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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.
So sorry for any inconvenience.
Who is guilty of vehicular manslaughter, here?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
It begins....
Then it's an easy fix. Just move the "sensitivity" slider a little to the left.
Actually, it's kind of terrifying that all that stands between life and death is a sensitivity setting.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
The Uber vehicle mistaken the woman for an old bag.
I understand that programmatically telling a blowing plastic bag from a child's toy is difficult.
But she (and her bike) were clearly large enough to damage the vehicle. Even if the code saw her as debris, the car should have avoided it.
I think the code had to have dismissed her as lens flair or something similar.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
criminal case! let's see uber ceo in tent city jail for some time.
Also with an criminal case you can't hide under the EULA's or a big list of subcontractors.
In autopilot software (airpalnes / FAA) this would be tuned in testing / code review before it makes it to real use.
My guess is that the problem is actually much more complicated than Uber is making it out to be. The easiest way out of this for them has become, "oops we didn't set the software up right". This allows them to save face, because even if it isn't true they just have to avoid the same circumstance in their testing (like only drive in the day) and then everyone thinks they fixed their software. I really hope they have to provide absolute proof that the problem is exactly what they are saying it is, and that they must demonstrate that it is REALLY fixed by reproducing those same conditions.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I think you mean kill mode
WTB [sig], PST!!!
start at the top UBER VP / CEO needs to go to court take the fall for the full outsourced map. Or the next one can just outsourced things so much that no one person is responsible and it takes an year or more to just fully understanding the outsourced mapping.
does the autonomous sensitivity need to be changed all the time? Time of Day? Weather? urban vs rural
If people follow at appropriate distance for the speed, no crash will happen.
The woman was smaller than the car, so...
That will be her epitaph:: "False Positive".
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
If people...
That's a big "if", especially when you look at how many crashes are caused by drivers texting and/or drunk.
It's like saying people should assume drivers will jam on their brakes because pedestrians have the right-of-way.
And can the correct setting be determined in a way that does not violate the zero-one-infinity rule?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
In all likelihood the AI did detect the woman, but then decided she wasn't attractive enough to harass and switched to "ignore" mode.
#DeleteChrome
"well if you remove the Uber car, there is still a good chance she would have been killed"
How?
"If the victim was never in the street, they never would have been killed"
Oh. You're playing stupid.
TFA doesn't mention how much time, if any was allowed for compliance. Compliance errors were even documented in an old movie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
Many cyclists are assholes, future Darwins, but you can't just run them over. She was in the road long enough to cross a lane and a half.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Should you name your self driving car? If so, are Christine and Kitt off limits?
ITYM Karr (Knight Automated Roaming Robot) - that was the evil one. Kitt (Knight Industries Two Thousand) was the good one.
(I feel very old now)
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
I still want to know why nobody seems to care that the driver wasn't looking at the road. The software bug is secondary.
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.
Surely even Uber can program a vehicle to hunt down a target even if he she or it isn't in the road.. I'm guessing that capability is scheduled for a future software upgrade.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
By the way this was a false negative (detection), not false positive.
A false negative means it decided there was nothing there i.e. that the data did not indicate an object. But that was false.
A false positive would mean the system decided something was in front of the car, when there wasn't anything or anything significant anyway.
The problem is when you set the parameters to lower the rate of false negatives (A good thing if you are considering being a pedestrian), then the rate of false positives goes up. Which would mean a car that slams its brakes on with no good reason too often. And that can cause accidents too, because following drivers are often tailgating or not paying attention.
The only way out of this dilemma is better sensors, and more sensors, preferably sensitive to different physical symptoms of object presence, and/or better use by the algorithms of multiple independent types of features from the images. That should reduce both the false positive and false negative object detection rate.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I for one hail our new corporatocratic overlords.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Excellent point re execs. I read that in England sometime in the middle ages bridge engineers were required after the construction to sleep for two weeks under the bridge -- with their families.
Uber software did not "see but ignore woman".
Uber software processed some pixel data and erroneously concluded that there was no significant solid object right in front of the car.
Simple as that.
To imply that the the software "saw" a person there but ignored the person is pejorative, sensationalist language, designed to troll.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
If a virtual Pepe/Pedobear walking across the road makes a car crash, they've done us all a service.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
So...this is a QA cycle with the expense of 'users'? Did they not test it in more controlled environment? I hope they (all of them) will now.
4wdloop
No one, because there was no vehicular manslaughter.
