So this isn't just a random company saying "we could do better", this is the company with equipment already on the car (though disconnected) defending their reputation.
Uber turned their gear off in favor of their own.
When you say this is why we've been calling for everyone to take it slow that's a defensive move.
When you say your setup would have detected her a second before the impact, that's an opportunistic marketing opportunity.
It's all defensive. In this case, the interests of the companies and the interests of the users are aligned.
If Uber intentionally disabled the second set of sensors, they were acting recklessly, and they're a danger to the development of the self-driving car industry. This one incident may have set us back years.
Might be better for Uber’s data collection to turn this off, but you really can’t argue it was safer. I don’t think we should be killing people because that works better for their business needs.
When I drive a car, I am a 'self-driving system'. It is intended that I am used in conjunction with the car's existing driving-assist functionality.
We've had them in the past (Christine, Trucks, Herbie the Love Bug), but the only thing Hollywood loves more than latching on to a trend (Emoji Movie) is blowing something out of proportion.
Granted it was self-driving thanks to a book inked in blood and bound with human flesh, but that's beside the point...
however i do see how people (including me) are sheep and can be manipulated into believing anything. taxis and trucker unions can use this an opportunity to condemn self driving vehicles.
Watching the video, I'm convinced that person died for no good reason beyond Uber rushing tech out the door before it was ready. An alert human would have braked and swerved in that circumstance.
People do die from drunk driving, and those drivers go to jail because they fucked up in a huge way. That's no reason to give Uber a dead-person mulligan. Indeed, it's a reason that some Uber exec should perhaps be wearing an orange jumpsuit over this.
I'm all for self-driving cars, as done right deaths will go down. But that means we shouldn't introduce them until they are well-made enough that deaths actually go down.
It's likely that the accident still would have been fatal, or at least the pedestrian would have been seriously injured if the safety driver was driving. Based on the video there was only a second or two to react from the time the pedestrian stepped out of the shadows, and human reaction time varies from 0.7 to 3 seconds [1]. One study found the average driver's reaction time is 2.3 seconds.
Yes, but it is difficult to state that it would have been "likely" fatal, and even sevral fractures are IMHO a big improvement over death, the whole point is not about the "average" braking time (BTW that same study gives 1.64 seconds average for "steering away" which is probably what most human drivers would have done in a similar situation, instead of braking or instead of only braking), it is the peaks that count.
I mean, it is about the (rightful) expectation that an automated system is safer (faster, more reactive) than the best you can find (not the average, the best) "in nature" among a random set of drivers, just like the state codes (correctly) take the worse case in the sample or however incereases the recommendation to three seconds.
If you play the game suggested on the same site you gave a link to and deliberately count up to three before clicking, you get:
Reaction time: 2916.00ms
Reaction speed age: 89 years old
Playing fairly, you are likely to get values in the range 300-500 ms.
Here is another paper:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233039156_Brake_Rea...
that puts it back to around 1-1.5 seconds or however maximum at 1.8 seconds in the very worst cases.
You also mis-cite your numbers. Reaction time to braking in that study was 2.2 seconds, but steering is 1.6 seconds, and beginning to slow is 1.0-1.3 s. Those numbers are also from a study environment; it's plausible to me that people would be more relaxed in a test than if they see a live human appear in front them.
Are you familiar with Threat Image Projection? It's a system where baggage scanning machines put in images of fake threats into real baggage. Why is this necessary? It's because regular baggage doesn't have enough in the way of actual threats to keep operators alert.
I think it's the same deal with being a backup driver for a robot car. Sure, they should be ready to take over when the car asks for help, and it's great if they notice a problem and stop the car. But I don't think expecting them to have this kind of reaction time is realistic.
(That may not stop Uber from throwing the backup driver under the bus, though.)
It's not like the car hopped the curb.
However, whether or not a driver is civilly liable for an accident usually doesn't even care about the right of way. For example, if a pedestrian is standing in the middle of the road attempting to block traffic. They have no right to be there, however, it is not ok to run them over.
When you're going to jaywalk, ensure that the next car is far enough away to where it doesn't matter if they stop. That's the correct way that would've saved this person's life without any further analysis.
I'm taking issue with this:
>that person died for no good reason beyond Uber rushing tech out the door before it was ready
Well, no. They died because they lost their gamble on an unguided crossing where the oncoming car did not stop.
We are now analyzing why the car didn't stop, but notice how no charges were pressed.
It's true that jaywalking is a gamble, but so is crossing a street with the light. Leaving the house is a gamble. That doesn't mean we can blame the victim of a collision for leaving the house. It can be simultaneously true that A) jaywalking is not always a great idea, and B) the Uber car should have avoided this collision.
i wonder... if the person crossing had been behind an obstruction and stepped out right in front of the car, would everyone still blame the car or the driver for hitting the person crossing?
If the car was speeding, you might be able to make that argument, but I don't think anyone has made that claim yet.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03/police-chief-said-uber-...
How about we let whoever wants to research autonomous vehicles have at it, and we just throw the "Supervising driver" who failed in jail like he should be?
I mean the guy had one fucking job: hit the brake pedal if you're going to crash into something. He failed. The car is an experiment. The driver is the only safety mechanism in that car that matters, and as usual with humans it screwed up.
In the past, Mobileye has made it a point to be very specific about what their technology is and is not currently capable of. I don't see a problem with that.
I tend to think that if Uber did detect the pedestrian, they would have said something by now. But perhaps they prefer the optics of not having seen her to the optics of seeing her but not braking at all. We simply don't know.
Imagine that press conference.
> Uber: "After examining the black box on the car we have determined that the car detected the pedestrian but failed to brake."
> Reporter: "Was this because the pedestrian was a woman?"
> Reporter: "Did the car do this to protect the life of the Uber employee inside?"
> Reporter: "Was her credit score too low?"
You were presented two pictures (e.g. a picture of school kids crossing a crosswalk and the other a picture of an adult male and female walking their dog across a crosswalk). Presumably you had to choose; would you swerve to hit the adults and dog or would you stay course and hit the kids.
I know there is no moral compass for a computer system to determine what it should do in the scenario but I laughed at the quiz because I couldn't believe this is the kind of data that will feed machine-learning algorithms.
It just feels bad.
For those interested here is an interesting article about the Trolley Problem.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/11/the-trolley-problem-w...
AFAIK, the trolley problem isn't something that the engineers consider to actually be a major problem.
To be fair, it has been a few years since I took the survey so I can't recall if it mentioned what the data was used for.
I don't know enough about machine-learning and self-driving technology but my one question would be, where do engineers get that kind of data to feed into a system? At some point a scenario like the Trolley Problem is going to happen (near or distant future) and what kind of data is going to be making that decision to swerve or remain on course?
But now is not the time to post speculative bullshit like this. Would your car also have run into a school shooting unarmed?
You weren't in that situation, you don't know all the edge cases, the best you can say is that you had a similar situation under controlled circumstances and reacted appropriately.
This is publicly patting yourself on the back for a competitor killing someone. To say it's in bad taste is an understatement.