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Waymo CEO Expresses Confidence Its Cars Wouldn't Have Killed Elaine Herzberg (washingtonpost.com)
theodp writes: Nearly a week after an autonomous Uber SUV claimed the first life in testing of self-driving vehicles, The Washington Post reports that Waymo CEO John Krafcik says he is confident its cars would have performed differently under the circumstances (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), since they are intensively programmed to avoid such calamities. "I can say with some confidence that in situations like that one with pedestrians -- in this case a pedestrian with a bicycle -- we have a lot of confidence that our technology would be robust and would be able to handle situations like that," Krafcik said Saturday when asked if a Waymo car would have reacted differently than the self-driving Uber.
In explaining its since-settled lawsuit against Uber last year, Google charged that Uber was "using key parts of Waymo's self-driving technology," and added it was "seeking an injunction to stop the misappropriation of our designs." In announcing the settlement of the lawsuit last month, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi noted, "we are taking steps with Waymo to ensure our LIDAR and software represents just our good work." A Google spokesperson added, "We have reached an agreement with Uber that we believe will protect Waymo's intellectual property now and into the future. We are committed to working with Uber to make sure that each company develops its own technology. This includes an agreement to ensure that any Waymo confidential information is not being incorporated in Uber Advanced Technologies Group hardware and software." All of which might prompt some to ask: was Elaine Herzberg collateral damage in Google and Uber's IP war? "I want to be really respectful of Elaine [Herzberg], the woman who lost her life and her family," Krafcik continued. "I also want to recognize the fact that there are many different investigations going on now regarding what happened in Tempe on Sunday." His assessment, he said, was "based on our knowledge of what we've seen so far with the accident and our own knowledge of the robustness that we've designed into our systems."
In explaining its since-settled lawsuit against Uber last year, Google charged that Uber was "using key parts of Waymo's self-driving technology," and added it was "seeking an injunction to stop the misappropriation of our designs." In announcing the settlement of the lawsuit last month, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi noted, "we are taking steps with Waymo to ensure our LIDAR and software represents just our good work." A Google spokesperson added, "We have reached an agreement with Uber that we believe will protect Waymo's intellectual property now and into the future. We are committed to working with Uber to make sure that each company develops its own technology. This includes an agreement to ensure that any Waymo confidential information is not being incorporated in Uber Advanced Technologies Group hardware and software." All of which might prompt some to ask: was Elaine Herzberg collateral damage in Google and Uber's IP war? "I want to be really respectful of Elaine [Herzberg], the woman who lost her life and her family," Krafcik continued. "I also want to recognize the fact that there are many different investigations going on now regarding what happened in Tempe on Sunday." His assessment, he said, was "based on our knowledge of what we've seen so far with the accident and our own knowledge of the robustness that we've designed into our systems."
I'm sure this statement is made in absence of any bias or potential for personal gain.
There are no stupid questions, just stupid people.
"I want to be respectful of the woman that died, but my self-driving cars wouldn't have killed her - unlike my rivals, who I'm suing because they stole my self-driving car technology. Buy my self-driving cars!"
There's a point where some people just need to shut up, and this guy passed it long ago. I think his decision making is not the sort of thing I want in my car...
Waymo killed Elaine by forcing Uber to take out the parts that worked..
is how good the damage control from Uber was. They got videos out fast with pitch black cameras that made it look like she came out of nowhere. Several days later videos popped up from locals showing the stretch of road was actually well lit. Even now I'm having a trough time finding those videos. There are stories now saying Uber's cars are behind Waymo, but I'm only just now seeing stories that say Uber should have avoided the crash. The first several /. posts about this story were riddled with comments from folks saying the crash was unavoidable and the pedestrian was completely at fault.
/. are going to end up assuming this was just an unavoidable accident caused by a crazy old homeless woman (a fact that was emphasized in many stories I read). I can't help but think we're being manipulated to think these cars are safer than they really are.
I think Some of this is the media at large siding with corporations to our detriment. The big outlets (CNN, Fox, MSNBC) have long since stopped covering the story on their front page websites, even as a single link. There's a little bit of left wing press, but I heard about those videos showing how well lit the road was from a post on Ars Technical that was on my feed.
Based on this I'm guessing that most people who don't read
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So the guy is supposed to say he has cars on the road that would murder someone?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
suicide by self-driving car exceed suicide by cops deaths?
Just step in front of one of your cars.
Have CEO suddenly run in front of a Waymo car.
Maybe the best way to advertise your business isn't saying your product totally would not have killed that lady like your competitor did.
