Uber ends self-driving operation in Arizona
Uber has shuttered its self-driving testing program in Arizona and laid off close to 300 workers there — most of them test drivers, or "vehicle operators" — two months after one of its autonomous cars killed a pedestrian, the company said on Wednesday. The company had been testing its self-driving technology in the state since 2016, but halted operations in the wake of the March crash. The company's testing was also indefinitely suspended by the Arizona governor's office.
[...] Uber says it still plans to restart its self-driving operations in other locations (like Pittsburgh or San Francisco) once the investigations into the Arizona crash are complete. But in those locations, Uber will "drive in a much more limited way," according to an internal email obtained by ArsTechnica.
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday May 24 2018, @11:30PM (1 child)
Say, downtown NY or Washington...
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 25 2018, @12:09AM
Arizona, with its miles of straight level nonpacked streets and 356 dry cloudless days out of the year is a horrible place to test.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Thursday May 24 2018, @11:40PM (5 children)
management (and programmers) screw up, testers get fired.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday May 25 2018, @12:12AM (4 children)
Rightly so. Their fault they didn't catch the screwup in time. (grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Friday May 25 2018, @01:53AM (3 children)
Test pre-conditions didn't specifically say testers had to know what a brake pedal was for.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday May 25 2018, @02:03AM (2 children)
Now, now... stop with those lame excuses, as they are completely irrelevant.
You don't expect management to support the consequences of the screwup, do you? This would go against the natural order, mate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Friday May 25 2018, @02:23AM (1 child)
Of course not!
The testing team signed off on the test scripts. Management can't be expected to know anything about testing. That is why you hire testers.
If there was anything wrong with the tests, of course it was the test team's fault. That is why they were all sacked.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 1) by anubi on Friday May 25 2018, @11:08AM
Well, the EULA had a clause down the line of "hold harmless"...
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by caffeine on Thursday May 24 2018, @11:49PM (1 child)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by MostCynical on Thursday May 24 2018, @11:58PM
So some States value rules, some value human life, and some value neither?
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Justin Case on Thursday May 24 2018, @11:57PM (17 children)
All the professional software dev projects I ever worked on had a test environment and you don't go live until the serious bugs are discovered and worked out.
And that's just a crummy web site that doesn't kill people.
Anyone know why they don't take an ordinary human driven car with the sensors in record mode, then play the recording to the SDC software? Advantage: you can reply the same scenario over and over after software updates to confirm that the fix is actually better, and no new problems have been introduced.
It is as if the cool kids have forgotten everything learned over the past decades. And at the same time, they unleashed their alpha code on test subjects that did not consent to put their lives at risk.
This kind of incompetence is unforgivable even when it's just the boss' money on the line. Now that the public has been lined up for shooting practice, I still say criminal charges are mandatory.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday May 25 2018, @12:19AM (2 children)
The essential difference between the two: a buggy web site will kill profit, a buggy self-driving car will only kill people that aren't its passengers (killing passengers would be the kind of profit-killing bug).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Fluffeh on Friday May 25 2018, @05:51AM (1 child)
I am pretty sure that the court costs and payout of this case will result in quite a bit of profit lost for the company. Well into the millions.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday May 25 2018, @06:09AM
FYI [reuters.com]
So no courts and the settlement was quick enough so I feel that it wasn't something that threatened Uber financial status.
Profit lost? Uber didn't have a ready-to-market self-driving car, so the lost profit was, at best, long term potential profit - things like this happens when you run a R&D project which can turn sour at any time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Informative) by suburbanitemediocrity on Friday May 25 2018, @12:25AM (6 children)
I've spent my career developing safety critical systems (the kind where lots of people die if you screw up) and cannot fathom how this was allowed to occur.
Other industries with century plus experience are highly regulated. These things are like engineering research projects (which I spent a couple years and published papers on). Where's the reliability safety analysis? For a passenger aircraft, the number is something like 1e-13 fatalities/hour. As much engineering goes into reliability as goes into developing the system.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday May 25 2018, @12:34AM (2 children)
But... how many passengers the self-driving cars killed? (large grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Insightful) by suburbanitemediocrity on Friday May 25 2018, @12:53AM (1 child)
The FAA is there to protect the people on the ground as much as in the plane if not more so.
The passengers knew what they were getting into and willingly took a risk. The family at home under the flight path eating dinner had no say in the matter.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday May 25 2018, @01:18AM
I'll let aside the ignored "(large grin)" (which would allow a 'whoosh')...
... and just interject here the ho [wikipedia.org]-hum [wikipedia.org].
