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Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

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Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#361

Post by dabbledash »

Izkata wrote: post #272
dabbledash wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pull into the intersection and go when it’s clear (on yellow or red). Gunning it so you can cut off oncoming traffic is ridiculous.

That doesn't solve it at all, you're thinking of a different problem. I got clued in from another comment that only mentioned it offhand, but this is the problem the "Pittsburgh left" tries to solve: The traffic is a single lane, and you want to turn left. Light turns green, and you wait for the oncoming traffic to clear. All traffic behind you is stopped on a green because they can't get around you.

Thanks, that’s a great point. That really is a terrible situation.

And I’m sure the risks associated with the “Pittsburg left” are significantly mitigated when everyone expects it.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#362

Post by bkor »

throwaway057 wrote: post #223
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 drive that stretch of road almost every single day, at night. Yeah, the video looked different than what my eyes see because my eyes have better low light sensitivity than most cameras. However (if this makes sense): the video released was an accurate representation of what you see driving on that road. A few weeks ago, I had somebody almost walk into my car out of the shadows (this person was paying attention thou…

> However (if this makes sense): the video released was an accurate representation of what you see driving on that road.

There have been many videos on that same road which were super clear. Only the Uber video was really dark. The other videos weren't. Further, darkness doesn't impact LIDAR.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#363

Post by bkor »

mcr1983 wrote: post #108

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.

> Uber's ultimately at fault because it was their car.

Uber while hiring should've specifically looked for people who can pay attention for hours on end. Basically like a train driver. Further, they should review if people pay attention and have a system in place.

She was employed by Uber. If you make a huge error while working for someone, often it's the employer who is responsible. There's way too much which should've been done which wasn't to just blame this driver.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#364

Post by icebraining »

Maybestring wrote: post #72
Symmetry wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're overselling the extent of the difficulty here. People from out of state usually manage to get through New York, pedestrians and all, without getting into an accident. A car won't get through a block as quickly as it could if it merely obeys the laws makes sure it doesn't run into anybody. I'm sure this will cause great joy among people crossing the street and consternation among other drivers but the p…

>I think you're overselling the extent of the difficulty here. People from out of state usually manage to get through New York, pedestrians and all, without getting into an accident. At this point, "it's easy for a person to do it" is probably better evidence that it's a hard problem in AI. In this case, I believe it's an inverse learning problem. We observe other agents acting in an environment, deduce their policy,…

You don't need it. Companies will program the cars for the various regions where it's profitable to do so, and block the self-driving features elsewhere. Much like geo-restrictions in streaming platforms, and such. Will anyone in the US not buy a self-driving car because it doesn't work in, say, Portugal?

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#365

Post by IggleSniggle »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #262
ubernostrum wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The usual case for this is a light where left-turning traffic must wait for oncoming traffic to clear, but at certain times of day oncoming traffic never clears . The only gap in oncoming traffic occurs when the oncoming traffic has a red light. But the left-turning traffic also has a red at that point.

I thought we were talking about the Pittsburgh-left. That's not what you're describing. The Pittsburgh-left occurs immediately after the light turns green, when both the oncoming traffic and the person making the turn have a green light. My point was, why do you need to do that when you can just enter the intersection during the green light and complete your turn once the light turns red?

Having driven in the single lane thoroughfares of Pittsburgh, I’m grateful for the people in front of me that take a “Pittsburgh-left.” Otherwise the entire lane would be stopped for every left turner each green light. This way it’s only stopped for every other left turner in the cases where a left-turner ends up in front of the line. It’s an improvement to everyone’s traffic flow.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#366

Post by mannykannot »

nmca wrote: post #121
thegambit wrote: post #48

It seems like it was actually Uber who disabled the safety settings that were there to prevent this according to Volvo. "Uber Technologies Inc. disabled the standard collision-avoidance technology in the Volvo SUV that struck and killed a woman in Arizona last week, according to the auto-parts maker that supplied the vehicle’s radar and camera." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-26/uber-disa...

