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Uber Will Not Re-Apply For Self-Driving Car Permit In California (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Uber, after suspending its self-driving car operations in all markets following a fatal crash, has decided not to re-apply for its self-driving car permit in California. Uber's current permit in California expires March 31. "We proactively suspended our self-driving operations, including in California, immediately following the Tempe incident," an Uber spokesperson told TechCrunch. "Given this, we decided to not reapply for a California permit with the understanding that our self-driving vehicles would not operate in the state in the immediate future."
Uber's decision not to reapply comes in tandem with a letter the DMV sent to Uber's head of public affairs, Austin Heyworth, today. The letter pertains to the fatal self-driving car crash that happened in Tempe, Arizona last week. "In addition to this decision to suspend testing throughout the country, Uber has indicated that it will not renew its current permit to test autonomous vehicles in California," DMV Deputy Director/Chief Counsel Brian Soublet wrote in the letter. "By the terms of its current permit, Uber's authority to test autonomous vehicles on California public roads will end on March 31, 2018." This comes following Arizona's decision to block Uber's self-driving cars in its city.
Uber's decision not to reapply comes in tandem with a letter the DMV sent to Uber's head of public affairs, Austin Heyworth, today. The letter pertains to the fatal self-driving car crash that happened in Tempe, Arizona last week. "In addition to this decision to suspend testing throughout the country, Uber has indicated that it will not renew its current permit to test autonomous vehicles in California," DMV Deputy Director/Chief Counsel Brian Soublet wrote in the letter. "By the terms of its current permit, Uber's authority to test autonomous vehicles on California public roads will end on March 31, 2018." This comes following Arizona's decision to block Uber's self-driving cars in its city.
With the reported problems their self driving car had im ammazed it was allowed off a test track. Barely averaging 13 miles before needing human intervention is piss poor, and not functioning properly while next to a large object (like a transport).
Yeah. Definitely should not have been off a test track.
Not a feature, just a bug. I think the relentless push for autonomous self-driving cars is too big right now but this incident will make those companies think twice especially when a few ambulance chasers come calling.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
"You can't fire me, I quit!"
Welcome to Arizona, we have the city!
Given Uber's history of flouting taxi and labor laws just about anywhere they operate, I expect them to test in California anyway, without a permit.
Uber is a high tech innovative company, with an App . . . who needs a permit . . . ?
"We don't pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes." -- Leona Helmsley
"We don't obey laws; only the little people obey laws." -- Uber
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Sweet; Arizona has downsized and is now a city!
Without self-driving cars Uber is dead. They are not sufficiently profitable with regular rides to service their debt.
What are the states doing to determine whether Waymo has the same flaws that Uber does? Maybe they're just being more careful with testing and are a ticking time bomb like Uber was.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
They'll just test without a permit. The law has never stopped Uber from getting its way so I'm not sure why people think this will somehow be different?
Wow, what a stupid individual you are. Arguing with a state that wants to keep its citizens safe from a company that doesn't know shit about self driving cars. Please don't reproduce.
Sweet; Arizona has downsized and is now a city!
Considering that nearly 2/3 the state's population lives in the metro Phoenix area (4.5million out of 7 million) it's actually pretty close to being a factual statement.
I suppose in your non-nanny non-fascist non-shithole hypothetical state, driver licenses are not required? Let's just let a 10 year old, or a blind person, or a person with dementia (etc...) drive, because if we don't, that would be fascism.
At this point, allowing Uber's autonomous cars to drive around is something akin to that.
Is this the same garbage company Uber that was all uppity about not paying for s permit a while back?
Yeah, corporations are worth more than people. In your corporateocracy, corporations should be allowed to run down as many people as they want.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I smell a (public relations/marketing) rat. Uber has sunk serious cash into self-driving vehicles, with a vision of a future where there are no drivers and no vehicle ownership. The public at large will simple dial up (automated) transport services from their mobile - transport services Uber will provide. I can't imagine one (admittedly tragic) setback is all it takes to cause them to abandon it.