My point for the ho-hum above? Nope, FAA is there as an organization that manage the safety rules and best practices in aviation (as in "best effort" and/or "steward of knowledge"), not a guarantor of safety for anyone in flight or under the flight path.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Friday May 25 2018, @12:39AM
First of all, just look at the company we're dealing with here:
https://www.google.com/search?q=site:soylentnews.org+Uber&cad=h [google.com]
Uber Leaves France [soylentnews.org]
Uber's World Class Tax Avoidance Infrastructure [soylentnews.org]
Uber Evaded Law Enforcement With "Greyball" [soylentnews.org]
Text Messages Between Uber's Travis Kalanick and Anthony Levandowski Released [soylentnews.org]
Real-Life Example of Uber's Regulator-Evading Software [soylentnews.org]
Uber: We Don't Have to Pay Drivers Based on Rider Fares [soylentnews.org]
Uber Paid Hackers to Delete Stolen Data on 57 Million People [soylentnews.org]
SoftBank Knew of Data Breach at Uber [soylentnews.org]
Uber Letter Alleges Surveillance on Politicians and Competitors [soylentnews.org]
MIT Study Shows How Much Driving for Uber or Lyft Sucks [soylentnews.org]
And of course, who can forget:
The Fall of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick [soylentnews.org]
Specifically related to Uber's crash:
https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=25554 [soylentnews.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Friday May 25 2018, @03:18AM
But you have to understand, if they'd left the emergency brake system online, the ride might not have been smooth enough for the passengers!
Seriously, that's gotta incur some serious liability. One does not simply switch off the emergency brake system.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Friday May 25 2018, @07:19AM
May I ask what is your preferred framework?
I have been involved in similar stuff, and the only thing I really trust is Micrium's Micro C/OS on the ColdFire processor.
But I got canned before I even started that one.
( They wanted me to use an OS I had no trust for... as I was afraid just one midnight "security update" would make ME look like a feeble coder incapable of designing robust code.)
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday May 25 2018, @12:31AM (1 child)
Oh, pops, when will you learn?
The old ways are old, we have now Agile supported by DevOps!
The manta: "Release early, release often, you gonna take care of bugs later and only if someone trips them!"
Yes, it's unfortunate someone was killed, we'll say a prayer at the spring review (it will be a short one, we must keep ourselves Agile)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Friday May 25 2018, @01:51AM
Two current systems (from completely unrelated companies) I am working with are "cloud solutions".
There is a "pilot" environment for each system, which is the dev and test box (yes, *and* stage/UAT)
The other environment for each system is "prod".
So: build and test in pilot, then build it again in prod. Live. No roll back.
This is the modern way! Trust in the Cloud!
Regression testing is... not really part of either provider's practice. Nor is "back up" or "restore"., as far as I can tell, no one can spell "D.R." My contract is short enough that I hopefully won't get to see what happens when things go wrong.
Note, I am not development, I am working with an end user organisation to implement new features, so this is 'how it is', not how any of us want it to be.. Many purists would run away. I will do my job (and keep my fingers crossed).
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 25 2018, @04:23AM (4 children)
And how well does a test environment match the real world for self-driving vehicles? Sounds like it does a rather poor job.
I think a big part of the problem here is that past some simple level of testing, the real world is the sole adequate testing environment.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Friday May 25 2018, @11:22AM (1 child)
For a good test environment, let the website programmers know the CEO is going to be given a random system and plain old consumer grade ISP line and he's going to evaluate the site. It may or may not have ad blockers, or any combination of same a consumer is apt to have on his system.
If it does not load, the programmer does not get paid. If it loads slow, the programmer agrees to a cut of 1% of pay per second.
Won't happen though. I do not know a single CEO that will give up his high-speed direct connection to his corporate system, and I know very few programmers that can still write really clean minimal code without involving a lot of "agile" programming that saves programmer time, but burns bandwidth, memory, and resources like crazy to do it.
Very few CEO's seem to see their site the way their customers see their site. Maybe its a good thing to keep the CEO ignorant of the customer experience, as it keeps his company from expanding too fast and keeps the goal of getting X percent of market share always below what he wants, so he will spend more, in much the same vein that coupon printers love to use the word "Expires" so that the business has to constantly print new coupons, while the recipients are trained to simply toss the coupon instead of saving it.
Businessmen just love to spend money to do the same thing over and over and over. Makes 'em feel important, I suppose.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 25 2018, @12:06PM
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Friday May 25 2018, @01:29PM (1 child)
If something simply cannot be done, then you can't do it. So stop already. Don't release code you can't test. Just don't do it.
But I doubt that's the case. If the guys with hardons for SDCs realized the only way we're going to be allowed to proceed is by setting up a thoroughly realistic test environment, they'd do it. If they don't have the skillz to do that, they are unqualified for this project and should be replaced.
The excuse of "well damn this is just too hard so we'll have to start bouncing high speed steel objects off of human skulls" ... can't you see that anyone seriously proposing such an approach needs to be dismissed from the human race?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday May 26 2018, @04:38AM
You're preaching to the choir. They can't build a good enough testing environment to forego real world testing, so they're not doing that. Instead, they're simply doing what can be done.
The real world is indeed a thoroughly realistic test environment. And it's already there.
No, I don't. Instead, I see that this "excuse" is good enough. We're always trying new things and those new things occasionally hurt people. Let us keep in mind that this approach is extremely successful in the real world where it is most needed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 25 2018, @01:50AM (1 child)
Arizona, you suspend us from testing our code just because of one fatality? Fine, we'll take our toys to Pittsburgh, where the mayor has a hardon for us. Enjoy your 300 new jobless!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 25 2018, @03:19AM
Don't worry. They won't count against the unemployment rate after 6 months, or has it been increased to 3 months yet?
(Score: 2) by Dopefish on Friday May 25 2018, @08:28PM
Our mayor, Bill Peduto, is definitely off the Uber hype train. Given Uber's cavalier attitude, I'm kind of glad they are no longer getting a free pass.