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Video suggests huge problems with Uber’s driverless car program

arstechnica.com

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Re: Video suggests huge problems with Uber’s driverless car program

#111

Post by foobarian »

saas_co_de wrote: post #51
sureaboutthis wrote: post #3

I have two problems with this article. 1) They make it appear that Uber is a car manufacturer. 2) Even though Uber has not been determined to be at fault, the author seems to want to make it that way anyway.

The other missing part is that it is the human driver who is responsible. This is a test vehicle and their job is to be ready to take over at any time as if they are driving. It seems unlikely that the Police will find any fault because they probably don't want to have to file a criminal charge against the driver, but that is who it would go against if there was fault.

It surprises me how downplayed this is. If you legally treat the Uber car as an ordinary car that happens to have a really fancy auto-assist, the driver should be on the hook. This person had eyes off the road for 5 seconds prior to the crash according to the article.

There was a case some years ago in Boston where a subway rear-ended another one because the operator was texting. The driver was fired and probably would have been prosecuted if there had been fatalities. Taking eyes off the road for this long seems insane to me.

Re: Video suggests huge problems with Uber’s driverless car program

#112

Post by TylerE »

ghfbjdhhv wrote: post #110

This event has me thinking about job of the behind-the-wheel backup driver. They get an easier job than a real driver, at the cost of potentially taking the fall if an accident occurs. I wonder if the pay is better.

I actually don't think it's really easier. Continuous attention is easier to maintain than hours of boredom only to have to react out of nowhere...maybe.

Re: Video suggests huge problems with Uber’s driverless car program

#113

Post by spacehome »

ben174 wrote: post #73
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #62

"Uber announced that it had driven 2 million miles by December 2017 and is probably up to around 3 million miles today. If you do the math, that means that Uber's cars have killed people at roughly 25 times the rate of a typical human-driven car in the United States." Wow there goes that "safer than human drivers" argument.

Well maybe not currently safer than human drivers. I don't think any sound-minded person would claim that they will never be.

Currently we're losing a million lives a year (about a 9/11 per day) to auto accidents. I think there's a serious argument that it's ethical to push autonomous driving onto the road before they're safer than humans if that would help them debug the software faster and advance to superhuman safety levels even a day sooner.

Re: Video suggests huge problems with Uber’s driverless car program

#114

Post by sulam »

mabbo wrote: post #102
Buldak wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One data point? So if Uber had driven a billion miles with zero deaths, they'd have zero data?

If you're looking for the rate at which something happens, for the purpose of predicting events in the future, you need to see the event occur many times before you can fairly estimate it's rate. That's what my example means. I'm not defending Uber here- I'm defending statistics! With more data, we may discover that Uber cars are 100X worse, not just 25X. Or we may discover they're better. But we don't have the stati…

Your knowledge of statistics could use some enhancement. The response referring to poisson processes is a better view of things.

Re: Video suggests huge problems with Uber’s driverless car program

#115

Post by mozumder »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #62

"Uber announced that it had driven 2 million miles by December 2017 and is probably up to around 3 million miles today. If you do the math, that means that Uber's cars have killed people at roughly 25 times the rate of a typical human-driven car in the United States." Wow there goes that "safer than human drivers" argument.

It's much, much worse than that, since that 37,461 deaths number includes all deaths, including motorcycle/Truck/SUV deaths, which have higher death rates than passenger cars, perhaps 5x-10x higher.

A proper comparison in this case is comparing passenger car death rates.

And then you need to factor in other conditions, such as the fact that weather was clean, and that you should be looking to compare pedestrian/bicyclist deaths, and you see that this incident already throws out wack the death rate for autonomous vehicles.

Re: Video suggests huge problems with Uber’s driverless car program

#116

Post by mozumder »

spacehome wrote: post #113
ben174 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well maybe not currently safer than human drivers. I don't think any sound-minded person would claim that they will never be.

Currently we're losing a million lives a year (about a 9/11 per day) to auto accidents. I think there's a serious argument that it's ethical to push autonomous driving onto the road before they're safer than humans if that would help them debug the software faster and advance to superhuman safety levels even a day sooner.

Why would you want to increase the death rate by pushing more autonomous vehicles onto the road?

Re: Video suggests huge problems with Uber’s driverless car program

#118

Post by Fricken »

slavik81 wrote: post #109
mabbo wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With one data point, you can't extrapolate much. This is misuse of statistics. Consider if there was a new lottery and you weren't sure what the odds of winning were. You play it three weeks in a row and the third time you win a million dollars. Conveniently, no one else tries the new lottery yet. Does it follow then that the odds of winning a million dollars are 1 in 3? Or should you play it a few more times before…

One accident is clearly not one data point. If Uber had driven a billion miles with 0 accidents, we would safely conclude they were safer than human drivers with "0 data points". Assuming that accidents are independent, we can model this as a Poisson point process. If the accident rate is 1 per 100M miles and Uber has driven 3M miles, the probability of there being zero accidents in that time is P{n=0} = ((λt)^n / n!…

Gil Pratt, who heads up Toyota's autonomous development initiative mentioned that we would need to drive 8.5 billion autonomous miles to be able to declare with 99% statistical certainty that autonomous vehicles are safer that human driven ones. Of course, as we are witnessing, great pains will be taken with every preventable injurious or fatal collision to ensure that sort of failure never happens again, so by the time we get to the 8 billionth mile the software and hardware will have improved considerably, rendering the early data moot.

One thing we can say about the woman killed the other day by an autonomous Uber, is that unlike the other ~40,000 killed on America's roads over the past year, her's was not in vain.

Every day that we delay the widespread deployment of this technology, it's another 100 or so people dead. Of course, the public is unlikely to see it that way. They see one death as a tragedy, but 40,000 is just a statistic, business as usual, nothing to get excited about.

Re: Video suggests huge problems with Uber’s driverless car program

#119

Post by slavik81 »

mabbo wrote: post #102
Buldak wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One data point? So if Uber had driven a billion miles with zero deaths, they'd have zero data?

If you're looking for the rate at which something happens, for the purpose of predicting events in the future, you need to see the event occur many times before you can fairly estimate it's rate. That's what my example means. I'm not defending Uber here- I'm defending statistics! With more data, we may discover that Uber cars are 100X worse, not just 25X. Or we may discover they're better. But we don't have the stati…

With 0 accidents you cannot accurately measure the rate, but you can estimate an upper bound on it for whatever probability of being wrong you're willing to accept.

Re: Video suggests huge problems with Uber’s driverless car program

#120

Post by always_good »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #78
superfrank wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Expecting engineers to always write perfect code is insane. Mistakes happen. - If bad code makes it into production, that is a systemic failure not an individual one (Why didn't the bug get caught in code review, QA, etc.) - No one is going to want to work on a project where a single failure can taint their career. - What if I use a 3rd party lib and that is where the bug is. Who is at fault then? What if the code…

This is a straw man. Nobody is asking for perfection. What is needed are processes and regulations that ensure a high confidence that companies with self-driving cars have done the best that can be expected of them to ensure their vehicles are safe and that they have met a minimum bar in that regard as well. There are many industries where this already happens, there's no reason to single out self-driving automobiles…

I can agree with this, but if a company wants to put self-driving cars on the street, I don't see how certificated engineers on their staff is the thing that matters.

Does that demonstrate that the cars are safe? Even a little bit?

To me it just demonstrates that a grunt is on the chopping block for what amounts to systemic failure.

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