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Arizona Government Suspends Uber's Self Driving Cars from Roads

chicagotribune.com

11–20 of 334 posts

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

#11

Amen. Uber's fatal accident rate is now 50x that of sober human driver's. At their current rate of driving, they can't have a _lower_ rate until 2028! Inexcusable failure of their technology to prevent a human death in the most basic collision avoidance scenario.

A fatal accident at 50x the rate of a sober human driver with a study size where N = 1.

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

#12
I wonder how long the investigations are going to take, they usually take months to a year in these cases. Or have for Tesla at least.

The political side is interesting to look at as well. The governor directly issued the order and he is up for election this year [0] and he played up the positive PR of the Uber and others coming to the state.

0 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arizona_gubernatorial_electi...

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

#13

Let’s suspend human driving too, since it kills over 100 people per day.

People that drive recklessly and kill people can, indeed, have their license pulled. This is not unreasonable and we'll see what the investigation finds. If Uber did not take needless risks and this was some kind of edge-case where everything that could go wrong, went wrong, then perhaps it would be acceptable to allow them to re-continue their testing.

Given Uber's track record, however, I believe we'll see this was more of their "don't give a fuck" brogrammer attitude. When you're only really risking people not being charged a correct fee or not being picked up for a ride it's one thing. Risking public safety is another.

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

#14
post #10
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans kill 1 person every ~100m miles. Uber has killed 1 person after ~3m miles. Yes, I would absolutely suspend a system that kills 3,000 people/day in favor of a system that kills 100 people/day.

n=1 (To reduce the number of email notifications I'm getting I'd best put this message in parentheses right next to this statement. NOTE: I'm not a statistician and don't believe statistics are all that important here! All I meant to say here is that this is a single incident. That's it. Nothing more.) Edit: I'm getting the impression some people think I am suggesting there aren't grounds to suspend Uber's driving ba…

Agreed, but it's not like it's OK to say "Well sure, so far we have a kill rate of 50x a human driver, but why don't we wait until Uber kills at least 20 people first so we can determine proper statistical significance"

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

#15
post #8

This is interesting, but can we avoid posting links to articles behind paywalls? Here's one on the subject that isn't: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-arizona-ub...

Just click the "web" link then click the WSJ link. If you have no cookies from them, it gets you around the paywall most of the time.

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

#16
post #10
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans kill 1 person every ~100m miles. Uber has killed 1 person after ~3m miles. Yes, I would absolutely suspend a system that kills 3,000 people/day in favor of a system that kills 100 people/day.

n=1 (To reduce the number of email notifications I'm getting I'd best put this message in parentheses right next to this statement. NOTE: I'm not a statistician and don't believe statistics are all that important here! All I meant to say here is that this is a single incident. That's it. Nothing more.) Edit: I'm getting the impression some people think I am suggesting there aren't grounds to suspend Uber's driving ba…

Yes, but given that the probability of an auto death is continuous, there is an incredibly high confidence level that Uber is, in fact, less safe then human drivers.

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

#17
post #8

This is interesting, but can we avoid posting links to articles behind paywalls? Here's one on the subject that isn't: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-arizona-ub...

FWIW, complaints about paywalls are generally off-topic, though I agree, a non-paywalled source can be useful.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

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

#18

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…

Or maybe Uber got unlucky and they had to be suspended. I wonder how many miles they had and every how many miles does an accident happens with human drivers.

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

#19
post #14
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

n=1 (To reduce the number of email notifications I'm getting I'd best put this message in parentheses right next to this statement. NOTE: I'm not a statistician and don't believe statistics are all that important here! All I meant to say here is that this is a single incident. That's it. Nothing more.) Edit: I'm getting the impression some people think I am suggesting there aren't grounds to suspend Uber's driving ba…

Agreed, but it's not like it's OK to say "Well sure, so far we have a kill rate of 50x a human driver, but why don't we wait until Uber kills at least 20 people first so we can determine proper statistical significance"

Why not?

Why in this case is it acceptable to make decisions on non-statistically significant data? You would exercise more rigour than that in a throwaway A/B test.

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

#20
post #10
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans kill 1 person every ~100m miles. Uber has killed 1 person after ~3m miles. Yes, I would absolutely suspend a system that kills 3,000 people/day in favor of a system that kills 100 people/day.

n=1 (To reduce the number of email notifications I'm getting I'd best put this message in parentheses right next to this statement. NOTE: I'm not a statistician and don't believe statistics are all that important here! All I meant to say here is that this is a single incident. That's it. Nothing more.) Edit: I'm getting the impression some people think I am suggesting there aren't grounds to suspend Uber's driving ba…

Using the above numbers as an example... from this sample size, we can be fairly confident that the current Uber fatality rate is greater than the sober human fatality rate (assuming that the Uber rate is 1 fatality every 3m miles and the human rate is 1 every 100m miles). Here, T is in "millions of miles".

    > poisson.test(1,3,1/100, alt='greater')
    
    	Exact Poisson test
    
    data:  1 time base: 3
    number of events = 1, time base = 3, p-value = 0.02955
    alternative hypothesis: true event rate is greater than 0.01
    95 percent confidence interval:
     0.01709776        Inf
    sample estimates:
    event rate 
     0.3333333
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