They are (disingenuously, I suspect) attempting to appear humane, cautious, and considerate... to mitigate the "we stomp on laws! we stomp on people! we harass! progress at any cost!" image that they have. When the dust settles, they'll - at best - issue a "we're super duper happy we took this pause to focus on safety blah blah".
Writing applications that impact public safety (as someone else pointed out, Therac anyone?) is an entirely different ballgame than "app development". Anyone rationally believe that Uber has the governance, structure, and discipline in place to create self-driving systems? What about airplane critical systems? Radiology?
Transportation is no joke. Realtime systems are not 'just another kind of app'. It's a very different approach, discipline, and willingness to follow a particular governance, a particular path. Nothing I've read about Uber, nothing they've ever said publicly, and nothing the three engineers I've known to work for them indicates that they - at all - acknowledge that. They believe they're somehow super-special, somehow smarter than the thousands of people who've come before them, working on critical systems, who utilized such safeguards and discipline.
NopeNopeNope.
I suppose in your non-nanny non-fascist non-shithole hypothetical state, driver licenses are not required? Let's just let a 10 year old, or a blind person, or a person with dementia (etc...) drive, because if we don't, that would be fascism.
At this point, allowing Uber's autonomous cars to drive around is something akin to that.
Such a marvelous strawman you've erected, and you take it down so well!
Where in my post did I even mention anything about Uber or their SDV?
Slashdot's MOTD is so apropos here:
"Tell the truth and run." -- Yugoslav proverb
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Without self-driving cars Uber is dead.
There is no reason to believe that even with self driving cars Uber will ever achieve profitability. Honestly I'm kind of astonished they have managed to get the funding they have because they haven't shown any credible path to profitability that I am aware of.
They are not sufficiently profitable with regular rides to service their debt.
And somehow we are to believe that they will beat their well financed competition in developing them? Self driving cars will require tens of billions at minimum to develop (probably hundreds of billions) and decades to get to a state where they can be sold to or used by the general public. Uber is losing money at an almost record setting clip and we're expected to believe they can seriously compete with Google and GM and Ford? All of which are profitable, have billions in cash, have proven business models, and most of whom have WAY more experience developing cars and related technologies than Uber.
Honestly I think Uber is doomed. The only question is when. They are well financed but it's not clear how they ever get to profitability. And no Amazon is not an obviously good analog here.
It is fascism not to allow businesses to kill people? You must have a pretty extreme position on laissez faire policies.
The paranoia and fear of these advanced technologies is crazy. Thousands of people die while human beings at charge of a car and nobody complains. Keep stoking the fear and china will move along and build these. Same with cloning etc.
Crazy.
Well, I know as a driver I have to prove I have clear visibility and I am paying attention when I drive. I can get a ticket or worse for any violation of these rules. This is not paranoia, this is just expecting self-driving car companies to be held to the same standard. Having a safety driver doesn't cover it, because it's natural for a safety driver to be too distracted in a self driving car to take over effectively.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
"We proactively suspended our self-driving operations, including in California, immediately following the Tempe incident," an Uber spokesperson told TechCrunch"
The word this spokesperson wanted was "REACTIVELY".
You don't proactively do things in immediate response to events. That's called reacting.
The situation is actually worse than with Therac-25.
Back then it was standard type of software, (a classical imperative program written in assembler, that is supposed to do a series of determined steps), where further analysis could find bugs (mostly due to bad practices that could help arise race conditions, overflows, etc.) you can clearly show that the software didn't work as planned.
Nowadays, with autonomous cars, its entirely different, mostly relying on modern-day AI with deep neural nets.
I'm exaggerating (though not necessarily that much, in the specific case of Nvidia's platform) :
but basically you have on one side a bunch of sensor inputs (camera, radar, lidar, sonar)
on the other side you have a bunch of controls (steering wheel, brakes, gaz pedal)
and in the middle you have a giant AI black box with "here magic happens" written on it (but it could as well be hallucinating sheeps).
There's no clear software bug here. In fact the software run exactly as expected : it correctly ran the neural net.
It's what the neural decided to do out of sensors data that is problematic.
