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More bad news for Uber: one of the ride-hailing giant's self-driving Volvo SUVs has been involved in a crash in Arizona — apparently leaving the vehicle flipped onto its side, and with damage to at least two other human-driven cars in the vicinity.
The aftermath of the accident is pictured in photos and a video posted to Twitter by a user of @FrescoNews, a service for selling content to news outlets. According to the company's tweets, the collision happened in Tempe, Arizona, and no injuries have yet been reported.
Uber has also confirmed the accident and the veracity of the photos to Bloomberg. We've reached out to the company with questions and will update this story with any response. Update: Uber has now provided us with the following statement: "We are continuing to look into this incident and can confirm we had no backseat passengers in the vehicle."
TechCrunch understands Uber's self-driving fleet in Arizona has been grounded, following the incident, while an investigation is undertaken. The company has confirmed the vehicle involved in the incident was in self-driving mode. We're told no one was seriously injured.
Local newspaper reports suggest another car failed to yield to Uber's SUV, hitting it and resulting in the autonomous vehicle flipping onto its side. Presumably the Uber driver was unable to take over the controls in time to prevent the accident.
Source: TechCrunch
(Score: 5, Informative) by Arik on Monday March 27 2017, @04:31PM (9 children)
Eh, the basics are definitely known, the problem is the market rarely appreciates or develops that sort of development, so it gets less funding less press less exposure etc. The reason that we've become accustomed to the idea that software is buggy is because the market is oriented towards producing something marketable quickly, and then patching bugs as necessary later. This seems to be mostly for social, rather than technical or even properly economic, factors, but that's another subject really.
The fact is that we *do* know how to make highly reliable and secure software - start by defining specifications, functions and structures very very carefully, get as much technical criticism as you can at every point, especially at the design stage, lock marketing out of the room, use something like ADA rather than whatever is currently fashionable, and test the fsck out of it at every stage. It's not impossible it's just slow and expensive and in danger of becoming a lost art.
There are far deeper issues with the autonomous car idea than simply writing reliable software however. An autonomous car needs to be able to do some things that would appear to be impossible in this universe, no matter how reliable their software could be made. But, again, another subject really.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday March 27 2017, @04:53PM (7 children)
The reason that we've become accustomed to the idea that software is buggy is because the market is oriented towards producing something marketable quickly, and then patching bugs as necessary later. This seems to be mostly for social, rather than technical or even properly economic, factors, but that's another subject really.
I'm not really sure what you mean by "social factors" as opposed to "properly economic factors," but my impression is that a lot of these decisions are driven by profit calculations. The longer you wait to release software, the longer it takes for it to start making money. If you have competitors (or potential competitors), that's a longer time for them to make money and cement market share (or perhaps get a competing product or new features out).
The balancing act always seems to be -- how soon can we release our product to start making money off of it without it being SO buggy as to annoy customers? If you have a huge market share, you seem to stop caring about annoying customers as much and just go for maximum profit (see Microsoft).
So, it seems it's mostly about economics, no?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Monday March 27 2017, @05:53PM (5 children)
I suspect that software is now complex enough that carefully designed, and validated software will get to market faster than software developed ah-hoc.
The reason is abstraction leakage. Nobody knows modern systems top-to-bottom. Coding to an interface is hard enough, but when you run into undefined behaviour because you did something the original programmer did not expect: suddenly you are chasing rabbits.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Justin Case on Monday March 27 2017, @06:47PM (4 children)
Nobody knows modern systems top-to-bottom.
Another reason a "modern system" cannot be reliable. You can't even predict what it is going to do under all permutations of inputs.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday March 27 2017, @07:12PM (3 children)
So just to be clear, are you saying z/OS isn't "modern" or isn't "reliable?"
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Monday March 27 2017, @07:30PM
From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
IBM releases ... corrections ... (a.k.a. PTFs) for z/OS.... IBM labels critical PTFs as "HIPER" (High Impact PERvasive). IBM also "rolls up" multiple patches into a Recommended Service Update (RSU).
So yeah, maybe like Microsoft, today's version is perfect, but all those previous versions apparently were not reliable.
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Tuesday March 28 2017, @12:08AM (1 child)
Really Arik? You made me a foe because I looked up your precious z/OS in Wikipedia, and discovered it wasn't perfect after all?
(Score: 2, Funny) by Arik on Tuesday March 28 2017, @12:42AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday March 27 2017, @05:53PM
However in case after case I have seen this backfire. A properly economic evaluation would, I strongly suspect, result in a different balance - yes some things are obviously going to be done cheap and dirty but not so much, not everything which seems to be where we're going.
So I suspect there are social factors confounding it. The decision makers don't tend to be technical, and I suspect as others have suggested that there is a systematic bias among them for paying technical types 'too much.' Even when their productivity justifies it economically, there's psychological opposition to it. Most suits would rather hire 10 "coders" at $10/hour than 2 coders at $50/hour, it just instantaneously strikes them as the obvious best decision, and it's really swimming upstream to convince them to even look at the other possibility. They think of us as commodities, that's the 'management' mindset that's drilled into them in school, and that creates a prejudice that distorts the market.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Monday March 27 2017, @06:43PM
we *do* know how to make highly reliable and secure software - start by defining specifications
How do you know that the specifications are correct?