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Mobileye says its software would have seen pedestrian in Uber fatality

reuters.com

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Re: Mobileye says its software would have seen pedestrian in Uber fatality

#41

Post by linsomniac »

I'm struggling with the question: Who's fault is this?

The pedestrian for walking across the street, wearing dark colors, being oblivious to traffic?

The human in the drivers seat for not paying attention?

Uber kind of gets the laundry list: For reducing the number of "safety drivers" from 2 to 1, for not using eye tracking to ensure the safety driver was paying attention, for faulty software or hardware that didn't detect the pedestrian, or for software that after getting the sensor input made a decision to not adjust speed or change lanes, for having some of the worst "intervention" numbers in the industry yet plowing ahead with removing a safety driver from the car...

Who gets the blame?

I'm mostly a "get rid of idiotic safety tags and let natural selection sort it out" sort of person, but on the other hand I feel that piloting a multi-ton killing machine needs to be treated as a huge responsibility.

Re: Mobileye says its software would have seen pedestrian in Uber fatality

#42

Post by ggg9990 »

reaperducer wrote: post #37
icebraining wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One fear is that Uber's mistakes will endanger the whole self-driving industry, by making people afraid. I'd say these companies are trying to separate themselves to avoid that.

I imagine we'll see self-driving car horror movies soon. We've had them in the past (Christine, Trucks, Herbie the Love Bug), but the only thing Hollywood loves more than latching on to a trend (Emoji Movie) is blowing something out of proportion.

Damn, I’m already imagining them like the climate change movies where a 800-foot tsunami hits Manhattan. 200 million self driving cars have become hostile and are trying to kill the humans. The problem is that they have commandeered a group of friendly-looking Japanese humanoid robots to pump gas for them. One rogue humanoid robot is the one who will save humanity along with help from a 6-year-old girl with pigtails and a stuffed rabbit named Hopsy.

Re: Mobileye says its software would have seen pedestrian in Uber fatality

#43

Post by frgtpsswrdlame »

always_good wrote: post #28
wpietri wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't just sound insensitive. Watching the video, I'm convinced that person died for no good reason beyond Uber rushing tech out the door before it was ready. An alert human would have braked and swerved in that circumstance. People do die from drunk driving, and those drivers go to jail because they fucked up in a huge way. That's no reason to give Uber a dead-person mulligan. Indeed, it's a reason that some…

Well, they were still jaywalking in the middle of the night hoping oncoming cars would stop for them. It's not like the car hopped the curb.

They were crossing a low speed, brightly lit street.

Re: Mobileye says its software would have seen pedestrian in Uber fatality

#44

Post by zelon88 »

reificator wrote: post #3

Look. It's generating bad press right now for your industry. I get that. I also think that in the long run your industry will be far safer than human drivers. But now is not the time to post speculative bullshit like this. Would your car also have run into a school shooting unarmed? You weren't in that situation, you don't know all the edge cases, the best you can say is that you had a similar situation under control…

It also seems to me that this experienced company is trying to setup road blocks to stifle competition and using this fatality as cannon fodder to support his arguments.

How about we let whoever wants to research autonomous vehicles have at it, and we just throw the "Supervising driver" who failed in jail like he should be?

I mean the guy had one fucking job: hit the brake pedal if you're going to crash into something. He failed. The car is an experiment. The driver is the only safety mechanism in that car that matters, and as usual with humans it screwed up.

Re: Mobileye says its software would have seen pedestrian in Uber fatality

#45

Post by ggg9990 »

wjnc wrote: post #14
reificator wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't make it the right time to publicly announce "we wouldn't have killed someone here, look how great we are".

Near my hometown a Tesla crashed and the crash killed the driver recently. Guess who gave a statement within days blaming the driver for speeding? For a European that was quite the novelty (and probably illegal, although AFAIK deceased lack privacy protection since not a natural person).

Musk definitely goes too far with his response to any criticism of Tesla. It makes him sound a little like Trump — “I’m so amazing”

Re: Mobileye says its software would have seen pedestrian in Uber fatality

#46

Post by lowbloodsugar »

pdpi wrote: post #30
zer00eyz wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except their technology was ON the car that was involved... they are part of the story - Uber turned their gear off in favor of their own.

The whole point is that uber is developing their own gear. Dunno about you, but for me giving two self-driving systems control over the car at same time seems like a recipe for disaster. Of course they turned off the other systems.

This is a system designed to respond when a human driver has failed to identify the threat, so we've already established that having two systems (one dumb system and one intelligent system) doesn't compromise safety.

Re: Mobileye says its software would have seen pedestrian in Uber fatality

#47

Post by reaperducer »

always_good wrote: post #28
wpietri wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't just sound insensitive. Watching the video, I'm convinced that person died for no good reason beyond Uber rushing tech out the door before it was ready. An alert human would have braked and swerved in that circumstance. People do die from drunk driving, and those drivers go to jail because they fucked up in a huge way. That's no reason to give Uber a dead-person mulligan. Indeed, it's a reason that some…

Well, they were still jaywalking in the middle of the night hoping oncoming cars would stop for them. It's not like the car hopped the curb.

In many (all?) states, pedestrians have the right-of-way, even if they're jaywalking.

Re: Mobileye says its software would have seen pedestrian in Uber fatality

#48

Post by Johnny555 »

reificator wrote: post #3

Look. It's generating bad press right now for your industry. I get that. I also think that in the long run your industry will be far safer than human drivers. But now is not the time to post speculative bullshit like this. Would your car also have run into a school shooting unarmed? You weren't in that situation, you don't know all the edge cases, the best you can say is that you had a similar situation under control…

Missing from the article is the nature of the link to Mobileeye -- the Volvo cars Uber is using come with collision avoidance built-in, Uber disabled it. The Volvo collision avoidance uses technology from Aptiv, which in turn uses technology from MobilEye.

So this isn't just a random company saying "we could do better", this is the company with equipment already on the car (though disconnected) defending their reputation.

Re: Mobileye says its software would have seen pedestrian in Uber fatality

#49

Post by mrguyorama »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #46
pdpi wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point is that uber is developing their own gear. Dunno about you, but for me giving two self-driving systems control over the car at same time seems like a recipe for disaster. Of course they turned off the other systems.

This is a system designed to respond when a human driver has failed to identify the threat, so we've already established that having two systems (one dumb system and one intelligent system) doesn't compromise safety.

Which one, human or automated, is the "dumb" system?

Re: Mobileye says its software would have seen pedestrian in Uber fatality

#50

Post by lowbloodsugar »

2474 wrote: post #22
reificator wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right. Developing video games has taught me that a second is a long time. But we still don't even know that Uber didn't detect them that early. The CV system or other sensors could have picked out the pedestrian but something else went wrong instead. I tend to think that if Uber did detect the pedestrian, they would have said something by now. But perhaps they prefer the optics of not having seen her to the op…

This reminds me of a survey I had taken. I can't remember the survey publisher but it was related to self-driving vehicles. You were presented two pictures (e.g. a picture of school kids crossing a crosswalk and the other a picture of an adult male and female walking their dog across a crosswalk). Presumably you had to choose; would you swerve to hit the adults and dog or would you stay course and hit the kids. I kno…

Getting data on an ethical dilemma. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

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