It's not as much a software bug as a general design oversight.
With problematic black boxes whose logic is hard to model and understand in an exact logic fashion (DNN aren't a long list of logic rules like "if condition A and B are detected then apply decision C").
Of course in practice that's a big simplification (except, again, for Nvidia's platform). In practice a good design should include also hard logic that looks at some simpler safeguards (a big object in front detected by sensors should cause direct slowing down/braking not waiting to see what weird decision the neural net might come up with). So there is actual "classical imperative program" somewhere that needs fixing.
But you get the general gist of the direction things are going with AI : we're reaching the point where it's hard to understand what going under hood, because what goes under the hood is closer to "intuition" than "hard logic".
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Automotive deaths are only justified when undertrained and underqualified human drivers have somewhere to be on a friday night.
They may as well not be. Human assisted self driving cars could be put on the road today and there would already be less accidents than with the existing level of intelligence and training required to drive in the US.
Even Autopilot doesn't work in enough situations yet for us to truly know how safe it would be. People who buy Teslas with Autopilot go into it prepared to have to maintain concentration even though the car is driving, but not everyone can do that.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Well I am sure we are all watching millions of people driving all the time making sure they are paying attention.
Wow, what a stupid individual you are. Arguing with a state that wants to keep its citizens safe from a company that doesn't know shit about self driving cars.
It wouldn't change my opinion if Uber's SDV was safe and Kalifornia welcomed them.
Kalifornia has been a fascist, intolerant shithole for decades and is only getting worse. Uber/SDVs and Kalifornia's reactions to them have nothing to do with it.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Human assisted self driving cars could be put on the road today
They already are. Lane assist, follow-at-a-distance cruise control, auto braking. Those can be had on any upper-mid-level car these days.
True story.
The register is reporting Uber cut the number of LIDAR sensors from 5 to 1 on the volvos. They also cut the number of cameras. Worse, it looks like the AZ gubanor was playing footsies with UBER. I just get more and more disgusted by this as more comes out. Much like the water slide thing in TX, someone needs to go to jail.
Self driving cars are neither run by AIs nor by Deep Learning Neural Networks.
Nvidia made a clear point that their platform was indeed pure DNN (aka "end-to-end deep learning self driving cars").
(Because it was more a demo of the application of their tensor acceleration rather than a practical implementation of driving).
But also has given rise to criticism about a technology that we can't completely understand (simply by not being based on a set of rules).
Recognizing a street sign might be so ...
Yes, in most cars (except Nvidia), the final decision is rules based (as in "if there an object that's too near, hit the brakes")
The problem here, is what goes upstream.
Neural nets use go way beyond recognizing signage.
We have moved past using Hough-space to recognize lane in early LDAS a long time ago. Neural nets are used to make better sense out of the sensors input, like tagging all the various object in the scene seen by the cameras.
(Comma.ai's blog gives a nice overview of what goes in a modern car system)
It's these modern classifier that enable auto maker to start detecting new object like cyclists, etc.
(e.g.: Volvo's various announcement of the improvment of their City-Safety)
But it's this type of image recognition that is the weirdest to understand and might get fooled in weird ways (Volvo having problem with kangoroos crossing the road in Australia, because by jumping vertically they might seem to move forward and backward to the monoscopic camera's perspective)
This makes the signals coming out the object dections/tagging of the sensors less reliable.
Thus a simple rule like the above "if there an object that's too near, hit the brakes" can become much less reliable in practice because the autonomous system will have trouble determining what's an object and were it is.
System are already reaching border condition where the standard input filtering gets in the way.
- Uber mentioned that their accident might be caused by the radar normally filtering out signals that don't move at a different speed (it tries to find incoming cars, but will miss a bike going perpendicular).
- Tesla mentioned that their car crash might be partially caused by the radar trying to filter out abnormal reflection that could be caused by metallic junk / metallic signage.
Now just try to imagine what happens when it's the neural net used to tag objects in the camera that goes miss prediciton.
It will be even harder to understand *why* the rules kicked into action and the autonomous car took a specific decision.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]