{"id":3320,"date":"2023-10-24T02:29:20","date_gmt":"2023-10-24T02:29:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/redesign\/ex-fighter-pilot-now-researcher-challenges-autonomous-vehicle-safety-businessinsider\/"},"modified":"2023-10-24T02:29:20","modified_gmt":"2023-10-24T02:29:20","slug":"ex-fighter-pilot-now-researcher-challenges-autonomous-vehicle-safety-businessinsider","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/redesign\/ex-fighter-pilot-now-researcher-challenges-autonomous-vehicle-safety-businessinsider\/","title":{"rendered":"Ex-fighter pilot, now researcher, challenges autonomous vehicle safety (BusinessInsider)"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 2021, an engineer named Missy Cummings drew the ire of Elon Musk on the social network then called Twitter. A professor at Duke University, Cummings had conducted research on the safety of self-driving cars, and the findings led her to issue some stark warnings about\u00a0Tesla\u2019s driver-assistance tech<\/a>. The cars, she wrote, had \u201cvariable and often unsafe behaviors\u201d that\u00a0required more testing<\/a>\u00a0\u201cbefore such technology is allowed to operate without humans in direct control.\u201d On the strength of her research, Cummings was appointed to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration \u2014 to help with regulation of robot cars.<\/p>\n

Tesla fans reacted with their usual equanimity and sense of perspective, by which I mean they absolutely lost it. Their insistence that Cummings would attempt to unfairly regulate their boy Elon soon prompted Musk himself to join the thread. \u201cObjectively,\u201d he\u00a0tweeted<\/a>, \u201cher track record is extremely biased against Tesla.\u201d In response, Musk\u2019s stans unleashed their full fury on Cummings \u2014 her work, her appearance, her motives. They accused her of conflicts of interest, signed petitions demanding her removal, and emailed death threats.<\/p>\n

But the thing is, Musk\u2019s bros of war were messing with the wrong engineer. As one of the Navy\u2019s first female fighter pilots, Cummings used to fly F\/A-18s. (Call sign: Shrew.) She wasn\u2019t intimidated by the dick-wagging behavior of a few people on Twitter with anime profile pics. She posted the worst threats on LinkedIn, hired some personal security, and kept right on fighting. \u201cI\u2019m like, are you really going to do this?\u201d she recalls thinking. \u201cI double down. The fighter pilot in me comes out. I love a good fight.\u201d<\/p>\n

She didn\u2019t exactly win that particular engagement. A lot of whinging from Tesla\u00a0pushed NHTSA to force Cummings to recuse herself\u00a0<\/a>from anything involving the company. But you know what they say about any landing you can walk away from. Cummings took a new gig at George Mason University and broadened her research from Tesla to the wider world of\u00a0all\u00a0<\/em>self-driving vehicles. With companies like Cruise and Waymo unleashing fully roboticized taxis on the streets of San Francisco and other cities, the rise of the machines has begun \u2014 and Cummings is on the front lines of the resistance. In a controversial new paper, she concludes that the new robot taxis are four to eight times as likely as a human-driven car to get into a crash. And that doesn\u2019t count the way self-driving vehicles are causing\u00a0weird traffic jams<\/a>,\u00a0blocking emergency vehicles<\/a>, and even\u00a0stopping on top of a person<\/a>\u00a0who had already been hit by a human-driven car.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the paper that really pissed all the Tesla trolls off, I actually say that this is not just a Tesla problem \u2014 that Tesla is the first one to experience the problems,\u201d Cummings tells me. \u201cFor years I have been telling people this was going to happen, that these problems would show up in self-driving. And indeed they are. If anyone in the self-driving car community is surprised, that\u2019s on them.\u201d<\/p>\n

It turns out that serving in the Navy is a very good way to train for inbound ire from Muskovites. In her 1999 memoir, \u201cHornet\u2019s Nest,\u201d Cummings recalls how she loved flying jets, and says the excitement of getting catapulted off an aircraft carrier \u2014 or landing on one \u2014 never got old. But the environment was far from welcoming. Sexual harassment in the Navy was routine, and male colleagues repeatedly told Cummings she wasn\u2019t qualified to fly fighters simply because she was a woman. When she and another female officer showed up at a golf tournament on base, they were told to put on Hooters uniforms and drive the beer carts. Cummings declined.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Flying tactical engines of destruction also provided Cummings with a firsthand lesson in the hidden dangers of machines, automation, and user interfaces. On her first day of training, two pilots were killed. On her last day, the Navy experienced the worst training disaster that had ever taken place aboard a carrier. In all, during the three years that Cummings flew, 36 people died in accidents.<\/p>\n

