A woman is dead because of some combination of overconfidence, hubris, and ignorance of Uber’s self driving engineers.

The above traits aren’t exclusive to Uber’s “engineers”, but are lethal when applied to the engineering of life safety systems.

I am not sure if I would have been able to avoid such a situation myself. That's the only thing that keeps me from excoriating Uber...

How many people are still alive because Uber had the restraint to not slap control systems together willy-nilly, like so many people here seem to think is an obviously great idea?

A lot more than one, that's for sure.

Yikes. I would not allow a business to continue to exist whose argument is “at least we’re only partially wreckless”.

See how that holds up in civil court in front of a jury, or any legislative body Uber might need to convince to allow their operation in a jurisdiction in the future.

“Just think of how many more people we would’ve killed if we didn’t care at all!”

"at least we’re only partially wreckless" has been Tesla's standard operating procedure for a while now. I'm guessing you think Tesla shouldn't exist either.

Oh, they'll get crucified for it, I'm sure -- because the public doesn't understand that integration is never trivial, and that "obvious" integrations aren't always good ideas.

I had thought an audience of developers would "get it," since we deal with fallout from ill-conceived integrations every day, although admittedly in a far less spectacular form than control system engineers.

Unfortunately, the uber hate train has already left the station and there's no slowing it down until the investigation finds (or doesn't) actual evidence of negligence rather than clickbait guesswork by armchair engineers. Too bad.

> I had thought an audience of developers would "get it," since we deal with fallout from ill-conceived integrations every day, although admittedly in a far less spectacular form than control system engineers.

You do a disservice to the audience by assuming it would be understanding of grossly negligent behavior.

Failures happen, that is to be expected. If you're building self-driving vehicles, you're supposed to be engineering for those failures. Disabling two life safety systems (Volvo's AEB and Uber's own AEB) and relying on a single inattentive human driver? I don't understand how that's understandable or justifiable in any scenario besides a carefully controlled test track.

I think you’re misunderstanding. According to the report, it’s not just the Volvo emergency braking system that was disabled. Uber’s self-driving system had its own emergency braking feature that was also disabled.

How many people were not killed by Uber? That's a terrible way to look at things. It is better to wonder _why_ Uber killed a person. The answer appears to be right in the NTSB report about the brake system.

You're being very charitable in your assumption that Uber 'engineers' gave it much thought at all.

(Were any Professional Engineers even involved in this? Or was it just a bunch of "software engineers"?)

However much thought they gave it, I guarantee that everyone in this comment train has given it much less. It wasn't a trivial decision, their choice is not prima facie evidence of negligence.

Again, very charitable. Your assumptions are baseless, seemingly motivated by little more than your trust that incredible incompetence and negligence is rare in the real world.

Again, not at all charitable. Your assumptions are baseless, seemingly motivated by little more than your mistrust that in the competence of people that have been actively working on this problem, many for years.

He said that he can "guarantee" Uber engineers gave it careful consideration (or at least more than people in this thread), but in truth he can do nothing of the sort. There are a plethora of examples where engineers and "engineers" didn't give a problem careful consideration and it got people killed. There is no rational basis for guaranteeing this is not one of them.

There is no "guarantee" that uber "engineers"/engineers put more thought into this than "their system is inconvienent, tear it out" or "we don't need their system because ours will be better, tear it out." Nobody can guarantee Uber engineers were not stupendously negligent until the investigation is complete. Anybody who thinks they can guarantee that has an irrational basis for thinking they can provide such a guarantee.