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

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#101

Post by dahart » Mon, May 07, 2018, 7:57 PM UTC

Sangermaine wrote: post #96

dahart wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s an ungenerous way to paraphrase what I said, given that we already have traffic laws, and enforcement of those laws.

But the point is those laws aren't enforced the same way in different areas, even when they're the same. Jaywalking is illegal in NYC. Come here and see if anyone, cops included, cares. But other cities seem to care much more about that. It's not as simple as having the same laws, or having them enforced, because the underlying cultural attitudes are different. If you tried to crack down on jaywalking in NYC you'd be…

It doesn’t matter what the cultural attitudes are. All it takes to change it is a significant increase in fines, then people would, statistically speaking, break the law less often.

We don’t have to convince the public to accept more enforcement, that’s not how traffic laws are made or enforced.

What we have is a system of cultural attitudes that’s bad for us. People are dying all the time because of lax attitudes. What you’re advocating is status quo. Why? Is it a good thing that a lot of people in NYC who choose to jaywalk get hit by cars?

I’m not on a mission to change things, I don’t care that much if people jaywalk. I’d prioritize speeding enforcement far above jaywalking. I’m just pointing out the obvious — that fretting over how safe it is for autonomous cars to obey the law is just “enculer les mouches”, to use the French term. It’s nitpicking the tiniest of margins while ignoring the primary cause of the problem.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#102

Post by assblaster » Mon, May 07, 2018, 8:01 PM UTC

hamitron wrote: post #52

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.

It shouldn't matter at all how dark the roads were, the vehicle was equipped with LIDAR.

It's easy for Uber to point to this video to say: "Look know dark it was! If it was you driving, you'd be in the same problem we are in!"

Look how much time has passed to learn of the fact that it was Uber's sloppy programming at fault in this tragedy.

The good news for Uber is that this comes out far after the event when people are in general less likely to care, or even remember the details of the accident.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#103

Post by lhorie » Mon, May 07, 2018, 8:06 PM UTC

TillE wrote: post #57

toast0 wrote: post #24

> We’re actively cooperating with the NTSB in their investigation. Out of respect for that process and the trust we’ve built with NTSB, we can’t comment on the specifics of the incident. Hey look, somebody knows how to follow the script! Uber may be grossly negligent, but at least they respect the process unlike Tesla.

It's actually the rest of that statement which shocks me a bit: > In the meantime, we have initiated a top-to-bottom safety review of our self-driving vehicles program, So they actually think they can continue to work on self-driving vehicles after this, and not scrap the program entirely. That's...not what I expected. No municipality in the country should allow Uber to test on their streets after they killed someone…

> No municipality in the country should allow Uber to test on their streets after they killed someone

This is pitchfork mentality.

Many industries have to deal with unintentional deaths. Car manufacturers sometimes have to deal with deaths resulting from hardware failure. Food companies sometimes have to deal with recalls due to food poisoning deaths. If the response to a death is to ban all further production work, eventually nothing is ever going to get done because it's inherently impossible to be perfect all the time.

It sucks that it had to come to someone's death, but the rest of the statement said:

> we have brought on former NTSB Chair Christopher Hart to advise us on our overall safety culture

so it sounds like Uber is at least trying in earnest to put the house in order.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#104

Post by sdenton4 » Mon, May 07, 2018, 8:07 PM UTC

ars wrote: post #15

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 mil…

Fatalities seems like a pretty low bar to measure failures by... I would prefer to measure reliability by reported accidents per 100k miles. This stat seems to be 183 per million miles in 2009, compared to 1.13 for fatalities per million miles. So quite enough to shave 7 9's down to 5ish...

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#105

Post by arich » Mon, May 07, 2018, 8:17 PM UTC

freditup wrote: post #18

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 pas…

George Hotz had a great point about this and how Comma.ai handles defining the driving problem and what "driving badly" actually means, aka, interacting with and driving as other humans are expected to drive, quirks included. His whole talk is interesting but the short part about that is here: https://youtu.be/IxuU5L2MEII?t=38m11s

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#106

Post by blattimwind » Mon, May 07, 2018, 8:19 PM UTC

SilasX wrote: post #69

blattimwind wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dead-man switches do not work.

Don't work for what purpose, according to whom? Are you sure that applies here? What I suggested there isn't really a deadman's switch ("stop if no one is around to do task x"), but something to periodically, randomly check the driver's attentiveness, and can raise a red flag if they take too long to respond. A deadman's switch is different and enforces "do X if person Y stops doing this thing at this predictable int…

Vigilance control. But even these fail with more experienced users, similar to how alarm clocks fail some people (they wake up just enough to get up and turn the alarm off, then continue sleeping).

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#107

Post by blattimwind » Mon, May 07, 2018, 8:19 PM UTC

SilasX wrote: post #69

blattimwind wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dead-man switches do not work.

Don't work for what purpose, according to whom? Are you sure that applies here? What I suggested there isn't really a deadman's switch ("stop if no one is around to do task x"), but something to periodically, randomly check the driver's attentiveness, and can raise a red flag if they take too long to respond. A deadman's switch is different and enforces "do X if person Y stops doing this thing at this predictable int…

Vigilance control. But even these fail with more experienced users, similar to how alarm clocks fail some people (they wake up just enough to get up and turn the alarm off, then continue sleeping).

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#108

Post by mcr1983 » Mon, May 07, 2018, 8:22 PM UTC

Uber's ultimately at fault because it was their car. But the woman driving should be arrested for vehicular manslaughter. Uber knew its cars weren't autonomous, that's why they had a driver to take over when the car screws up. But she was texting while she should've been ready to take control of the vehicle and hit a pedestrian any driver that was paying attention would've easily avoided.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#109

Post by ams6110 » Mon, May 07, 2018, 8:26 PM UTC

Sangermaine wrote: post #79

frankharv wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't beleive they would do a trail run with an automous truck weighing 80,000lbs barreling down the freeway. This revolution should have started with mundane tasks, such as city street sweepers and perhaps garbage trucks. Vehicles that move slow on a predefined path in the night. Then advance to faster moving objects like taxis. Just like the DARPA Grand Challenge that started this mess. Many of those vehicles wer…

>This revolution should have started with mundane tasks, such as city street sweepers and perhaps garbage trucks. Vehicles that move slow on a predefined path in the night. Then advance to faster moving objects like taxis. No, you've got it backwards. The point of all of the above comments is that driving in cities and densely populated areas is a much more difficult challenge than driving down a straight open highwa…

Or when there's a random tire or mattress lying in your lane. I see that kind of stuff on the interstates all the time.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#110

Post by 0x00000000 » Mon, May 07, 2018, 8:28 PM UTC

dahart wrote: post #94

0x00000000 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can't and won't happen without significant increase in police and traffic enforcement spending which is not always a popular position and there is little motivation. Some states just can't afford it. But in Maryland for example, 55 almost universally means 75 and if an autonomous car didn't know that they will cause many accidents due to unsafe and aggressive driving even if they are technically not "at fault"

Why’s that? Fines are income, not expenditure.

People don't want more highway patrol, red light cameras, and traffic enforcement and tend to see it as a waste of resources. It also disproportionately screws lower income people and breeds contempt for police - people feel they are being persecuted when there are non-victimless crimes happening every day.

I can't find a source for this, but I imagine they are not ever making net profit on tickets when a trooper makes 75k per year minimum not including overtime or benefits[1] plus 60k+ for a new cruiser[2] plus all other training and administrative overhead (dispatcher etc).

[1] https://www.criminaljusticedegreeschools.com/state-trooper-r...

[2]http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-cop-cars-2015...