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Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

chicagotribune.com

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Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#31

Post by robbrown451 »

jazoom wrote: post #10
vkou wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans kill 1 person every ~100m miles. Uber has killed 1 person after ~3m miles. Yes, I would absolutely suspend a system that kills 3,000 people/day in favor of a system that kills 100 people/day.

n=1 (To reduce the number of email notifications I'm getting I'd best put this message in parentheses right next to this statement. NOTE: I'm not a statistician and don't believe statistics are all that important here! All I meant to say here is that this is a single incident. That's it. Nothing more.) Edit: I'm getting the impression some people think I am suggesting there aren't grounds to suspend Uber's driving ba…

So if there isn't enough data to use statistics, they need to go with what they've got. And what they've got is a video that shows that it failed in a way that is inexcusable. It can't be explained as "this was a fluke accident, the car just happened to look away at the exact wrong time". Self-driving cars don't look away.

Mentioning the statistics might only makes sense if someone is to claim that, statistically, Uber's self driving fleet is safer. Well, it's not.

Any way you look at it, we don't have a reliable indicator to say they are safe enough. Maybe at some point we'll get more information, and realize that, indeed, this was a highly unlikely combination of things that is unlikely to happen again. But we don't have this now, so AZ was right to do this.

Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#32

Post by suresk »

For all of the theoretical moral questions that have been brought up around self driving cars (the proverbial lever that lets you kill one person instead of a handful, for example), it's interesting/inevitable that this one came up first.

I'm sure lots of people will argue that self-driving cars will, in the long run, save a lot of lives, and therefore we can justify some loss of life in the process. They are probably right about self-driving cars saving more lives in the long run, but I don't know that the conclusion follows.

From what has been released so far, this feels like a case where a human would have had a high likelihood of doing the same thing and would not have been at-fault in the collision. But self-driving cars have more sensors and, in theory, more capabilities to prevent something like this, and we absolutely should expect them to do better.

As someone with a little bit of experience with the machine learning side of things, I understand how this stuff is really hard, and I can imagine a handful of ways the system could have been confused, which makes it all the more important to understand what went wrong and how we could prevent it from happening in the future.

As self-driving cars become more prevalent, things like this will happen and it will be tough to walk the line between over-reacting to every incident and killing progress in this area and designing safe cars that don't make the problem worse. I think it is prudent to have Uber stop testing on public roads until they can explain how this happened and how they can keep it from happening again.

Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#33

Post by ineedasername »

buvanshak wrote: post #5

Good riddance. But I think this is not enough to send a strong message to all those who want to put half baked tech out there in hopes of "disrupting" something.. Also, I really hope all self driving testing is suspended until there is sufficient legal and testing ground work before these things are allowed on roads...

Precisely. Disruption can be a wonderful force for change and innovation, but "minimum viable product" is an astronomically higher bar when injury & death are the default failure modes.

Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#34

Post by ineedasername »

stordoff wrote: post #17
swang720 wrote: post #8

This is interesting, but can we avoid posting links to articles behind paywalls? Here's one on the subject that isn't: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-arizona-ub...

FWIW, complaints about paywalls are generally off-topic, though I agree, a non-paywalled source can be useful. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

I think courtesy should dictate that paywalled articles be accompanied by at least a brief description. Perhaps a change to the FAQ to recommend such?

Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#35

Post by ineedasername »

jazoom wrote: post #10
vkou wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans kill 1 person every ~100m miles. Uber has killed 1 person after ~3m miles. Yes, I would absolutely suspend a system that kills 3,000 people/day in favor of a system that kills 100 people/day.

n=1 (To reduce the number of email notifications I'm getting I'd best put this message in parentheses right next to this statement. NOTE: I'm not a statistician and don't believe statistics are all that important here! All I meant to say here is that this is a single incident. That's it. Nothing more.) Edit: I'm getting the impression some people think I am suggesting there aren't grounds to suspend Uber's driving ba…

No, bad statistician, don't pass go. N = 3,000,000. Miles are the observation here. We're talking # of mortalities per mile, so mile is the N. If you want to talk about the problem of only have a single mortality incident, you need to do the work of determining the likelihood of a 1 in 100,000,000 observation incident occurring in the first 3,000,000 observations. I leave that detail to the students.

Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#36

Post by Cheyana »

cbron wrote: post #29
owenversteeg wrote: post #9

Saying nothing about Google/Waymo, it appears they're allowed to continue? Their self-driving technology seems far more advanced, I think it would be unfair to punish all the players for the bad actions of a few. In particular, Uber seems to have been operating self-driving cars recklessly and in an attempt to "move fast and break things". When those things are people's lives, that's unacceptable. I'm all for interes…

Yes Waymo is still active. I live in the testing zone and see an enormous amount of their vans. About 1 for every 5 minutes of driving.

I drove down a main road here in Chandler, Arizona yesterday and saw three in five minutes. Based on all my experiences on the road with them in the last few months I’d say the chances of them having an incident similar to Uber are much less.

Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#37

Post by ars »

suresk wrote: post #32

For all of the theoretical moral questions that have been brought up around self driving cars (the proverbial lever that lets you kill one person instead of a handful, for example), it's interesting/inevitable that this one came up first. I'm sure lots of people will argue that self-driving cars will, in the long run, save a lot of lives, and therefore we can justify some loss of life in the process. They are probabl…

> From what has been released so far, this feels like a case where a human would have had a high likelihood of doing the same thing

No, a human would have easily avoided this (unless they were not looking).

The video is much darker than what a person would see.

Even when you can see the bike on that dark video, the car still does not react!

Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#38

Post by MBCook »

suresk wrote: post #32

For all of the theoretical moral questions that have been brought up around self driving cars (the proverbial lever that lets you kill one person instead of a handful, for example), it's interesting/inevitable that this one came up first. I'm sure lots of people will argue that self-driving cars will, in the long run, save a lot of lives, and therefore we can justify some loss of life in the process. They are probabl…

Based on what came out of the last few days I don’t think it’s clear at all, I think a human would not have hit the woman.

The footage we saw was from a terrible dashcam and did not represent how dark the street actually was. Other people who have driven down the street with cameras show it to be perfectly reasonably lit, with streetlights and everything.

Second, the woman was crossing across two lanes, so any driver watching would have already seen her cross the left-hand lane. It’s not like she popped out from behind a tree suddenly. She wasn’t even going that fast.

This seems to be a massive failure of Uber’s system as well as a complete failure of the ‘safety’ driver.

I don’t think anyone’s overreacting. I think they’re under reacting. I think it’s pretty clear over was heavily negligent. There’s no way they don’t get sued. What comes out at trial is going to be up amazing, I think.

I think if this had been a “real” accident that would’ve been almost impossible to avoid, around it WAS impossible to avoid, or one where the human stepped in and it wasn’t good enough… We would be having a discussion we’re like what you’re saying. Maybe if this was what emai I think if this had been a “real“ accident that would’ve been almost impossible to avoid, around it WAS impossible to avoid, or one where the human stepped in and it wasn’t good enough… We would be having a discussion we’re like what you’re saying. Maybe if this was Waymo or one of the other comapnies.

But it looks like the dubious honor of first death by a autonomous car was totally unnecessary and preventable.

Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#39

Post by dontreact »

suresk wrote: post #32

For all of the theoretical moral questions that have been brought up around self driving cars (the proverbial lever that lets you kill one person instead of a handful, for example), it's interesting/inevitable that this one came up first. I'm sure lots of people will argue that self-driving cars will, in the long run, save a lot of lives, and therefore we can justify some loss of life in the process. They are probabl…

"From what has been released so far, this feels like a case where a human would have had a high likelihood of doing the same thing and would not have been at-fault in the collision."

The camera footage is A LOT darker than what people have filmed there just a day or two after and is probably not a good representation of what it looked like to the human eye.

Even if it was fairly accurate, the car would be HEAVILY and EXTREMELY dangerously overdriving its headlights in a way that humans would not do.

Re: Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

#40

Post by zitterbewegung »

spiderPig wrote: post #22
owenversteeg wrote: post #9

Saying nothing about Google/Waymo, it appears they're allowed to continue? Their self-driving technology seems far more advanced, I think it would be unfair to punish all the players for the bad actions of a few. In particular, Uber seems to have been operating self-driving cars recklessly and in an attempt to "move fast and break things". When those things are people's lives, that's unacceptable. I'm all for interes…

Which makes me think of it would be prudent for the government or military to invest in this tech as well. Companies like Northrop Grumman while being bureaucratic nightmares, take safety pretty seriously.

This whole thing was started by a DARPA grand challenge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge

Industry takes the lead after DARPA's investment which makes sense.

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