Uber exec in March: “we shouldn’t be hitting things every 15,000 miles”

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/uber-exec-warned-of-rampant-safety-problems-days-before-fatal-crash/

by ProAm • 8 years ago

83 83 8 years ago

StargazyPi• 8 years ago

Surely this is corporate manslaughter at the very least? Systematically ignoring such dangerous problems should result in jail time for someone.

candiodari3• 8 years ago

Why ? There is no such legal concept. Manslaughter is criminal law and criminal law only applies to people.

In other words, either that woman watching hulu behind the wheel is responsible, or perhaps some other employee, but a person is.

The corporation is a legal fiction that was not driving any car for the same reason the tooth fairy wasn't riding a pink unicorn next to it.

kevin_thibedeau• 8 years ago

If corporations don't have the responsibilities of people then they shouldn't have the privileges either.

darpa_escapee• 8 years ago

In other words, either that woman watching hulu behind the wheel is responsible, or perhaps some other employee, but a person is.

Right. If a group of people came together with a scheme that caused car accidents at the rate Uber does, they'd be held liable and they'd receive conspiracy charges.

Perhaps the same should happen to people who come up with such schemes behind the corporate veil.

snarf21• 8 years ago

Citizens United gave them the constitutional right of free speech granted to citizens. The problem is that we let the corporations have it both ways. There are no easy answers but if I am a corporation of 1 person and commit manslaughter do you think it would be handled the same as Uber?

shittyadmin• 8 years ago

Precisely - I think this falls to the classic problem of who to blame in accidents involving self-driving cars. Is the manufacturer at fault? The driver? Certainly statements like this suggest it could be argued in this case.

jnwatson• 8 years ago

That's not true. Corporations are found criminally guilty in the US not infrequently. I'm not aware of any being convicted of manslaughter though.

There's even a specific crime in the UK of Corporate Homicide.

aphextron4• 8 years ago

It really never ceases to amaze me the level of protections we have in this country for corporations, and the amount of personal insulation that the members of those corporations receive from their actions. If I had hit someone with my car like that I would be sitting in jail right now. I'm not arguing that we shouldn't push things for the sake of science, but the level of willful negligence displayed by tech companies on every front these days is just staggering because of it. It's the default attitude. You see it an absolutely everything, from illegally dumping millions of scooters everywhere in public, to arbitraging the subversion of well established social contracts that in some cases took decades or centuries of literal blood and sweat to work out, like labor rights (Uber) or urban zoning (AirBnB) etc.

berberous• 8 years ago

>"If I had hit someone with my car like that I would be sitting in jail right now."

This is tangential to your point, but in many (I'd guess most) parts of this country, that is not true. Unless you are under the influence, distracted driver's frequently kill others, and the cops don't press charges, chalking it up to "mistake".

CocaKoala• 8 years ago

If you hit something every fifteen thousand miles, the cops will stop chalking it up to "mistake" pretty quick.

aphextron4• 8 years ago

This is tangential to your point, but in many (I'd guess most) parts of this country, that is not true. Unless you are under the influence, distracted driver's frequently kill others, and the cops don't press charges, chalking it up to "mistake".

Wasn't it proven that their system recognized the pedestrian and continued driving? That means business logic killed a person. Somebody, somewhere within Uber made the calculation that more miles of uninterrupted data was more valuable to them than public safety. If a jury could be convinced that I, as an individual, recognized a person and chose to purposely continue driving to save myself time, that's manslaughter.

stefan_2• 8 years ago

They haven't even charged the actual driver in that car, the one watching Hulu on their phone.

It was only natural that the law-insulating aura that operating a vehicle provides in the US is extended to "self"-driving vehicles.

surge2• 8 years ago

It was deemed the pedestrian was also partially at fault. She was crossing a road, at night in a dimly lit portion of the road, no where near an intersection and with seemingly no regard of awareness of oncoming traffic in dark colored clothes which is the opposite of pedestrian safety for walking/running at night. If you watch the video, even a human probably wouldn't have hit the brakes in time with average reaction speeds, the person was only visible for 1.5 seconds before impact. I believe the term is contributory negligence, when both parties are making mistakes that lead to the accident.