The woman was found to be at fault for not checking that the road was clear before stepping out of the shadows to cross illegally. Something that she could have easily done since it was dark and the vehicle's headlights were on.
A large median at the site of the crash has signs warning people not to cross mid-block and to use the crosswalk to the north at Curry Road instead.
I remember when AZ bragged their state was more "business friendly" than CA when CA rejected Uber's testing permit. AZ stepped up to court Uber's testing. A smart, forward thinking politician would realize they are opening the door to a public relations disaster and tone down their anti-regulation rhetoric. Instead, they are eating crow.
At the start they could have said, "We know there are risks, but we are willing to accept the risks for the sake of jobs and economic expansion in our State". Instead, their tone sounded closer to the style of "we ain't no big gov't socialists, like CA is". (At least that's how it came across to me.)
The thing is politicians on both sides are rarely rewarded by voters for presenting trade-offs such that they often only give the up-sides. Too many voters don't tolerate nuance: they want "bold and committed" and elect Kirks over Picards. In this case, a car-bot boldly plowed down a pedestrian where no car-bot had gone before.
Table-ized A.I.
Many cyclists are assholes, future Darwins, but you can't just run them over.
Yet. I'm working on getting new legislation on the ballot in CA that would allow drivers and pedestrians to hunt and kill bicycle riders who break the law (or wear Lycra).
I've been learning to get angry about stuff in advance, so that I have time to vent some of it before the incidents I see coming actually happen. This way, the anger itself is not such a surprise to me when it does.
If people follow at appropriate distance for the speed, no crash will happen.
I live in Washington State with recent strict anti texting laws. Has done nothing to curb cellphone use while driving. It's amazing, Nobody cares. Facetube posts are still more important than human life.
Ah... Yes.. The conservative argument creeps up on you doesn't it...
Before we did this same law here, my argument was two fold.. 1. It's unenforceable so nobody will follow it because you simply cannot make the fines high enough to make an impact and low enough to not bankrupt most people... 2. We already have laws about accidents due to distracted driving and liability so this new one is unnecessary.
A conservative asks the questions "is this necessary and if it is, is the law the least possible, and can we actually enforce this?" Any place we see "no" as the answer, we stop and say "no" .
Personally, I think it would have been much more effective to institute a "Don't text and Drive" campaign and make it socially unacceptable to do. Making it illegal really just encourages folks to do it anyway. Don't think so? Tell me, what do you do when you see a "Wet Paint, don't touch!" sign? You know you want to touch it...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Problem here is that the only thing that broke the law was the woman who got killed. She was J-Walking.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Ah come on. THINK McFly... Think..
If they don't do there own investigation, who's going to have evidence to argue they are not a fault before this hits the news? You don't think the STATE will let them skate if the PR turns on Uber?
Uber is in full CYA mode on this, of course they are doing their own investigation... If for no other reason than to be able to lie convincingly should it become necessary.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Add cyclist neck high cords across the roads in front of 'critical mass' rides please.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Some ambiguity. Not all rules are spelled out.
We know women are 10 points more than men in all age groups, we know the value for men triples at age 40 (she was 49).
For her to be worth 50 points men under 40 would have to be worth 13 1/3 points. I think she was 40 points, nobody ever had anything but a round point total.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
We switched off the video camera.
The software developer, already sweating under the fluorescents, asked for some water. He described the exception error, where the object was categorized as crazy cat lady, so he happened to recognize all the false positives that when combined triggered the escape routine, and ignored the object as nonexistent. That was it.
Unfortunately, his contract period ended, and management was going to investigate further. But it was some sort of religious holiday season for them, and nothing came of it.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
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.
... to society and quickly concluded that it wasn't worth the wear on the brakes and that it was in fact better to put her out of her misery.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
At the point the safety driver looked up, the pedestrian was a few feet in front of the car. The question is whether a human would have seen her far enough in advance to brake / steer around her. The other question is why the pedestrian was paying absolutely no attention to traffic.
If only a technology existed that allowed cars to travel at night in areas with no lights.
"unlikely a moderately attentive human would have hit her"
Unfortunately those are rare and the worst drivers are typically engaging their phone more than the boring traffic.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Not riding it, pushing it, so no bonus.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
> If only a technology existed that allowed cars to travel at night in areas with no lights.
Parent has a very good point. They put an IR camera inside the car to observe the driver, but didn't put one facing the road?
so, this car isnt programmed to not hit moving objects ? maybe it just didn't like their new meatbag overlords ... does this mean the car will get
an electric chair ?
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?