Friday, February 24, 2017

Lies and the Lying Liars

As I keep saying, I don't think safety per se is the issue. If they work, they'll be safe enough. It's tautological almost. Making them safe isn't the challenge. Making them work is.
But even though Uber said it had suspended an employee riding in the Volvo, the self-driving car was, in fact, driving itself when it barreled through the red light, according to two Uber employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they signed nondisclosure agreements with the company, and internal Uber documents viewed by The New York Times. All told, the mapping programs used by Uber’s cars failed to recognize six traffic lights in the San Francisco area. “In this case, the car went through a red light,” the documents said.

I never believed all their "human error" bullshit. And no this isn't evidence that they won't work, it's just evidence that Uber can't be trusted. They still won't work.

...adding, someone in a position to know a bit more about this stuff than I do emailed me once to explain what it was all about. Roughly, it's this:
In fact, Sebastian Thrun, who founded Google’s self-driving car project and is now the chief executive of the online teaching start-up Udacity, said last year that the going rate for driverless car engineering talent was about $10 million a person.

Everybody has an interest in keeping the con going...until it's over.