Grounding the fleet would have saved her life, but its arguable any other driver could have hit her and only applied the brakes for a short period of time, not enough to stop or slow to a less lethal speed before impact.

woah• 8 years ago

Do you understand the concept of limited liability?

perfmode2• 8 years ago

I believe this is precisely the concept under critique.

throwaway57524• 8 years ago

They clearly don't, and obviously don't understand why it exists. Nothing interesting would be possible without it. Nobody on Earth would be a C-level executive if they had criminal liability for all their employees. I sometimes think that people that want to end it have never been in charge of anything nontrivial and have no idea how terrible the consequences of ending it would be.

aphextron4• 8 years ago

Do you understand the concept of limited liability?

I sure do. But I didn't when I was younger, growing up as a member of the lower class never exposed to business. That's why I find it so appalling. The concept of being able to run a business into the ground, maxing out debt, ignoring all reality while paying yourself a paycheck, then just walking away from it in bankruptcy and doing it again is just mind blowing to the blue collar, working class mentality. There's a whole class of people in our society who may or may not provide any benefit, but nevertheless get by making vast sums of money and working in prestigious high paying jobs who have no concept whatsoever of what it means to work for a living is like. The whole system is completely rigged against anyone who doesn't meet that threshold, and I'm increasingly convinced that this is the entire basis of capitalism.

paulcole2• 8 years ago

If I had hit someone with my car like that I would be sitting in jail right now."

The best way to kill someone in America is with your car. As long as you're not drunk and can afford a lawyer you're going to get a slap on the wrist.

rocky1138• 8 years ago

If you ever kill anyone with your car, your post will be used as evidence in court against you. I don't think it was too smart to post this, honestly.

throwaway57524• 8 years ago

I honest do not understand your point. What is confusing about corporate vs individual liability? The corporation (Uber) will be held accountable at a civil level and employees can and do get held accountable at criminal levels (and that is also possible at this point). All this "let's frog-march the execs" talk because "if I did X I'd be in jail now" stuff is tiresome. I honestly do not think you understand the law well enough. Perhaps you should be upset over the enforcement of the law (which has been repeatedly and intentionally gutted in multiple areas of regulation by a major political party in the US). But that is a social and cultural problem, not a problem with the legal entity of a corporation.

swsieber• 8 years ago

Potato Potato.

The law is written such that the corporations can do more with less accountability than people.

The law is enforced such that the corporations can do more with less accountability than people.

It seems like a very small difference at this point.

It just seems that corporations can commit crimes with far less disincentives (i.e. punishments) than people.

engineeringwoke2• 8 years ago

employees can and do get held accountable at criminal levels (and that is also possible at this point)

What? American employees never get held accountable for white collar crime in startups

Every startup I was a part of in America was engaged in fraud, and the co-founders would laugh about it in front of employees

PhasmaFelis• 8 years ago

You have missed the distinction between not understanding the law, and understanding it perfectly well and disagreeing with it.

mindslight• 8 years ago

Individual liability carries both criminal and civil penalties, with the criminal prosecution generally making up the bulk of the work.

Corporate liability only carries civil penalties, even when the corporation's behavior is well over the line of a constructive mens rea. A harmed individual is left trying to prove an essentially novel case against a well-funded company - compared to the criminal system where most defendants are presumed guilty and eagerly prosecuted by the state.

If an individual modified their car to develop self-driving software, and the car hit and killed someone, that person would likely be sitting in jail for gross negligence. Uber's insurance carrier will pay out, push Uber to do some "internal reforms", and the actual people responsible for the poor culture won't be affected. That is the double standard people are bemoaning.

bendbro• 8 years ago

I don’t think we should lean on the negative impacts progress has on social contracts, since this is one of the primary arguments the alt-right uses to justify their position. Social contracts always change, especially so when a country is composed of an ever increasing portion of immigrants, asylum seekers, and migrants. Despite the blood, sweat, and tears, being open to social change ensures society doesn’t get locked into a local minimum via well intended but ultimately misplaced concern.

rbongers• 8 years ago

Do you mean to say that a change to the social contract is necessary where it could be acceptable in some cases for someone to get killed by a car? I am just trying to understand what you mean by this comment.

eximius• 8 years ago

I don't think they're saying that change is bad but that THIS change is bad - a regression for a hard fought thing. Characterizing all such critiques as the same reduces the toolset we have to answer things like the alt right.

bytematic• 8 years ago

Sometimes we have to have trust in private entities in order to achieve technical advancement. Also we don't want to discourage it for others

anyfoo• 8 years ago

We certainly do want to discourage willful negligence.

poslathian• 8 years ago

Tax reform proposal: the limited liability shield is incredibly inexpensive, bordering on free ($600/yr here in MA). On the other hand, it’s insanely valuable. Let’s generate tax revenue by charging fairly for this incredible gift to business operators. In lieu of system wide income taxes, we can charge a percentage of revenue in return for limited liability protection. Don’t like the tax? Chance it, and shareholders can take legal responsibility for the actions of their organizations.

