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.

Comments

OOps we're sorry

[makotech222]

We'll do better next time. We promise. Execs should be in prison for murder.

Re: OOps we're sorry

[Travis Mansbridge]

They sure do, when the features are enabled that allow them to stop because an obstacle is present. This feature was disabled in Uber's test cars (because false positives cause frequent stoppage - thus the reference in the summary to them tuning to a "smooth ride," i.e. one without these AI-initiated stops), and the human driver was using a mobile app at the time of the incident.

Rather than do the hard work of improving their AI, they simply disabled obstacle detection for the appearance of progress. This was less of an accident and more of a completely avoidable mistake up the entire chain of responsibility. But why it surprises anyone that Uber, perhaps the most amoral company in the world, behaves this way is beyond me - and Arizona state leadership deserves some of the blame for inviting this company to test these products fully unregulated on its streets, knowing their corporate mentality.

Re:OOps we're sorry

[Travis Mansbridge]

Normally killing a person due to incompetence is still manslaughter. But when you're a corporate entity, it's a "journey."

Re: OOps we're sorry

[uncqual]

There are no relevant statistics on self-driving cars in the real world. This is because there are NO self-driving cars available in the hands of consumers which self-drive in complete control in all the same conditions (snow, ice, rain, darkness, etc) on all sorts of roads (rural, dirt, highways, freeways, under construction, traffic control devices out or missing, road routing changed without notice, detours, worn out lane markings, areas highly congested with pedestrians and children etc) that humans drive in regularly.

Comparing the miles driven on carefully curated roads with safety drivers taking over at planned times (let alone unplanned times) to "real world" miles is absurd. One also has to compare the efficiency of getting from place to place -- if a self driving car decides to stop-and-go or just freeze on an on-ramp during rush hour because there's no "lawyer safe" thing to do where a human would have efficiently and quickly dealt with the same situation, the human piloted car can't reasonably be compared to the self-driving car as the latter is not performing the same function (at an extreme, a self driving car that never went over 3 MPH would probably result in very few fatalities - except due to passenger old age - but would be useless).

Thus, the claim is impossible to verify at this time.

I think it's likely that some categories of accidents will become much less common with self-driving cars (esp. those involving drunk drivers piloting the car in question and those that existing collision avoidance, lane keeping, etc would also reduce). On the other hand, I expect some categories of accidents will be more common with self-driving cars - mostly those where a human driver has to make a logical decision based an somewhat unusual circumstances (such as a downed tree or noticing that there is a stop sign but it's been run over or a new traffic control sign appearing warning of a difficult to anticipate transient situation).

(Hopefully, true self driving cars won't have a penchant for smashing into big red fire trucks, sometimes with flashing red lights, like Tesla autopilot does. I assume/hope the adults are implementing the real self-driving cars and Tesla is the only one that hired fresh outs from community college to do design and write their software and follow pedo-Musk's every whim.)

Re:OOps we're sorry

[ClickOnThis]

This. This tragic episode was on the level of criminal negligence or manslaughter, but definitely not murder.

Re: OOps we're sorry

[swillden]

Waymo's director of 'self driving' cars recently said in an interview that 'level 5 self driving cars are impossible.'

Link: https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/21...

The money quote: 'But L5 is impossible, said Krafcik.'

You're taking that quote out of context. Read on and he clearly says that self-driving cars *are* going to be doing a lot of fully-automated driving, with no human involvement. The snippet you quoted is merely him trying to reassure the journalist that there will always be some place for human driving, some sorts of specialized driving that computers won't be trained to do. I suppose that makes sense; there is a lot of specialized driving that very few human drivers can do either.

The article goes on to point out that self-driving cars will initially "operate in designated areas on familiar roads", and then widen those areas, diminishing the need for human driving. This is obvious. It makes perfect sense to start in the most controlled conditions and then gradually widen the scope as experience is gained and problems are solved.

Re:$100M payout and 100M fine should cover it

[geekmux]

$100M payout and 100M fine should cover it

Sorry, but that bullshit isn't good enough anymore. It sure as hell isn't a deterrent. Look at the banking industry.

Time to start shutting businesses down and looking at jail time for those who prioritize a "smoother ride" over a human life.