Cruise, General Motors’ self-driving division, knew its cars sometimes had problems detecting children — but kept the vehicles on the road.

When it comes to hitting kids, however, internal materials indicate the company’s machines were struggling to match the safety performance of even an average human: Cruise’s goal was, at the time, for its robots to merely drive as safely around children at the same rate as an average Uber driver — a goal the internal materials note it was failing to meet.

“It’s I think especially egregious to be making the argument that Cruise’s safety record is better than a human driver,” said Smith, the University of South Carolina law professor. “It’s pretty striking that there’s a memo that says we could hit more kids than an average rideshare driver, and the apparent response of management is, keep going.”

    • money_loo@1337lemmy.com
      288·
      1 year ago

      Did you even read the article?

      We’ve just got another extremely misleading technology hating title here.

      In its statement, Cruise said, “It is inaccurate to say that our AVs were not detecting or exercising appropriate caution around pedestrian children” — a claim undermined by internal Cruise materials reviewed by The Intercept and the company’s statement itself. In its response to The Intercept’s request for comment, Cruise went on to concede that, this past summer during simulation testing, it discovered that its vehicles sometimes temporarily lost track of children on the side of the road. The statement said the problem was fixed and only encountered during testing, not on public streets

      So they found out during internal testing that children were sometimes being identified as adults. That’s it. It wasn’t missing kids entirely, and it never endangered a single one. They recognized a problem during testing and fixed it, meanwhile in the three months of testing to bug fix it, about 25 kids under 14 were killed by human drivers.

      But whatever, just more fear mongering and hyperbole from Lemmy!

      • Nurse_Robot@lemmy.world
        123·
        1 year ago

        I can question the intentions behind a billion dollar company without fear mongering. The article we both read brings up valid criticisms and the questionable way Cruise has handled them. If you only read what Cruise spokes persons write then I can understand why you’re so confused about the very real issues being addressed. The only person being hyperbolic is you acting like a shill for this company.

        • money_loo@1337lemmy.com
          51·
          1 year ago

          This entire article is about them discovering issues during simulations and then fixing them before deploying to the streets.

          So if your attempt is genuinely to question their intentions then it should be very obvious what those intentions are.

          The only person being hyperbolic is you acting like a shill for this company

          Stating facts from the article and being reasonable is hyperbole?

          Even before GM, Cruise has been using their vehicles on public roads since 2020. How many kids has it killed since then?

          The answer is precisely zero.

          Over that same period human drivers killed about 528 pedestrian children.

          Now “foul!” You may cry, as the data is for national averages versus isolated incidents, to which I would both agree and point out that Cruise has been operating in 13 major metropolitan cities now.

          “Well that’s all fine and dandy, money_loo, but just you wait until the day they hit and kill a kid!”

          Which just brings us back to the entire point of the article, how they are doing everything they can to insure that, y’know, their cars never hit any kids…

      • quindraco@lemm.ee
        32·
        1 year ago

        Woa, expecting people to read the article before discussing it? How optimistic of you.