
Uber exec in March: “we shouldn’t be hitting things every 15,000 miles” - ProAm
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/uber-exec-warned-of-rampant-safety-problems-days-before-fatal-crash/
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aphextron
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.

~~~
throwaway5752
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.

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swsieber
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.

~~~
towelr34dy
Actually, I'd add that this is more related to the importance of the
individual or company as a node in the country's economic network.

The larger the impact on the network in terms of either magnitude or volume of
souls owned, the greater the ability to get away with actions that forward
individual gain over general good.

Shareholders and directors of many corporations do get prosecuted.

The disincentive for the government is always going to be the effect of
removing an important node from a network. Especially when the government and
people gain from the stability of the network, even if certain negatives
happen.

Not to say the way we treat corporations isn't really horrible. It is. Adam
Smith would roll in his grave if he knew we were justifying our corporatocracy
on his writings.

I'm simply pointing out that large nodes are always treated differently
because it is logical to do so. If 3 people do something and you take them
out, the economy keeps up exactly the same.

But take out the head of a company that owns... er... hires 100,000 souls? Or
maybe the company only hires 300 souls, but they are developing nuclear bombs,
or maybe developing a new gene editing tech, or green fuel? Then we have
magnitude instead of volume. You got yourself political backlash if you remove
these nodes.

~~~
clairity
that's called cowardice and is used as justification all the time, but that
doesn't make it right or even rational. in fact, there is no reason to believe
the economy won't be stronger through the failure of corporations and holding
directors and exectives accountable.

proponents of the banking bailout used this same rationale, that allowing big
banks to fail would lead to economic collapse, but that was only the
rationale, not the reason for that course of action. bernanke, paulson &
geithner were instead worried about blowback to their careers and economic
futures, because it would be their friends in high places taking the hit.

if some large banks had failed, most certainly other economic actors would
have swooped in to pick up the pieces and resume business. these were
lucrative, real assets after all. the danger was not in economic collapse, but
in how long the rebound would take, and more pointedly, the effect on bernanke
and friends' careers.

we retard progress and innovation if we don't hold institutions accountable
and allow them to fail. bankruptcy is the mechanism we use to allow instutions
(and people) to bounce back quickly from failure, so they can use their
learnings to try another tactic.

~~~
towelr34dy
My comment was on why governments don't intervene as quickly when detecting
bad behavior from important nodes. This applies to the US as to the other
countries. I seem to remember a quote from some Russian book I read that went
along the lines of "we crucify small thieves and celebrate the big ones".

Your comment on the bailout is something I agree with. Using a non-
intervention consideration to justify intervention... has nothing to do with
the validity of the non-intervention consideration.

I find it a very odd tangent to use as a reply, since it sounds like a
rebuttal but doesn't address the point. It does add to it, in a way, I guess.

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

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

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DanFeldman
> 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.

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ChuckMcM
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.

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

~~~
candiodari
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.

~~~
snarf21
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?

~~~
candiodari
That's an edge case. I would say no, because 1 person companies are not
treated the same.

Generally to get this sort of treatment it needs to be an employee that fucks
up (meaning not the owner) and the company needs to guarantee it'll take civil
responsibility (meaning pay up damages).

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macawfish
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.

~~~
brokenmachine
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.

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

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

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

~~~
pranjalv123
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](https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm)

[2] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/moneybuilder/2011/07/27/how-
man...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/moneybuilder/2011/07/27/how-many-times-
will-you-crash-your-car/#728bbe864e62)

~~~
lsc
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.

