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

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

#81

Post by soyiuz » Fri, Mar 23, 2018, 1:51 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…

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

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

#82

Post by notyourwork » Fri, Mar 23, 2018, 1:53 AM UTC

tantalor wrote: post #65

TillE wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> core competency 3 years ago Uber hired ~50 specialists from CMU to work on autonomous vehicles. I'd call that a core competency. https://www.theverge.com/transportation/2015/5/19/8622831/ub...

Core focus, competency implies being competent. With this I’m less convinced.

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

#83

Post by phyller » Fri, Mar 23, 2018, 1:53 AM UTC

"Uber recently placed an order for 24,000 Volvo cars that will be modified for driverless operation. Delivery is scheduled to start next year."

Wow. The other driverless car players should be all over this lobbying to shut Uber down. If Uber massively deploys a commercial service with subpar quality in order to "win", and then those cars start getting into accidents, the entire field is going to be delayed by 10 years. The general public is not going to just think "Uber is bad", they are going to think "self-driving cars are bad". Politicians will jump all over it and we'll see very restrictive laws that no one will have the guts to replace for a long time.

And honestly if that happens, that's probably what we would need anyway. If the industry doesn't want to be handcuffed they need to figure out some really good standardized regulations on sharing data with law enforcement, how to determine fault for self-driving vehicles, and what penalties there should be. That are fair and strict.

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

#84

Post by dfee » Fri, Mar 23, 2018, 1:58 AM UTC

soyiuz wrote: post #81

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…

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

I believe “one data point” referred to one winning, not three plays.

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

#85

Post by slavik81 » Fri, Mar 23, 2018, 1:59 AM UTC

Silhouette wrote: post #20

ghaff wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They exist. They're required for some roles: https://insight.ieeeusa.org/articles/professional-licensure-...

But what qualifies the people administering those examinations to judge how good someone is at writing reliable software in safety-critical environments?

The examiners don't judge that. They just check that you meet the educational requirements, that you did an apprenticeship under supervisors who have a good safety record, and that those supervisors think you are qualified. Then you get your license. If there's a safety incident relating to your work and you were acting recklessly, you may lose your license.

That's the whole process. Repeat that over a long enough period of time and you tend to select for a more competent, safety-conscious group of engineers.

Over the long term, its survival of the fittest. Reckless engineers have safety incidents and get barred from both working and from supervising new engineers. So, it tends to be the safer engineers who get to pass on their work culture to the next generation of engineers.

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

#86

Post by Nomentatus » Fri, Mar 23, 2018, 1:59 AM UTC

soyiuz wrote: post #81

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…

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

It still falls under "one swallow does not make a summer" - even though a lot of days of winter preceeded that bird sighting.

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

#87

Post by Nomentatus » Fri, Mar 23, 2018, 2:02 AM UTC

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.

One more person who had no trouble taking the salary, but just didn't want to do the job. Fraud, on their part IMHO.

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

#88

Post by neom » Fri, Mar 23, 2018, 2:03 AM UTC

notyourwork wrote: post #82

tantalor wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> core competency 3 years ago Uber hired ~50 specialists from CMU to work on autonomous vehicles. I'd call that a core competency. https://www.theverge.com/transportation/2015/5/19/8622831/ub...

Core focus, competency implies being competent. With this I’m less convinced.

My measure of core competency is capability + capacity. (Tesla and Ford, for example, do not have the same core competencies, and to your point, have core focus in each of the others.)

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

#89

Post by Nomentatus » Fri, Mar 23, 2018, 2:04 AM UTC

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #58

Silhouette wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 judg…

It doesn't need to outperform an experienced and reasonably careful human driver to be a significant net benefit to society. All it needs to do is get the most dangerous 10-20% of the population out from behind the wheel.

It's occurred to me lately that we probably need to get autonomous vehicles on the road even a bit earlier than this, since delaying how quickly the safety learning curve is mounted has a long-term cost in lives, too.

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

#90

Post by Nomentatus » Fri, Mar 23, 2018, 2:05 AM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #37

bobthepanda wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You have a sample size of 1. Acknowledging that doesn't suddenly make the sample evidence of anything, good or bad :P. Almost all the miles driven are going to be in near-ideal circumstances (daylight, no rain, good road surface, driver familiar with normal road traffic conditions and drives the route regularly). I have nearly no insight into the uber death, but I gather it happened at night. It could easily be that…

It just takes one fish in the milk, to paraphrase Thoreau.

Something happened that just shouldn't be possible, with Lidar and half-competent AI - which we use in good part because cameras don't handle low-contrast nearly as well as human eyes, say at night.