An AI-driven car company called Cruise (evoking laid-back trips “cruising” leisurely down the road, sipping on a latte and catching up on TikTok or whatever) is super convenient and highly desirable for our future Utopia, of course, and we celebrate our new robot saviors, obviously.
It’s all really great.
Unfortunately, they have a small penchant for running down pedestrians and small children.
Via The Intercept (emphasis added):
AV companies hope these driverless vehicles will replace not just Uber, but also human driving as we know it. The underlying technology, however, is still half-baked and error-prone, giving rise to widespread criticisms that companies like Cruise are essentially running beta tests on public streets.
Despite the popular skepticism, Cruise insists its robots are profoundly safer than what they’re aiming to replace: cars driven by people. In an interview last month, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt downplayed safety concerns: “Anything that we do differently than humans is being sensationalized.”
The concerns over Cruise cars came to a head this month. On October 17, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced it was investigating Cruise’s nearly 600-vehicle fleet because of risks posed to other cars and pedestrians. A week later, in San Francisco, where driverless Cruise cars have shuttled passengers since 2021, the California Department of Motor Vehicles announced it was suspending the company’s driverless operations. Following a string of highly public malfunctions and accidents, the immediate cause of the order, the DMV said, was that Cruise withheld footage from a recent incident in which one of its vehicles hit a pedestrian, dragging her 20 feet down the road.
So. A lady gets dragged 20 feet down the road every now and then.
Big deal.
If you want to make an omelet, you’re going to have to break some eggs.
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Continuing:
Even before its public relations crisis of recent weeks, though, previously unreported internal materials such as chat logs show Cruise has known internally about two pressing safety issues: Driverless Cruise cars struggled to detect large holes in the road and have so much trouble recognizing children in certain scenarios that they risked hitting them. Yet, until it came under fire this month, Cruise kept its fleet of driverless taxis active, maintaining its regular reassurances of superhuman safety.
Okay, yeah, these cars are liable to run down a few children now and again, but so what? Let’s not be luddites.
Continuing:
[Cruise’s] internal materials attribute the robot cars’ inability to reliably recognize children under certain conditions to inadequate software and testing. “We have low exposure to small VRUs” — Vulnerable Road Users, a reference to children — “so very few events to estimate risk from,” the materials say. Another section concedes Cruise vehicles’ “lack of a high-precision Small VRU classifier,” or machine learning software that would automatically detect child-shaped objects around the car and maneuver accordingly. The materials say Cruise, in an attempt to compensate for machine learning shortcomings, was relying on human workers behind the scenes to manually identify children encountered by AVs where its software couldn’t do so automatically.
Look at all of this dehumanizing language. Children, in the new utopia, are now “vulnerable road users.”
