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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

#21

Post by Stanleyc23 »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #18

Are you suprised? Uber is a company that: * Flouted Taxi regulations * Living in legal gray zones in regards to contractors vs employees * Designed a system to avoid law enforcement * Performed shady tactics with its competitors * Illegally obtained the private medical records of a rape victim * Created a workplace where sexual harassment was routine * Illegally tested self-driving cars on public roads in California…

if they are at fault they should be punished, but you do realize that the expectation for self driving vehicles is not to eliminate all car related deaths, right?

edit: wow this triggered some people. somehow 'if they are at fault they should be punished' got interpreted as 'they are not at fault and should not be punished'

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

#22

Post by carlsborg »

bambax wrote: post #9

"Testing" of driverless cars seem to be the wrong way around. Software should try to learn from human drivers: watch them instead of being watched by them. The way it would work would be: the human is driving and the software is, at the same time, watching the driver and figuring out an action to take. Every time the driver's and the software's behavior differ, is logged and analyzed to figure out why there was a dif…

Agree. Uber should have fitted their taxis with data devices.

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

#23

Post by TillE »

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.

Every engineer on this project at Uber knows very well that their car completely failed in one of its most basic expected functions. It's incredibly obvious, and a number of independent experts have said as much.

I'd be fairly surprised if there's any real appetite at Uber to continue with this now. It was never anywhere near their core competency.

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

#24

Post by ubernostrum »

Stanleyc23 wrote: post #21
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #18

Are you suprised? Uber is a company that: * Flouted Taxi regulations * Living in legal gray zones in regards to contractors vs employees * Designed a system to avoid law enforcement * Performed shady tactics with its competitors * Illegally obtained the private medical records of a rape victim * Created a workplace where sexual harassment was routine * Illegally tested self-driving cars on public roads in California…

if they are at fault they should be punished, but you do realize that the expectation for self driving vehicles is not to eliminate all car related deaths, right? edit: wow this triggered some people. somehow 'if they are at fault they should be punished' got interpreted as 'they are not at fault and should not be punished'

The expectation is that a car that can "see" in a broader part of the spectrum than a human should have, y'know, detected a person in the street ahead, when there were no obstructions between the car and the person.

There have been cars on the market for years now that can detect a dangerous situation ahead, even in the dark, and auto-brake. If they haven't caught up to several-years-ago's consumer model of car, then what on earth are they doing putting these things on public roads?

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

#25

Post by notahacker »

Stanleyc23 wrote: post #21
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #18

Are you suprised? Uber is a company that: * Flouted Taxi regulations * Living in legal gray zones in regards to contractors vs employees * Designed a system to avoid law enforcement * Performed shady tactics with its competitors * Illegally obtained the private medical records of a rape victim * Created a workplace where sexual harassment was routine * Illegally tested self-driving cars on public roads in California…

if they are at fault they should be punished, but you do realize that the expectation for self driving vehicles is not to eliminate all car related deaths, right? edit: wow this triggered some people. somehow 'if they are at fault they should be punished' got interpreted as 'they are not at fault and should not be punished'

I think it's fair to set the minimum expectation of not being much, much worse in a situation where decision making is utterly straightforward and where sensors ought to give it a significant advantage over humans. It also would appear that the vehicle fell well short of that minimum standard on this occasion.

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

#26

Post by Silhouette »

c06n wrote: post #16
bambax wrote: post #9

"Testing" of driverless cars seem to be the wrong way around. Software should try to learn from human drivers: watch them instead of being watched by them. The way it would work would be: the human is driving and the software is, at the same time, watching the driver and figuring out an action to take. Every time the driver's and the software's behavior differ, is logged and analyzed to figure out why there was a dif…

> Software should try to learn from human drivers Yeah, that doesn't work though. Basically because you would need to have an excellent situation representation to really understand the drivers' reactions to outside events. But that does not exist. Perception and situation representation are key to mastering the driving task, and they both differ greatly between humans and machines.

