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Uber Driver Was Streaming Hulu Just Before Fatal Self-Driving Car Crash, Says Police (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Tempe, Arizona, police have released a massive report on the fatal Uber vehicle crash that killed pedestrian Elaine Herzberg in March. The report provides more evidence that driver Rafaela Vasquez was distracted in the seconds before the crash. "This crash would not have occurred if Vasquez would have been monitoring the vehicle and roadway conditions and was not distracted,'' the report concludes. Police obtained records from Hulu suggesting that Vasquez was watching "The Voice," a singing talent competition that airs on NBC, just before the crash. Hulu's records showed she began watching the program at 9:16pm. Streaming of the show ended at 9:59pm, which "coincides with the approximate time of the collision," according to the police report.
Do we ban Uber, Hulu, cars or pedestrians?
#DeleteFacebook
Hopefully this gets "the voice" taken off the air
Couldn't she afford Netflix?
I'm absolutely shocked that an employee whose job is "be vigilant for hours and react in seconds" had their mind could wander and decided they could probably watch a whole episode of the Voice without any negative consequences. I mean, there are people who watch TV while they are actively driving.
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I could understand if it were Rick and Morty, but not The Voice.
Isn't "The Voice" a singing competition? It's not impossible to envisage someone streaming that with no intention of watching the video.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
How's the crow taste?
Errr you post makes no sense what so ever. The people who were defending Uber's self-driving car were from the beginning blaming human error...
In this case she may have saved a life by doing her job and paying attention, but the final solution assumes that nobody is sitting behind that wheel. This is still a major fail for Uber's software.
In a very foreseeable way. If Uber couldn't figure out they shouldn't allow unsupervised employees to carry an small entertainment device into a situation where there were rare but impactful actions/attention required, I put more blame on Uber.
After all, an employee having an accident is one thing. An employee consistently making choices without consequences for a while, and those choices causing the accident, is a failure of supervision.
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How about we arrest the driver for watching TV while they were supposed to be operating a multi-ton piece of machinery?
The person should have been doing her job. At the same time, Uber hires people telling them it's a self driving vehicle, removes the 2 driver-per-car to reduce costs, and then tests disabling safety features because, "Hey it's okay. We have a human in case something goes wrong."
Fuck everything about this. Uber is equally at fault here. Sure she could have prevented the accident if she had been doing her god damn job. Uber could have prevented the accident if they didn't recklessly disable their own lidar and auto-brake algorithms to test their (failed) computer vision system AT NIGHT!
This girl made a mistake, one that will haunt her for the rest of her life. A girl on a bicycle is dead. There is plenty of blame to go around. But at a minimum, given Uber's track record, they should not be allowed to put these pieces of shit on the road.
Telsa has had a car crash into a truck and another into a barrier with their lane assist (they should be forced to rename that from "auto-pilot. It's not fucking auto-pilot). These systems give people a false sense of security and make people less aware, less active drivers. We are a good 15 year minimum from true autonomous vehicles and it's a fucking hard problem space.
Even with how expensive it is to expand rail, we could probably expand rail at a fraction of the price of self driving tech. Singapore and London already have self driving trains. Let's make transportation better for everyone in America first and catch up to the rest of the world before we work on complicated stuff that's only good for its cool factor:
https://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-solve-the-transportation-problem/
in the car. If nothing else it decreases the odds. They'd both have to be watching Hulu to mess up. Safety is about reducing risk, not eliminating it. Also, Uber still disabled a ton of safety features they shouldn't have so they could get better data.
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note that "dimly list street" - what you have seen is footage from camera that does not perform well in low light condition. Human eye works way better - as long as you focus it on the road...
This person was also a convicted felon (armed robbery). What a country!
Except it wasn't a dimly lit area, Uber's own diagnostics attested to this, she was spotted with plenty of time to come to a full stop if need be. Furthermore, this is an area with an average of 1.25 miles between marked crosswalks. Are you saying you would have made the half-mile hike to the next crossing?
Until someone puts out a law saying companies can force employees to turn in / turn off their cell phones. Then the same people will be crying foul for giving employers that power.
In this role UBER is paying minimum wage and the qualifications are a pulse and a drivers license - this doesn't exactly attract people who would not fit in as extras in Idiocracy.
