Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads • Hacker News Board

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

#281

Post by coryfklein » Tue, Mar 27, 2018, 4:07 PM UTC

philip1209 wrote: post #272

coryfklein wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I specifically mean that Arizona chose to allow self-driving cars on their roads with little regulation and that lack of regulation contributed to the death of a pedestrian.

Yea, I'm really splitting hairs at this point, but you can't use the Uber incident this month as evidence to support the claim that "regulation is good". You could use the incident as evidence that "Arizona's regulation is not good".

We _can_ support the claim "regulation is good" by pointing to other states that did regulation right and seeing how their fatality rates are better than Arizona's.

But yes, I agree with the spirit of the statement, Arizona needs better regulation, and it seems pretty clear that "regulation is good" in this case.

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

#282

Post by stormthebeach » Tue, Mar 27, 2018, 4:08 PM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #245

dmix wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even regardless of her lack of full attention, from the video it seems quite obvious a human driver would have failed to see the woman in time even with full alertness. The only question here, and why Uber is under scrutiny, is why a Lidar system which can "see in the dark" wasn't able to detect her and react in time.

> from the video it seems quite obvious a human driver would have failed to see the woman in time even with full alertness The video is massively - and I'll wager intentionally - misleading. There's no chance the car was making decisions from a $20 dashcam. Here's what a better camera (looks like a smartphone camera) sees in the same spot (at about 33 seconds - you can see the signs, lights, and terrain match the Ube…

I've driven this area plenty of times, and something that is misleading about the YT video is that there are around two dozen cars driving around lighting that area up. I agree that the dashcam video makes it look very dark, but this video is on the other end of the spectrum and does not represent how dark that stretch gets when there isn't another car.

The moment another car passes the driver to the left is where the accident was. That part is typically very dark and has plants as a backdrop - I can see where it would be difficult to distinguish a human form under specific conditions. Regardless, the LIDAR and backup driver failed miserably here.

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

#283

Post by Aspyre » Tue, Mar 27, 2018, 4:12 PM UTC

tim333 wrote: post #270

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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. It's very unlikely that Uber and Waymo have radically different technology. The two companies probably differe only in business and testing practices- i.e. the environments and the conditions in which they are willing to test their cars. Waymo simply seems to be more conscious a…

>Google, said that in tests on roads in California last year, its cars went an average of nearly 5,600 miles before the driver had to take control from the computer to steer out of trouble. As of March, Uber was struggling to meet its target of 13 miles per “intervention” Quite a difference.

I know you're under the impression you are informed. These metrics, however, are not the same. You don't know what Uber's equivalent metric is at. That doesn't mean you should compare different metrics as if they were the same.

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

#284

Post by Aspyre » Tue, Mar 27, 2018, 4:14 PM UTC

ggg9990 wrote: post #104

onetimemanytime wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe Uber got unlucky and they had to be suspended. I wonder how many miles they had and every how many miles does an accident happens with human drivers.

Uber did not get unlucky -- they are simply an evil company. Their cars need human intervention every 13 miles as opposed to Google's every 5,600 miles -- they were not fit for the road but Uber let them out anyways. Uber should be shut down and the principals should get life without parole.

The numbers you are comparing do not measure the same thing.

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

#285

Post by vorpalhex » Tue, Mar 27, 2018, 4:20 PM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #190

shakna wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The investigation isn't complete, but Uber did disable the car's own safety features [0]. Both Volvo and Intel tested their software against the low-grade video that was released, and it was able to detect the impending accident and reduce the impact to where the pedestrian would likely have survived. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-26/uber-disa...

Uber did disable the car's own safety features Well, of course they did. Can you imagine testing a self-driving system when another system is also controlling the car? What happens when they send contradictory commands? Race conditions are bad enough outside of actual cars!

Car is likely to hit object. Car hits brakes.

Not to say on a closed course you might not disable it, but fundamentally new self driving tech on open roads? Redundancy is an important part of reducing risk.

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

#286

Post by Aspyre » Tue, Mar 27, 2018, 4:26 PM UTC

takeda wrote: post #80

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. 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. The footage was artificially darkened, or it was extremely crappy dash cam or bo…

How would the footage be tampered when it was taken by the police directly from the dashcam itself at the scene?

