Don't bite the hand that feeds you...
For-profit corporation helps elected politician maintain power.
Elected politician uses the power of the state to promote the corporation and eliminate oversight that would have been in the public interest.
All of this is done in secret, of course. The rubes who elected you don't need to know what their "representatives" are doing in their names.
The politician wins, the corporation wins, and the public is the big loser.
One thing we should take away from this incident is that we need to seriously push back on immediate "pedestrian's fault" rulings when police make them after a pedestrian/vehicle collision. It was readily apparent within hours that the story didn't add up, but people only paid so much attention because it's the first such crash involving an autonomous vehicle.
The more interesting question is how that shockingly poor dashcam footage came to be. That quality is so poor that I find it hard to believe that Uber is actively using it as a sensor input. Hell, it's worse than most dashcams I've seen on Youtube...
The release of the interior shot might have been an attempt to throw the 'safety' driver under the bus, so to speak, and while her inattentiveness was a very serious matter, it also does not look good for Uber.
Certainly Uber the company is systemically responsible for this failure, but the driver also had a role in preventing harm, and they were negligent. There's more than enough blame to share.
It probably isn't used as sensor input. It's probably an off-the-shelf dashcam (the cheapest they could find that could also record the driver) added as an afterthought. It also wouldn't surprise me if the windshield were tinted, which would make the dashcam recording even darker (since it's behind the windshield).
Maybe you’re thinking of the black out style tinting that you see in movies but most people tint to filter out like 5-20% light.
"Transparent material that is installed, affixed or applied to the topmost portion of the windshield if:
(a) The bottom edge of the material is at least twenty-nine inches above the undepressed driver's seat when measured from a point five inches in front of the bottom of the backrest with the driver's seat in its rearmost and lowermost position with the vehicle on a level surface.
(b) The material is not red or amber in color."[0]
and
"Windshields Sunscreening devices must be applied above the AS-1 line. If there is no AS-1 line, sunscreening devices must end five inches below the top of the windshield. Sunscreening devices may not be red, amber, or blue in color. Sunscreening devices, when measured in combination with the original glass, must have a light transmittance value of 25% or more. Sunscreening devices, when measured in combination with the original glass, must have a luminous reflectance value of 25% or less. A clear (un-tinted) UV film is allowed anywhere on the front windshield without a medical exemption being required."[1]
[0] https://www.azleg.gov/ars/28/00959-01.htm
[1] https://www.dps.texas.gov/rsd/vi/consumerinfo/windowTint.htm
Big difference. I'm not aware of anywhere that it's legal to tint your windshield below the top 4-5 inches. (Not saying it isn't but it certainly isn't in AZ or TX)
In my country, you can put a tinted film on the whole windshield, as long as it allows at least 75% of the light to pass (the side and rear windows can be much darker: the film must allow at least 28% of the light). They're a common sight.
I'm not being facetious, but a little top-down pressure can go a long way. This isn't about a grand conspiracy as much as it is about simple human nature, and the act to please those above you, keep your job, and move up yourself.
"The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation."
In 2012, Australian psychologist Gina Perry investigated Milgram's data and writings and concluded that Milgram had manipulated the results, and that there was "troubling mismatch between (published) descriptions of the experiment and evidence of what actually transpired." She wrote that "only half of the people who undertook the experiment fully believed it was real and of those, 66% disobeyed the experimenter". She described her findings as "an unexpected outcome" that "leaves social psychology in a difficult situation." In the journal Jewish Currents, Joseph Dimow, a participant in the 1961 experiment at Yale University, wrote about his early withdrawal as a "teacher", suspicious "that the whole experiment was designed to see if ordinary Americans would obey immoral orders, as many Germans had done during the Nazi period."
1) Nothing was reflective
2) She was walking across the road between street lights in a random space.
3) If a person hit the woman it would not have been homicide or manslaughter even if we didn't know the driver was on their phone.
I would say the pedestrian was legally more than 50% at fault in this horrible accident.
http://www.alllaw.com/articles/nolo/auto-accident/driver-at-...
This might sound like it makes no difference, but the car had LIDAR. That the scene was badly lit, whether true or not, is irrelevant; the car didn't use ambient light to see. If it could hit her under these circumstances, then it could just as easily hit her at noon.
Uber's systems failed spectacularly, and should not have been on public roads.
Now we learn that Uber and the governor secretly collaborated to enable this, to neutralize any effective oversight, and to keep the public in the dark.
Blaming the victim doesn't illuminate any of these issues.
Which is fine for Uber-as-operator if they were operating in a state which uses a contributory negligence or modified comparative negligence rule, but a number of jurisdictions—Arizona, for instance—use a pure comparative negligence rule where, e.g., an injured party that is 99% responsible can recover 1% of damages from a party that is 1% responsible.