This whole line of reasoning frustrates me somewhat. The story of "Uber Disabled the Safety System" paints Uber out to be negligent for doing so. Outside of consideration of all the other facts (which unlike this one, do indeed suggest that Uber are to blame), this element of the story is not indicative of negligence. Of course they disabled the existing safety system - they were aiming to build a new, safer one that…

This argument frustrates me more than somewhat, especially if it is what Uber's engineers were thinking when they removed the last safeguard that could have avoided this fatal accident.

There is a reason for there being such a thing as a crash-test dummy, and for crash tests being done in elaborate facilities that simulate crashes. It is because testing how a vehicle handles a crash in live (literally) situations is both ineffective and unethical.

The purpose of the system under test is to drive safely. If the simple safety override was triggered, then that was probably a failure of the autonomous driving system. Any case where it was not could be identified afterwards, by analysis.

Furthermore, when you have a complex system controlling potentially dangerous machinery, it is a sound engineering principle to include simple 'censors' to catch the rare corner cases that are a feature of complex systems, no matter how carefully designed and thoroughly tested. Nuclear systems have a number of independent safety systems that can scram the reactor, each in response to a single specific condition. Disabling them for a test is what happened at Chernobyl.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#368

Post by lemoncucumber »

Noumenon72 wrote: post #319
systoll wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that I'd recommend doing it in an area not used to it... but that sounds like a riskier alternative to a hook turn. With hook turns, If you want to turn right, you start in the leftmost lane. When your light goes green, you 'hook' around to put yourself in front of the cars to your [initial] left. From there, the road you want to enter is straight ahead. This way, no-one cuts across lanes where traffic has a gree…

This makes no sense to me even after assuming you are from a country that drives on the left and reading the Wikipedia page.

First off, note that hook turns are a bike thing, not a car thing — trying to imagine it with cars isn’t going to make any sense. They rely on the fact that bikes are small enough that they can fit in the space in front of the stopped opposite-direction cars (which might be a crosswalk, bike box, etc). You just go stop there, turn your bike so it’s pointing the right direction, and wait for the green.

They work even better with dedicated bike infrastructure as depicted in the diagram about half way through this article: https://www.vox.com/2015/8/12/9139771/protected-intersection...

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#369

Post by mannykannot »

nmca wrote: post #344
jschwartzi wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are absolutely negligent for doing so. I wouldn't have made that decision, because in a safety-critical system it's ALWAYS preferable to have a backup system, especially when the system you're working with is unproven software that you don't fully understand. It doesn't matter that the old system would have interfered with the new system, and in fact if the two systems did interfere it would behoove you to under…

So I agree that the system was insufficiently tested to be operating on public roads and endangering lives, and that lack of testing was negligent; I also agree with your comment about their engineering culture. But those two points seem distinct from the idea of disabling a system in order to have a better understanding of what's going on. Suppose they had built a car that was safe, conditioned on the presence a bla…

Even with the red herring about the safety overrides being a black box, yes, it would be satisfactory - see my other post. Not only would the triggering of the safety override generally indicate a failure of the autonomous system, the use of failsafe overrides to catch corner cases should be a feature of the final system.

If Uber could demonstrate, through the analysis of a statistically significant number of events, that its system was actually safer without the car manufacturer's override (e.g. if all the events were false positives), then it would be appropriate to disable it at that time. That's how you do it.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#370

Post by [deleted] »

lhorie wrote: post #314
telchar wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, if you want to move fast and disrupt yada yada. They shouldn't be putting hack-job self-driving cars on public roads. Either do some engineering so that they keep the backup system in place or keep it on a test track. This is Chernobyl-like irresponsibility.

Are you an engineer or at least familiar with vehicle engineering? Do you know for a fact that Waymo/others don't disable built-in safety mechanisms in similar fashion? If not, perhaps it may be best to not pass armchair judgment...

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