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."

Comments

Monday-morning quarterbacking and spin control

[Rick Schumann]

That's all this is. Like other companies 'developing' this 'technology', he is protecting his companys' massive investment so he doesn't get fired. I have no doubt his shitty cars wouldn't have done any better -- NONE of them would have done any better, because it's a 'pseudo-intelligence' running them, not a real AI that can actually think, and like all other companies building this crap, they have rushed it to market to prevent investor revolt.

I want the damned things off public roads. NONE of it is even REMOTELY ready for general use, and likely never will be. We need REAL AI, not this fake pseudo-intelligence; your DOG or CAT is smarter than any of these pseudo-intelligent machines are. The systems of public roads in our civilization is designed by and for human drivers, who have an actual mind that can think and reason. If you want to build a machine mind that can even be the equivalent of a human driver (never mind 'better than' a human driver) then that machine mind needs to be a full-on Artificial Intelligence, that thinks and reasons like a human being, that can relate to human beings, understands the difference between a living being and an inanimate object, and more to the point, understands that a living human being is more intrinsically valuable than anything else, including itself. Currently, we do not have the technology to understand how and why a human brain is capable of what it's capable of; until we can understand that, we have precisely zero hope of designing machine intelligences that can match what humans posess by default; that is why the current approach to so-called 'self driving cars/driverless cars' is completely and totally wrong and a dead end.

..oh, and by the way: It's real fucking easy for you SDC fanbois on the internet to shrug off the death of a fellow human being that you didn't know and never would have met, try to make it out as "all her fault", and so on, and to accuse me or anyone else of 'appeal to emotion' when we point out that even one human death at the hands of these machines is UNACCEPTABLE -- but I put to you that emotion has everything to do with this, and if you had even so much as met this woman, or better yet, had been a family member, you'd be singing a different tune about this -- and that if you really are capable of just shrugging this off like it didn't matter, then YOU ARE AN ASSHOLE and deserve to be BEATEN for it.

HUMAN LIVES MATTER. That's what this so-called 'technology' is supposed to be about, right? You fanbois trot out your cherry-picked statistics about traffic deaths, convey your anecdotes about shitty drivers you've encountered, then speak in such flowery, blue-sky terms about how wonderful the world will be when no humans are allowed to drive a car anymore -- yet here we are, with one of your hero machines KILLING A HUMAN BEING.

NO MORE DEATHS AT THE HANDS OF SELF DRIVING CARS! GET THEM OFF THE ROADS!