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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

#251

Post by jcranmer »

sokoloff wrote: post #237
galdosdi wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pretty much every serious attempt at protecting pedestrians requires building refuges (which already exists) and devising ways to get drivers to actually slow down (as opposed to slapping a lower speed limit sign and hoping they'll do so). If you want to truly dissuade pedestrians from crossing, you need to erect a median barrier.

Merely putting up a sign sounds a lot more like the traffic department dealing with drivers' complaints of annoying jaywalkers in the least effort way possible.

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

#253

Post by xvf22 »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #127
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…

Arizona did something reckless and stupid. Unfortunately, somebody other than the decision maker paid the price. Arizona stupidly allowed Uber to operate after California kicked Uber out and after seeing the videos of Uber cars running red lights in SF. For what? For a few temporary (the plan is to be fully autonomous quickly) low paying test driver jobs? The engineers making the big salaries stayed in California (or…

The police department was also quick to defend Uber by saying that the crash was 'unavoidable'.

From the reports it seems like Uber were heavily focused on putting in miles trying to make up ground. The NTSB report will hopefully expose the failures (if any) of the Uber self driving system or the organization.

They've said that self driving cars are critical to their survival and if it turns out they cut corners / mis-represented things then it'll be hard for them to get out of that hole.

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

#254

Post by shakna »

icebraining wrote: post #249
shakna wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> generally adding multiple layers of control on the same axis They wouldn't be. Subsumption architecture is the usual method to couple these things together, since the 80s. Individual reactionary modules, that may be 'dumb', like the AutoBreak, that have a hierarchy of response. Redundancy is essential for safety.

OK, let's say the Volvo system gets precedence. How will the Uber system ever learn how to behave when the Volvo system is no longer in place? If we were talking about a production system, I would agree, but I don't think this is appropriate for the training phase. Redundancy is only essential if the potential for failure is unacceptable. If you remove that (by not driving in public streets), it isn't.

> Redundancy is only essential if the potential for failure is unacceptable. If you remove that (by not driving in public streets), it isn't.

In which case we wouldn't be having this conversation, Uber wouldn't be under investigation, and someone wouldn't be dead.

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

#255

Post by leereeves »

icebraining wrote: post #249
shakna wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> generally adding multiple layers of control on the same axis They wouldn't be. Subsumption architecture is the usual method to couple these things together, since the 80s. Individual reactionary modules, that may be 'dumb', like the AutoBreak, that have a hierarchy of response. Redundancy is essential for safety.

OK, let's say the Volvo system gets precedence. How will the Uber system ever learn how to behave when the Volvo system is no longer in place? If we were talking about a production system, I would agree, but I don't think this is appropriate for the training phase. Redundancy is only essential if the potential for failure is unacceptable. If you remove that (by not driving in public streets), it isn't.

Saving lives is more important than training the self-driving system. Disabling safety systems for the sake of training isn't acceptable.

That said, how does Uber improve the self-driving system in response to any failure? Perhaps by training on recorded data? They must have ways to train the system in addition to waiting and hoping the car encounters the same situation again.

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

#256

Post by coryfklein »

philip1209 wrote: post #252

This seems like a lesson in why government regulation can be good.

The government regulation allowed the Uber on the road, so it may be a lesson in why government regulation doesn't work or provides a false sense of safety.

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

#257

Post by lemonghost »

humanrebar wrote: post #209
lern_too_spel wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arizona did something reckless and stupid. Unfortunately, somebody other than the decision maker paid the price. Arizona stupidly allowed Uber to operate after California kicked Uber out and after seeing the videos of Uber cars running red lights in SF. For what? For a few temporary (the plan is to be fully autonomous quickly) low paying test driver jobs? The engineers making the big salaries stayed in California (or…

> Arizona did something reckless and stupid. Unfortunately, somebody other than the decision maker paid the price. Well, crossing the street in that manner wasn't the smartest thing to do either. The person shouldn't have been run over, but we accept some risks while walking bicycles across multi-lane highways at night without watching for oncoming traffic.

> we accept some risks while walking bicycles across multi-lane highways at night without watching for oncoming traffic.

The accident occurred on a surface street in a fairly busy area right down the street from ASU's main campus where there tend to be a lot of pedestrians and bikers

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

#258

Post by davidgould »

pgreenwood wrote: post #137
setra wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fatal accident at 50x the rate of a sober human driver with a study size where N = 1.

I'll have a go at seeing what we can conclude from the data. Others, check my thinking please . Now we have 1 death in 3m miles for Uber, versus 1.18 deaths in 100m miles for sober drivers. The expected rate for 100m miles for Uber is 33.333... But how confident can we be? To answer that let's compute a poisson confidence interval around that rate, as in https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/10926/how-to-calcu...…

> 1.18 deaths in 100m miles for sober drivers

> Uber is less safe than sober drivers

But the 1.18 deaths in 100m miles is for all drivers, not just the subset of sober drivers. Not quite sure why you are claiming it is only sober drivers.

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

#259

Post by mkempe »

knuththetruth wrote: post #107
qwerty456127 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. This makes sense then. Why did they do this?

One can only speculate at this point, but the only thing consistent about Uber is their recklessness and disregard for others.

Indeed. Good engineering does not consist of disabling proven safety mechanisms for the sake of ones under development.

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

#260

Post by tim333 »

johngalt wrote: post #81

Several comments here making comparisons to human drivers. As if autonomous cars are ok so long as they are at or below parity with humans. This is statistically true but a complete misunderstanding of human nature. Human risk tolerance varies drastically depending on control/participation. What is the acceptable casualty rate of elevators?

Dunno if someone/something is driving my cab I'd go with the one that was safer.

I note elevators used to be controlled by human operators - you don't get much of that these days https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elevator#Manual_controls

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