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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.youtube.com/watch?...
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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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.
I doubt it was that pedestrian's first time crossing that highway at that point. Given that she was reported to be developmentally disabled she probably found a pattern that worked for her and stuck to it. How many times did she cross there at night? 10? 100? 1,000? Assume 1/3 of those crossings were at night to be conservative. And yet she was never hit by a human driver in full control...
We are being told that these cars add up to safer driving overall. Given that they will be significantly less per capita than manual cars for many, many years to come, this means in fact they will need to be significantly better than humans to achieve this lofty goal. If I am to drink the kool-aid, at least explain to me how automated driving companies plan to make this happen, because if they aren't even away from "perfect weather planned routes" yet then they aren't doing very well.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Don't forget the Tempe Police Department immediately placed all blame on the pedestrian.
"Waymo self driving cars hit 10 million road miles they aim public debut"
'Self driving' is only a marketing term for robot cars with very limited possibilities.