13 ms·

How Driverless Cars May Interact with People

28 points by pavornyoh 10y ago

Animats 10y ago
Cars have body language. Small moves are useful, such as edging towards the side of a lane to indicate a turn. Edging towards a crosswalk where pedestrians are crossing against a signal will probably be necessary in some cities. Google already does some of this. This is probably more useful than adding indicators and signs.
- greeneggs 10y ago
  Yes, except regulating car "body language" is harder than regulating indicators and signs. Since it is easy to regulate indicators, I think they are inevitable.
dsl 10y ago
I have always described self driving cars as the ultimate test of the the Trolley problem [1]. Does a self driving car have an obligation to protect the occupant at the risk of pedestrians? vice versa? What if the pedestrian or occupant is a Google executive? EDIT: Apparently MIT has turned this whole line of thinking into an app where they collect a consensus on what a machine should decide: http://moralmachine.mit.edu/ http://moralmachine.mit.edu/ 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
- gene-h 10y ago
  These trolley problems make the assumption that the car can perfectly distinguish pedestrians from other obstacles, however, in the real world this will probably not be the case. It is difficult for self driving cars to distinguish pedestrians from a bunch of realistic cardboard cutouts(image recognition fails), mannequins(point cloud matching fails), a street level animated billboard(motion recognition fails), a herd of moose(thermographic recognition fails), or random noise. If one takes the fact that the problem is partially observable into account, many of these moral issues disappear. We can control the environment inside the car making it easier to be certain that a human is inside. Because the car is certain that it contains a human, and less certain that it is running into humans, it should take actions to preserve the life of the occupant.
  - douche 10y ago
    If there is one thing I want to make sure my self-driving car has hard-coded in as its Fourth Law of Robotics, it is "Do not hit a moose!" It's a great way to die gruesomely if you are driving anything smaller than a dump truck.
- thatswrong0 10y ago
  I don't think this is a question: I wouldn't get in a self-driving car unless protecting my safety was its number one priority.
  - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    The problem is, if it's a cloud connected car, or an artificially intelligent car, or even just a closed source car... how can you know if your car is going to decide to protect you over someone else?
    - thatswrong0 10y ago
      I think the incentives are aligned for companies to try their best to provide this for their users. If even one fatal accident is documented where the car valued the lives of others over the passenger of the car, people would switch car providers.
    - mhb 10y ago
      Contracts? Testing?
  - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
    Would you want your car to prioritise saving just you over saving two random children? Say your car detects a high speed head-on collision with another non-autonomous car is imminent, your car detects one adult and two children in the other car, and it determines it can only avoid collision by ditching your car, risking your life. What should it do? There is plenty evidence that many adults will sacrifice their life to save children.
    - thatswrong0 10y ago
      Whatever results in me having the highest chances of survival.
      - the8472 10y ago
- bryanlarsen 10y ago
  There's another article prominently linked from the OP titled '5 Things that Give Self-Driving Cars Headaches". The trolley problem is #5, and it's described as having 'no solution', yet it has the simplest solution: slow down. If you're ever in a situation where it's possible for a child to jump in front of your car and you are not able to stop in less than a car length or at most two, you were driving too fast. And if you're driving slow enough to stop that quickly, it doesn't matter what the car does, it's not going to kill anybody.
  - zingermc 10y ago
    This is an extreme case, but if the policy is to slow down and/or stop, then that can be manipulated. Imagine your car takes you through a bad part of town and a group of people want to rob you -- they just have to stand in the car's path and it will stop. It feels weird saying this, but there is a sort of physical threat that being behind the wheel gives you.