Figure that out, program that into part of the car's repertoire of situations to handle, appropriately, and at the very least, you'll have made future cars that much safer.
If software was supposed to do X, and didn't do X, then the designers need to find out what is wrong with their assumptions about what the software is doing, and come to a resolution, so that software can behave as intended by its designers.
This is basic debugging, for fucks sake. Instead of throwing around a blame game, they should be fucking trying to find out what, exactly, went wrong in the first place. They should have the car sensor logs.... why didn't the car see her? If she came out of "nowhere", why was the place that she came from not visible to the car? If there's no way it could have been because of heavy occlusion or low visibility in general, then why was the car moving so fast it couldn't stop in the event of something unexpected suddenly moving into visibility?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
So Waymo tells Uber to stop using its tech' uber reverts to inferior non-infringing tech and death results. Was their fallback that buggy or incompetent? I can hypothesize that Uber not pulling a trial on our public roads to prove their systems.
Or the the legal challenge result in licensing?
j-walk in front of a Waymo car...
Accidents are going to happen with self-driving cars. We should not be surprised by that. That said, a lot of people are claiming that self-driving cars should be allowed on the road because they are safer. They then go on to argue why these cars are safer in qualitative terms, pointing out everything from human follies to the extra sensors on these cars. That is fine for casual conversations. That is likely to lead to poor decision from both designers and legislators.
We are dealing with very new technologies here. This ranges from the particular applications of sensor technologies to the machine learning and resulting behaviours of autonomous cars. We are also just starting to understand social aspects, like the cultural biases behind the development of technology. I bring up that last point primarily because the product of machine learning is going to heavily depend upon on these vehicles are trained and what they are learning from their training. While the design of the infrastructure outside of these vehicles may be more-or-less the same, road conditions are not and the behaviour of people in the environment varies a lot from place to place. Heck, the behaviour of people in the environment will vary a lot based upon whether they think the vehicle is under autonomous or human control.
Can you post a link ?
The speed limit there is 35 mph. 35 is NOT THAT FAST. And I've definitely avoided accidents that were harder to prepare for than this one. I fully expect Uber to get some serious criminal charges over this.
Mod this post up!!!
NO MORE DEATHS AT THE HANDS OF SELF DRIVING CARS! GET THEM OFF THE ROADS!
You don't actually give a good goddamn about deaths due to cars, or you'd be agitating to get rid of cars period. We do have alternatives, like PRT. Self-driving cars will kill people, but human-driven cars kill people.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Mod this post up!!! - FIFY
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Vehicle accidents kill 32,000 a year. There are 222 million drivers. Making a conservative assumption that 90% of the deaths are licensed drivers, you have a 0.013% chance of dying in a car accident. Those are pretty good odds, and a long way to go for self driving to make a dent in that. Drivers that remain alert, look ahead and use good practices such as slowing down to appropriate speeds for conditions decrease their odds even more.
Putting that into perspective, the CDC estimates that there are 45,000 deaths a year from *second hand* exposure to cigarette smoke. Maybe that is something we should tackle first, and then come back to self driving when the technology is fully baked.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Correction: 41,000 per year die from second hand smoke exposure.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
"This ship is unsinkable!"
History says NO ONE should make statements like this.
Wilful ignorance is ugly. That's not what the post said. I agree, get autocars off the roads until they are tested and proved safe. Bug testing and hoping they don't just randomly kill people is fucked up.
Maybe that is something we should tackle first
Maybe there is more than one department / corporation in the world and we should tackle multiple problems at the same time.
I kind of thought this would be the end result of only one company seriously doing any work on self-driving cars. What we have here is a typical capitalist worst case scenario: Every company doing their own thing and starting from square one because each is unwilling to license IP from the other, and each is unwilling to let the fruits of their labour be used for the general good.
Waymo could have avoided the accident? As far as I'm concerned they are culpable.
Video links and a technical discussion here Engineering Tips - Engineering Failures & Disasters - Self Driving Uber Fatality
Making a conservative assumption that 90% of the deaths are licensed drivers, you have a 0.013% chance of dying in a car accident.
About 13% of the people involved in fatality collisions are licensed drivers. About 19% of fatality collisions are caused by unlicensed drivers. But what do the percentage of licensed drivers involved in fatality collisions have to do with my personal chance of dying in a car accident? Nothing whatsoever, that's what.
Drivers that remain alert, look ahead and use good practices such as slowing down to appropriate speeds for conditions decrease their odds even more.
Yeah, so? I'm worried about all the drivers, not just the good ones.
