Text Messages Between Travis Kalanick and Anthony Levandowski
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
is the implication here that that intersection has a lot of red light runners? if so, are they so dense in not understanding how normal people running red lights is less of an issue here than a machine running that red light?
normal humans run red lights because they're either not paying attention or they're assholes. how is a machine safer or better if it can't pay attention (or even worse, is an asshole).
someone could have died because uber decided the rules didn't apply to them. it's ridiculous that they're still allowed to operate in california.
These guys are criminals... total disregard for human life (but their own) in every shape and way there is. From potentially killing people, too treating everyone is who not their BRO like trash; drivers, employees, customers, business partners, etc, etc, etc... GROSS!
This is not about some product you buy, or some service you pay for, it's about sharing the road, and whether the other people/entities on the road with you operating multiple thousand pound machines at 24-65 Mph have a legal right to be there and are safe. That's not something you can necessarily "ignore" without consequence.
Their behavior is so GROSS it's almost illegal.
As for concerning that's funny ... Uber stole my money and laughed, then caused other ppl I know financial harm and then all this stuff comes out in the press about them. I loathe Uber that is all ... no more no less.
Why do you care so much ... what skin in the Uber game do you have?
Reminder to us all to please declare your interests if you have them. even if it's only:
Full disclosure: I quite like Uber.
For me, full disclosure, I do actually, quite like Uber. (Although not everything they do, or endorse all their policies or individual employee abhorrent behavior etc).
Further, thousand of us aspire to reach Kalanick's heights and to see all lack of graciousness and humility for his position is disgusting! His persona is one of a greedy BRO who thinks he's king one who needs to be kicked off his horse and learn humility! Thankfully it looks like this is slowly happening!!!
Give it up Travis and save Uber or continue being your greedy BRO king self and in turn burn Uber to the ground.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pzzQ42D9Srw
Watch that and tell me that it's reasonable or caused by a short yellow...
That area is also messed up because you need to be in the correct lane else you will be forced up different streets so you have many cars trying to change lanes. Lastly, that area has its share of asshole drivers that cut you off, speed, etc....
From my perspective, that car is behaving like someone not aware of the light and not sensitive to context (should have driven more slowly). You can call that asshole behavior if you wish.
That makes it hard for a person, especially if they're new to that road, but why would it affect the database lookup that a self-driving car is doing?
Who said a self driving car is doing a "database lookup"?
If anything, a good self driving car should NOT do any kind of database lookup (of the location of traffic lights etc) and be able to recognize and respond to a moved, impromptu (e.g. because of road work), new, unfamiliar, etc. traffic light.
A level 5 self-driving car would work completely autonomously without any prior knowledge of the area it's driving in. We're not there yet.
Perhaps I should have said that its a hard light for humans but that I don't know anything about how hard it is for cars.
This mechanism really shouldn't be susceptible to the same biases as humans. The described signal may legitimately be more challenging for the self driving car, but more than likely the signal was missing from Uber's database. Their lack of explanation for this failure does not inspire confidence in their approach.
[1] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/Web/People/zkolter/pubs...
With a pedestrian in / on the edge of the crosswalk. And there was even another car that had been moving just a few seconds earlier stopped there too...
A more reasonable interpretation is: A techie pointing out that this is a really confusing intersection, and trying to ease his boss' concerns that the software isn't going to work. Surprise surprise, people have trouble with it too.
Obviously a machine can be safer if it doesn't pay attention (can't recognize the light being red) on a smaller rate than humans.
I.e. if humans cross red lights 2% of the time because they don't pay attention, and a machine 1%, then the machine is safer -- despite still crossing red lights.
I disagree. A machine might be able to completely verify that it's safe to ignore the light. I wouldn't trust a person to do that.
also they weren't suspended insomuch as the vehicle registration of the cars they were using were revoked. at that point i'm assuming at that point uber stopped messing around with the ca dmv.
Like, they are standing there taping other people running red lights? And Kalanick cares how, exactly?
No, this is them taping their own cars running red lights. Which is a very likely scenario since they are 1) testing on a small subset of streets and 2) if it makes the mistake once, bet on a computer to make it again.
In turn, why would any sane person run a two ton piece of gear through a moving intersection, endangering pedestrians and cross traffic through a red light where it is known to have failed once already, not once, not twice more, but six times in a day?
Why would you, as a responsible person, not immediately tell your test drivers to avoid this intersection until the issue is root caused, or, more likely, suspend testing for that day entirely?
Or do you just assume every engineer at Uber is a cackling mad scientist blinded by their quest to create our new machine god?
> Like, they are standing there taping other people running red lights?
It sounded like you were rhethorically wondering why would they be standing there taping the intersection, but perhaps my interpretation was faulty.
Unless they had already pulled the self driving cars, which the timeline presented suggests they haven't, why would that data be important enough to text back without the corresponding number of Uber violations?
The number of Uber's violations could have been communicated previously, or could have been implicit in the context of the conversation (at least 1 violation, causing the investigation) - either of these 3 explanations seems equally likely.
Considering how dangerous this is, I really doubt they would run a red light SIX times through the SAME intersection purposefully, risking the life of REAL PEOPLE around them each and every time.
Uber's management and engineers may be irresponsible, but I don't think they're that evil, and I would hope no self-respecting engineer or human being would go along with that. "Oh, that's funny, let's try that again" works for software development, it's emphatically not how real world testing involving danger to life and limb works.
As to "why would this be important enough to text back", that's pure speculation, but if I was tasked with investigating this, I would be pretty relieved to see that this is a location that's confusing human drivers as well, not just my software, and would be pretty likely to communicate that back to my team.
The implicit one doesn't make sence, if an event caused the investigation surely how well Uber did would be the primary focus. Which leaves he knew already, meaning they already had a meeting or something to discuss the results and they were significant enough that he wanted a comparison.
>Uber's management and engineers may be irresponsible, but I don't think they're that evil, and I would hope no self-respecting engineer or human being would go along with that. "Oh, that's funny, let's try that again" works for software development, it's emphatically not how real world testing involving danger to life and limb works.
This was their illegal self driving car test on the streets of San Fransisco. They were unwilling to follow the legal safety rules, and unwilling to provide the deposit in the event they did cause someone serious harm. That they left on the road while they tested if the light was to blame.
While Uber followed Google’s cars closely, it was Tesla and Elon Musk that the duo discussed most frequently.
9/14/2016 Levandowski: Tesla crash in January … implies Elon is lying about millions of miles without incident. We should have LDP on Tesla just to catch all the crashes that are going on.
9/22/2016: We’ve got to start calling Elon on his shit. I'm not on social media but let's start "faketesla" and start give physics lessons about stupid shit Elon says like [saying his cars don’t need lidar]"
Does anyone know what they're referencing here? I don't take Elon as a person to lie, his character seems too strong for that - he understands public perception and seems to deeply cares about it.
But cameras now cost under a $1 each in volume (thanks smartphones!) so dirt cheap. An imaging based point cloud extraction system main components are therefore cheap. Add a GPU enabled system to process (it's quite compute heavy) and you are set. OpenCV has the algorithms needed.
LiDAR is an active sensor in that the laser "illuminates" the target area. This adds cost but that is coming down quickly. Also as the sensor delivered 3D points (not images) the computational cost with images can be saved; so less CPU/GPU required.
Levandowski is a LiDAR guy. It's what he believes is the best solution for the problem.
Some feel that LiDAR is not a fit either as it doesn't work well in rain/fog/sleet/snow. There was a youtube video showing a self driving car running a test course in clear weather and again in the rain. You would not want to be a pedestrian during the rain test.
In reality this is all engineering dick waving. Prices will come down and the sensor payload will converge.
For full autonomy it is likely that cameras, LiDAR, Radar, and sonar all will be used. They all bring some advantage to the problem that addresses a weakness of one of the other sensor techs.
Oh yeah, and Levandowski is a complete prick. Someone should teach him about IP theft and give him a prison life lesson. He's going to need it.
And sure, there might be a better way to get down a ski slope, but skis would be a pretty good starting point. And they guarantee you don't end up in an impossible situation because you're doing things a fundamentally different way than the system expects.
Adding other sensors isn't free. Every minute you spend on developing techniques to process inputs from other sensors, not to mention integrating their conclusions with that of other sensors, is time, money, and energy you could have used to improve your optical system.
I'm not saying I necessarily agree (though I find his position intuitively compelling), but he clearly thinks that it's easier, faster, and cheaper to bring an optical-only system to a point of reliability than it is to bring a mixed-sensor system to the same point.
It requires enough information ("features") in the images to compute a stereo pair. Flat patches of color have no features and as such, cannot be correlated between cameras. In such a case, you have a spot with no depth information.
This is exactly why you want to have other sensors, and saying that "oh humans have two eyes and they do fine" doesn't really cut it. Humans can say "hey this flat patch of color is a sign and signs are not dangerous" or "hey this flat patch of color is a really clean semi truck, and crashing into trucks is bad" but computers aren't that smart.
Flat patches of color are also flat, which makes it possible to fill in the missing depth information.
I took a course in computer vision where one of the projects [1] involved monocular vision, and assuming that flat patches are flat, vertical lines are vertical, all others are horizontal and the background is flat, it was possible to get a pretty good reconstruction.
[1] http://groups.csail.mit.edu/vision/courses/6.869/notes/chapt...
Some people believe this to be impossible for the time being - LIDAR gives you a 3d point cloud (every obstacle, with its distance from you measured), which is amazing (but currently expensive, bulky, fragile, etc) while with cameras it's way harder, and RADAR can't see some materials at all.
Tesla argues that their suite is enough (humans manage with just 2 "cameras", some even 1), but the algorithms to let you safely entrust your life to such a sensor suite are harder (i.e. more far off in the future).
Kalanick + Levandowsky disagree with Musk, and were planning on calling him out on it.
A 3D point cloud is great, but with the raw computing power we have these days, image processing should be pretty reliable, at least until LIDAR becomes more. . .well, reliable and affordable.
Doesn't the HoloLens just use an IR camera to map its environment in real time?
In theory? Yes.
In practice? That's how the first autopilot fatality happened. The image processing confused the white side of a semi truck with the sky.
Ultimately this was driver error, since he wasn't paying attention and didn't break.
As for why autopilot did not engage the breaks, you could blame any of the forward facing sensors since they all failed to see the truck.
If the vehicle had windshield-height radar, or a better vision system, perhaps the system would work.
The problem with the radar was it couldn't see the object at that height.
The vision system confused the trailer for an overhead road sign.
After the incident, I remember some people reporting more breaking occurring on highways underneath overhead signage. That made me think the fix they put in place was to raise the threshold for what is considered an overhead sign. That is, they chose to err on the side of assuming the sign is an object ahead.
That may have been a temporary fix. I'm only speculating based on driver reports that appeared in /r/teslamotors a month or two after the crash was reported.
I don't know whether Tesla ever gave an official statement about how they fixed that issue. Tesla wasn't found to be at fault so they probably didn't have to. Also, the whole system is constantly under development.
One thing jumps out at me,
> This is where fleet learning comes in handy. Initially, the vehicle fleet will take no action except to note the position of road signs, bridges and other stationary objects, mapping the world according to radar. The car computer will then silently compare when it would have braked to the driver action and upload that to the Tesla database. If several cars drive safely past a given radar object, whether Autopilot is turned on or off, then that object is added to the geocoded whitelist.
Relying on whitelists seems like a hack. Then again, I'm not building it =)
Agree that it feels hacky at first, but once the whitelist dataset gets huge, it becomes unique training data for Tesla (and hopefully their machine learning will be able to generalize from it).
I guess. But then you still have to deal with rollout in other countries. And maintenance of sign locations which can change over time, get removed, etc. Still hacky IMHO.
How would machine learning make use of white-listed data? I doubt they could use that data to predict the GPS location of unknown signs.
If you mean image recognition, I assume if machine learning could properly identify the signs with accuracy, then they wouldn't need the whitelist. Then again, maybe they truly haven't collected a full overhead-sign dataset yet. I'd be shocked though if they don't by now. Anyway, you could be right. It would be fun to learn more about these setups.
There are some things about SLAM that are best done optically.
https://electrek.co/2016/10/19/teslas-new-self-driving-car-c...
that is the bigest challenge for Uber if tesla decides to completely integrate vertically and as a big fleet.
But we all know he will exaggerate to the point of being misleading.
Tesla's tech is generally considered weaker but Musk could still catch up and overtake by playing the "worse is better" card.
The end game in Uber's VC-money-burning present state is an eventual future where self-driving vehicles drive the cost down to where Uber makes a profit from the same fares we pay now. But if Tesla prices their service near their own cost, Uber could get to its own self-driving service and be forced to choose between pricing their service higher than Tesla or continuing to take a loss on each ride.
Tesla also has a huge PR advantage. Competitors need to be able to capture the attention of riders as well as offering self-driving vehicles. Given how easy it is for Musk to get press, he might have the best chance of doing that without having to pay for it in the same way that Uber has had to pay.
Travis shows dog fooding at its best.
Self-driving is such important (just after eliminating combustion engines) that we could upgrade existing cars with cheap ROMB boxes. Vehicle GPS tracking system costs about $30. ROMB box would cost about $60. Let's say that from 2027 all cars have to have a ROMB box to enter a downtown ...
Who will be building this? Who will pay for it? If it is the city how will you convince the city's taxpayers to pay for it? If it is a profit-seeking corporation, how will you convince a city to let you cause the disruption, construction, etc. to let you do this?
For other cars, what advantage does this bring to other car manufacturers and why would they agree to cooperate with competitors? Of course there is the obvious benefit that this would help all the players, but why does that marginal benefit outweigh the risk of commoditizing a brand new market / product and eliminating the chance to establish a market share lead. I am partly raising these hypothetical questions because I think companies are trying to "tough it out" and do it without such changes to city infrastructure first and see how that turns out.
I appreciate your simple approach, but you might be disregarding the societal and business factors in favor of making the engineering challenge simpler.
Edit: grammar
[1] (and I believe you can get it down to ~3cm if you have enough data.)
ROMB purpose is not to replace cameras or LIDARs, but to extend gathered info.
http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3932688-TEXTS-From-AL...
JS Disabled: https://imgur.com/a/IAcXb
JS Enabled: https://imgur.com/a/TtSeg
Likely a result of my zoom/font settings, but this is ridiculous.