My thoughts exactly.
You're having someone drive a prototype vehicle where you know focus is going to be an issue. You probably don't need someone with a 4-year degree, but you need to make sure they're responsible and have good work habits.
Instead Uber found the cheapest body they could throw in the driver's seat.
Sure she was negligent for watching Hulu instead of controlling the car, but so was Uber for hiring a test-driver who couldn't be reasonably expected to pay attention while the car was driving.
I stole this Sig
Correct - testing auto pilot includes the part where we see the effects of a distracted driver if something goes wrong with the automation... automation who's very existence practically begs the human driver to ignore the road. Similar to texting while driving - drivers SHOULD pay attention to the road rather than text, but we know many will. Deciding on if auto pilot is safe enough to use in mass production must account for the fact the human drivers won't pay attention to the road as this accident revealed in testing.
I have a friend who's a school bus driver. Using a cellphone while behind the wheel (even when parked) is a first-time termination offense. And remember, there is sound and video recording in school buses.
What's even more damning to Uber is that they previously found out that the car detected the pedestrian something like 6 seconds before the crash, but wasn't configured to autobrake or potentially to even give a warning that it sensed that condition.
If you don't even have autobraking worked out, why would you be testing an autonomous car anywhere but a private track? You'd need to be an immoral company who thinks that laws are an inconvenience to make that sort of a decision.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
The safety driver watching Hulu is more than just a poor decision on the drivers part. It represents a complete failure of the safety culture at Uber. What were hiring requirements and training for safety drivers. There was in cab recording of the safety driver. Was it streamed to a monitoring system to ensure the drivers were doing there job? Was it reviewed by safety supervisors? Was there any ongoing analysis done to determine how effective the safety drivers were? Did the safety drivers have regular performance reviews/ briefings to ensure they were staying focused on the road? The fact that the driver was watching Hulu while working suggests that she knew she was not being monitored and that her primary role was a warm body in the drivers seat as safety theater.
It's already legal for companies to do so (turn off/do not bring).
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Furthermore, this is an area with an average of 1.25 miles between marked crosswalks. Are you saying you would have made the half-mile hike to the next crossing?
If you bothered to check, you would have seen that the place where it happened was about 300 feet from a crosswalk.
WTB [sig], PST!!!
The later is mindnumbingly boring
... which is why they call it a JOB and not a FUN.
Countless millions of us suffer daily with jobs we would rather not be doing. However we do not feel so entitled to ignore what we should be doing when public safety is at stake.
If United has a pilot don a blindfold, and had no copilot to take over, I would also blame them. However, the situation of "be a daredevil while landing" and "when bored, turn on a tv show" are very different things. It is foreseeable that when bored people will watch TV.
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To be fair, if the woman hadnâ(TM)t been jaywalking on a dimly lit street at night in front of oncoming traffic, the accident also wouldnâ(TM)t have happened. There were two people making poor decisions, their paths crossed, and one of them died because of it. It sucks.
The sensors detected her just fine, the software just decide: 'Ehhh fuck it -- I am not stopping"
Source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...
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What about senior citizen, their eyes don't work so well in the dark either.
That teleporters are perfect for gingers?
Ezekiel 23:20
You have no clue how good the human eye is and how poor a digital replica is, do you?
Until someone puts out a law saying companies can force employees to turn in / turn off their cell phones.
Ah, but as Uber repeatedly states, their drivers are NOT their employees.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
The drivers testing the vehicles are employees. :P
Well in about the same way that United Airlines shouldnâ(TM) allow their pilots to don blindfolds while attempting to land the airplane.
Instrument landings happen all the time is when the *airplane* is effectively blindfolded by poor weather. But there's no way the pilots can see the instrumentation when blindfolded themselves, that would be nonsense.
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The sensors detected her just fine, the software just decide: 'Ehhh fuck it -- I am not stopping"
That's obviously a extreme software failure -- the crash might have scratched the paint, thus damaging the car.
Those lazy software people should be fired immediately and the responsible managers should hire new ones -- preferably 20 years experience in a field that's only been around for 5.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
If United Airlines did have its pilots wear blindfolds, it would be Alitalia.
"How's the crow taste?"