Traster• 8 years ago

Well let's call it what it is. You want a revenue tax on corporations. The obvious point is: high turnover businesses that make profits through volume would pay a disproportionate tax - a tax which ostensibly is to do with liability insurance, but doesn't correlate with the things that are likely to incur liability.

datpuz• 8 years ago

Sounds like they're "moving fast and breaking things"

trhway• 8 years ago

in their case it is "moving fast and killing people"

conbandit2• 8 years ago

What is the average number of miles per accident for humans? Is it less than 15000? If yes, this is still good.

pranjalv123• 8 years ago

The average driver drives like 13,500 miles a year [1].

The average driver files a claim for collision once every 17.9 years [2].

That makes human drivers 16 times safer than Uber self-driving cars. This is concerning for people who think self-driving cars are right around the corner! Improved algorithms would need to avoid 94% of the collisions that self-driving cars currently get into in order to have the same failure rate as humans.

[1] https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/moneybuilder/2011/07/27/how-man...

lsc• 8 years ago

this is the thing about most of what we're doing with machine learning. It gets exponentially harder the closer you get to 100%; most of the things we use machine learning for where it works pretty well, 99% is really pretty great. 99% won't cut it for self-driving cars.

Which isn't to say that self driving cars won't get there, just that the fact that it looks like we are almost there doesn't mean as much as you'd think; we still have the really hard bits in front of us.

conbandit2• 8 years ago

Looks like there's still a lot of work left on that front. I was trying to get some context for the 15000 miles number.

zip1234• 8 years ago

Many accidents have no claim filed

marcosdumay• 8 years ago

That makes human drivers 16 times safer than Uber self-driving cars.

While that's a difference large enough to make wide scale deployment of those cars irresponsible, it is not large enough to make one pessimist on self-driving cars existing soon. It's the kind of difference that often enough go away with a few years of engineering.

And I expect those to be the worse stats for all the self-driving car companies around, since others seem to be doing things in a less "move fast and break things" way.

perl4ever3• 8 years ago

"The average driver files a claim for collision once every 17.9 years"

That leaves open the question of how much damage that driver is at fault for on average.

dllthomas• 8 years ago

"The average driver" isn't our cutoff for allowing people to drive. Once the self-driving cars are safer than the most dangerous drivers that we allow, there's theoretically an advantage moving those people to self-driving cars.

opjalkjdfowmfl• 8 years ago

AI should be safer than humans... not vice versa..

justtopost• 8 years ago

Citation desprately needed.

I would theorize the opposite.

ChuckMcM• 8 years ago

And that is going to put a crimp in their IPO plans.

This sort of corporate malfeasance, pursuit of product in the face of a clear and present danger to the public, is the sort of thing plaintiff attorneys use to drain sad corporations of all their capital to operate.

DanFeldman• 8 years ago

Miller also suggested that Uber might want to drastically scale back its testing program. "I suspect an 85% reduction in fleet size wouldn’t slow development," he wrote.

The vehicles create a firehose of data for the engineers/devs to deal with when there's large fleets. Things are ignored, and you have to dedicate more and more time to create good tools to filter through anomalies, incidents, and disengagements. With a smaller fleet, they'd see less problems come up but perhaps be able to diagnose and act on more of them.

cjhopman• 8 years ago

I expect that his recommendations are a good indication of how seriously Waymo takes safety.

blurbleblurble• 8 years ago

I've told so many people that I don't use Uber and why. It just goes in one ear, right out the other. Consumer society in the US has no sense of culpability. I don't mean that in the sense that I'm somehow superior. I'm involved in this too. "business as usual" has so much momentum.

It'd help if lawmakers backed up educated advocates, but the lawmakers are at this point bought by lobbies.

brokenmachine2• 8 years ago

I think there's a sense of powerlessness in general. Nothing actually represents the people. It's a race to the bottom.

I vote with my wallet as well, but I don't think the majority of people even consider that.

Even if I'm not making a difference, at least I feel better about what I'm doing.

thunderbong• 8 years ago

That is why you don't run tests in a production environment

Uber exec in March: “we shouldn’t be hitting things every 15,000 miles”

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