What ills do you speak of? The negative media narrative is not a full reflection of reality, rather what will attract the most eyeballs to monetize in this current media cycle.
To summarize what happened - Uber's autopilot makes decisions about when emergency braking is necessary. But the software was braking so often on public roads that overall it's driving was erratic.
So Uber knowingly disabled emergency braking in all cases.
This essentially turned the car into a missile on our public roads.
at the time of the accident, the autopilot detected the pedestrian. Calculated an imminent collision, and initiated emergency braking. Instead of actually breaking, the message to break simply went to the logs.
Combine that with a safety driver that was looking down at the console and not up at the road - and the fatality was the result.
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It is completely beyond me why there isn't a battery of government saftey tests that vehicles with autopilot must pass before they get approved for use on our public roads.
How many times have you seen footage of a crash test dummy safely landing in an air bag? I want to see footage of crash test dummies getting pushed out in front of autopilot cars - and hopefully, never getting run down.
> It is completely beyond me why there isn't a battery of government saftey tests that vehicles with autopilot must pass before they get approved for use on our public roads.
Because the inefficiencies of government are catching up with them as they'd rather right each other (different parties) rather than be productive and move the country forward.
Technology always outpaces legislation. It's been that way since the telegraph and earlier. Legislators can't rule for stuff that isn't there, and tech changes spec all the time. Once there actually are fully-autonomous vehicles on public roads, the rules will come together. For now it's humans, just like every other vehicle.
Everything that came out after that last fatality points to Uber trailing everyone else in terms of functionality and sacrificing safety to appear further along.
I hope this is the strategy instead of Toyota wanting to use Uber on their cars as the main source of AI. To this day Uber hasn't done anything to impress me and probably most people. Their corporate culture doesn't help either.
Their reckless (compared to Waymo) behavior with self-driving car testing is certainly more than negative press. It seems to reflect their entire culture.
