Video suggests huge problems with Uber’s driverless car program • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by jon_richards » Fri, Mar 23, 2018, 4:55 AM UTC

discodave wrote: post #132

wdr1 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it better for self driving cars to have a flawless record & low adoption, or to have a 100x improvement over human drivers & broad adoption? Creating the perfect self-driving car, with redundant systems, safety everything & so on will certainly help its safety records. But it will also drive up the cost. And put it out of reach for a lot of people. If the goal is to save lives, the bar self-driving cars should be…

From the article: > But zooming out from the specifics of Herzberg's crash, the more fundamental point is this: conventional car crashes killed 37,461 in the United States in 2016, which works out to 1.18 deaths per 100 million miles driven. 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…

To be fair, you have to keep in mind that deploying 1000 cars would quickly make self-driving cars safer than humans. Yes, you lose some life in the interim, but you accelerate the creation and adoption of something that saves much more life in the long run.

But that is human experimentation, something we as a culture generally agree is abhorrent.

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

#142

Post by URSpider94 » Fri, Mar 23, 2018, 4:57 AM UTC

femto wrote: post #126

URSpider94 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your concept that there are no accidents, only oversights, is not correct. Say I’m crossing the street and I don’t see your car coming, because I look the wrong way or I’m distracted, or my view is blocked by the sun. You may not be able to avoid hitting me. Additionally, if we train self-driving cars to always give way to pedestrians who even look like they might cross the street, they’re going to have a heck of a t…

I think your first paragraph is written from the perspective of a human driver. The machine can predict based on physics. If anything a person who does not see a car will be more predictable, not less, as they will tend to be moving uniformly and not taking evasive action. Taking into account optimal (computer driven) car stopping distances, the maximum acceleration of a person and typical pedestrian densities, I don…

My point is not that children would jump in front of cars. It’s that they would run toward the curb with a heading and velocity that would dictate a collision, then stop just before entering the street. They would do it for the main reason that children do things - because it would be hilarious to watch self-driving cars leave a patch on the road and jerk their passengers back with seatbelt pretensioners. If you don’t actually set foot in the street, you’re not breaking the law.

Changing the average travel speed from 45 kph (the city-wide speed limit in New York) to 10 kph would be a disaster.

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

#143

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 23, 2018, 4:59 AM UTC

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.

[deleted]

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

#144

Post by URSpider94 » Fri, Mar 23, 2018, 5:00 AM UTC

telchar wrote: post #125

URSpider94 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your concept that there are no accidents, only oversights, is not correct. Say I’m crossing the street and I don’t see your car coming, because I look the wrong way or I’m distracted, or my view is blocked by the sun. You may not be able to avoid hitting me. Additionally, if we train self-driving cars to always give way to pedestrians who even look like they might cross the street, they’re going to have a heck of a t…

You're suggesting that self-driving cars may have to drive slowly and carefully in cities. I don't really see a problem with that. Pedestrians aren't frequently in the immediate vicinity of roads with limits higher than 35mph in my experience. Any human driver has to drive cautiously in the vicinity of pedestrians anyway, if they don't want to risk manslaughter. I'd want SDVs to do that too.

Slowly and carefully, yes. Assuming that any pedestrian could leap in front of your car in violation of traffic laws - no.

Where I live in California, there are two major streets with crosswalks in regular use, with speed limits of 40 mph or higher (and travel speeds of 50+ mph), within a quarter mile of my home.

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

#145

Post by DanBC » Fri, Mar 23, 2018, 5:05 AM UTC

URSpider94 wrote: post #139

powercf wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your concept that there are no accidents, only oversights, is not correct. Say I’m crossing the street and I don’t see your car coming, because I look the wrong way or I’m distracted, or my view is blocked by the sun. You may not be able to avoid hitting me Solvable by reducing speed sufficiently. It's reasonable to expect the car to avoid a man travelling at 10kph from any off-road blind-spot, and a car travelling…

It’s not a blind spot I’m worried about. People frequently walk at full speed up to the edge of the sidewalk, then stop just before they would walk into traffic. Should an autonomous car assume that any pedestrian walking towards an intersection is going to continue into the roadway, even if they don’t have the right of way? That’s not what a human driver does. Likewise, I can be standing still with my toes on the cu…

> That’s not what a human driver does.

A human should be aware that these pedestrians might enter the roadway. The human should perceive those pedestrians as a risk, and be ready to take action.

> Should a self-driving car assume that every pedestrian standing at a crosswalk could walk into traffic at any moment,

Yes.

> and slow down accordingly?

This doesn't follow. The car don't need to slow down. It does need to be ready to perform an emergency brake.

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

#146

Post by jamesgeck0 » Fri, Mar 23, 2018, 5:06 AM UTC

Fricken wrote: post #118

slavik81 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Maybe her death wasn't in vain, but it was definitely avoidable. If Uber rushes out half-baked driverless cars, fallout from the incidents they're responsible for will cause serious delays to widespread deployment.

Trading lives to save on R&D time would violate professional codes of ethics in literally any other industry.

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

#147

Post by soyiuz » Fri, Mar 23, 2018, 5:07 AM UTC

mabbo wrote: post #97

soyiuz wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did not sample three times and win once. They sampled three million times and won once. Hardly "one data point."

The point remains: it isn't fair to decide what the probability is with only one data point on one side- especially for rare events. Would it have been fair if Uber last week were to declare that they have a 0% probability of pedestrian deaths, since they'd never had one yet? The goal of these statistics is to predict future outcomes. But with such a small data sample, you cannot fairly predict the future- just as in…

It would be fair to approximate it was near zero per however number of miles they drove, just as it is fair to approximate it is one per three million miles today. Think of it the other way, we know with a high degree of certainty the fatalities are not one per mile, for example.

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

#148

Post by jamesgeck0 » Fri, Mar 23, 2018, 5:13 AM UTC

spacehome wrote: post #121

mozumder wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Because doing so will cause issues (like this one) to be found and fixed faster. When enough bugs are fixed that the autonomous drivers are safer than the meatbag drivers, then the death rate will start to decrease. The argument is that you can trade more deaths today for a sooner decrease later. Under certain assumptions, you'll save net lives.

Why is the FDA so strict about human trials? We could save net lives if we just did drug tests faster to figure out what works. /s

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

#149

Post by corny » Fri, Mar 23, 2018, 5:14 AM UTC

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.

Any comparison between self-driven miles and typical human-driven miles has to take into account all the times a safety driver took over driving to prevent an accident. Those self-driven miles have a huge asterisk.

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

#150

Post by KKKKkkkk1 » Fri, Mar 23, 2018, 5:24 AM UTC

iClaudiusX wrote: post #123

pdkl95 wrote: post #99

> We don't need redundant brakes & steering or a fancy new car; we need better software," wrote engineer Anthony Levandowski Any engineer with this attitude needs to learn the lesson of the Therac-25. The issues in the Ars article are very similar to section 4 "Causal Factors" of the report[1]. > To get to that better software faster we should deploy the first 1000 cars asap. Is that admitting that they do not have t…

I get the feeling based on comments here that there is a severe lack of ethical and critical thinking among engineers and developers. I recognize that this is only a vocal minority but the constant mantra of "move fast and break things", where getting rich at any cost is seen as a virtue, has made me extremely disillusioned with this brand of startup culture. Doubly so when people are trading stock tips on how to pro…

"Move fast and break things" is the motto of Facebook. It means that Facebook engineers are encouraged to make user-facing changes without red tape. If you are claiming that some self-driving car company has "move fast and break things" as their motto, then you are being willfully deceptive.