    - stcredzero 10y ago
      That's not weird. As a driver of a car, you control much more destructive and lethal potential than someone with a 9mm handgun. (You can even quantify that in terms of kinetic energy.)
    - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
      In certain places (big cities in Brazil come to mind, maybe even some places in the US?) it is customary to ignore certain red traffic lights at night because stopping there is very likely to get you carjacked. I'd like to see the autonomous car that can do that correctly and safely. Same goes for when the lights at a junction are out of service. How will an AI handle that? In general, proper autonomous cars are going to need a shit-ton of data collection at a very fine level everywhere. Together with the required sensor suite, the cost increase over a normal car in the same class is going to be huge. I'm not talking 20%, I'm talking at least twice as expensive. This is why I think Ford are making exactly the right bet: taxi companies will adopt driverless cars many years, even decades, before private drivers. Because a taxi company saves a lot of money on not having any drivers (I'm guessing not far from 100-150k per year per car) on an autonomous car, they could easily afford to pay $150k for a Ford Fusion (normally $30k).
- SilasX 10y ago
  I think, in practice, SDCs will be programmed with a slight preference against saving the driver (including favoritism toward passengers). This is because they will have made an agreement with the driver in advance, and have a known quantity to pay in case of collision death, while amount they have to pay out for other random people will be less predictable [1] and err on the high side since they're so deep-pocketed. This matches my intuition on the trolley problem, which is that you have to factor in the "non-involvement" of the guy not on the tracks -- he should count as more than one person because he did not deliberately take on the risks of crossing an active track. Ditto for diverting the trolley off the track into a random person's house. But such people aren't worth infinitely more either: you should probably divert a terrorist nuke from an urban area to a sparsely-populated desert, even though the hermits might have deliberately chosen the desert because it was an unlikely terrorist target. [1] Assuming governments don't legislate specific damage caps
- okwhatthe2 10y ago
  Athens voted to kill Socrates.
stcredzero 10y ago
As a pedestrian, eye contact is very important to my interaction with drivers. If cars become truly driverless, will we then see psople behind the driver's seat reading books? Will pedestrians fall out of the habit of establishing eye contact with drivers? Might there be a way for cars to signal that they're "looking at" a pedestrian? (Half joke: What if all driverless cars had to have a red "cyclon eye" in the middle of the front of the car?)
- monk_e_boy 10y ago
  I like to keep a record of 'How will AI do this?' as part of my driving day. Today I drove down a road that had parked cars blocking one lane. Half way down a rubbish collection lorry came round the corner. He couldn't go back, and nor could I due to the cars behind me. We rolled down our windows and shouted instructions at each other as he inched back a little and I bumped up the pavement and drove half past him, then he jiggled forward a little to let me past. How is AI ever going to do that?
  - Symbiote 10y ago
    The cars behind you could easily reverse, if they were computer controlled. As could the bin lorry.
    - monk_e_boy 10y ago
      Where I live we're still driving second hand ten to twenty year old cars. Even if the rich people buy AI cars now we won't own them for many years. I was talking with a bunch of mates the other day asking who'd ever owned a new car. Only one of them had once, and it was a company car. We're all in our late 40s. I think it's the transition period of a few AI cars and the majority human driven that will be the fun period.
  - inimino 10y ago
    Such occurrences are perfectly commonplace in China. It's going to be a tougher environment for autonomous cars as the driving is much less restricted by adherence to any particular set of arbitrary rules and requires a lot more flexibility.

