Arizona Uber crash driver was 'watching TV'
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
It is no defense to say that Uber also told a human driver to be present. If Uber had directed a five year old to drive the SUV, with a back-up driver ready to take control, I think everyone would agree that qualifies as gross negligence notwithstanding the presence of the back-up driver. (To be clear, I think some risk in the name of progress is acceptable. But it's one thing to use testing on public roads to work out the kinks in the software. It's another to put vehicles on the road that you know cannot perform the basic, essential functions of driving.)
[1] http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-uber-arizona-nts... ("However, Uber also disabled its own emergency braking function whenever the test car was under driverless computer control, 'to reduce potential for erratic behavior.'").
I'm not sure if this is legally possible, but frankly I think the humans made the decision to let it on the streets should be personally charged as well.
The system was not prepared for the presence of people with bicycles on the road who are not crossing the road, but rather using it, and doing so properly.
There is no reason to believe that this car would not have struck a properly behaving cyclist.
The system did identify the cyclist as such but didn't react to the hazard.
If you have to, move it to executives, it could actually justify the insane salaries and bonuses.
Stepping up the level of fines and corporate penalties to be greater than the expected gains from bad behavior is a much more workable solution. Companies were much more careful to not act too monopolistically when the government was in full trust busting mode.
Yes, the fines should probably be increased and enforced. But if I, as an investor, decide to put $10 into Uber, I only risk my $10 if Uber kills more people and breaks more laws. It seems to me I should have more responsibility than that for encouraging such behavior.
That's an extraordinarily huge presumption to make about someone, especially, in practice, an "investor" isn't even a natural person.
Moreover, the "person" who owns the shares may not be the one who made the purchase decision, such as with venture capital, hedge funds, and mutual funds [1].
Even an individual, natural person may buy a particular stock based purely on financials, or even just price (such as day traders). No awareness of business practices is necessary.
Then there's short-selling. Who owns those shares, at which point in time?
Most of these questions (ownership, not purchase decision responsibility) do need to have an answer for the purpose of corporate voting, but only occasionally and not to determine criminal liability for an arbitrary point in time. The latter would be remarkably impractical, if not unfair.
[1] Assuming one pierces that "veil" of ownership
My understanding is that Uber is privately held, mostly by venture capitalists who expect it to increase in value once it monopolizes the market. We are not talking about a publicly held, well-governed organization.
Shareholders shouldn't (unless there's clear mens rea, such as when they set up the corporation in order to break laws) but officers of the corporation should, and probably already are.
Corporations cannot act, as they do not have hands. Only individuals can break the law.
Just a high enough fine (and I mean HIGH) would still do something.
As it is there is no hit to Uber except their stock price for killing someone through gross negligence.
Why don't we instead start with the individual who was supposed to be monitoring the road and the vehicle's systems? It's well known at this point that they in fact were negligent in their duty.
One small mistake, on something so critical, can ruin many peoples' lives.
The Texas version requires recklessness, and I think that's met here.
I thought the emergency system was only disabled for the computer so that it doesn't accidentally activate it. I think the driver was still able to activate the emergency system.
Any assistant features reduce driver awareness. Take the Tesla car that crashed into a barrier. Even if the driver had hands on the wheel, the fact the car was auto-lane adjusting well for so long can relax the drivers cognitive functions. You start thinking about other things, and not even realize your lane assistant feature, improperly named "auto-pilot" lost its tracking and is now driving you into a barrier. You're dead.
Uber shouldn't have had these cars on the road, and they certainly shouldn't have disabled any safety features because they thought they could rely on drivers to stay alert after eight+ hours a day in these things.
If not, then any driver assisted implementation should emulate the feel of a concave road (or road ruts) as much as possible. Make it so that the car is more comfortable to drive, but just subtle enough so that the driver's attention doesn't drift too much.
This situation in a way is very similar to another story that was on HN yesterday about a guy who got "fired by a machine". We are putting a huge amount of trust on automatic systems, sometimes without a failsafe mechanism. This inevitably leads to bad consequences.
Anything less is skapegoating and letting the managers get away with manslaughter (in this case).
The whole lot needs to be prosecuted, not only the driver (who also should not get let off)
Did the driver got a driving license? What does that driving license tell him to do in a car? That is FAR more important than what you boss tell you, it's the freaking law.
It's like saying if you kill someone in your car after a long day of work, you aren't responsible because your boss gave you an impossible task to drive your car after such long hour. You are still freaking responsible of your driving. Can't do it? Then don't do it, it's that simple.