An employee watched TV instead of doing her fucking job.
Your Dyslexia is acting up again.
"The fact that the driver was watching Hulu while working suggests that she knew she was not being monitored and that her primary role was a warm body in the drivers seat as safety theater."
And I'd bet her hourly wage will confirm that.
If they'd been really serious about her being a safety driver for an autonomous car on public roads then they would have payed her a lot more.
I don't think that applies here. Aren't Uber drivers dispatched through a cellphone app? I know Lyft is but I haven't taken Uber. (Lyft is always cheaper for my trips.)
If they apply a knee-jerk broad brush "fix" by default, they aren't fixing anything. They are just forcing the drivers to decide if they would be willing to break the law in order keep their job.
A better solution would be a mandatory agreement to limit the apps they can use on the job our risk penalties.
is Americans really, really (and I mean really) hate paying for anything that benefits somebody else. You have it crammed into your skull from day 1 that if you're doing that then you're a sucker. A fool. A "cuck". Whatever. It's a narrative pushed by our ruling class so they can avoid paying for the commons and it's worked for hundreds of years...
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all the time. I start it up when I get in the car and it autoplays while I drive. It's entirely possible that's what she was doing. In that case it's no different than running the radio.
The question is did she also fiddle with the display on the car (like she was instructed to do so by Uber so that they didn't have to pay for a second driver/passenger to keep track of interesting driving events for the engineers to review). That'll come up in a court case.
But here's a much, much better question, why they _hell_ is this information being released to the public? At this point it should be part of a criminal case, and congrats, you just tainted every jury pool in the country. On the plus side this makes Uber look good, so I guess I just answered my question...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
You obviously have information the rest of us lack. All I've seen is the very dodgy camera feed from the car which seems at odds with what other cameras could see in the same place at the same time of night, and a LIDAR scan that picked the victim up 6 seconds before the collision. So where's your source?
I think the point was more that Uber's openly stated method of business is to deliberately break laws it finds inconvenient.
Can anyone else remember a point to self-driving cars other than being able to do other things while the car drives? I sure can't.
Because it's safer? We'll apparently not in this case.
Umm... Why am I pay extra for self driving cars again?
You have no clue how poor the human eye is and how good a digital replica is, do you?
Ezekiel 23:20
I don't "assume" it. I know it is because we can measure it.
Ezekiel 23:20
Companies using a safety driver to test automated driving need to program their system to drop into manual mode at random intervals no more than an hour apart.
If the safety driver has to regularly be alert and take over, they'll pay attention. Otherwise, it's almost impossible to convince a normal human to focus for day after day of sitting there and not having to do anything just in case there is a failure which by then they won't be expecting. If their "normal" is that they expect to have to take over with no notice at least once an hour, they'll be ready to take over in the event of a real issue.
The psychology of this is already well researched for patrolling security guards, metal detector monitoring, etc...
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Does the car use visual sensors for driving, or was the camera just there for test purposes? If the latter, it doesn't need to be all that good.
I think a running commentary should probably work. The Advanced Driving test in the UK has this as part of the requirement. Example here. Would need to be adapted for the nature of self driving cars, and would require some training of the operators but nether of those are barriers. Would certainly keep the safety driven engaged, which is the key point. Would also allow comparison with what the car sees and what the driver sees.
It's a very sad world when a company has to treat every employee like a child who needs constant supervision. And of course, the really interesting question is who will supervise the supervisors? Will it be turtles all the way down?
How about we go back to a saner world when we considered adults as responsible for their own actions?
It shouldn't. Silicon devices should be much more sensitive than human eyes. Someone cheaped out?
Yes they are, and the result is that we take this awesome footage and through 99% of the data away and cram it into an 8bpp representation on a display with a woeful contrast ratio.
The wonders of the human eye is not that it's more sensitive than silicon, but rather that it is more selective and as such we are able to see phenomenal amounts of dynamic range that can not only not be captured by silicon, but also not displayed properly as a result.
Either way, I guarantee the road did not appear anywhere near as dark as in that video.
You have no clue how good the human eye is and how poor a digital replica is, do you?