Moreover, it's no help for Uber-as-manufacturer if strict product liability principles are applied. Now, it's not clear to me that they would apply to Uber as manufacturer as long as the product isn't sold to a third party, but even if they don't apply under current law, Uber using operating a service directly with the product rather than selling it to other operators as an end-run around liability for an unreasonably dangerous product invites a change to the law which would extend such liability to manufacturer-operators.
For a human driving the car, the dash cam together with personal testimony would probably put the issue to rest; although the fact that the pedestrian was in the roadway before they entered the lane looks very suspicious because a human likely would have seen them because of headlights on an open road even if not illuminated by streetlights. Nonetheless, the dash cam shows what it shows, and human sense and memory is fragile.
Not so for a self-driving car -- the memory is not fragile, and should be preserved. If it is not preserved and there is no remaining copy of the car's telemetry at the time, that in itself is a detail that can point towards gross negligence on the part of Uber. If it is preserved, the question becomes, would a "reasonable person/software" have acted based on what was shown there, and that goes towards whether there is negligence or recklessness. But we (or at least, investigators) need to see that telemetry to make that decision.
The dash cam is either proof that: i) that dash cams are far inferior to human eyes in terms of dynamic range (certainly true); and/or ii) the video was purposely darkened or compressed to mislead the public into believing a human driver would have hit the pedestrian (see, https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03/police-chief-said-uber-... ).
I think it was both i) and ii).
The dash cam video is very suspicious. What I want to see is the actual computer vision camera footage; it's never been made clear whether the footage that has been publically made available is from a dashcam or CV camera; I suspect the former.
On the notion of the LIDAR - the device spits out 64 beams; it appeared in the video the woman who was hit was wearing a fuzzy and dark color jacket (was she? I don't know for certain). If this is so - it is possible that any reflections for the LIDAR returns only came from the bottom half and the bicycle at best. The top half would have been either absorbed, or possibly filtered as "noise" prior to the classification algorithm.
Which is why the ML algo's matter - how did the classifier classify the data? Did it think what was moving across the road was something other than a human? Without the data and the algorithm, there's no good way to know.
But now I hear it's possible the LIDAR was turned off to run a "vision only" driving system. Was it? Who knows; we may never get the truth of what happened here.
Form a personal standpoint, it saddens and perplexes me - and makes me upset to a degree - that this happened here in my city. I recently completed the Udacity Self-Driving Car Engineer nanodegree, and I tend to wonder if this incident will somehow potentially color any future employment opportunities in that field, should I pursue them...
The whole political angle of this thing - sigh.
I doubt the LIDAR data would be that useful compared to the enhanced high fidelity video just because of how interpretable it would be to a jury.
The second point is an allegation of criminal obstruction of justice, which would be taken into account both as a crime in an of itself and also as an overt act in furtherance of a conspiracy. These are very serious charges, that would result in prison time for people throughout the program. Thus it's my tendency to assume good faith on the part of Uber since the consequences are so dire.
Most likely the higher fidelity video and sensor logs are being held back pending a warrant or subpoena for them so that Uber can conduct an internal investigation to figure out how avoidable the collision was, and to avoid giving ammunition to a wrongful death civil suit.
Until the footage is released to investigators or potentially to the public, I think both sides (unfortunate accident vs. gross negligence or recklessness) are possibilities. I personally think the latter is likely -- purely a gut feeling based on the video released. If the underlying footage was not automatically archived or otherwise somehow lost then I think that has to be significant evidence regarding "intent" in a criminal case for manslaughter.
EDIT: In my opinion, the more you think about this crash the worse Uber looks. The LIDAR should have worked, the lighting was likely brighter than the video shows, the weather was good, no obvious distractor objects, the road was straight, no parties were impaired. The pedestrian had a big bulky bike and crossed at right angles to the car. This is nearly the most basic test of self-driving cars and it failed. The only way Uber would look worse is if it had happened in day time. On top of that, Uber disabled the Volvo auto-braking safety system. (https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Uber-Disabled-Volvo-...)
That's because the bar for vehicular manslaughter is incredibly high. There is a huge range of shitty road behaviour that is not illegal, but you should never do, for the sake of yourself and other people.
Driving faster then you can see is one of those behaviors. Hitting someone because you had legal right of way is another. Right of way is good and all, but your first job as a driver is to avoid crashes. Right of way is just a set of guidelines for avoiding crashes... And a way to assign legal blame when one happens.
When I sea kayak, I have right of way against large boats in some situations. I'd be a complete, and dead idiot if I were to exercise my legal right to stay on course.
Deer are not reflective. Random objects that have fallen off a truck are not reflective. People are often not reflective, and there is no law requiring them to be.
And this woman was wheeling a bright pink bike, which shows up quite well. (It may also have had standard spoke reflectors, which might not show up in this video. hard to say.)
And finally, there weren't any crosswalks in that area for her to use. Yes, she misjudged the speed of the car, but her choice to cross the road at all is pretty solid.
What's interesting is the X paved walkway in the median. You can see it here: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Tempe,+AZ/@33.4364759,-111...
This point needs to be understood by everyone discussing the issue.