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Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

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

#231

Post by nmca »

Slartie wrote: post #173
jakobegger wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Erm... I don’t think statistics work like this. You can‘t go and pick a confidence level that „confirms“ your desired outcome. People with more knowledge about statistics than me might be able to explain why.

Statistics works exactly like this. What doesn't work is saying "Okay, we have one death in 3 million miles, that extrapolates to 33 deaths in 100 million miles", because it implies a silent addition of "with nearly 100% certainty", which is the part that's wrong here. But the poster did something different. He took it one level further and attempted to calculate this confidence number for different spans in which th…

The statement "with 95% confidence" is a classic misinterpretation of what a CI is, the assumption of Poisson is dubious but there's no obvious plausible alternative. Overall seems reasonable.

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

#232

Post by seanmcdirmid »

arkades wrote: post #196
ducktoller wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a person at the wheel. That person wasn't paying full attention to the road. From the video of the crash, it looks like the woman at the wheel was looking at their phone. Why is no one acknowledging that this woman was responsible for taking over the wheel if necessary for any reason. When I have cruise control on, I take my feet off of the pedals and rest them on the floor. But if, say, a homeless person w…

>There was a person at the wheel. That person wasn't paying full attention to the road. From the video of the crash, it looks like the woman at the wheel was looking at their phone. >Why is no one acknowledging that this woman was responsible for taking over the wheel if necessary for any reason. The woman was part of their safety program, but ultimate responsibility for the effectiveness and failures of said program…

Those are level 1 or level 2 systems, not level 4 ones. In the former systems, the driver must and will intervene often, in the latter intervention is really really rare. It would get painfully boring very quickly in a level 4 system to have the driver on the wheel at all time but not do anything. The same problem arises in airplanes with modern autopilots.

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

#233

Post by talibandito »

icebraining wrote: post #201
carlmr wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For real-time embedded there are basically 3 options, C, C++ and Rust. And Rust isn't that widely used, so my guess would be on C/C++. You can't have a GC.

What about Ada?

From what I know Ada is basically a legacy language mostly used by the military now a days.

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

#234

Post by losvedir »

galdosdi wrote: post #147
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…

Actually, it may be an instance of a "tragedy of the commons" but I think the most strategically optimal move for a state when there are 49 others is to ban it and let "sucker" states do the testing, and then immediately legalize it as soon as it shows promise. Just like how I never upgrade to a new software version right away, letting the other "suckers" test it in production for me, creating value for me at their e…

I had thought it was a brilliant move by Arizona. They were trying to be for autonomous vehicles like what Detroit was for cars back in the day, or Boston is now for biotech, or New York for finance.

But I never thought through: which jobs are moving to Arizona? Autonomous vehicle production and maintenance? LIDAR and other sensor R&D? AI software development? Or is it just the test driver and the cars get developed elsewhere?

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

#235

Post by jcranmer »

sokoloff wrote: post #77
jcranmer wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an example of the strong tendency to blame pedestrians for most to all pedestrian-vehicle collisions. In reality, pedestrians are generally at the bottom of the list for blame, behind even the engineers who designed the roads in the first place. In this situation, there is no evidence that the pedestrian did anything dangerous. She was crossing in what amounts to an unmarked crosswalk. When struck, she was we…

> If you object to the idea that it's an unmarked crosswalk I do. I've never seen another crosswalk with a "no pedestrians" sign.

As an analogy, the road design here is similar to a highway built to Interstate standards... with a 25mph speed limit. That speed limit is not going to be honored.

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

#236

Post by sokoloff »

Steeeve wrote: post #129
sokoloff wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you object to the idea that it's an unmarked crosswalk I do. I've never seen another crosswalk with a "no pedestrians" sign.

In California, that's a legal crosswalk and the pedestrian gets right of way. In Arizona, it is not. I'm not sure a pedestrian even gets the right of way in a marked cross walk at all times in Arizona. Different state, different culture, different laws. We had local PD actually pull a very similar sting operation that had people complaining recently. They had a police officer with a baby stroller cross at an unmarked…

Genuine question: what are the conditions to make a particular piece of pavement a legal crosswalk in California?

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

#237

Post by sokoloff »

galdosdi wrote: post #91
sokoloff wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you object to the idea that it's an unmarked crosswalk I do. I've never seen another crosswalk with a "no pedestrians" sign.

That's one point of view, if you're a goodie two shoes who automatically follows and agrees with every law and rule you ever heard of, even if it violates your own basic ethical values. Another point of view is that the state of arizona intentionally hates pedestrians and gratuitously creates roads that put their lives at risk when all they're trying to do is get home from the grocery store or whatever, a perfectly r…

Another point of view is that the traffic department realized that this was perhaps an unreasonably dangerous place for pedestrians to cross and posted a sign to that effect, in hopes of protecting pedestrians who might incorrectly judge/perceive the danger.

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

#238

Post by brianwawok »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #230
michaelt wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is no one acknowledging that this woman was responsible for taking over the wheel if necessary for any reason. Nobody in the industry really believes safety drivers work, beyond the early point in testing where they're intervening regularly. It is widely known [1, 2, 3] that it's extremely difficult for humans to remain vigilant when monitoring systems for rare events. Airport baggage screening systems perform "t…

So when they tell me to open my luggage at the airport, it may be because they have just seen a fake knive or gun placed on the x-ray image by the system to enhance their attention? Amazing!

IIRC it notifies the gun was fake BEFORE it gets to the random search part.

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

#239

Post by carlmr »

talibandito wrote: post #233
icebraining wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about Ada?

From what I know Ada is basically a legacy language mostly used by the military now a days.

True, I forgot about Ada. While ugly, Ada2012 is a very modern language with a lot of benefits compared to C, especially for embedded control systems programming.

Ada got a bad rap in the past and didn't spread very wide outside US military circles. But it is a very good language. For adoption today it would need some big backing though.

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

#240

Post by brianwawok »

jmalicki wrote: post #197
ducktoller wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a descriptor, the same way "man" or "woman" is a descriptor. Descriptors help you picture a situation more clearly.

Nothing about whether or not the person involved happened to have a permanent place of residence is a relevant descriptor to the situation at hand.

Great, and neither does their hair color, their # of kids, their name, their birthplace, or any of the other 100 details we normally include. Would you prefer all news articles were:

> Someone was walking and a car hit and killed them.

And that is the end of the story?

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