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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?
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.
..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.
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.
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!
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.
"This ship is unsinkable!"
History says NO ONE should make statements like this.
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
They got videos out fast with pitch black cameras that made it look like she came out of nowhere.
She did come out of nowhere.
The video is darker than other dash cams, but does not change the fact the woman was standing in a. strong shadow cast by a tree before she went out in front of the car, and additionally the brighter lights of the city were behind her in such a way that it made her almost invisible.
The human driver looked up about three to four seconds before the car hit the woman (not the time she looked up as she hit the woman, the time before that), and did not see her - proving that the woman on the road was obscured enough that a human could not and did not see her.
I'm guessing that most people who don't read /. are going to end up assuming this was just an unavoidable accident caused by a crazy old homeless woman
They would assume that because that is what happened, from the standpoint of a human driver.
Why would you NOT classify her as crazy, when she jumped in front of a moving vehicle??? How is that sane? Do you do that, ever???
Now I do think that the LIDAR should probably have seen her, but I also think that it DID see her but because she was not moving yet classified her as an obstacle in the other lane, and when the woman moved it was too late to do anything. But almost all human drivers would have hit the woman so it was basically unavoidable from a legal sense.
It's sad to me that Slashdot readers these days cannot even competently analyze multiple video feeds to put together the real facts.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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
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?
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.
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.
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.