> Uber made sure to point out that the victim of their incident was homeless. Tesla is pointing out how the driver received unrelated cues earlier in the journey. None of this information is relevant.

I don't understand how you can equate those first two lines. Uber's observation is clearly irrelevant, but the fact that the Tesla driver received multiple "get your hands back on the wheel" notifications, as close as six seconds before the accident seems very relevant to me.

But that isn't what their statement says. It says the victim had his hands off the wheel for six seconds before the crash, and that he received hands-on warnings "earlier in the drive." It does not say that during those crucial six seconds he was being warned. Nor does it explain the fact the car plowed into a barrier.

This is critical. No matter how many notices you give, slamming into something at speed is the wrong answer. It’s almost unbelievable that they’re trying to use that as an excuse.

I’m supposed to trust an “autopilot” that warns me six seconds before it slams me into a wall?

Actually it doesn't even say that, it says his hands "were not detected." Which means nothing to me.

They're right when they say we don't speak of the accidents that didn't happen, and I bet there's a ton of them.

As someone who's been in multiple car crashes, as a passenger, I really on longer want to be at the mercy of human drivers.

Brief reminder of the same discussion, in a different context.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzD4tIvPHwE

Yet on one, and I really mean no one complains about computer assisted landings and takeoffs. I'm not sure why. Lots of passengers even sleep through them.

I guess we've come to realise that the man machine symbiosis works well for flight. But it might take time for this to get engrained into our culture when it comes to driving.

Maybe what we need is to put the brakes on the notion that self-driving cars are nearly ready for prime time and in a few years they will be all over the road. A level-headed review of the state of the technology suggests that is extremely unlikely. Except for people hanging around /r/futurology and to some extent here on hacker news, who are perhaps too close to technology to really appreciate it's limits in the practical world.

It would probably be for the best if the enthusiasts and the companies rushing headlong towards this new driving paradigm put forth some effort to tone down the hype.

When the cost of them killing somebody by having a deficient QA process is minimal (and just affects shareholders), then the cars will be rolled out before they are ready.

What will happen to liability at present is still unclear but if the self driving car companies are successful in dodging most of it (and it appears they are trying) then self driving cars are going to kill a lot of people unnecessarily - quite possibly more than humans would.

If a CEO has many millions of cars running his software, their will always be a death.

In that case, nobody would want to take on that responsibility so nobody would build self driving cars.

Therefore humans will still drive cars and there will be 1000x more deaths, most preventable with self driving cars.

This is pretty much exactly the Trolley problem in ethics and philosophy. Read up on it :)

That is something that "tech" companies will in all likelihood never be able to do, since they seem uniquely designed to betray and lose the public's trust at the earliest opportunity.

"Tech" companies have become far too culturally accustomed to dishonest hype, "growth hacking", marketing BS, PR spin, etc. for their statements to be trusted, especially when there are life-and-death implications.

(of course Google did lots of ,,ungoogly'' things in the past few years, but at least they got Waymo right)

By characterising self driving cars as a "trolley problem" you have presented what is known as a "false dilemma". Maybe you could read up on that ;)

I feel that is the only way we could isolate for self driving and not other factors.

Obviously this would also mean that compensation would have to go up for self driving car engineers and execs to compensate for the risk. That's fair, and, if that cost makes a self driving car venture uneconomic - again, not viable. And that's okay.

People take responsibility for other people's lives every day when they get in a car. I don't think the idea that Uber engineers should do the same should be considered particularly controversial.

The tricky part is figuring out what constitutes negligence.

What exactly am I looking at? The video itself says it's a computer-piloted takeoff, the YouTube title says it's a computer-piloted landing, and the top-voted comment says it's a human-piloted fly-by.

edit: it appears to be this flight: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_296

(That would be an inexcusable and cynical deflection.)

I must have missed the part where they explained why their autopilot system drove into a concrete divider at high speed. Please can you quote the explanation you're referring to.

Because humility requires you to admit wrongdoing, which from a legal standpoint is not advisable in a public statement.

Ultimately companies don't have feelings, their employees do. PR statements and the words chosen (unless written by an individual like the CEO) don't somehow make a company into a person and don't reflect the feelings of their employees: they are a crafted tool to create a certain outcome by instilling thoughts in the mind of the reader and/or providing legal cover.

I would venture a guess this is an outcome of the "sue for everything" legal environment in the US. Any statement that could be construed as anything other than "we did nothing wrong" could be seized on by shareholders suing the company for securities fraud and demanding class action status.