Putting that into perspective, the CDC estimates that there are 45,000 deaths a year from *second hand* exposure to cigarette smoke. Maybe that is something we should tackle first, and then come back to self driving when the technology is fully baked.
How about we tackle both things at once? What are we, Windows 3.1?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Vehicle accidents only kill 32,000/yr precisely because of strong regulations on the auto industry—that they fought tooth and nail against for decades—like seat belts, airbags, crumple zones, fall-away steering wheels, etc.
Uber—in all aspects—is what happens when a company pretends all regulations are useless when compared against their profit motive. Arizona drank the deregulation Kool-Aid and is now shocked (shocked, I tell you!) that they killed someone.
Well that's an easy enough challenge to reproduce so here ya are put up or shut up..set up a dummy on the very same road at the very same time and see what happens..
Jack of all trades,master of none
The cars would likely pass a driving test. Why impose a double standard, especially for technology that's likely much safer than a human driver?
This exact type of fatal crash happens all the time, hence signs like "BRAKE FOR MOOSE".
Wonder what the public key field is for?
WE can now do something to prevent it from happening again... with human drivers that's not really possible.
[($)]
All he has to do is step out in front of traffic consiting of his own cars in the same conditions. I think the typical statistical standard is about 30 samples, right?
You're going to make a dent on easy, cherry picked routes at the expensive of things like "I thought that truck was a sign" or "Sorry, I didn't see you crossing the road on your bicycle.
> and then come back to self driving when the technology is fully baked.
Unfortunately, on-road testing is how the technology becomes fully baked. I expect at least 1,000 deaths in the next several years as the technology gets put into real use and it gets billions of miles of experience.
Whether Uber's tech is baked enough that they should be allowed to test on the road will only become apparent once this accident is investigated.
The Uber cars have a failure every 13 miles. Normally when we talk about self-driving cars on /., we point out that a safety driver isn't very useful because they just can't avoid the boredom. If you look at pools, most lifeguard only work 30-45 minutes without a break just for this reason. The Waymo drivers can probably barely stay awake. But the Ubers cars are rolling sarcophagi with a failure every 13 miles. If I were the "safety" driver on those death traps I'd be white knuckling the steering wheel and eyes glued to the road.
Drivers that remain alert, look ahead and use good practices such as slowing down to appropriate speeds for conditions decrease their odds even more.
True. However, I'm a pretty good driver; not reckless, leave good distance to the car in front, speed appropriate to conditions, etc. Just last night I was coming home on a route I have driven at least a hundred times and missed a turn because I was thinking of various things and my wife, who is usually aware of where we are too also failed to notice. These kinds of lapses happen to everyone at some point, and sometimes they have consequences worse than driving a couple of miles out of the way.
the CDC estimates that there are 45,000 deaths a year from *second hand* exposure to cigarette smoke. Maybe that is something we should tackle first
This incident should be used to not only focus Uber's attention on safety, but everyone else working on these cars. Don't forget, in addition to deaths there are huge numbers of injuries from auto accidents (in the US, over 4 million requiring medical consultation annually), and the expansion of mobility to the elderly or blind will be positive for society too. I doubt that Waymo's efforts are really stopping anti smoking policies; it's totally possible to be working on both at the same time.
Vehicle accidents kill 32,000 a year.
In 2011. Last year it was over 40K. And I see that you revised your second hand smoke estimate downward. So the two are dangers are at very similar levels, although deaths from smoking (in the U.S.) seem to be declining because of course, we have been working on that problem for decades. On the other hand, after decades of declines in auto accident fatalities, in the last several years we've begun to trend in the wrong direction in that area.
But the fact that we're working in new ways on addressing traffic fatalities does not mean we've stopped working on reducing smoking and smoking-related illness and deaths.
Why do you insist on repeating this meme that's obviously not true? We had a self driving vehicle run somebody down without the slightest hint that it even detected her, and you keep saying "likely much safer". This is obviously not true. Experts have chimed in and said it was a MASSIVE failure and even the most basically competent driver would have fully avoided it. Only the most impaired drivers wouldn't have avoided it, and they aren't legal to drive. Clearly this tech ISN'T safer. Just because you keep saying it doesn't make it true.
Google's self-driving car technology has been around longer and probably done far more miles than Uber's tech ever has and we have yet to hear of them running over a Pedestrian. Even Tesla's Super-Cruise technology despite it missing trucks and killing the driver hasn't run over Pedestrians yet. Plus the statistics that the makers are required to provide show that the Uber self-driving tech has an alarmingly large number of required Driver interventions. Heck it was speeding to begin with! Plus we know Uber's in a rush to get this tech to work because the hope to IPO in about a year so at the end of the day, can't say I'm surprised they'd be first to kill a Pedestrian.
