1. Software that operates heavy machinery is life-critical. There’s no such thing as “just a bug” in that environment. It requires a different level of care.
2. As I understand it, Cruise was shut down in San Francisco not because of the software error, but because the company didn’t disclose the full details of what happened with the pedestrian that was hit. That’s very much a cultural problem.
Cruise's responses to their many negative events read like Uber's and I expressed my distaste for Cruise numerous times on here because of their bro trying to kill it attitudes (if you're not for robot cars you're out of touch being one example).
I'm not surprised and maybe sharper and more adult heads in GM stopped the program in time saving another poor innocent pedestrian from being mangled by training wheel robot car technology. I.e. The cars all came to a screeching halt when the 5G network it used was clogged up due a concert nearby (wow). It relied on a public 5G network?
Maybe one day robot cars it will be safer then a humans if so it will take decades to more yet is that progress worth these algorithms learning at the expense of more innocent lives?
There are certain professions that operate with public trust. Doctor, lawyer, and engineer are the classical examples. Sometimes those of us in tech get lulled into complacency because we operate under an industrial exemption (ie, don’t require an engineering license) or we work on non-critical systems where we’re encouraged to move fast and break things. We shouldn’t let that attitude spill into safety-critical applications.
If you have a duty to the public to provide a safe product in an ethical manner, the software bug can certainly be the issue.
But regardless, that's not what Cruise is on the hook for. They got in trouble because they tried to hide the full truth from regulators. And that for sure is a toxic internal company culture problem.
https://getcruise.com/news/blog/2023/a-detailed-review-of-th...
Then the robot look quite Good, No?
The truth is that virtually every traffic accident can be prevented on some level by every vehicle involved. People (you included, I assume?) who want to argue against automation in all cases will always be able to find something wrong with "the robot". Always. But that's not the right standard to be applying, because those accidents were going to happen anyway. The question is merely if there will be more or less of them with "robots" at the wheel.
And by the way, there's a cheaper and more effective way to reduce traffic fatalities, and it uses fewer precious resources, energy and land, emits less carbon dioxide, and stimulates economies but it's some kind of stealthtech from the 1800's. (choo choo)
That's only good enough if the type of the wrong decisions it makes is the same as the ones a human would make. Otherwise the car will seem unpredictable to human drivers and therefore dangerous.
A few baffling Tesla FSD examples:
• Misleading turn signals: https://youtu.be/2VWyaAzwMT0?t=702, https://youtu.be/2VWyaAzwMT0?t=723
• Failure to yield: https://youtu.be/2VWyaAzwMT0?t=1180
• Randomly stopping: https://youtu.be/2VWyaAzwMT0?t=1215
That too