Uber CEO on Saudi murder of journalist: "We've made mistakes too"

I don’t know about you, but I am still feeling good about deleting Uber a while back…

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Uber says:

You have made a mistake.
It would be a shame if we were to make a mistake on you.
Maybe you should avoid any mistakes by reinstalling the app.

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“I didn’t read that part of the CIA report,” Khosrowshahi said. “You’re obviously deeper in it.”

‘I didn’t read stories about my largest single financial backer,’ should exclude him from leading the company. Being Uber it probably means he’s up for promotion.

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:clap:very true. those are simply ways to placate voices while carrying on business as usual. not seeing the change you want? you must not be spending hard enough! :unamused:

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I’d add that “human resources” are also not the same thing as or replacements for citizens. That said, all these are not opinions shared by at least half of the electorate.

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All of Uber’s “mistakes” were also premeditated. They openly flout the law and dare cities to take them on in court. It is no surprise that they think a targeted assassination isn’t all that bad, especially if nobody can hold you accountable for it.

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I’m surprised that he bothered with the apology. Now he’s pissed off a big chunk of the populace, and he’s pissed off one of his major shareholders.

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Hopefully they’re thinking of the person they killed in Arizona, probably they’re thinking about not getting in on the ground floor of some start up.

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dara

Sorry. This one is clearly your fault. :wink:

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How did that happen? :grin:

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Just an outlier.

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They are thinking when they deliberately disabled multiple safety features in their self driving cars in order to avoid false positives which might get their executives carsick during a demo and then killed someone with it. You know, mistakes.

Seriously, if you read the incident reports for the uber self driving fatality I am not sure it is so far removed from this. It is cold, clinical, and random compared to messy, brutal, and targeted, but some engineers sat down and wrote code that said “when we detect a life-threatening emergency and need to stop immediately, instead keep going”

All of the stuff about how the computer didn’t have proper categorization for someone walking a bike, or whatever is all true, and those are legitimate “bugs”. Testing in that situation is reckless but probably not premeditated. That confusion took up much of the 5 seconds before impact.
However, 1.1 seconds or so before impact, the self driving computer decided that an emergency stop was needed. However, due to false positives and an immanent executive demo they added an unconditional 1 second wait before reacting to emergencies, so the car only started braking 0.1 seconds before impact. Even with the confusion, that 1 second was likely the difference between a low speed non-fatal crash and what happened.

Furthermore, the vehicle in question had a factory installed emergency automatic braking system provided by Volvo which was also disabled and also would have prevented the fatal crash.

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“can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, am i right?” :unamused:

…clearly not everyone values human life the same way.

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This makes it sound a lot like Uber knew that their autonomous car would probably kill someone before it killed someone like basically every single person knowledgeable about traffic safety said they would.

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History is full of examples when the majority were wrong, yet the correct idea prevailed eventually anyway. I frequently hear this lament of how wrong folks are, as if thats some kind of veto. As if Democracy meant plodding along at the pace of the most common opinion.

This is a stopgap alibi, cooked up by those who prefer to not be held accountable for their power.

Just because the scale gives sharp, readable numbers, doesnt mean we have to rely on it. Especially when theres a finger pressing it down. Democracy is about best interests of the people, not facebook likes.

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I’m not saying it’s a veto. I’m pointing out a sad fact of life, one that will take real work to overcome.

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I’m not sure Uber is that subtle. They hired Levandowski of “I’m pissed we didn’t have the first death" fame(also carrying a bit fat trove of stolen IP to bolster their R&D efforts, which helped).

There isn’t an obvious business case for bonesawing a guy to death, so they are presumably not for it; but they were, at a minimum, more enthusiastic than average about the can’t-disrupt-an-omelette-without-breaking-a-few-irrelevant-poors dynamic than average. Normally one is supposed to deny it, or at least emulate non-actionable sadness at the concept; rather than revel in it.

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Pretty sure they darkened down the video they released to make it look like the pedestrian lost in the gloom.

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One has to wonder what sort of grim depths of ruthlessness exist to be plumbed in anyone who would try the “He that has not tortured and eviscerated an inconvenient journalist among you, let him cast the first stone” defense.

Especially when the only ‘mistake’, as so often the case among the great and good, appears to have been getting caught; not the whole dispatch-15-man-hit-squad part.

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Well, yeah, I mean, everybody commits the occasional “oopsie” like intentionally subverting the regulatory framework of every market you operate in, creating a workplace culture so toxic even Bay Area tech bros quietly wave one another off from considering an offer there, or kidnapping, torturing and murdering a politically inconvenient journalist then chopping up his body and tossing him down a well. I know I have. In the immortal words of Bob Morton, “that’s life in the big city.”

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