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"before such technology is allowed to operate without humans in direct control." On the strength of her research, Cummings was appointed to thefans reacted with their usual equanimity and sense of perspective, by which I mean they absolutely lost it.
It turns out that serving in the Navy is a very good way to train for inbound ire from Muskovites. In her 1999 memoir,"Nest," Cummings recalls how she loved flying jets, and says the excitement of getting catapulted off an aircraft carrier — or landing on one — 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't qualified to fly fighters simply because she was a woman.
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 —"sociotechnical," as she puts it. What she calls the"hypermasculine culture in Silicon Valley" intertwines with Big Tech's mission statement to"move fast and break things." Both bro culture and a disruptive mindset, as she sees it, incentivize companies to gloss over safety risks.
Cummings responded in kind."I'd 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," So who's right: Cummings, or the self-driven men of Waymo and Cruise and Tesla? It's hard to tell, for a simple reason: The data on the safety of robot cars sucks. 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.
Other experts also discount Cruise's claims, coming as they do from folks who are incentivized to welcome our new robot overlords."If we were to believe the numbers Cruise is putting out there for ride-hailing drivers, those drivers would be having on average two crashes per year," says Steven Shladover, a research engineer at UC Berkeley's Institute of Transportation Studies."How many drivers have two crashes every year? That is pretty extreme.
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