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Uber Wants To Resume Self-Driving Car Tests On Public Roads (go.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ABC News: Nearly eight months after one of its autonomous test vehicles hit and killed an Arizona pedestrian, Uber wants to resume testing on public roads. The company has filed an application on with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation to test in Pittsburgh, and it has issued a lengthy safety report pledging to put two human backup drivers in each vehicle and take a raft of other precautions to make the vehicles safe. Among the other precautions Uber will take are keeping the autonomous vehicle system engaged at all times and activating the Volvo's automatic emergency braking system as a backup. In addition, Uber is requiring more technical training and expertise of employees sitting behind the wheel of the vehicles, according to a 70-page safety report the company released Friday. "Our goal is to really work to regain that trust and to work to help move the entire industry forward," Noah Zych, Uber's head of system safety for self-driving cars, said in an interview. "We think the right thing to do is to be open and transparent about the things that we are doing."
If there is Uber is associated with anything then it's shady business practices. Seriously, I would trust anyone else with engineers working on this more than Uber. If anything is going to impede the rapid progress on self-driving cars then it's going to be a reputation for killing people that was earned by these corner-cutting fools that are out to make a buck without regard for consequence.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Get to it
Uber needs to test these 'autonomous' vehicles in their own parking lots and facilites while their executives cross the area every hour blindfolded. Only then will I even start to consider them maybe ready for public roads.
Apt challenge word: molest
If you want to test and develop on public roads, share all data collected with the public. Open source AI and all mapped routes, etc. shared with all.
You blew it when your AI murdered that woman. Its done, give away your patents, etc. Nobody will trust an Uber AI again.
Jail is too good for Uber.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Request denied.
Wait a fucking minute here. They want to test the vehicles with us as part of the experiment. The test incorporates using the rest of us a test subjects, our lives, our vehicles, included in their experiments for fucking free, seriously WTF? Fuck off, no testing without asking for volunteers and then why the fuck free, what do corporations do for fucking free, they are people, we are people, why are we used as test subjects for fucking free. Want to test your autonomous vehicle alongside my vehicle, then fucking pay me fuckers. NO FREE TEST SUBJECTS, fuck the corporations.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
The new Volvo will be encased in a large bright yellow rubber duck bumper system. And a bright flashing light on a pole overhead. The two drivers will actually walk in front of the vehicle and brush the road as they pull the car on a little leash.
Give up. Or change the name.
If they're willing to pre-pay a $50 million dollar deposit towards jury verdicts (and pay ANOTHER deposit each time they're involved in a fatality), I don't see any reason why we shouldn't let them. If they don't want to pay a deposit, then they can go f*** themselves.
What dramatic change in management has occurred at Ube that this should be ok in any universe?
This is the nature of a class war.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
If corporations are people too (I don't agree with this, but devil's advocate here), how long would a person have been kept off the road after that Arizona accident? And yes, I know the person was crossing at night and not at a crosswalk, and not watching, but there were multiple factors to the "accident".
Just another day in Paradise
I have seen no news of criminal charges being filed against the "safety" driver, the managers of the testing project, or anyone at Uber.
I'm pretty sure that if I killed someone with my car due several examples of gross negligence that I would be facing jail time.
Let's see them try running on rural Pennsylvania roads first. Narrow, winding, frequently with shoulders a few feet high with trees and tree roots lining them, so they amount to walls of wood and dirt (or rock)...
Even humans driving these need to keep alert and white-knuckle their steering wheels, and that's in the day with dry pavement.
If an automaton can manage this and not kill people, it might be somewhat trustworthy. (There is still the issue of getting them to react
sensibly when humans do odd things (wasp in the car or the like) or the issue of getting them not to slam on brakes or drive wildly in
ways that confuse humans and cause accidents.
Testing these things on California freeways where they can follow lane markers and have wide shoulder lanes and wide driving lanes is far too limited a test. Millions of those miles give no useful information about how the automatons will manage with the kinds of roads humans have to deal with all the time. I might remark that the roads in Pgh lack the challenges of many rural roads, though they make up for them with the scattering of kids who may jump out. Humans tend to be aware of these and slow up if they see them, lest they collide. How's a car-automaton
going to do at parsing its surround to notice kids on the sidewalks or nearby lots playing and figure if they might go running around?
It is alarming to me that these gadgets are being allowed to run free and kill a few people where the evidence they can cope with real roads is so thin. Fact is, brain models aren't even that close to getting the senses right, let alone modelling associations people do (and the fact that Hough transforms are an n-cube problem at best doesn't help). These experiments on the road are jumping the gun by far more than the businessmen are willing to admit.
Test it on your own people.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM