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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

#191

Post by cmsj »

URSpider94 wrote: post #184
DanBC wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 b…

My bigger point, which is getting lost, is that there are rules to traffic (pedestrian, bike and auto) that we are all expected to obey. I do not agree that we can simply assume that a self-driving car assumes all liability for any accident (which is what the parent to my original comment posited). The rules of the road let us operate vehicles at tolerances that make it physically impossible to avoid every kind of co…

> they are going to drive like a cross between my grandmother and a startled squirrel.

That genuinely might not be a bad thing, at least in the initial phases. They should be ruled by an abundance of caution until we're sure they can actually make more aggressive decisions.

Uber seems to be defaulting to maximum aggression from the outset, which is hardly surprising from them, but seems extremely over-confident (in fairness, like most new drivers are ;)

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

#192

Post by zach43 »

Fricken wrote: post #169
tmd83 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The pharmaceutical industry tries to save lives, for money. They're driven by greed. They also have a long track record of fucking up big time and people dying because of it. Does this mean we should stop giving people medicine? Would letting people get sick and die be preferable than allowing imperfect industries with a profit motive try and save them?

That’s not really an apples-to-apples comparison. In the case of the pharmaceutical company, people don’t really have any other choice other than to take experimental medicine for terminal stage diseases.

On the other hand, there are widely used, cheap, and efficient alternative to self-driving cars on the roads today: human drivers, public transport, carpools, etc.

If you want to make analogies, I think the self-driving car accident is more like if an elevator company accidentally crashed an experimental high-speed elevator in a shopping mall. I think it would be grossly negligent on the part of the company to test such an unproven device on the general public, especially if people’s lives are being put in a position of risk which they did not to worry about before.

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

#193

Post by PinguTS »

colatkinson wrote: post #122
PinguTS wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is ISO26262 for automotive about safety. Yes, there are reviews, QA, and all of that. So, yes, there is no single person responsible (exceptions apply). But there is no excuse for using 3rd party libs. Just don't use it. If you not know: do not use it. That is the reason, why certifications are for. The same rules apply for medical and other areas.

> But there is no excuse for using 3rd party libs. Just don't use it. If you not know: do not use it. Wait, what? That goes against one of the core benefits of open source software--that having many eyes on a problem decreases the risk of bugs. I'm willing to bet that if Uber had to implement their own machine learning/vision libraries from the ground up, there would be significantly more issues.

Please do not get me started with the argument over "it is open source, so there are many eyes who have seen the code".

The problem with that is, nobody audits code, if it is working just for fun. And even if it is buggy, then most people look for bugs in their own software and then they work around, so that the original piece is not modified.

We have this seen in many open source projects. Remember all the obvious, mostly security related, bugs that weren't uncovered for years. They weren't uncovered because everybody thought: "huh, that is hard. I assume that other more experienced than I will have reviewed it, so I will trust it."

The thing with certification is, that it is required that it is really reviewed. That there is a guarantee that it is reviewed. That there were people with a different mind set, with different background have reviewed it and as such have brought in their own view.

Certification does not guarantee that something bug free. It guarantees only, it is reviewed. Open source has no guarantee that it is reviewed. There is only hope, that someone has reviewed it.

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

#194

Post by rightbyte »

jamesgeck0 wrote: post #146
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…

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.

Her death was in vain. These kind of fundamental scenarios can be practised with dolls or stunt men on closed test tracks not on public roads ...

If Uber needs data they could have driven manually. Obvously their obstacle tracking is bad.

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

#195

Post by PinguTS »

phlo wrote: post #179
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…

> willful contempt for safety To play Kalanick's adversary, he might be arguing for more real-world data collection. Tesla famously equipped most of their cars with more sensors than were required at the time of delivery, using the data to drive development of the Autopilot function that was later added to the cars.

Please, remember that the original technology of the so-called Autopilot was bought from MobilEye. Please remember, that MobilEye is a long-time player in this area and have deployed their technology first with BMW and later with Volvo way before it was used in Tesla. Tesla only activated features that were not ready for primetime. That was the reason why MobilEye backed off from the partnership with Tesla.

Btw. all this of collecting sensor data and improving on this, is an original idea of MobilEye that they presented at conferences before the so-called Autopilot was available from Tesla.

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

#196

Post by chopin »

vamin wrote: post #6
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 author is making a distinction between whether Uber was legally at fault (as stated in the article, likely not) versus whether the accident was avoidable. I agree with the author's position that the accident was likely avoidable.

In Germany, when an accident is avoidable, you are 100% at fault (as it should be) criminally and civilly. Isn't that the case in the US? I'd be astonished if that were the case.

If you enforce your right of way and kill somebody, that's manslaughter in my book.

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

#197

Post by chopin »

superfrank wrote: post #39
matte_black wrote: post #10

Why don’t we require software engineers who work on self driving car software to go through licensing and certification. And then, if their code results in a death, they are liable and can have their license completely revoked, and they would be unable to work on self driving cars again.

- 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…

So you can't be bothered to vet 3rd party software for safety critical uses? That sounds like a no-brainer to me. You can't just slap some NPM libraries together for that use case.

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

#198

Post by oldgradstudent »

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.

What do you base this claim on? It sounds more like a statement of faith.

> I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah; and even though he may tarry, nonetheless, I wait every day for his coming.

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

#199

Post by galdosdi »

KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #154
buildbot wrote: post #91

I don't understand how there isn't a non-ML based piece of code that looks at moving radar and lidar returns and preforms an emergency brake, light flash, horn, or dodge if that vector would intersect with any confidence. Even slowing down to 20MPH can turn a fatal accident into an injury.

What if it has nothing to do with ML? You see a point cloud that's moving toward your lane at a speed estimate of say 2 mph. If that's below the sensor noise threshold, you might classify the cloud as a stationary object on the other lane (say a stranded car). In that case, by the time you realize that this stationary object has somehow moved itself into your own lane, it is already too late.

ACTUALLY, in many US states it's not just wise, but it is the law that if a vehicle is stopped in an adjacent lane you MUST either move to a further lane (if you can do so safely in time) or else at least slow down.

This is because stopped vehicles often have people come out of them to fix the vehicle, and too many cops, tow operators, etc, were getting killed by careless motorists.

Guess this is news to you (and uber), update your driving style please for the sake of first responders!

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

#200

Post by oldgradstudent »

buildbot wrote: post #91

I don't understand how there isn't a non-ML based piece of code that looks at moving radar and lidar returns and preforms an emergency brake, light flash, horn, or dodge if that vector would intersect with any confidence. Even slowing down to 20MPH can turn a fatal accident into an injury.

Because it would result in too many false positives, which could be just as bad as not stopping.

For example, unnecessarily stopping in a middle of a highway is extremely dangerous, especially if visibility is limited or roads are slippery.

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