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Uber Vehicle Saw But Ignored Woman It Struck, Report Says (engadget.com)
gollum123 writes: Uber has reportedly discovered that the fatal crash involving one of its prototype self-driving cars was probably caused by software faultily set up to ignore objects in the road, sources told The Information. Specifically, it was that the system was set up to ignore objects that it should have attended to; Herzberg seems to have been detected but considered a false positive.
This is a clinical trial. The FDA has long long long long long experience in conducting clinical trials. Now one can argue if FDAs caution is too much but even in the worst case everyone would agree they have a well established process for assuring something is safe and effective before you release it onto the public.
Uber is conducting experiments on the public.
If this were a new drug or treatment or medical procedure they would be shut down.
This is actually far worse than that because most new drugs or treatments have clear lineages from prior ones that give us high expectations of what the outcome will be.
The argument that something has to be allowed prematurely because in the long run it will save lives is a failed argument for medicine.
In this case there is nothing to support the claim that this will save lives in the long run. Sure one could imagine that it would. But I don't think thats very well established. And if this were a drug study people would have spent the time and money to establish that.
The claim that they have conducted 5 million miles (or whatever of testing) is rubbish. Those are not statistically valid tests. We execs dashing in front of the cars going 50 miles per hours in any of those tests? I assure you that did not happen.
Moreover we already have evidence from those tests that driver re-aqusitions do happen frequently, and there is a substatnial lag in the hand over dues to human inattention. THe fact that they only had one driver in it says Uber is negligent.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Uber's entire business model is based on cutting corners (not paying employees as employees, not following local taxi laws/regulations, etc.). I wasn't at all surprised to hear that one of their self-driving test cars killed somebody. I immediately assumed that it was the result of yet another corner that they cut.
I don't respond to AC's.
Not a bug, a feature! Cleaning up the streets one (homeless) cyclist at a time.
Functions as designed.
But that's the danger of machine learning, which seems to pass for AI today, you often don't really know why it does anything that it does. Makes it difficult to test for correct function to say the least. I guess this test failed. Maybe they shouldn't be testing this on public streets.
What you appear to want is called "ghosting", where the driver drives and the autonomous software pretends to drive and the differences are evaluated. That is not the role of the safety operator. You appear to agree that a safety operator is a stupid concept because they have no way to know if the car is correctly evaluating any given obstacle until it is likely too late.
My argument is that is the obstacle was too obvious. The safety operator had to also overcome their expectation that the car would do the right thing. The engineers doing post-crash analysis appear to only have a vague idea why the car didn't appropriately evaluate this blatantly obvious obstacle. But the safety operator was supposed to figure this all out in less than 3 car lengths.
Does the safety driver get any feedback on what the autopilot is planning? I'd think that even a simple green/yellow/red indication to show what it's perceiving (everything's OK/I see something and am prepared to take action/I am taking action) would be useful.
I could see the car recognizing a potential hazard well in advance of a need to take action - that info should be given to the safety driver. If they in turn take action before the autopilot would have, perhaps an algorithm needs tweaking. And, if the driver sees a potential hazard first, they should be able to provide feedback on that, too, so they can figure out why the human is doing a better job.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
No one is guilty of vehicular manslaughter. This is an accident due to bad design. You don't jail the engineers or architects who design a building that fails in an earthquake. You don't arrest the airline execs when a plan component fails. The only difference here is software failed. Learn from the mistake, don't do it again. Sheesh.
Actually, there are a number of videos that people took from their cars on the following nights that show the area as well lit and it seems unlikely a moderately attentive human would have hit her. The video released from the car camera does not appear to be representative of what a human would have perceived. Notice that the "safety" driver obviously could see her easily when he glanced up from whatever she was distracted by. I am, of course, assuming that the street lighting hadn't suffered a massive failure that night and been restored the next few nights.
Of course you jail the engineers or architects, when they are criminally negligent.
There is little doubt that the Uber CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, was criminally negligent and aware that this kind of accident was not only possible but likely.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I've seen plenty of videos. The street is very well lit in all of them except Uber's video.
Interestingly, the camera facing the human "driver" is crisp and clear, using your standard "night vision" mode.
The Uber video is either doctored or doctored.
No one is guilty of vehicular manslaughter. This is an accident due to bad design. You don't jail the engineers or architects who design a building that fails in an earthquake.
You do if it wasn't designed to code.
You don't arrest the airline execs when a plan component fails.
Maybe not the exec, but certainly the maintenance engineer who committed fraud that resulted in the death of people.
So here - who's to blame? Who decided to live-test an experimental system that can operate with the safety disengaged?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Fuck off. Always brake, then evaluate, then maneuver.
Even if it was as dark as they edited it, it would mean the car was driving too fast for the human in the car and the lights on the car wbhere not bright enough for the human in the car.
You can not blame the human if you close his eyes and then ask him what he sees and he is wrong.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.