Put as much blame as you want on Uber, it doesn't change the fact that she drove that car and killed that person.
> Here, Uber put a "driver" in control of the car that by design wasn't able to avoid collisions with pedestrians
To play devils advocate, doesn't this describe any profession involving regular vehicles (mail delivery, taxi drivers, etc)? If a taxi driver gets into an accident for dozing off and relying on auto-braking features that aren't there (either because he does in his personal car, but not in his work car, or a company technician forgot to reconnect it after a repair or whatever), whose fault should that be?
This is a bad analogy. First, Uber's software is much better than a 5 year old. A 5 year old would have hit something well before a jaywalking pedestrian. Second, the backup driver was fully capable of stopping the vehicle, or navigating around the jaywalker. The person they hired is responsible for safe operation of the vehicle. They failed.
And thus should end the bewildering “but you couldn’t see her to the last minute and I don’t understand how bad cameras are in low light”
Just because one party is neglicent does not mean other parties are cleared of their neglicence.
Waymo specifically monitors the driver plus checks their attention span before hiring them. There's various things which went wrong for this to happen. It's not just one cause.
Responsible engineers deal with this in a number of ways, such as the test images TSA screeners see throughout the day, Waymo’s reported careful monitoring of the drivers, or redesigning the process so the human is continuously engaged. Uber engineers apparently say YOLO! and disable the car manufacturer’s own safety systems.
It was well known all along that humans are poorly equipped to remain actively engaged in situations that require split-second reactions, while exerting zero effort or control for hours on end.
Air traffic is as safe as it is because the accident analysis always pushes past "pilot error" as the root cause. If one pilot can make the error, why won't another? Did the system set them up to fail? Even if it didn't, could the system be enhanced such that the failure (or class of failures) could be prevented?
In the case of the human in Uber's self-driving car, they were set up for failure. And in such a well known way that makes any claim Uber was not negligent very hard to defend.
> According to Uber, the developmental self-driving system relies on an attentive operator to intervene if the system fails to perform appropriately during testing. In addition, the operator is responsible for monitoring diagnostic messages that appear on an interface in the center stack of the vehicle dash and tagging events of interest for subsequent review.
I think if you are going to pay someone near minimum wage and let them hold onto their phone while in the car, you know they are likely to use it. Even if the request is reasonable, you know minimum wage workers are going to do that sort of thing if not monitored via an in-car camera directed at the driver's seat.
The technologies are not ready. They are being tested. Aircraft get to such a safe state like today after so many iterations and improvement, both in technology and process.
A terrible tragedy happened in this case. Hopefully it will help save a lot of lives in future.
Absolutely. We know from centuries of evidence that humans are profoundly bad at monitoring 'mostly autonomous' systems. Waymo/Uber know this as well, they just employ the driver as a convenient way to offload legal liability while they test unproven and unsafe technology on the public without consent.
https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/where-automakers-...
You can pass all the prerequisites, but none of that guarantees that it doesn't fail at the real world testing phase.
All that said, in this specific case, Uber absolutely hadn't passed all the prerequisites and shouldn't have been given any permission to be on real streets.
This is honestly what bothers me most. Firstly, I expect self driving to have massively more information at hand than humans do. I'm talking long range, 360deg sight. I expect multiple sensors to be recording at all time, analyzing. And finally, I expect a "black box" to be able to visualize all of this for cases like this.
Visualizing is something I think needs to be black-box level standardized. It's what we need to hold them accountable, I think. We're dealing with proprietary implementations - so humans should be able to review black box "footage"[1] and decide if the scenario was handled better or worse than a human.
There's going to be times where this system fails, and I'm not expecting perfection. Yet, humans in non-private positions need to be able to regulate how Uber and friends are behaving on the road.
A short sighted grainy video that looks like it was from 1990 is not cutting it. Fully unacceptable in my view.
[1]: I say footage loosely, because I imagine a lot of the scanned data is just that, data. So it needs to be rendered in a human friendly, visual manner, fully understandable by lawmakers.
For that to work, I'd like that cars that have features like this show you what they're seeing. Tesla does this a bit by showing all the cars it has detected in the dashboard. But it should go further and other car brands should do the same.
Without that, you're right, you can not be sure if the car is going to react to something on its own.
[1] https://futurism.com/self-driving-car-video/
[2] https://next.reality.news/news/augmented-reality-cars-compan...
Tesla, in putting it's targets on self driving, has omitted a lot of low-hanging fruit that would make significant day-to-day difference to drivers right now.
