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Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

chicagotribune.com

301–310 of 334 posts

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

#301

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.

Yes, because oncoming traffic at night is just so hard to see with those bright headlights and all.

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

#302

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…

Even if the driver and the woman crossing the street were both to blame, it doesn't mean that Uber was any less to blame. Accidents in critical situations are typically multi-system failures, and every failure needs to be addressed. There are four entities who could have and should have relatively straightforwardly avoided this death. 1. The woman shouldn't have crossed the street there and then. 2. The safety driver…

Sure, fine. But this is the world as it is. Badly designed roads everywhere - very, very occasionally with enough accidents one gets fixed. (Keep an eye on local news for that one). People crossing where they "shouldn't" - all the time. Wearing black clothes - hey try cycling at night, they're all over the bicycle paths like that - thank heaven for LED lights.

This is what automated cars have to be able to solve. The real world is not a special case.

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

#303
post #203
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This strikes me as a risk factor that no one is really discussing. We talk about the dangers of Level 3/4 autonomy, where the driver is still responsible for the car, but autopilot is doing most of the work, leading to a bored/disengaged driver who's not ready to react when it's actually necessary. We don't hear as much pedestrians taking it for granted that a car will stop for them, right of way or no, because of th…

Maybe that's what happened here. The LIDAR would be visible from afar and that lady just watched the car run into her without flinching. In all seriousness, what you're describing happens on college campuses across the country today, where students are conditioned to drivers yielding right of way.

Part of that conditioning is that in many of those places, drivers are legally required to yield the right of way.

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

#304

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…

This is what's always confused me. The usual play is to suck up to a corporation in the hopes that a bunch of jobs or other investment will show up, but self-driving testing is kinda a perfect example of something that will not give any economic benefit to the testbed state at all. It takes very little local investment, and it's a temporary thing that will only yield benefit for the corporation doing the testing, and…

A very common play is to remove all regulatory requirements for an industry that you know will provide next-to-no jobs at a cost to public safety, because it looks good to Republican voters. See: Coal.

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

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Sure, but every time you cross the street, you assume some risk. That's why little kids hold an adult's hand when they cross. And the risk is even higher if you're crossing the street at night. And it's even higher if you don't have a light, crosswalk, or stop sign to protect you.

I used to live in Arizona. The traffic lights and crosswalks are an insane distance apart. There are bright streetlights basically everywhere. All the roads are straight.

It's all designed for cars, and not for pedestrians. And it's really tempting to j-walk if you're ever stuck walking somewhere.

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

#306

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…

You know who’s not applauding Arizona? The dead woman and her family.

Turns out when you let corporations do whatever they want without oversight for a weird PR “win” against SF people can die.

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

#307
post #215
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Several comments here making comparisons On one hand, you are (reasonably) calling out comments for questionable comparisons, but on the other hand... > What is the acceptable casualty rate of elevators? ...you've made one of your own. I haven't yet formed an opinion on the underlying question (of what kind of risk aversion is appropriate in the face of automation), but I do notice that it evokes questionable compa…

His point was that machines should be held at much higher standards than humans. This is a point I'e been making since the beginning myself. If you want self-driving cars to be accepted, they need to be at least 10x better than the best human drivers . Comments such as "self-driving cars only need to be 50% better than humans on average " are absolute nonsense. Humans will never go for that.

Why 10x better? Hypothetically, if you could replace every manually operated car today with a self-driving car and this reduced collisions by .01%, wouldn't you want to do it?

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

#308
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hello! I'd be interested to hear what you think the correct interpretation of these CIs are in this case. Failing that can you explain what is wrong with saying something like "with xx% confidence we can conclude that the rate is within these bounds" is? The assumption of using Poisson seems pretty solid to me, given we are talking about x events in some continuum (miles traveled in this case), but always happy to he…

The Poisson distribution assumes equal probability of events occurring. That seems to me to be an oversimplification, given that AV performance varies over time as changes are made, and also given that terrain / environment plays a huge factor here, whether looking at one particular vehicle or comparing to vehicles across companies (and drivers in general). Since AV performance will hopefully be improved when an accident occurs, we also cannot meet the assumption of independence between events. Although if AVs are simply temporarily stopped after an accident, that also breaks the independence assumption as we'd have a time period of zero accidents.

The bigger problem though is what you are doing with your confidence interval. A CI is a statement about replication. A 95% confidence level means that in 100 replications of the experiment using similar data, 5 of the generated CIs -- which will all have different endpoints -- will _not_ contain the population parameter, although IIRC this math is more complicated in practice, meaning that the error rate is actually higher. As such, if you generate a CI and multiply the endpoints by some constant, that's a complete violation of what is being expressed: there is vastly more data with 100m driving miles than 3m miles, which will cause the CI to shrink and the estimate of the parameter to become more accurate. There is absolutely no basis for multiplying the endpoints of a CI!

Ultimately, given that the size of the sample has an effect on CI width, you need to conduct an appropriate statistical test to compare the estimated parameters between the 1 in 3m deaths for Uber and whatever data generated the 1.18 in 100m deaths for sober drivers. There's a lot more that needs to be taken into account here than what a simple Poisson test can do.

For an analysis of how AVs with various safety levels perform in terms of lives saved over time, I recommend https://www.rand.org/blog/articles/2017/11/why-waiting-for-p...

Edit: Note the default values of the T and r parameters when you run poisson.test(1, conf.level = 0.95), and also that the p-value of the one-sample exact test you performed is 1. Also, since this is an exact test, the rate of rejecting true null hypotheses at 0.95 is 0.05, but given my reservations about the use of a Poisson distribution here, I don't think that using an exact Poisson test is appropriate.

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

#309
post #253

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…

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…

"Unavoidable"... I assume for a human. I'm not sure it was unavoidable for an automated car.

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

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For what? To advance technology and make AZ attractive to other R&D. Not everything has to be tied to a direct economic boom.

California remains the center of autonomous car research and industry with carefully thought out regulation designed with public input. Laissez-faire regulation and rolling out the red carpet for bad actors in Arizona didn't change that. It just led to the predictable result.

California remains the center because the companies are already headquartered there due to decisions made 50 years ago by the military for radar technology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo That's despite it's often idiotic regulations driven by populist ignorance.

A governance policy in favor of developments of new technology most certainly can have an impact over time.

> Laissez-faire regulation and rolling out the red carpet for bad actors in Arizona didn't change that.

Oh, red carpet for bad actors? Where is it that Uber is headquartered again? And doesn't Waymo also test in Arizona?

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