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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.
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/
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...
Except that this autonomous car ran over a pedestrian because the loose nut behind the wheel was not paying attention.
If there had been no people in the car, this still would have happened. This is why no cars are licensed to drive autonomously. As long as cars require a driver to monitor they are going to be more dangerous, as the "driver" is going to get bored and not pay attention.
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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?
If that was a pop culture reference I don't get it. If it was an insult I don't get it either.
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.
As I recall, the vehicle had code that could stop automatically, but it was disabled. It also had code to warn the driver, but it was also disabled. Whoever decided that having both disabled should not be a fatal error should be fired, because if the driver knows the car can handle or warn, and expects the car to handle or warn, and is wrong, you get situations like this.
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!!!
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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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
in the car. If nothing else it decreases the odds. They'd both have to be watching Hulu to mess up.
It is a sad comment on society of epic proportions if companies need to hire two people to police each other from cell phone addiction.
Good idea. Next month's Slashdot headline: "Drivers in latest fatal self-driving car crash were having sex at the time..."
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Fired? What about being charged with negligent homicide?