Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

  Why is no one acknowledging that this woman was
  responsible for taking over the wheel if necessary
  for any reason.

Nobody in the industry really believes safety drivers work, beyond the early point in testing where they're intervening regularly.

It is widely known [1, 2, 3] that it's extremely difficult for humans to remain vigilant when monitoring systems for rare events. Airport baggage screening systems perform "threat image projection" where they show the operator knives and guns from time to time, just to break up the monotony and reward attentiveness.

Beyond early testing, safety drivers are there to make the public/politicians feel safer, for situations where a slow response is better than none at all, and for more cynical companies, so you can use them as scapegoats in situations like this one.

[1] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ece2/465ed2258585ebb8055fd7... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5633607/ [3] http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/001872081350155...

"It is widely known that it's extremely difficult for humans to remain vigilant when monitoring systems for rare events."

It may be difficult to remain vigilant, but it's not difficult to stay off of your phone while you're at the wheel.

There are signs all over the road and commercials on tv telling people that texting and driving kills. Being on your phone while you're driving is illegal for that reason.

Having a self-driving car on the road with a car operator is legal. There are many companies with self-driving cars on the road that have higher intervention rates than Uber.

We'll never know whether that woman would've been saved if the car operator wasn't on their phone. We do know that what the car operator did was illegal.

How do you know she was on her phone? Was anything released on that regard? All we know is that she's looking down, I assumed it could be to some self-driving debug screen.

So when they tell me to open my luggage at the airport, it may be because they have just seen a fake knive or gun placed on the x-ray image by the system to enhance their attention? Amazing!

IIRC it notifies the gun was fake BEFORE it gets to the random search part.

Even regardless of her lack of full attention, from the video it seems quite obvious a human driver would have failed to see the woman in time even with full alertness. The only question here, and why Uber is under scrutiny, is why a Lidar system which can "see in the dark" wasn't able to detect her and react in time.

Human vision has much better dynamic range than the dashcam video they released.

> from the video it seems quite obvious a human driver would have failed to see the woman in time even with full alertness

The video is massively - and I'll wager intentionally - misleading. There's no chance the car was making decisions from a $20 dashcam.

Here's what a better camera (looks like a smartphone camera) sees in the same spot (at about 33 seconds - you can see the signs, lights, and terrain match the Uber video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XOVxSCG8u0

It looks to me that the relevant part of that video is at 2:06, where he mentions a news camera filming. That section is much darker than the earlier footage, but the camera is waving around making it difficult to get a clear idea.

Here, I screencapped the same scene in the two videos:

https://imgur.com/a/LiISl (note the signs on either side of the road, the street lights, the hill on the right-hand side, the building with lit sign in the background, the purple light on the left-hand side, etc.)

33 seconds in in the YouTube video, and 6 seconds in on the Uber video at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/22/video-rel....

mea culpa, you're right.

I've driven this area plenty of times, and something that is misleading about the YT video is that there are around two dozen cars driving around lighting that area up. I agree that the dashcam video makes it look very dark, but this video is on the other end of the spectrum and does not represent how dark that stretch gets when there isn't another car.

The moment another car passes the driver to the left is where the accident was. That part is typically very dark and has plants as a backdrop - I can see where it would be difficult to distinguish a human form under specific conditions. Regardless, the LIDAR and backup driver failed miserably here.

The YouTube video has plenty of sections in less well-lit areas. For example: https://imgur.com/a/9L53u

No cars, a light only one one side, and you can still see much further than the Uber video makes it seem. If the Uber car's sensors can't get a better idea of its surroundings than a smartphone video, Uber's management should be liable for criminally negligent homicide for letting them out on the streets.

Plus, the Uber car itself has headlights.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com