\nself-driving Waymo blocks traffic in San Francisco<\/div>\n

In 2011, while conducting research on robot helicopters for the Navy, Cummings had an epiphany. Even surrounded by nothing but air, those helos were far from perfect \u2014 and they relied on the same sensors that self-driving cars do while operating right next to cars and people. \u201cWhen I got in deep on the capabilities of those sensors,\u201d Cummings says, \u201cthat\u2019s when I woke up and said, whoa, we have a serious problem in cars.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some of the dangers are technical. People get distracted, self-driving systems get confused in complicated environments, and so on. But other dangers, Cummings says, are more subtle \u2014 \u201csociotechnical,\u201d as she puts it. What she calls the \u201chypermasculine culture in Silicon Valley\u201d intertwines with Big Tech\u2019s mission statement to \u201cmove fast and break things.\u201d Both bro culture and a disruptive mindset, as she sees it, incentivize companies to gloss over safety risks.\u00a0<\/p>\n

All of which makes it even tougher for women when they level the kind of critiques that Cummings has. \u201cWhen Elon Musk sicced his minions on me, the misogyny about me as a woman, my name \u2014 it got very dark very quickly,\u201d she recalls. \u201cI think the military has made a lot of strides, but I do think that\u2019s what\u2019s happening in these Silicon Valley companies is just a reminder that we haven\u2019t come as far in our society as I thought we would have.\u201d<\/p>\n

An example: Last month, the head of safety at Waymo touted a new study from his company on LinkedIn. The research was unpublished and had not undergone peer review. But Waymo used the study to\u00a0argue that<\/a>\u00a0its robot cars were actually much less likely to get into crashes than cars driven by biological organisms like you and me.<\/p>\n

Cummings wasn\u2019t having it. She had her new results \u2014 also still in preprint \u2014 which showed self-driving taxis to be way more crash-prone. So she went on LinkedIn, too, and said so.<\/p>\n

The response was familiar to her from her days in the Navy. Kyle Vogt, the CEO of Cruise,\u00a0slid into the comments<\/a>. \u201cI\u2019d love to help you with this analysis,\u201d he wrote to Cummings, questioning her number-crunching. \u201cWould be great to connect and discuss this further.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cummings responded in kind. \u201cI\u2019d love to help you with your understanding of basic statistics, use of computer vision, and what it means to be a safe and responsible CEO of a company,\u201d\u00a0she wrote<\/a>. \u201cCall anytime.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Women, she figures, caught her vibe. \u201cEvery woman who read that was like: Mmm-hmm, you go,\u201d Cummings says. But men \u2014 friends in Silicon Valley \u2014 did not. They thought she had been too mean to Vogt. \u201cHe was just trying to help you,\u201d they told her.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll the guys read it like: She\u2019s such a shrew!\u201d Cummings says. But, ever the fighter pilot, she was unfazed. \u201cThat\u2019s how I got my call sign,\u201d she says. \u201cSo I live with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

So who\u2019s right: Cummings, or the self-driven men of Waymo and Cruise and Tesla? It\u2019s hard to tell, for a simple reason: The data on the safety of robot cars sucks.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Take Cummings\u2019 approach in her new paper. First she had to wrestle with NHTSA\u2019s nationwide data for nonfatal crashes by human drivers, to get numbers she could compare to California, the only place where the robot cars run free. Then she had to figure out comparable nonfatal crash numbers and miles traveled for Waymo and Cruise, tracked by divergent sources. Her conclusion: Cruise has eight nonfatal crashes for every human one, and Waymo has four \u2014 comparable to the crash rates of the fatigued and overworked drivers at ride-hail services like Uber and Lyft.<\/p>\n

The purveyors of robot taxis argue that Cummings is wrong for a bunch of reasons. Chiefly, they say, the numbers for human crashes are actually undercounts. (Lots of fender benders, for instance, go unreported.) Plus, crash numbers for the whole country, or even just California, can\u2019t be compared to those for San Francisco, which is way denser and hillier than the state as a whole. Looked at that way, Cruise argued in a recent blog post, its taxis have been involved in 54% fewer crashes than cars driven by humans. The company also maintains that ride-hail drivers get into one nonfatal crash for every 85,027 miles of driving \u2014 74% more collisions than Cruise\u2019s robots.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n

The post Ex-fighter pilot, now researcher, challenges autonomous vehicle safety (BusinessInsider)<\/a> appeared first on London Reconnections<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 2021, an engineer named Missy Cummings drew the ire of Elon Musk on the social network then called Twitter. A professor at Duke University, Cummings had conducted research on the safety of self-driving cars, and the findings led her to issue some stark warnings about\u00a0Tesla\u2019s driver-assistance tech. The cars, she wrote, had \u201cvariable and often unsafe behaviors\u201d that\u00a0required more…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":3321,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-camcab"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/redesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3320"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/redesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/redesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/redesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3320"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/redesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3320\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/redesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/redesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/redesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/redesign\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}