Agreed it's too difficult.
We are in between the technologies. That's litteraly beta testing. Are you saying that when you test your software you expect that everything that get out of it is gospel or you VERIFY and make sure it is?
This is a beta software, this is the testing, this is making sure everything is alright. You have to pay attention at that level BECAUSE it's a test, just like your software you wrote.
Once it's good enough (and we are still pretty far from it), then you won't have to pay that much attention.
And this was just a drone...
"A toxicology test carried out on Ms Herzberg after the accident returned positive results for methamphetamine and marijuana.
She did not look before crossing the road in a poorly lit area and was wearing dark clothes, the NTSB report says. And the reflectors and lights on her bike were at right-angles to the Uber car's path."
Even though, the self-driving software failed to recognise her, and also totally not excusing the lack of attention of the Uber driver, you cannot rule out that under normal circumstances with a non-automated car, the pedestrian would not have been hit.
Although this is a sad event, the pedestrian does carry a certain amount of blame here. It also shows that the biggest blocker to effective self driving vehicles is people, not technology.
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Looking at the video it's clear that at least some evasive action could have been taken by an attentive driver; at the least it should have been possible to hit the pedestrian at a lower speed. This article claims the car had six seconds to react (although I'm not sure what sense that's based on) and that the crash was avoidable if the operator had been paying attention, according to police.
If the car can't handle a jaywalker, it can't handle a toddler running into the street. That's a problem that shouldn't be hand-waved away.
I had a near-collision when I was headed to work one day. I was going the speed limit on a major four lane road. I noticed ahead of me that a car was stopped in a neighboring lane. It wasn't clear if it had broken down or what, so I started slowing down. Cue a group of kids jaywalking, and running in front of my car causing me to slam on my brakes.
Had I not seen or reacted to the already stopped car (or had it simply not been there), I probably could not have stopped in time. Not that I wouldn't have absolutely tried my best, but physics dictates that a compact SUV going at 45 mph doesn't come to a stop immediately.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't evaluate whether Uber seriously messed up and should face dramatic consequences - it certainly seems like they disabled a critical safety system that would of saved the pedestrians life.
Rather, we shouldn't make such grandiose statements like "Jaywalking shouldn't carry a death sentence" which don't really touch on the facts of the case. We should instead ask, "Did Uber's negligence cause this to result in a death when it shouldn't of been one?"
I'll point out that in this case the crash was "entirely avoidable" according to the official police report.
Does Uber do that? Does any of the more advanced systems (lidar, radar etc) do that?
You know. So what?
I always think it's especially galling when, for example a cop shoots a black teenager, the police departments spinmeisters immediately start to smear the victim.
As if smoking marijuana is a character fault and makes the victim implicitly a crook with low morals.
In the case of a jaywalker, this might be as simple as crossing with no warning when a sober person might not cross. Any driver (human or machine) should of course do their absolute best to avoid a collision, but whether or not that collision is avoidable is determined in part by the object you collide with.
In the case of violence by the police, somebody who is holding a weapon and behaving erratically is inherently more of a threat then somebody holding a weapon and complying.
There's nothing per-say "evil" about drugs, but somebody with meth in their system is a hell of a lot harder to predict then somebody sober, whether that's in terms of jaywalking or a violent confrontation.
When we evaluate situations, especially emotionally involving situations, we have to try and gather the totality of evidence.
Except that in a lot of cases the victims were unarmed.
Any case of self defense needs to be evaluated by a court. I'm not suggesting police should get a free pass, but that somebody is unarmed does not mean they are not a lethal threat.
But if you have a gun and the person that you target hasn't then threats as you describe them usually don't come to play.
It especially doesn't explain that cops shoot people into the back, when they very clearly pose no threat.
And they often used to get away with it would it not be for video.
And still victims are smeared.
Holding a gun doesn't make you immune to being injured or killed. Pointing a gun at someone doesn't always make them comply. A gun is a deadly weapon, but it's not a token of immunity and compliance. Shooting someone doesn't magically stop them or cause them to become a statue or a corpse.
> cops shoot people into the back
You're a police officer. You're called to investigate a violent rape by a suspect armed by a knife. The suspect runs and is quickly getting away. Do you:
1. Shoot them in the back
2. Let them escape and possibly rape someone else, hoping you catch them in the future
Neither of those is a good outcome and, just to make things more confusing, different states and departments have different rules in those situations.