How about we tackle both things at once? What are we, Windows 3.1?
Because we have solutions to second hand smoke deaths that don't themselves kill people. We don't have that yet with self driving.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
There are plenty of testing facilities.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Sure, anyone who has a solution that doesn't *itself kill people* then they should contribute.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Mod me as 'flamebait' all you want, people, IDGAF, I know damned well I'm FAR from alone in what I think about this, and no Echo Chamber is going to change that.
You can REASON with a human being. You CANNOT REASON with these piece of crap pseudo-intelligent machines; even the programmers that created them don't know what the hell is going on under the hood. Get them off public roads!
Negative. If you only ever look for a 100% perfect solution to a problem you will never solve any problem. You don't need to not kill people, you just have to prove you're better than a human driver. And in many scenarios this is already the case, e.g. NHSTA's report on Tesla's death found despite the fatality that users letting auto drive do the work were 40% less likely to end up in an accident.
Sign me up.
Considering the number of Tesla S's out there versus other vehicles, that's not going to trigger a significant drop in overall fatalities. It makes me wonder if anyone has tried this Phoenix/Uber scenerio with Autopilot.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Money supply is finite.
People don't generally activate Tesla's automation on city streets with traffic control. Street driving is much trickier than highway for automated vehicles to handle.
Furthermore, what is not known is how much of these 40% is due to the automation and how much of it is due to the fact that people realized their $80K vehicle was not as capable as advertised and might drive under a trailer or into the side of a firetruck. I would be more alert too if my car could do that.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Because we have solutions to second hand smoke deaths that don't themselves kill people. We don't have that yet with self driving.
Perfect is the enemy of good. If less people are killed by AV systems than human drivers, then it's still a win, even if they kill people.
We DO have a self-driving solution that won't kill people. It's called PRT. So let's return to my earlier point.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You can REASON with a human being.
Says who? You'd rather humans drive cars whether they're safer than software or not. That doesn't seem reasonable.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The problem with human drivers is not that they're human, it's that driver training and testing has been gutted over the last several decades. Enact reforms of how drivers are trained, tested, and held accountable, and these problems will go away. This may mean some people will not be allowed to drive ever again due to a consistent pattern of incompetence in spite of training and education; too bad, they can call Uber or Lyft or take a cab or the bus for all I care. But this UTTER NONSENSE some people spout about 'humans being banned (universally) from driving' is just that: UTTER COMPLETE NONSENSE -- ESPECIALLY when the machines these (you?) mouth-breathing fanbois think will 'save them' are clearly and objectively not capable of being any more competent than human drivers are RIGHT NOW.
GET THESE MACHINES OFF PUBLIC ROADS!
I can't reason with another driver. I'm in my car and the other driver is in their car, so there's no way to communicate with the bandwidth needed. I don't know what's going on with other drivers either. They may be tired, depressed, angry, having a bad side effect from a prescription drug, on something illegal, drunk, or distracted. Nor do I understand brains nearly as well as I understand artificial neural nets and the like.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Enact reforms of how drivers are trained, tested, and held accountable, and these problems will go away. This may mean some people will not be allowed to drive ever again due to a consistent pattern of incompetence in spite of training and education; too bad,
Ah, but there's a problem with that notion. The auto companies have been crapping on public transportation with the aid of the federal government. The interstate highway system is a prime example; the nation would have better been served by further development of the rail network. Outside of certain urban areas, people who don't own a car are second-class citizens, and that situation was deliberately created. Now you want to say that a bunch of people should be deprived of their right to drive, and up theirs? I don't think you understand what kind of impact that will have.
Now, if those people have a viable alternative, like a self-driving van which costs no more than a city bus and which doesn't impede traffic like one, then maybe they'll be okay. But you don't want them to have that option.
But this UTTER NONSENSE some people spout about 'humans being banned (universally) from driving' is just that: UTTER COMPLETE NONSENSE -- ESPECIALLY when the machines these (you?) mouth-breathing fanbois think will 'save them' are clearly and objectively not capable of being any more competent than human drivers are RIGHT NOW.
It is only a matter of time. I am not happy to see it coming, because we should really be phasing out most automobiles and replacing them with a combination of PRT and traditional rail.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
People do not want to live their lives with nothing but public transportation.
People do not want to live their lives with nothing but public transportation.
That's what they've been told, yeah. But they've also been told that public transportation can't work for them, and it can.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
No, it really can't.
No, it really can't.
See? You're one of the people telling them. I rest my case.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"