The GP is narrow minded. CCDs are definitely far more sensitive than the human eye but they suffer greatly in the way the resulting image is processed. All the sensitivity in the world doesn't help if you clip the highlights, compress the result to 8bit, and display it on a shitty monitor with a 200:1 contrast ratio.
You're an idiot and a blind Uber defender
I'm saying that Uber uses shit cameras and therefore I'm a Uber defender? You should have your head checked.
Ezekiel 23:20
But there's no technical need to do any of those in a night time camera. Those are artifacts of cheap designs, not limitations on the light capturing technology.
Ezekiel 23:20
How about we blame the woman who jay-walked out into the middle of a dimly-lit street at 10 PM? Noooo, let's not blame that stupid behavior, we should focus only on the driver and the the car. If she had walked, or rode, the extra bit to get to a crosswalk she'd likely be alive.
If this hadn't been an Uber car it never would have made headlines. People are distracted by all sorts of things while driving, and no system is going to be able to prevent all accidents, especially when people dart out into the middle of a dark road at night.
No they are limitations of display. Your eyes in realtime adjust every point dynamically. You can do that in software too, and the result looks like shit. There's a reason when you take a photo into the sunset everything around you looks black, and that's because the alternative looks like garbage.
Also you want to capture realtime video in HDR with almost no compression? Good luck with your technology. Your $200 dashcam suddenly isn't.
You could use a running commentary, but then you also need to QA the commentary at random brief intervals to ensure they aren't just talking. That takes additional resources. I still think having the driver actually periodically do what they are supposed to be there for would be ideal, but a running commentary would at least ensure they are paying attention, even if it wouldn't get them used to taking over control on short notice.
Obviously in either case, you'd want to start the driver on a closed track (an abandoned neighborhood like Mythbusters used several times would be perfect) in order to get them used to the requirements and only let them out in public once they've established they can actually do the job with minimal risk of harm to others.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
No they are limitations of display.
But there's no "display" in self-driving car's "brain". Only an FP framebuffer which doesn't have these limitations.
Also you want to capture realtime video in HDR with almost no compression?
You're *not* trying to store it so it's irrelevant what a dashcam can or cannot do. (Your brain is not trying to store it either after all.)
Ezekiel 23:20
Oh you're talking about the car navigation system not the feed. Right. Well that makes everything you said irrelevant since the car navigates using LIDAR and doesn't care how light or dark it is.
You're *not* trying to store it so it's irrelevant what a dashcam can or cannot do. (Your brain is not trying to store it either after all.)
Side note: Your brain definitely stores it. Your vision is actually quite horrible. What you see is made up of an assessment of a lot of "stored frames" each individually quite horrible. But our brain is great at building a visual world out of a continuous crappy feed.
I'm pretty sure that Uber would have fire their testing monitor if they knew they were streaming Hulu while they were suppose to be monitoring the operation of the test car.
It's not applicable here because the person in question wasn't an Uber driver (which Uber claims is a contractor) but a self-driving vehicle test monitor working for Uber as part of their division that is developing a self driving car.
That's not how any of this works.
Digital telescopes at high sensitivities require perfect stillness for long periods of time and isolation from all other light to get a fuzzy dot to filter.
And such telescopes don't exactly fit in the human skull.
Have you ever used a film camera? How did the shot come out compared to what you saw in real life?
Increasing gain doesn't do shit other than up the noise floor.
Guess which car didn't use LIDAR, or didn't react to the results of anything?
Guess which car and camera we're talking about. You can go and watch the video. If your human eye can't see tons better than that camera you shouldn't have a license.
Further, go look up other videos of that area. It's NOT dimly lit. This was at best a crappy camera and crappy software with an inattentive "driver" and a complacent Uber. In actuality, I believe it's a good camera with crappy software, an inattentive "driver", and an Uber who is complacent with inattentive drivers and crappy software, and who is fucking lying about the whole situation. I believe they doctored the footage from the external cam to make it appear very dark and make it seem like it wasn't their fault. I believe they released the internal camera's footage (note how it's nice and bright and clear, in your typical "night vision" light amplification style) to shift blame to the "driver", who they hired, trained, and presumably reviewed.
Did the Uber car use LIDAR? It had the module installed, it may have even been on, but the software didn't give a fucking shit either way.
Neither did the "driver". Neither did Uber.