> still victims are smeared
You can't know who the victim is until after the chips have landed. If someone gets shot by a police officer, they might have been an innocent person doing nothing wrong, or they might have been a violent predator who sexually assaults and murders kids for fun. When we're trying to assess that situation, you need all the evidence to come out - whether that hurts the cop (How many times have they used their weapons before? Do they have previous misconduct charges? Have they made racially charged statements previously?) or the person on the other side (Do they have a history of violence and crime? Are they a known felon? Were they on drugs?)
There are a few YouTube videos of use-of-force activists undergoing police training (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfi3Ndh3n-g) and one of the things that stands out to me is that they are very, very fast to pull the trigger compared to most police officers. That isn't to say their points are invalid, but it's easy to criticize from a sofa and it's a different thing to be in that fight-or-flight life-or-death moment of decision making.
This, however, is part of the problem.
She had traces of drugs _in her system_. Without knowing the amounts, you cannot say she was _under the influence_.
You can detect marijuana in the system several days after smoking a single joint. You're certainly not high at that point.
I'm not sure what the detection timeframe is for meth.
Certainly, if someone is _under the influence_ of a drug or drugs, that's one thing.
Similarly, I also work for Medic One in my area, training new EMTs. One of the perennial discussions is about being "altered", and consent, because we discuss implied consent in the context of intoxication. It has to be explained that just because someone has had one drink, does not impair them, or their ability to consent, and that tests more revolve around ability to comprehend consequences of decisions and actions. Simply put, I ask them, "You had a beer. Are you allowed to drive home?" "Yes, of course!" "So why would you not be allowed to make your own medical decisions?" "Ohhhh..."
Deny
Accuse
Reverse Victim and Offender
It’s a playbook that’s as old as people, and sadly it works, especially when there’s a significant power asymmetry at play.
That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did...
You deserved it.
All of this is usually applied to narcissists, psychopaths and sociopaths, but it works equally well for immoral corporations.
2 self-driving software recognized obstacle just fine, but was programmed to DO NOTHING
The Japanese pointing-and-calling technique comes to mind as a good example of keeping drivers engaged: they would have to continuously, actively point at dangers and at the car's appropriate response.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LmdUz3rOQU (quite fascinating to watch)
Combine this with short sessions (not driving around for hours with nothing to do), and I think the driver would have had a reasonable chance of preventing this accident.
Agreed. I think the right analogy is an airplane pilot. Operating an airplane and an autonomous car require special training and require professional operators. Replace car crash with plane crash. My judgement is predicted on - did Uber train their drivers? Did Uber evaluate their drivers before allowing them to operate on their own? What policies did Uber have in place for drivers? What punishment did drivers typically receive for violating policies? Did Uber occasionally review footage of the driver to verify driver compliance?
It's hard to expect a layperson to pay attention for hours on end without input, but somebody appropriately trained should be able to do so.
Absolutely no surprises there. Everyone who has ever taken a picture in the dark should have known this after seeing the footage from the car.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03/police-chief-said-uber-...
Visibility looks considerably better than what the Uber video portrays.
This system would have to be described as "driver assist".
Someone died that day because that "safety operator" was watching TV? Imagine how 'extra happy' the cyclist's family is right now.
Not calling it an “autopilot” is a huge psychological queue that it's an emergency safety measure rather than something you should rely on.
"Autonomous" and "self-driving" (and "autopilot") are incredibly loaded terms, and manufacturers know it, and really do change the context of the interaction the customer can expect to have with the car.
"Driving Assistants" help you drive, "self-driving" means, well, it drives itself, and no matter how many caveats you apply to it, you've just primed your audience with your headline.
If the manufacturer expects you to be in control, then I really think they shouldn't knowingly sell it as something else.
I like a good analogy and I've been struggling for one, but let's make a tenuous link to the World Cup: if I as a football team buy an "autonomous" or "self-saving" or "autogoalkeeper" goalkeeper, my expectation would be what I bought would stop balls going into the net by itself. My expectation would not be to have to position a back-up defender next to it at all times because it jumps in the wrong direction when presented with an attacker coming at a certain angle.
Is there a valid reason this should be law?
Having to babysit the self driving car is a no starter
For the counter, why do you think the false positive/negative rate on the attention-sensing system would be better than the false positive/negative rate on the eg emergency brakes?
In contrast, this woman was so quickly at ease (I wonder what she was told beforehand, during her training) that she felt comfortable enough to watch TV. I also wonder, as this kind of tech progresses, how it will be sold to the public. Perhaps the same: "we take your security seriously"...
