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Let's be honest, humans are pretty bad at driving in snow too. Sure, but most human drivers can call upon a wealth of experience both with driving and interact

Let's be honest, humans are pretty bad at driving in snow too. Sure, but most human drivers can call upon a wealth of experience both with driving and interacting with the physical world in general. They have an incredibly rich mental model, allowing for adaptations that would be risky or impossible to program into an autonomous driver. For example, when lane lines are missing or obscured, human drivers will often follow the car in front of them... unless they observe erratic behavior that might indicate the driver ahead has lost control. What's "erratic behavior" is a judgement I wouldn't expect near-future software to be particularly good at. Of course, there are areas like reaction time and feedback-based control where autonomous drivers will always be vastly superior to human ones. Which is why it seems to me that the safest option in the medium term is likely to be (as it is today) an increasingly software-assisted human driver. This is the primary reason I'm down on the chances for wide adoption of fully (or mostly) autonomous drivers in the next 5-10 years: Human + computer will be a safer, more reliable alternative. The active participation of the human will fall off over time, but I think it will be a much flatter curve than many enthusiasts expect.

jerf 11y ago
"Human + computer will be a safer, more reliable alternative." Unfortunately, there's a cliff where if you aren't stimulating the human enough, they stop paying attention. They can't help it. Their neural architecture is fundamentally structured to do that and merely trying not to isn't going to cut it. We can't have automated cars that 98% drive autonomously but beep when they need help, right now. This could work if the car can reliably predict when it is going to need help in 10+ seconds, but I'm not sure that's practical. (Which I phrase that way on purpose... maybe it is. I'm just not sure. Would certainly take a lot of work and some very conservative automated driving.)
- seanp2k2 11y ago
  To be able to know that it's doing something wrong or mis-reading things would require some deeper understanding of what it's doing (or at least a confidence score or similar). This is why it'd likely be important for s human to be overseeing it 100% of the time, to step in and swiftly make a manual override when the autonomy doesn't realize it's about to do something stupid.
  - ghaff 11y ago
    A lot of people don't really oversee their car's driving 100% of the time today because they're fiddling with their phones or whatever. It's completely unrealistic to expect that anyone will actively monitor their environment if there's an autopilot that works reliably the vast majority of the time. Just won't/can't happen--and has been shown in research. Indeed, why would I even want a fully autonomous driving system if I have to drive the car anyway?
zanny 11y ago
> call upon a wealth of experience both with driving and interacting with the physical world in general. > a judgement I wouldn't expect near-future software to be particularly good at. Its going to take a fleet of a ten thousand self driving cars a week to have driving experience equal any person alive. Thats why Google / et al are putting millions of miles of data into these logic engines before they even attempt to sell them.

jerf 11y ago

"Human + computer will be a safer, more reliable alternative." Unfortunately, there's a cliff where if you aren't stimulating the human enough, they stop paying attention. They can't help it. Their neural architecture is fundamentally structured to do that and merely trying not to isn't going to cut it. We can't have automated cars that 98% drive autonomously but beep when they need help, right now. This could work if the car can reliably predict when it is going to need help in 10+ seconds, but I'm not sure that's practical. (Which I phrase that way on purpose... maybe it is. I'm just not sure. Would certainly take a lot of work and some very conservative automated driving.)

seanp2k2 11y ago
To be able to know that it's doing something wrong or mis-reading things would require some deeper understanding of what it's doing (or at least a confidence score or similar). This is why it'd likely be important for s human to be overseeing it 100% of the time, to step in and swiftly make a manual override when the autonomy doesn't realize it's about to do something stupid.
- ghaff 11y ago
  A lot of people don't really oversee their car's driving 100% of the time today because they're fiddling with their phones or whatever. It's completely unrealistic to expect that anyone will actively monitor their environment if there's an autopilot that works reliably the vast majority of the time. Just won't/can't happen--and has been shown in research. Indeed, why would I even want a fully autonomous driving system if I have to drive the car anyway?

zanny 11y ago

> call upon a wealth of experience both with driving and interacting with the physical world in general. > a judgement I wouldn't expect near-future software to be particularly good at. Its going to take a fleet of a ten thousand self driving cars a week to have driving experience equal any person alive. Thats why Google / et al are putting millions of miles of data into these logic engines before they even attempt to sell them.