Video suggests huge problems with Uber’s driverless car program

Post by tmd83 » Fri, Mar 23, 2018, 6:04 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…

Post by tmd83 » Fri, Mar 23, 2018, 6:08 AM UTC

jamesgeck0 wrote: post #148

spacehome wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Post by PinkMilkshake » Fri, Mar 23, 2018, 6:13 AM UTC

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…

Post by Lewton » Fri, Mar 23, 2018, 6:30 AM UTC

mabbo wrote: post #76

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.

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…

Post by Fricken » Fri, Mar 23, 2018, 6:31 AM UTC

tmd83 wrote: post #161

Fricken wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't really understand a whole of similar comments. It's as if Uber and all other autonomous driving pursuer is doing so for the betterment of life for everyone and so their laziness in making sure their tech is good enough can be excused. The car in question failed spectacularly and the response is her death was not in vain? Uber is doing this for money, so is all the other companies even if there are some potent…