Also, there was no moon on that night and all of the video comparisons that have been put out are low-light cameras. They are not very realistic.

Also, noone seems to think it's a possibility that the agencies responsible for the lighting in this area to have made improvements immediately after the inicident before the public speculation started.

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

#287

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » Tue, Mar 27, 2018, 4:30 PM UTC

tim333 wrote: post #270

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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. It's very unlikely that Uber and Waymo have radically different technology. The two companies probably differe only in business and testing practices- i.e. the environments and the conditions in which they are willing to test their cars. Waymo simply seems to be more conscious a…

>Google, said that in tests on roads in California last year, its cars went an average of nearly 5,600 miles before the driver had to take control from the computer to steer out of trouble. As of March, Uber was struggling to meet its target of 13 miles per “intervention” Quite a difference.

As many others have pointed out, it's very difficult to take these disengagement stats as a direct comparison between the two companies' systems. Basically, there's no information about what miles driven by Uber and miles driven by Waymo are covering. Perhaps Waymo is driving its cars in less complex environments, or maybe Uber is driving them in more diverse environments (whereas Waymo is sticking to the same few roads and neighbourhoods).

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

#288

Post by ameister14 » Tue, Mar 27, 2018, 4:33 PM UTC

stormthebeach wrote: post #278

xvf22 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 / mi…

I find it peculiar that you would quote the police department saying the crash was "unavoidable" when I'm unable to find such distinct phrasing used in any news articles. The most damning phrasing is: "it’s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode (autonomous or human-driven) based on how she came from the shadows right into the roadway".

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/tempe/2018/03/20/...

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

#289

Post by mv4 » Tue, Mar 27, 2018, 4:38 PM UTC

agildehaus wrote: post #126

coinjobber wrote: post #3

Amen. Uber's fatal accident rate is now 50x that of sober human driver's. At their current rate of driving, they can't have a _lower_ rate until 2028! Inexcusable failure of their technology to prevent a human death in the most basic collision avoidance scenario.

Before the accident they were infinitely better than a sober human driver. Understand statistics before employing them please. We don't have enough data and a single data point doesn't change that.

reminds me of this xkcd https://xkcd.com/605/

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

#290

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » Tue, Mar 27, 2018, 4:41 PM UTC

simion314 wrote: post #244

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Similar if you drive 1 million km and kill 1 person, if I drive 10 km and kill 1 person is still 1 data point and I can make no conclusion? Yep. Because I still have another 9 m km to go before I've driven as long as you have and there is no way to know whether I'm going to kill another 9 people, or 0 more, until I've actually driven them all.

You are wrong, there is a conclusion we can make, the conclusion is not absolute but fuzzy so maybe fuzzy logic is not your thing. Also you have a mistake in your comment, I would still have to do 999990 km of driving. If I killed a person in my first 10 km what is the probability that I won't kill anyone in my next 999990? Your point is that I can't be 100% sure and that is true but we can compute the probability, s…

I misread the numbers in the original post. But what you say in your comment- well, that's not how it works.

To assess the risk posed by a driver, you wouldn't follow them around, constantly logging the miles they drive, counting the deaths they cause and continuously updating the probability they will kill someone, at least not in the real world (in a simulation, maybe). Instead, what you'd do is wait for enough people to have driven some reasonably significant (and completely arbitrarily chosen) distance, then count the fatal accidents per person per that distance and thereby calculate the probability of causing an accident per person per that distance. That's a far more convenient way to gather statistics, not least because if you take 1000 people who have causd an accident while driving, they'll each have driven a different distance before the accident.

So you might come up with a figure that says "Americans kill 1.18 people every million miles driven" (it's something like that, actually, if memory serves).

Given that sort of metric, you can't then use it for comparison with the performance of someone who has only driven, say, 1000 miles. Because if you did, you would be comparing apples and oranges: 1 accident per 1000 miles is not on the same scale as ~1 accident per million miles. There's still another 999k miles to go before you're in the same ballpark.

And on that scale, no, you can't know whether an accident in the first 1000 miles will be followed by another in the next 1000 miles. Your expectation is set for 1 million miles.

It's a question of granularity of the metric.