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Uber allegedly ignored safety warnings before self-driving fatality
Just days after Uber announced its plans to resume testing of its self-driving taxis, new information reveals that a whistleblower had made the company aware of the technology's safety failures before the incident in Arizona last March, which saw a pedestrian struck and killed by one of Uber's vehicles, and which led to the suspension of all testing activity.
According to The Information, Robbie Miller, a manager in the testing-operations group, sent a cautionary email to a number of Uber's executive and lawyers, warning that the vehicles were "routinely in accidents resulting in damage. This is usually the result of poor behavior of the operator or the AV technology."
It appears the email was prompted by an incident in Pittsburgh, where just a few days before Miller sent the message an Uber prototype swerved completely off the road and onto the sidewalk, where it continued to drive. According to Miller's email, the episode was "essentially ignored" for days, until Miller raised it with other managers. He also noted that towards the end of 2017, it took two weeks for engineers to investigate the logs of a separate Arizona incident, in which an Uber vehicle almost collided with another car.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 12 2018, @08:07PM (5 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 12 2018, @08:19PM
No surprise, what you are really saying is that Stanford has better AI programmers than Carnegie-Mellon...
Google raided Stanford and Uber raided C-M.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by sjames on Wednesday December 12 2018, @08:38PM (3 children)
Before going on public streets, their car should run a test course where the obstacles are replaced by members of Uber's board and executive management. If they don't believe in their technology enough to stake their lives on it, why should I allow them to stake MY life on it?
(Score: 2) by Fluffeh on Thursday December 13 2018, @12:30AM (1 child)
Why do you think you actually get a say in this? You vote in someone who says they will do what you want them to do... right up until the point they don't. Then if they think you will buy it, they tell you they will next time - or if they don't think you will stomach that, they'll say that they had to vote that way, but look, we agree on many other things. The problem is, the next guy on the ticket does exactly the same thing.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday December 13 2018, @01:26AM
They're my rocks, I'll throw them where I want to.
(Score: 2) by legont on Thursday December 13 2018, @02:55AM
Unfortunately, the main driver of western dominance was and still is *limited liability*, which is, in a nutshell, an ability to make new things without too much consequences.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.