"Uber recently placed an order for 24,000 Volvo cars that will be modified for driverless operation. Delivery is scheduled to start next year."<p>Wow. The other driverless car players should be all over this lobbying to shut Uber down. If Uber massively deploys a commercial service with subpar quality in order to "win", and then those cars start getting into accidents, the entire field is going to be delayed by 10 years. The general public is not going to just think "Uber is bad", they are going to think "self-driving cars are bad". Politicians will jump all over it and we'll see very restrictive laws that no one will have the guts to replace for a long time.<p>And honestly if that happens, that's probably what we would need anyway. If the industry doesn't want to be handcuffed they need to figure out some really good standardized regulations on sharing data with law enforcement, how to determine fault for self-driving vehicles, and what penalties there should be. That are fair and strict.
> We don't need redundant brakes & steering or a fancy new car; we need better software," wrote engineer Anthony Levandowski<p>Any engineer with this attitude needs to learn the lesson of the Therac-25. The issues in the Ars article are very similar to section 4 "Causal Factors" of the report[1].<p>> To get to that better software faster we should deploy the first 1000 cars asap.<p>Is that admitting that they <i>do not have</i> the "better software" and intend to deploy 1000 cars using "lesser software"? That's treading dangerously close to potential manslaughter charges if prove this <i>willful contempt for safety</i> to a court.<p>[1] <a href="http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf</a>
"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."<p>Wow there goes that "safer than human drivers" argument.
I don't understand how there isn't a non-ML based piece of code that looks at moving radar and lidar returns and preforms an emergency brake, light flash, horn, or dodge if that vector would intersect with any confidence. Even slowing down to 20MPH can turn a fatal accident into an injury.
> We don't need redundant brakes & steering or a fancy new car; we need better software," wrote engineer Anthony Levandowski to Alphabet CEO Larry Page in January 2016.<p>Looks like Uber has attracted Levandowski due to his cultural fit.
Why don’t we require software engineers who work on self driving car software to go through licensing and certification.<p>And then, if their code results in a death, they are liable and can have their license completely revoked, and they would be unable to work on self driving cars again.
I have two problems with this article.<p>1) They make it appear that Uber is a car manufacturer.<p>2) Even though Uber has not been determined to be at fault, the author seems to want to make it that way anyway.
Why is everyone considering it a forgone conclusion that self driving cars will quickly become much, much safer than human driven cars? Yes, lots of people die every year in human driven car accidents. But it is equally true that our most sophisticated AI/ML can only really operate within very narrowly defined parameters (at least when compared to the huge sets of uncertain parameters humans deal with every day in the real world). Driving is perhaps one of the most unpredictable activities we can engage in, anecdotally supported by my daily commute. What if our self driving software never becomes good enough? How many more deaths are we willing to go through to find out?
I was at SXSW a few weeks ago and went to an Uber driverless car talk. They spent the first half of the talk discussing driver safety, it felt incredibly hollow.<p>If you really cared about safety, there are far more immediate and impactful solutions then spending billions on self-driving cars. If they came out and said that they were doing it to make money or make driving easier, it would have carried more weight. But you just can't trust a word this company says.
Are you suprised?
Uber is a company that:<p>* Flouted Taxi regulations<p>* Living in legal gray zones in regards to contractors vs employees<p>* Designed a system to avoid law enforcement<p>* Performed shady tactics with its competitors<p>* Illegally obtained the private medical records of a rape victim<p>* Created a workplace where sexual harassment was routine<p>* Illegally tested self-driving cars on public roads in California without obtaining the required state licenses.<p>* Possibly stole a LIDAR design from a competitor<p>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.)<p>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.
Machine learning and AI are data hungry algorithms and the concern is there isn't enough "emergency situation" data. Also a detector can not have both a 100% probability of detection and 0% probability of false alarm. You have to sacrifice one for the other and that is usually influenced by weighted probabilities and priorities (e.g., a smooth ride).
This event has me thinking about job of the behind-the-wheel backup driver. They get an easier job than a real driver, at the cost of potentially taking the fall if an accident occurs. I wonder if the pay is better.
"Testing" of driverless cars seem to be the wrong way around. Software should try to learn from human drivers: watch them instead of being watched by them.<p>The way it would work would be: the human is driving and the software is, at the same time, watching the driver and figuring out an action to take. Every time the driver's and the software's behavior differ, is logged and analyzed to figure out why there was a difference and who guessed better.<p>But the way testing is currently going on, it seems millions of miles are wasted where nothing happens and nothing is learned.