Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck • Hacker News Board

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#11

Post by jakelazaroff » Mon, May 07, 2018, 6:26 PM UTC

assblaster wrote: post #7

The question I want to know is: Did Uber doctor the camera video to make the road seem darker than it actually was? If you recall, there was initially a doubt that Uber was at fault because the streets appeared extremely dark, but I think they were buying time to delay the outage at incompetent Uber. The police initially didn't fault Uber based on this video.

That was a bad call on the part of the police.

You're only allowed to drive as fast as conditions permit. If it's dark enough that you can't avoid an obstacle by the time your headlights illuminate it, you need to slow down.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#12

Post by gizmo686 » Mon, May 07, 2018, 6:27 PM UTC

retSava wrote: post #5

tlb wrote: post #4

The disturbing thing about this crash is that it's such a basic thing to test on a test track. A pedestrian walking in front at night, with nothing else unusual happening, should be on the list of scenarios to get 5 9s reliability on before taking it out in public. The things you have to test in public are the complex real-world interactions, like these: https://medium.com/kylevogt/why-testing-self-driving-cars-in...

That, and the inattentive safety driver. It's quite infuriating really, letting lose a ton and a half of fast-moving mass without even the decency of looking where it's going. There's really no excuse.

Humans are terrible for supervising mostly functional machines.

This was researched in the context of security guards, who had a 95% missrate after just 20 minutes on the job.

It is entirely unreasonable to expect a human supervise to detect and correct this type of situation in time.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#13

Post by leggomylibro » Mon, May 07, 2018, 6:29 PM UTC

_ea1k wrote: post #3

NegativeLatency wrote: post #2

Didn't that car also have a builtin automatic braking system that was disabled?

I think so. But I'm not sure why that would be a bad thing. The Uber built system was designed to fully replace such systems.

As long as Uber's system logged which automatic brake was triggered - or simply failed to log that its own braking system stepped in - it could have saved a life without impacting the data gathered.

They didn't put a tarp over the windshield; why get rid of other proven safety features?

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#14

Post by wil421 » Mon, May 07, 2018, 6:29 PM UTC

assblaster wrote: post #7

The question I want to know is: Did Uber doctor the camera video to make the road seem darker than it actually was? If you recall, there was initially a doubt that Uber was at fault because the streets appeared extremely dark, but I think they were buying time to delay the outage at incompetent Uber. The police initially didn't fault Uber based on this video.

I can recall thinking the video was very bad quality. To the point where I was questioning if the video was from some dashcam they installed instead of the self driving car tech.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#15

Post by ars » Mon, May 07, 2018, 6:29 PM UTC

tlb wrote: post #4

The disturbing thing about this crash is that it's such a basic thing to test on a test track. A pedestrian walking in front at night, with nothing else unusual happening, should be on the list of scenarios to get 5 9s reliability on before taking it out in public. The things you have to test in public are the complex real-world interactions, like these: https://medium.com/kylevogt/why-testing-self-driving-cars-in...

> get 5 9s reliability

That's it? Humans have greater than 7 9's reliability when driving. (As measured by fatalities per time of driving, and assuming a fatality takes 5 minutes, and average speed is 30mph.)

If the cause of a fatality is 10 seconds of failure, not 5 minutes, humans have greater than 9 9s of reliability.

Math: 10 seconds / (1.13 / (30 miles/hour / 100 million miles))

Fatality rate is 1.13 per 100 million miles.

Good luck programming a computer to even stay on and not crash with that level of reliability.

There's this belief that humans are horrible at driving, etc, etc. Until you run that math and realize, no, they're not. There's just a lot of driving going on.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#16

Post by ta9999999999999 » Mon, May 07, 2018, 6:32 PM UTC

assblaster wrote: post #7

The question I want to know is: Did Uber doctor the camera video to make the road seem darker than it actually was? If you recall, there was initially a doubt that Uber was at fault because the streets appeared extremely dark, but I think they were buying time to delay the outage at incompetent Uber. The police initially didn't fault Uber based on this video.

https://twitter.com/Uber_Comms/status/977738312831066112

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#17

Post by lhorie » Mon, May 07, 2018, 6:32 PM UTC

assblaster wrote: post #7

The question I want to know is: Did Uber doctor the camera video to make the road seem darker than it actually was? If you recall, there was initially a doubt that Uber was at fault because the streets appeared extremely dark, but I think they were buying time to delay the outage at incompetent Uber. The police initially didn't fault Uber based on this video.

I highly doubt it, considering the video came from Tempe police, not Uber. Regardless, does it matter at this point? Uber is basically saying here that the sensors did detect the pedestrian but the issue was that the software to ignore false positives was tuned incorrectly.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#18

Post by freditup » Mon, May 07, 2018, 6:32 PM UTC

I'm curious what degree of "cultural context" is built into automated cars - I feel that there has to be a lot of locale-specific techniques for driving.

For example, in NYC, there's nothing at all uncommon about a pedestrian beginning to cross the street in front of you and approaching the area of your lane where you will shortly be. Pedestrians typically then stop about a foot away from your lane, let you drive past them, and then continue walking. If a car slammed on the brakes in this situation, it would likely cause more accidents than not braking would cause.

On the contrary, in Tempe, a pedestrian starting to do the exact same thing as above is likely much more a case of them not realizing your car is coming at all, in which case slamming on the brakes is appropriate.

This isn't to defend Uber, clearly their car did do the wrong thing in the Tempe situation (though I make no judgment on who was at fault). And clearly cars need to be able to handle the variety of unwritten, localized driving quirks different regions have. But it seems like a very non-trivial problem to do this correctly.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#19

Post by trgn » Mon, May 07, 2018, 6:32 PM UTC

retSava wrote: post #5

tlb wrote: post #4

The disturbing thing about this crash is that it's such a basic thing to test on a test track. A pedestrian walking in front at night, with nothing else unusual happening, should be on the list of scenarios to get 5 9s reliability on before taking it out in public. The things you have to test in public are the complex real-world interactions, like these: https://medium.com/kylevogt/why-testing-self-driving-cars-in...

That, and the inattentive safety driver. It's quite infuriating really, letting lose a ton and a half of fast-moving mass without even the decency of looking where it's going. There's really no excuse.

yes for sure.

I wish articles about this crash would continue to hammer on the basics, to keep front&center this crash was completely avoidable.

Even if there were no technical issues,

(1) the driver was on her phone before and during the crash. The whole reason for the driver to be present is to intervene in a situation like this.

(2) the car was driving too fast for conditions. Nobody should drive this fast in the middle of the city in the middle of night. It doesn't look like the car could have come to any kind emergency stop. Self-driving cars should drive more carefully than humans, not push against and over the speed limit regardless of outside conditions.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#20

Post by [deleted] » Mon, May 07, 2018, 6:32 PM UTC

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #10

retSava wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That, and the inattentive safety driver. It's quite infuriating really, letting lose a ton and a half of fast-moving mass without even the decency of looking where it's going. There's really no excuse.

Unfortunately I think it's one of those things that is both inexcusable and guaranteed to happen. It absolutely makes sense to put a human in a car you're testing and don't have full confidence in yet but are sending into real traffic. Not doing so would be ludicrously negligent. However, humans simply don't maintain focus for a long period of time without some sort of extreme, years-long training. The ability of mon…

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