Basically because you would need to have an excellent situation representation to really understand the drivers' reactions to outside events. But that does not exist.

This is the #1 reason I'm sceptical about self-driving cars becoming ubiquitous any time soon. Clearly they have potential advantages over a human driver in terms of not being tired or distracted, better sensors and better reaction times, but their judgement in any given situation will always be a function of some predetermined inputs. It's a brute force approach.

Until a self-driving car can recognise a pub door opening around throwing-out time where a drunk patron is about to stumble out into the road from a hidden position, or that it's about to pass a park and a nearby school just finished for the day so kids will be kicking balls around and running across the road to join their friends, or that the recent weather conditions make black ice likely and the cyclist it's about to pass doesn't seem very steady, and take corresponding actions to reduce both the risk and the consequences of a collision, it's going to take a lot of brute force to outperform an experienced and reasonably careful human driver.

In short, reacting to an emergency 100ms faster than a human driver is good, but sufficient situational awareness and forward planning that you were never in the emergency situation in the first place is better.

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

#27

Post by simion314 »

Stanleyc23 wrote: post #21
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #18

Are you suprised? Uber is a company that: * Flouted Taxi regulations * Living in legal gray zones in regards to contractors vs employees * Designed a system to avoid law enforcement * Performed shady tactics with its competitors * Illegally obtained the private medical records of a rape victim * Created a workplace where sexual harassment was routine * Illegally tested self-driving cars on public roads in California…

if they are at fault they should be punished, but you do realize that the expectation for self driving vehicles is not to eliminate all car related deaths, right? edit: wow this triggered some people. somehow 'if they are at fault they should be punished' got interpreted as 'they are not at fault and should not be punished'

There are only 16 cars (or something like that) + safety drivers in the car, so 16 cars we have 1 death, normalize this to the number of human driven cars and you will get a lot of deaths, I do not have the numbers but 1 in 16 cars killing a person is a large number, now remove the safety driver and you get even more deaths.

The point is that it is to early to test this cars on public roads. The fact that self driven cars will kill less is just a hope, we may never achieve that(there is no proof we can do it with current tech) or it will take more time, and we need some actual numbers that are not tampered with before letting this self driven cars on the road, the security drivers seem to not pay attention so this car testing are a risk.

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

#28

Post by bobthepanda »

Stanleyc23 wrote: post #21
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #18

Are you suprised? Uber is a company that: * Flouted Taxi regulations * Living in legal gray zones in regards to contractors vs employees * Designed a system to avoid law enforcement * Performed shady tactics with its competitors * Illegally obtained the private medical records of a rape victim * Created a workplace where sexual harassment was routine * Illegally tested self-driving cars on public roads in California…

if they are at fault they should be punished, but you do realize that the expectation for self driving vehicles is not to eliminate all car related deaths, right? edit: wow this triggered some people. somehow 'if they are at fault they should be punished' got interpreted as 'they are not at fault and should not be punished'

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 people at roughly 25 times the rate of a typical human-driven car in the United States.

We have a sample size of 1, granted, but it's not looking very good. At the very least they were expected not to be less safe than humans.

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

#29

Post by XR0CSWV3h3kZWg »

Stanleyc23 wrote: post #21
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #18

Are you suprised? Uber is a company that: * Flouted Taxi regulations * Living in legal gray zones in regards to contractors vs employees * Designed a system to avoid law enforcement * Performed shady tactics with its competitors * Illegally obtained the private medical records of a rape victim * Created a workplace where sexual harassment was routine * Illegally tested self-driving cars on public roads in California…

if they are at fault they should be punished, but you do realize that the expectation for self driving vehicles is not to eliminate all car related deaths, right? edit: wow this triggered some people. somehow 'if they are at fault they should be punished' got interpreted as 'they are not at fault and should not be punished'

Driverless car programs should really not be having more than 1 fatality per 100 million miles. Uber is currently at 1 per 3 million miles.

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

#30

Post by SamReidHughes »

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.

Then we would never have self-driving cars.
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