Lol. You can get a real non-robot driver for that price. The whole point is to get some sort of contractor non-employee to work below the minimum wage.
Doesn't matter if you glue our hands to the steering wheel and hold our eyes open, if we're not doing anything 99% of the time we won't be ready to react with split second timing to recover from some failure.
https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20180524.as...
On scene police reports are often unreliable. This is why the NTSB does not speculate before the investigation is completed.
This is why it's manslaughter.
If someone makes a mistake while in traffic I'm much more happy do not immediately die as a result. There's been a few instances such a thing could've happened to me.
As a driver you're sent to driving school and you're operating a 2 ton death machine. If you're not in control of your vehicle for whatever reason (alcohol, drugs, phone) you're already at fault, even when you're not the only person to blame (Uber, the driver and the cyclist).
Ofc Uber driver was distracted, it was clear from the video. But I would put 80% blame on the victim.
For what it's worth I didn't downvote you, but think you're completely wrong.
When I cross a road and see a car approaching it's not unreasonable to believe that the driver reacts. Especially at a well lit place (which apparently it is and for which the video gives a very wrong impression).
In my book the company as well as the "safety driver" who's aparently so stupid that she watches TV when her responsibility is to supervise a deadly machine are criminally culpable and if I had any say she, as well as the responsible head of Uber's "self driving" unit should go to jail for that.
If the system was supposed to be entirely driverless and autonomous, then sure -- perhaps more blame would lie with those in charge of whatever kind of "certification" procedures take place (rather than the developers). But IMO, in this instance the blame lies with the backup driver, and Uber for not enforcing more training or monitoring of the backup driver to prevent this kind of horrendous incident from happening in the first place.
I'm not saying Uber aren't at fault -- an Uber employee failed to do their job by watching TV instead of concentrating on the road, and Uber failed to do sufficient training/screening or failed to put enough safeguards in place to stop this from happening.
My point is that they KNEW that the automated system side of things wasn't perfect which is why they employed someone to look after the car in the first place. Yes, the car failed to stop react to the pedestrian -- but the safeguard (i.e. the human in the car) failed to do their job, which was to step in under such circumstances.
http://www.ncsl.org/research/transportation/pedestrian-cross...
"Arizona: Vehicles must yield the right-of-way to pedestrians within a crosswalk that are in the same half of the roadway as the vehicle or when a pedestrian is approaching closely enough from the opposite side of the roadway to constitute a danger. Pedestrians may not suddenly leave the curb and enter a crosswalk into the path of a moving vehicle that is so close the vehicle is unable to yield. Pedestrians must yield the right-of-way to vehicles when crossing outside of a marked crosswalk or an unmarked crosswalk at an intersection. Where traffic control devices are in operation, pedestrians may only cross between two adjacent intersections in a marked crosswalk."
A road network that destroys access for other users is not functional. And sometimes the only way to achieve that is to reduce the volume of cars in city centres, lower speed limits, and have traffic calming measures. This helps align demand with what the roads are actually designed for. Pedestrianisation and pedestrian priority are just one logical extension of this.
No. How can you write something like this without thinking realising what you're saying?
(I would also question that, except maybe in rural areas where there are hedges right up to the road, if you are at risk of killing yourself if something unexpected appears, perhaps your speed is not appropriate for the road, visibility, and lighting conditions? This applies to human and inhuman drivers)
I am sure you can find videos on Internet where pedestrians by their actions caused fatalities when drivers tried to avoid & save them.
This need for regulation simply dosn't apply to pedestrians, and strict rules just seem extreme and uneccessary. There simply isn't the evidence that pedestrian behaviour is a cause of death and injury among drivers. So why bother inflicting unpleasant rules and laws on people? Especially when the pedestrian themselves is likely to be the only person injured or killed.
Of course some places do have jay walking laws, and I would agree that people should follow the law. But those laws exist solely for the benefit of motorists and not the safety of pedestrians. I just don't see any strong moral case for those sort of rules to exist.
I think that cars create a uniquely weird set of circumstances. We impose a set of rules and restrictions on people that are more aggressive than would normally be acceptable. They are completely against free will and liberty. They are a total drag. And people reactively assume that the same rules should be applied to other road users. But that is categorically unfair and uneccessary.
Should drunk walking be banned? Should kids cycling to school be banned? Should we have a law that punishes careless walking? No, that is ridiculous. But we have to have those laws for drivers.
https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article120372008.html
Let's assume that the pedestrian was jaywalking.