesn't even exist in the rest of the world. It is some weird concept spoken about in movies and TV shows from the US.
For example, in the UK we would call it 'crossing the road' and 'crossing the road' is not illegal (it is expected that pedestrians will use common sense). The idea that 'crossing the road' could be illegal is very strange to someone from the UK.
I agree. Look at how well lit the stretch of road is at night The camera view uber showed us was either purposefully darkened (just look at a histogram of a random frame or two), or the camera had an insufficient light sensitivity. The driver, had she not been texting but paying attention, would have had 5-6 seconds to do something. That said, I agree putting a human safety driver in the seat for 200 hours doing nothing except take over on a seconds notice is safety theater.
What's relevant is that the car did not see an almost stationary object in the middle of the road. That the object happened to be an old lady pushing a bike is irrelevant.
Exactly. And any modern non-autonomous car with "simple" collision avoidance system would have noticed. Dunno what Uber is doing, but it does not come as a surprise that it's Uber who are the most irresponsible and reckless
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns