Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

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Are you suprised? Uber is a company that:

* Flouted Taxi regulations

* Living in legal gray zones in regards to contractors vs employees

* Designed a system to avoid law enforcement

* Performed shady tactics with its competitors

* Illegally obtained the private medical records of a rape victim

* Created a workplace where sexual harassment was routine

* Illegally tested self-driving cars on public roads in California without obtaining the required state licenses.

* Possibly stole a LIDAR design from a competitor

Now their vehicle killed a pedestrian in a situation that the self driving vehicles should be much better than humans at (LIDAR can see in the dark, and the reaction time of a computer is much better than humans.)

Uber has exhausted their "benefit of the doubt" reserve. Maybe, they need to be made an example of with massive losses to investors and venture capitalists as an object lesson that ethics really do matter, and that bad ethics will eventually hurt your bank account.

>"One of my big concerns about this incident is that people are going to conflate an on-the-spot binary assignment of fault with a broader evaluation of the performance of the automated driving system, the safety driver, and Uber's testing program generally,"

Self driving cars are currently in that state where they're always in accidents but never technically at fault. When individuals have this behavior patter their insurance company drops them because if they're so frequently present when shit hits the fan they're a time bomb from a risk perspective.

Edit: meant to reply to parent, oh well.

if they are at fault they should be punished, but you do realize that the expectation for self driving vehicles is not to eliminate all car related deaths, right?

edit: wow this triggered some people. somehow 'if they are at fault they should be punished' got interpreted as 'they are not at fault and should not be punished'

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 people at roughly 25 times the rate of a typical human-driven car in the United States.

We have a sample size of 1, granted, but it's not looking very good. At the very least they were expected not to be less safe than humans.

> "We have a sample size of 1..."

i'm not sure that's the right way to look at it (that uber is a sample of 1, or that the death is a sample of 1).

in this case, the metric is deaths per mile, so there are purportedly 3 million samples for uber self-driving cars, with one positive (negative?) result in that sample. you need so many samples because the positive observation rate is expected to be very low (as evidenced by the 1.18 deaths per 100 million miles driven by human drivers).

if you assume the death rate is roughly the same, you can (roughly) estimate the expected error or confidence interval with the 3 million sample size versus a 100 million known rate for human drivers. as more samples are gathered, the confidence interval gets tighter: if the confidence interval currently stands at 80% with 3 million samples (made up numbers), it might go up to 85% with 6 million samples.

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 humans are also an order of magnitude more dangerous at night.

Of course it's evidence of something!

Suppose, as a massive oversimplification, Uber's self-driving cars crash with some constant probability P for every mile driven (i.e. a Bernoulli process).

We now have learned at least one thing with absolute confidence: P > 0.

The first mile driven before the accident, of course, also showed P < 1.

But beyond absolute certainty, we also have a better idea of the actual value of P. (Intuitively, the longer we go without a crash, the lower we suspect P to be, and for every crash, we increase our estimate of P).

If there was only one crash in 3 million miles driven, this is evidence for values of P near 1/(3 million), and evidence against values of P far from it.

Is it strong evidence? Nope! But it's evidence!

You obviously want to be technical. Technically you are correct. However, the evidence that this car is a worse driver than a human is currently so weak we're both wasting time talking about it. We need more of the stuff for it to be worth considering.

Your pedantry has managed to upset me and I would encourage you to be a little more understanding of people using language in the way it is used outside of the world of mathematics. Walking into a practical discussion of safety with an existence proof of all things is disrespectful of the fact that lives and enormous quantities of human attention are at stake.

Obviously, technically everything is evidence of something. I know that. Using the language in that sense is not going to help.

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.

The singular of data is an anecdote, as they say.

> It could easily be that humans are also an order of magnitude more dangerous at night.

Given that the actual circumstances of the death (pedestrian crossing left to right in a large road with the car in the rightmost lane) was a case that autonomous cars should've been much more equipped to deal with, and the Uber clearly failed, it's not promising. Autonomous cars were supposed to be better than humans; this particular one does not seem to be, given that as a human I can pretty clearly see someone crossing from the far side of the road.

I am not the OP, but this numbers are not confirming the optimistic view that self driving cars are better, so if we do not have numbers that show that are better and even with a human driver inside we had a few incidents then the number without human driver inside would have been larger, so how should we determine that the self driving car X is ready to be released on public roads for testing? At least we should have some basic tests done by an impartial authority.

I'm not sure that's the point you want to make, an order of magnitude making Uber 2.5x more dangerous still.

There are only 16 cars (or something like that) + safety drivers in the car, so 16 cars we have 1 death, normalize this to the number of human driven cars and you will get a lot of deaths, I do not have the numbers but 1 in 16 cars killing a person is a large number, now remove the safety driver and you get even more deaths.

The point is that it is to early to test this cars on public roads. The fact that self driven cars will kill less is just a hope, we may never achieve that(there is no proof we can do it with current tech) or it will take more time, and we need some actual numbers that are not tampered with before letting this self driven cars on the road, the security drivers seem to not pay attention so this car testing are a risk.

The expectation is that a car that can "see" in a broader part of the spectrum than a human should have, y'know, detected a person in the street ahead, when there were no obstructions between the car and the person.

There have been cars on the market for years now that can detect a dangerous situation ahead, even in the dark, and auto-brake. If they haven't caught up to several-years-ago's consumer model of car, then what on earth are they doing putting these things on public roads?

I think it's fair to set the minimum expectation of not being much, much worse in a situation where decision making is utterly straightforward and where sensors ought to give it a significant advantage over humans. It also would appear that the vehicle fell well short of that minimum standard on this occasion.

Almost all current assitance systems in luxury cars, which are not design for automated driving, could have avoided this situation with activation of the emergency brake. But this car didn't even brake at all?

It will be interesting when Volvo pulls back from that relationship, because even the uptodate emergency brake assistent should have catched up. Except Uber as deactivated those in favor for their own technology (because it is superior).

EDIT: German Automotive Club did tested full sized cars in 2016, which means decaded old technology in IT. The results where that the Subaru Outback was the only one detecting persons in the dark. But was very poor with biclysts. https://www.adac.de/infotestrat/tests/assistenzsysteme/fussg...

I think a lot of us are of the opinion that it wasn´t as dark as the camera makes it look. But let´s say it was... a human driver under those conditions would have full beam headlights on, and I´ve never personally experienced any issues spotting cyclists and dark clad pedestrians with those on.

Driverless car programs should really not be having more than 1 fatality per 100 million miles. Uber is currently at 1 per 3 million miles.

A sample size of 1 is completely meaningless.

It's not, because we have considerable detail about that one sample. This wasn't simple bad luck, it was performance on par with a completely distracted driver.

Why do you say it's a sample size of 1? They've been driving AVs for a while.

That general statement does not give Uber a pass on this particular incident, any more than this particular incident casts aspersions on the autonomous vehicle industry as a whole.

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