Uber's self-driving car killed a pedestrian because it wasn't told people could exist outside of sidewalks

[CitizenVectron]

https://www.wired.com/story/ubers-self-driving-car-didnt-know-pedestrians-could-jaywalk/

 

Follow-up to the death from last year:

 

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The software inside the Uber self-driving SUV that killed an Arizona woman last year was not designed to detect pedestrians outside of a crosswalk, according to new documents released as part of a federal investigation into the incident. That’s the most damning revelation in a trove of new documents related to the crash, but other details indicate that, in a variety of ways, Uber’s self-driving tech failed to consider how humans actually operate.

 

These guys were just reckless and dumb:

 

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Uber engineers also appear to have been so worried about false alarms that they built in an automated one-second delay between a crash detection and action.

 

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Much of that explains why, despite the fact that the car detected Herzberg with more than enough time to stop, it was traveling at 43.5 mph when it struck her and threw her 75 feet. When the car first detected her presence, 5.6 seconds before impact, it classified her as a vehicle. Then it changed its mind to “other,” then to vehicle again, back to “other,” then to bicycle, then to “other” again, and finally back to bicycle.

 

It never guessed Herzberg was on foot for a simple, galling reason: Uber didn’t tell its car to look for pedestrians outside of crosswalks. “The system design did not include a consideration for jaywalking pedestrians,” the NTSB’s Vehicle Automation Report reads. Every time it tried a new guess, it restarted the process of predicting where the mysterious object—Herzberg—was headed. It wasn’t until 1.2 seconds before the impact that the system recognized that the SUV was going to hit Herzberg, that it couldn’t steer around her, and that it needed to slam on the brakes.

 

Jesus. Just complete gross incompetence and negligence.

[b_m_b_m_b_m]

And there will be no accounting for their death

[CitizenVectron]

I know people like Uber because of the convenience, but I personally cannot wait until it goes bankrupt. It's only a matter of time at this point. They aren't automating faster than they are hemorrhaging money, and if they lose the Google automation case then they are done for even earlier.

[legend]

We need safety regulations and laws on this stuff now; corporations like Uber are not responsible enough to do it themselves.

 

And no Elon, I'm not talking about laws to prevent super-intelligent genies.

[skillzdadirecta]

1 hour ago, CitizenVectron said:

I know people like Uber because of the convenience, but I personally cannot wait until it goes bankrupt. It's only a matter of time at this point. They aren't automating faster than they are hemorrhaging money, and if they lose the Google automation case then they are done for even earlier.

I use ride sharing services a lot but I've tried to use Lyft when I can instead of Uber... I've heard nothing but bad things about the company.

[chakoo]

Uber isn't going anywhere any time soon. At worse they get bought out/taken over long before they could go away. They hold far too many patents, and while they did totally fuck up on this, their ATG division has made some interesting work in AI in recent years. 

 

The issues I have with Uber is the same I have in much of tech and software currently, you only solve for the known, don't safe guard for the unknown and call it a day, and wash your hands of it. If we did this in game development back in the ps1/ps2 era, everything would have been crashing every 5 mins.