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Former Top Waymo Engineer Altered Code To Go on 'Forbidden Routes', Report Says (arstechnica.com)
In the early days of what ultimately became Waymo, Google's self-driving car division (known at the time as "Project Chauffeur"), there were "more than a dozen accidents, at least three of which were serious," according to a new article in The New Yorker . From a report: The magazine profiled Anthony Levandowski, the former Google engineer who was at the center of the Waymo v. Uber trade secrets lawsuit. According to the article, back in 2011, Levandowski also modified the autonomous software to take the prototype Priuses on "otherwise forbidden routes."
Citing an anonymous source, The New Yorker reports that Levandowski sat behind the wheel as the safety driver, along with Isaac Taylor, a Google executive. But while they were in the car, the Prius "accidentally boxed in another vehicle," a Camry.
As The New Yorker wrote: "A human driver could easily have handled the situation by slowing down and letting the Camry merge into traffic, but Google's software wasn't prepared for this scenario. The cars continued speeding down the freeway side by side. The Camry's driver jerked his car onto the right shoulder. Then, apparently trying to avoid a guard rail, he veered to the left; the Camry pinwheeled across the freeway and into the median. Levandowski, who was acting as the safety driver, swerved hard to avoid colliding with the Camry, causing Taylor to injure his spine so severely that he eventually required multiple surgeries." This was apparently just one of several accidents in Project Chauffeur's early days.
Citing an anonymous source, The New Yorker reports that Levandowski sat behind the wheel as the safety driver, along with Isaac Taylor, a Google executive. But while they were in the car, the Prius "accidentally boxed in another vehicle," a Camry.
As The New Yorker wrote: "A human driver could easily have handled the situation by slowing down and letting the Camry merge into traffic, but Google's software wasn't prepared for this scenario. The cars continued speeding down the freeway side by side. The Camry's driver jerked his car onto the right shoulder. Then, apparently trying to avoid a guard rail, he veered to the left; the Camry pinwheeled across the freeway and into the median. Levandowski, who was acting as the safety driver, swerved hard to avoid colliding with the Camry, causing Taylor to injure his spine so severely that he eventually required multiple surgeries." This was apparently just one of several accidents in Project Chauffeur's early days.
Freeway traffic always has the right of way. It is the duty of the person merging onto the freeway to adjust their speed accordingly. This includes speeding up to prevent cutting people off.
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/pubs/hdbk/merg_pass
If you don' t know something, just make it up? Who said they didn't stop?...Do you have some cite for information that says they did not report this accident, one that you're keeping secret from the law enforcement authorities who would like to know about it?
I am not blaming you. The summary quotes the horrible Ars writeup, which itself butchers the New Yorker piece. In the New Yorker piece, it explicitly states about the incident
The Prius regained control and turned a corner on the freeway, leaving the Camry behind. Levandowski and Taylor didn’t know how badly damaged the Camry was. They didn’t go back to check on the other driver or to see if anyone else had been hurt. Neither they nor other Google executives made inquiries with the authorities. The police were not informed that a self-driving algorithm had contributed to the accident.
The quote from Ars doesn't even make it explicitly clear that the "forbidden route" was involved with the near miss which led to the Camry crashing. It should be noted, however, that the Camry driver was by all accounts at fault in that scenario. It sounds like the Camry thought he could be more aggressive and overtake the Prius, but the Prius (human or robot) has the right of way.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
These two yutzes cause a crash on the freeway and they don't even bother to stop and check if the other people are injured?
Doesn't that actually depend on who has to give way when merging? In most countries, traffic merging has to give way to that on the main road. If this is true in California while the safer thing to do would have been to slow down and let the Camry in what was preventing the Camry from slowing down and merging in behind i.e. giving way to existing traffic as it merged?
While the software could have taken steps to avoid this behaviour that it not the same thing as saying that it caused the accident. If you leave your house door open and you get burgled you have not caused your house to be burgled nor have you done anything wrong you just failed to anticipate that your actions would encourage bad behaviour by others.
In the United States, and specifically in California, the traffic entering the highway yields to traffic already on the highway.
If there was no collision between the cars, then the Camry was at fault. They should have moderated their speed (read: slow down) and merged behind the Prius instead of trying to outrun it before the auxiliary lane went away. Bad, aggressive driving was responsible for this wreck.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Wildly off topic, but I guess I wonder why anyone gives a single shit about if she has native American blood somewhere in her ancestry or not. Does that all of a sudden make her policy stances more acceptable? Less?
The things that voters choose to care about...
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
You're so fucking wrong that it's not funny. Before you kill somebody here is the relevant line from the CA DMV handbook: "Freeway traffic has the right-of-way." From: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/... Every state that I have lived in has been the same, some going so far as to post "YIELD" signs on the on-ramp.
Here in the US, the "zipper principle" applies when two lanes are merging into one, but not when a car is merging onto the highway. Are you sure that, in Denmark, the zipper principle applies when merging onto a highway? That doesn't seem to apply since there should be many many car lengths of space between each car merging onto the highway, and there should not be a long line of cars require such a merge.
while the safer thing to do would have been to slow down and let the Camry in what was preventing the Camry from slowing down and merging in behind i.e. giving way to existing traffic as it merged?
I've been screwed by the people who think slowing down to "let merging traffic in" is safer. I enter an onramp and adjust my speed to slip behind the person in the lane. What do they do? Slow down as well, hanging out in my blind spot as I run out of onramp. If you're on the road maintain your speed, don't speed up to cut someone off but don't slow down either. Then the person who's merging knows where you are and how fast you're going. If I see a slow vehicle merging onto the road and it seems we might be trying to share the same space I'll change lanes to the left, leaving them the lane to merge into. I do not alter my speed except to avoid an accident with an idiot who doesn't know how to enter a freeway.