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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.
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.