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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.
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?
They don't even bother reporting the crash to the authorities, they just driiive on back to HQ and hush it up?
"Former Top Waymo Engineer Altered Code To Go On Forbidden Routes" is not the headline I would have chosen for this story, folks.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
some flashing lights and rotating blades to the front, and some Roman chariot-like scythes to the wheels. Would probably eliminate most pedestrian issues, one way or the other. /s
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
I might sound callous to you but this has always been the case.
Explorers who sought India, how many expeditions died? How many of them found what they actually sought? How many flight pioneers died so now we can travel to a beach resort two times a year? How many people died so far in rockets? How many people died before we thought "Hey, seatbelts would be a swell idea!". Airbags too but seatbelts would have been a possible tech from 1900 onwards while an airbag is much harder to build.
New and possibly dangerous technology will always kill a number of people before it is made safe enough for the average user and commoditized. Driverless cars are even at the very beginning, so there will be many more deaths and injuries in the future I'd think before driverless cars will be common day usage.
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.
Seriously, why are there not criminal charges pending? Perhaps they stopped and reported it. But had they done that, why did the PR at Waymo not cite the police report? Conversely, a police report would have been created for the victim in the case of a hit and run -- where is the investigation into the Camry? Shoddy journalism. Fairly one sided view of the incident
If they were not involved in the accident they are not obligated to stop or report anything. Unless I misread the article, they were not in an accident. AN idiot who does not know how to merge was in a single car accident, unless I am mistaken.
WHAT hit and run? There was NO hit (the Google car was never impacted). It reminds me of when I was cruising down the interstate, and the guy behind me was distracted (probably on his phone)...... he came up behind me very rapidly, suddenly saw my car with mere feet to spare, and turned hard to avoid me (eventually hitting the guard rail).
I thought "Should I stop?" and then remembered I'm in a flyover state where they own guns & quick to anger. So I kept going thinking "I didn't do anything wrong. I was in my lane, driving 65, never deviating from my course
"I can't help if the idiot CRASHED HIMSELF without any intervention by me." Same with the google car, which did not cause the Camry to crash.... the Camry driver crashed himself with reckless, uncontrolled swerving.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Nah, we need autonomous driving.
There are a huge number of benefits once we finally cross the threshold of 100% autonomous drivers. There will be a day, far in the future, when a car crashes and causes a traffic jam and it makes national headlines. You'll see posts on reddit's successor about how kids these days don't understand the past horrors of having to be awake for a 35 minute commute to work BOTH WAYS. You can train people as much as you want - you'll never reach that level if you don't just get their hands off the wheel altogether.
There are way more benefits, but you get the idea.
People are too easily distracted to ever be trusted with a 4000 pound block of metal and flammable liquids capable of going over 100 mph easily.
> As The New Yorker wrote: "A human driver could easily have handled the situation by slowing down and letting the Camry merge into traffic ..."
Rather funny to read anything that involves a "New Yorker" suggesting that human driver would exercise courtesy, let alone courtesy that wasn't required by law....
Unless a video still exists we will never know exactly what happened, and as discussed above a driver that causes an accident by violating the norms and conventions of a maneuver and/or region can always fall back to the letter of the law to claim they weren't at fault.
With that said, your statement raises a bit of concern for the future in that if autonomous vehicles are good at anything it will be dancing around a potential point of impact, thus saving themselves from collision at the price of forcing other vehicles into unrecoverable situations. Unless these vehicles explicitly implement the Three Laws the result of putting 5% of them into the driving population may not be the accident reduction nirvana their proponents claim - a bit of unintended consequence may well intervene.
"A human driver could easily..." Bullshit. Human drivers are the worst. A drunk monkey could do better than most humans who are distracted by their pretty phones.
I am not defending anyone here but this is part of the problem.
When drivers drive "exactly as they should've done", alongside humans who don't, then it ends in such accidents.
As my dad always said, you can always argue about who's to blame, or who has right-of-way, but it's easiest to just not have the accident in the first place.
And let me highlight - the problem with automated cars is not that they "can't break the rules" like humans do. I'd much prefer we kept to the same rules than they learned to expect us to break them because that's just madness. The problem is that there are two totally incompatible ways of driving on the same road, and one of them is unable to change it's programming.
That means it has to be just as rude as us, or it will literally follow the rule of the road and "cause" accidents (the cause is really the other guy being a dick, but you know what public perception will be).
Self-driving cars need to be on their own road. And at that point, you might as well just build personal trains.