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At an All-Hands Meeting, Uber CEO Said The Company Deserves Some Fault After Its Self-Driving Car Killed a Pedestrian (businessinsider.com)
During an all-hands meeting at Uber earlier this week, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and the head of the self-driving car unit, Eric Meyhofer, were questioned by employees over the culture at the self-driving unit. An anonymous reader writes: They asked about allegations of infighting and dysfunction in the unit prior to a tragic accident that killed a pedestrian, based on Business Insider's newly published investigation. (The investigation found that engineers were pressured to "tune" the self-driving car for a smoother ride in preparation of a big year-end demonstration of their progress, but that meant not allowing the car to respond to everything it saw, real or not.) What followed was a strange couple of minutes in which the executives told odd stories and quoted wrong statistics leading up to Khosrowshahi admitting, several times, "we have screwed up."
[...] Khosrowshahi showed his support of his senior leader by saying some negative things about Business Insider. And then he said, "we did screw up" and that "we are radically changing how we develop, how we test, etcetera. So we've gone through changes. We have screwed up." Sources tell Business Insider that Khosrowshahi had not been paying much attention to the self-driving car unit in his first year because he was so busy fighting fires with Uber's main business, but that this is changing now. On Tuesday, Khosrowshahi indicated as much saying, "A year forward from all the controversy that we saw last year, we are better, stronger. And I think ATG is going through that same journey," he said.
[...] Khosrowshahi showed his support of his senior leader by saying some negative things about Business Insider. And then he said, "we did screw up" and that "we are radically changing how we develop, how we test, etcetera. So we've gone through changes. We have screwed up." Sources tell Business Insider that Khosrowshahi had not been paying much attention to the self-driving car unit in his first year because he was so busy fighting fires with Uber's main business, but that this is changing now. On Tuesday, Khosrowshahi indicated as much saying, "A year forward from all the controversy that we saw last year, we are better, stronger. And I think ATG is going through that same journey," he said.
We'll do better next time. We promise. Execs should be in prison for murder.
$100M payout and 100M fine should cover it
What hes actually saying is "We did what we have always and will always do. We compromised on due process, safety and regulations with the goal of getting more money. We're Uber, it's what we do."
he indicated there was a lot of fault to go around, not just Uber:
1 - The Arizona DOT made that road too wide, it took too long for the pedestrian to reach the other side safely
2 - CO2 pollution due to inefficient human drivers probably reduced atmospheric visibility
3 - The bike manufacturer for not having some sort of automatic lighting system built in
and many others
"Uber CEO Said The Company Deserves Some Fault After Its Self-Driving Car Killed a Pedestrian"
Screw up makes it sound like it's no big deal or it's fixable. Not seeing changing consumer tastes is a screw up, but one companies can fix. Having such a lax safety culture that it leads to a death, that isn't a screw up, that's a sickness within the company's leadership that can only be solved with firings. Testing an autonomous vehicle on public roads is an inhernent risk which should have every possible mitigation in place, and your drivers damn well better put their cell phones away and pay attention. Each drive should be started and ended with a safety briefing, and each near miss studied to make sure it doesn't occur again.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/10/10/waymo-self-driving-cars-hit-10-million-road-miles-they-aim-public-debut/1536441002/
I never gave written consent to turn our public roadways into your leathal testing lab.
Only a matter of time before some grey-Hat hacks an uber car and does goodness knows what with it.
Remote-Driving cars and software deployed cars are clearly a national security risk:
1. Error.
2. Terrorism.
3. Hackers & Jokers.
4. Criminal Theft.
All problems with people driven cars, but software driven cars multiply the risks and scale the city disabling proportions quickly.
It is not SciFi to say software controlled cars could shutdown a whole city. It is cyber security and a very high risk soft target remote deployable 1 ton weapon system. V.I.E.D. risks multiplied by total number of deployed hatchback drones.
There is NO upside to 'self-driving' cars.
Subaru EYESIGHT & all othet collision avoidamce sensors that react faster than humans and saves lives.
The Locus of Control, and responsibility, is on the driver.
Stop killing us, and ban this dangerous technology Nation Wide.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Enjoy watching Trump go to prison meanwhile!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/11/29/key-takeaways-michael-cohens-new-plea-deal
1. There are conspicuous mentions of Trump and his family
2. Putin’s spokesman appears to have helped cover this up
3. This ties the Trump family’s efforts to the Russian government
4) The deal apparently died the day The Post broke a story about Russian hacking
Not sure what the uproar is, as self-driving cars will never be 100% fatality free. Hell, just get its numbers under humans and there you go.
Their entire corporate culture is built around "Ignore the law". They can go fuck themselves.
Ride sharing is not a thing, they are a taxi company.
Uber drivers are employees.
Self-driving car division, was built around corporate espionage. And now they are trying to skirt the law again and ensure their execs aren't thrown in jail for manslaughter.