28 points by pavornyoh 10y ago

Cars have body language. Small moves are useful, such as edging towards the side of a lane to indicate a turn. Edging towards a crosswalk where pedestrians are crossing against a signal will probably be necessary in some cities. Google already does some of this. This is probably more useful than adding indicators and signs.

greeneggs 10y ago
Yes, except regulating car "body language" is harder than regulating indicators and signs. Since it is easy to regulate indicators, I think they are inevitable.

dsl 10y ago

I have always described self driving cars as the ultimate test of the the Trolley problem [1]. Does a self driving car have an obligation to protect the occupant at the risk of pedestrians? vice versa? What if the pedestrian or occupant is a Google executive? EDIT: Apparently MIT has turned this whole line of thinking into an app where they collect a consensus on what a machine should decide: http://moralmachine.mit.edu/ http://moralmachine.mit.edu/ 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

gene-h 10y ago
These trolley problems make the assumption that the car can perfectly distinguish pedestrians from other obstacles, however, in the real world this will probably not be the case. It is difficult for self driving cars to distinguish pedestrians from a bunch of realistic cardboard cutouts(image recognition fails), mannequins(point cloud matching fails), a street level animated billboard(motion recognition fails), a herd of moose(thermographic recognition fails), or random noise. If one takes the fact that the problem is partially observable into account, many of these moral issues disappear. We can control the environment inside the car making it easier to be certain that a human is inside. Because the car is certain that it contains a human, and less certain that it is running into humans, it should take actions to preserve the life of the occupant.
- douche 10y ago
  If there is one thing I want to make sure my self-driving car has hard-coded in as its Fourth Law of Robotics, it is "Do not hit a moose!" It's a great way to die gruesomely if you are driving anything smaller than a dump truck.
thatswrong0 10y ago
I don't think this is a question: I wouldn't get in a self-driving car unless protecting my safety was its number one priority.
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  The problem is, if it's a cloud connected car, or an artificially intelligent car, or even just a closed source car... how can you know if your car is going to decide to protect you over someone else?
  - thatswrong0 10y ago
    I think the incentives are aligned for companies to try their best to provide this for their users. If even one fatal accident is documented where the car valued the lives of others over the passenger of the car, people would switch car providers.
  - mhb 10y ago
    Contracts? Testing?
- semi-extrinsic 10y ago
  Would you want your car to prioritise saving just you over saving two random children? Say your car detects a high speed head-on collision with another non-autonomous car is imminent, your car detects one adult and two children in the other car, and it determines it can only avoid collision by ditching your car, risking your life. What should it do? There is plenty evidence that many adults will sacrifice their life to save children.
  - thatswrong0 10y ago
    Whatever results in me having the highest chances of survival.
    - the8472 10y ago
bryanlarsen 10y ago
There's another article prominently linked from the OP titled '5 Things that Give Self-Driving Cars Headaches". The trolley problem is #5, and it's described as having 'no solution', yet it has the simplest solution: slow down. If you're ever in a situation where it's possible for a child to jump in front of your car and you are not able to stop in less than a car length or at most two, you were driving too fast. And if you're driving slow enough to stop that quickly, it doesn't matter what the car does, it's not going to kill anybody.
- zingermc 10y ago
  This is an extreme case, but if the policy is to slow down and/or stop, then that can be manipulated. Imagine your car takes you through a bad part of town and a group of people want to rob you -- they just have to stand in the car's path and it will stop. It feels weird saying this, but there is a sort of physical threat that being behind the wheel gives you.
  - stcredzero 10y ago
    That's not weird. As a driver of a car, you control much more destructive and lethal potential than someone with a 9mm handgun. (You can even quantify that in terms of kinetic energy.)
  - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
    In certain places (big cities in Brazil come to mind, maybe even some places in the US?) it is customary to ignore certain red traffic lights at night because stopping there is very likely to get you carjacked. I'd like to see the autonomous car that can do that correctly and safely. Same goes for when the lights at a junction are out of service. How will an AI handle that? In general, proper autonomous cars are going to need a shit-ton of data collection at a very fine level everywhere. Together with the required sensor suite, the cost increase over a normal car in the same class is going to be huge. I'm not talking 20%, I'm talking at least twice as expensive. This is why I think Ford are making exactly the right bet: taxi companies will adopt driverless cars many years, even decades, before private drivers. Because a taxi company saves a lot of money on not having any drivers (I'm guessing not far from 100-150k per year per car) on an autonomous car, they could easily afford to pay $150k for a Ford Fusion (normally $30k).
SilasX 10y ago
I think, in practice, SDCs will be programmed with a slight preference against saving the driver (including favoritism toward passengers). This is because they will have made an agreement with the driver in advance, and have a known quantity to pay in case of collision death, while amount they have to pay out for other random people will be less predictable [1] and err on the high side since they're so deep-pocketed. This matches my intuition on the trolley problem, which is that you have to factor in the "non-involvement" of the guy not on the tracks -- he should count as more than one person because he did not deliberately take on the risks of crossing an active track. Ditto for diverting the trolley off the track into a random person's house. But such people aren't worth infinitely more either: you should probably divert a terrorist nuke from an urban area to a sparsely-populated desert, even though the hermits might have deliberately chosen the desert because it was an unlikely terrorist target. [1] Assuming governments don't legislate specific damage caps
okwhatthe2 10y ago
Athens voted to kill Socrates.

stcredzero 10y ago

As a pedestrian, eye contact is very important to my interaction with drivers. If cars become truly driverless, will we then see psople behind the driver's seat reading books? Will pedestrians fall out of the habit of establishing eye contact with drivers? Might there be a way for cars to signal that they're "looking at" a pedestrian? (Half joke: What if all driverless cars had to have a red "cyclon eye" in the middle of the front of the car?)

monk_e_boy 10y ago
I like to keep a record of 'How will AI do this?' as part of my driving day. Today I drove down a road that had parked cars blocking one lane. Half way down a rubbish collection lorry came round the corner. He couldn't go back, and nor could I due to the cars behind me. We rolled down our windows and shouted instructions at each other as he inched back a little and I bumped up the pavement and drove half past him, then he jiggled forward a little to let me past. How is AI ever going to do that?
- Symbiote 10y ago
  The cars behind you could easily reverse, if they were computer controlled. As could the bin lorry.
  - monk_e_boy 10y ago
    Where I live we're still driving second hand ten to twenty year old cars. Even if the rich people buy AI cars now we won't own them for many years. I was talking with a bunch of mates the other day asking who'd ever owned a new car. Only one of them had once, and it was a company car. We're all in our late 40s. I think it's the transition period of a few AI cars and the majority human driven that will be the fun period.
- inimino 10y ago
  Such occurrences are perfectly commonplace in China. It's going to be a tougher environment for autonomous cars as the driving is much less restricted by adherence to any particular set of arbitrary rules and requires a lot more flexibility.