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Uber Shutting Down Self-Driving Operations In Arizona After Fatal Crash (azcentral.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Arizona Republic: Uber is shutting down its self-driving car tests in Arizona, where one of the cars was involved in a fatal crash with a pedestrian in March, the company said Wednesday. The company notified about 300 Arizona workers in the self-driving program that they were being terminated just before 9 a.m. Wednesday. The shutdown should take several weeks. Test drivers for the autonomous cars have not worked since the accident in Tempe, but Uber said they continued to be paid. The company's self-driving trucks have also been shelved since the accident. Uber plans to restart testing self-driving cars in Pittsburgh once federal investigators conclude their inquiry into the Tempe crash. The company also said it is having discussions with California leaders to restart testing.
This isn't your facebook feed, you can't just post that kind of stuff without some sort of proof to back up that claim.
I can't quite remember where I read it, but the car model has collision detection in the default configuration and would normally have performed an emergency brake when collision was imminent. All the "smart" features were disabled to run Uber's SDC software, though from what I understand this is standard practice so you don't have competing/conflicting automated systems. Nobody made a big deal of that part, it's just part of the explanation of how it could plow down that pedestrian without reacting at all - they disabled a primitive system that worked and replaced it with a sophisticated system that didn't and actually performed worse than out of the box.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Except one of the much vaunted benefits of self-driving cars is they're going to be safer than human drivers...
Anyway, this wasn't a freak accident - the safety driver was watching their phone and not the road and, if you believe the video they released, then the car was driving too fast for the visibility conditions (the alternative is not to believe the video...)
Even in the good ol' 60s, if Apollo 11 had landed on a civilian's head because the Heroic Astronauts were busy Tweeting then Questions Would Have Been Asked (like, "what the hell is Tweeting?")
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Yeah, the good old days when scientist like Marie Curie killed themselves with exposure to dangerous radiation, rather than the public (I mean, yes, there are "radium girls," but Curie discovered polonium, not radium).
P.S. To be actually serious, it's a good thing for autonomous cars that unscrupulous companies like Uber will be driven out of the business (if not "out of business" altogether). There are much more competent, ethical, and less-profit-crazy companies out there. They are the future of technology, not companies like Uber.