They are cracking though, otherwise they never would have said "we screwed up" not even in an internal meeting. I hope those pieces of shit are unable to sleep at night for the rest of their miserable lives.
and probably not in her right mind. That's not me being flippant. Just that the actual probability was that she wasn't. Most homeless folks have mental problems. The reason we've got so many of them is we closed the asylums when Reagan was president.
As for the driver, maybe she should have caught it. Probably. But that doesn't change a god damn thing about how safety measures were turned off by engineers to impress their boss with the "smooth ride".
I'm reminded of that recent plane crash caused when Boeing enabled a safety feature without training the pilots. It appears they did this so they didn't scare off customers with expensive pilot training programs. This is like that in reverse; e.g. a safety feature was turned off. But was the driver told? Were they aware that they should be at a heightened awareness of risk? By all accounts no. Because like Boeing the engineers responsible probably knew they were doing something wrong.
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> OK, agree with you it's not murder, but no, a human driver would not have killed the pedestrian.
There was a human "safety driver" in the car at the time, supposedly monitoring, but not really. I'd agree that an attentive driver should've noticed them, however, but this is by no means out of bounds for a human driver based on my experience here.
> The video that came out shortly after the death has since been revealed to be highly misleading about the conditions that lead to the crash - there was more lighting,
Yes, on the Mill bridge which has a ton of lights, but it's darker north of that, where the accident was. I saw the same video, they drove north on Mill, over the well-lit bridge and barely got to the scene of the accident. The actual scene was the last few seconds of the video and was highly misleading. I have driven that exact stretch of road many times, I'm not relying on the dynamic range of anyone's camera, whether it be Uber's or that other guy's.
> the pedestrian's path was clear 6 seconds before the accident, and the speed of the car was such that an emergency brake operation could have kicked in 1.3 seconds before the impact and prevented the accident. 4.7 seconds is plenty of time for a human driver to react.
The hard part is that the lights don't help you as much as you'd think. Actually headlights and the like make it harder to see pedestrians, because the bright lights turn people into moving shadows that are harder to see than you'd think. Yes, Uber's dashcam with the crappy dynamic range overstate how dark it is, but your eyes do have problems seeing dark objects (pedestrians) vs. the lights. Because I deliberately watch for this, I notice the moving shadows, but I didn't always, it's one of the things you get used to because pedestrians like this are, unfortunately, really common. As in I can drive about 10 miles and see several of them. I don't even blame them, the intersections are mostly at the major crossroads, which are approximately one mile apart and the main roads are 5 lanes across (2 going each direction + 1 'turn lane'). ASU has a bridge over University, but that's the exception, I can't even think of a pedestrian bridge elsewhere in the city offhand. Phoenix was designed for cars.
> (Oddly enough, the Volvo's own automatic emergency brake system, which had been disabled to avoid clashes with Uber's own system, would have prevented the accident according to the data available.)
Agreed, they did F up on some of the settings.
> It was very bad, and Uber is 100% liable, but it's hard to see how it's murder given it was clearly an accident.
I half-way agree, but I'm not sure about the 100% liable. Pedestrians have liability for crossing outside of marked crosswalks. Maybe you mean that morally in which case I'm more inclined to agree.
Did he explain why they artificially darkened the video they released of the crash? Fucking up the software is one thing. Pushing the limits to meet a deadline I can understand too.
Actively covering it up is where they crossed the line to evil and criminal.
While I don't expect ATG to completely shutdown, I expected killing someone to be a career ending event for the head of ATG. Instead, he doesn't seem to have any personal investment in a zero tolerance for avoidable deaths. I have found no statement from Meyhofer which indicates the maximum allowable number of deaths before he would resign. However, we now know he is accepting of the number being at least one.
The way transcript reads almost makes him sound like someone that has no conscience. Neither Meyhofer or Dara Khosrowshahi never directly uses the name Elaine Herzberg at all in the entire transcript speech. Instead, she is reduced by Meyhofer to being one of the many "challenges" of the last year. Instead, he justifies being proud of what ATG has done and who ATG is based on his children wanting to come to Uber on Thanksgiving weekend. But what if it wasn't just some stranger that died on March 18th. What if it was his 15 year old daughter or 14 year old son? Would their death still just be another challenge in 2018? Would he still be proud of ATG and what ATG has done? What if one of his own children stop having to have the option of where they will spend Thanksgiving weekend because a product he heads the department for resulted in their death? Would his child mean something or is heading up restarting operations in Pittsburgh still something he would be involved with?
Should Pennsylvania take into consideration if Eric Meyhofer is a psychopath incapable of having a conscience? If he is a psychopath, shouldn't Pennsylvania put pressure on Uber to replace him as the head of ATG before restarting testing? Should a psychopath that places no value on the cost of life from ATG testing really be the head of the ATG during active testing?
I don't know what the correct answers to these questions are but I do know that I find Eric Meyhofer continued involvement to be troubling.
Don't forget the Tempe Police Department immediately placed all blame on the pedestrian.
Who wrote the title? "deserves some fault". Has that phrase ever been used in the English language before?
Oh wait... Americans.