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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
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.
You can't expect it to be perfect
We don't expect it to be perfect, but Uber was unnecessarily reckless. They intentionally disabled safety checks. It is hard to imagine Waymo doing that. Waymo has WAY more road-miles than Uber, and has had no fatalities, or even injuries. Tesla has killed a few people, but they have WAY WAY more road-miles, and their fatalities were honest errors, not intentionally crippled software.
I understand why Uber is cutting corners. They are losing money and under pressure from investors, with no obvious path to profitability. They can't raise rates without losing customers to Lyft. They can't cut driver pay, since they are already having trouble recruiting drivers. So self-driving-cars are their only hope, so they needed to show progress before the VCs pulled the plug.
Actually, it was carelessness or negligence by two people (the safety driver and the pedestrian).
It was malfeasance by others (the persons who ordered the safety feature to be shut off/tuned down and the programmers/techs who turned it off /tuned it down and should have known that would be dangerous -- the "{Hitler, TheBoss} told me to do it" doesn't work. That's not to say that a low level tech who may have been told to "Change the setting for Sensitivity to 5" is liable if they had no reasonable way to anticipate that "5" was an unsafe setting.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
You don't need to shut them down. Just need fines that are more expensive than the money saved from malfeasence. $100 million fine for a business pulling in $2.7 billion in revenue is just ridiculous. That's like me getting a $2k dollar fine for killing someone.