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Happens all the time with autonomous driving. I've heard so many people argue that self-driving cars need to be 100% perfect, but they always overlook that huma

Happens all the time with autonomous driving. I've heard so many people argue that self-driving cars need to be 100% perfect, but they always overlook that humans aren't anywhere near 100% perfect drivers. Frankly, we're lousy drivers.

M_Grey 10y ago
That's the point though... people who want 100% perfect automation have no leg to stand on when presented with a more reliable option than a human. That's not the case with speech recognition yet, and I'd say as a result people would be well justified in demanding at least as much capability as they're capable of themselves.
- taneq 10y ago
  Really? I expect there to be huge resistance to driverless cars (at first) as people come up with crazy scenarios in which they're certain that their own elite driving skills could save them but the car could not. Then there'll be a reversal as people start to actually accept that the car is a better driver than they are, and surprisingly quickly they'll start saying anyone who wants to drive manually is a dangerous egotist.
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    Maybe, but the "upside" of humans being such terrible drivers is that we've almost all either gotten into a bad accident, or know someone close who has. The fact that it's not going to be hard to empirically prove a difference between machine reliability in this case, and human reliability may help as well. Unfortunately... I think the big issue is going to be pure anxiety; a bigger and more immediate form of what a lot of people experience on an airplane. Giving up even the illusion of control is supremely hard for us as a species, in general. Then there's just the fact that as a species we're terrible at risk assessment. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/11/perceived_risk_2.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/11/perceived_ris...
jmde 10y ago
I agree with your general sentiment, but think those error rates hide a lot as well. Human error might be at x% overall, but when you eliminate malfunctioning humans, broadly defined, it's probably much lower than x%. The recent death of the Tesla owner, for example, as far as I know, was due to the vehicle accelerating into a semi. This is something that most people would not do even in their worst driving state unless they were intoxicated or seriously mentally impaired. I don't want AI driving errors to be compared to human benchmarks that include people who are seriously intoxicated. A lot of speech frustration problems, similarly, are not only about poor recognition in general, or lack of appropriate prompting to increase classification certainty, but recognition failures in situations where a human would not have any trouble at all, such as in recognizing names of loved ones, or things that would be clear in context to a human. I.e., maybe humans listening to speech corpora would have x% error rate, but that's strangers listening to the corpora. The real question is, if I listen to a recording of my spouse or coworker having a conversation what's the error rate there? So, although humans are far from perfect, which is something that's often forgotten, the true AI target is also probably not "humans broadly defined" but rather "functional humans" or something like that. AI research often sets the bar misleadingly low because it's so hard to reach as it is.
- greglindahl 10y ago
  Sorry, but did you get the Tesla story right? The Tesla driver was not paying attention, and the car drove at constant speed into an obstacle of the sort that it is known to not be able to see. I know people are posting all kinds of things on the Internet and HN about this accident, but that doesn't make it true. If an actual self-driving car did the same thing, you'd have a great example. But not this one.
- Hondor 10y ago
  The types of mistakes a human and a car are prone to making are different. Neither one has to be a superset of the other. For example, cars are probably better at going round corners at a safe speed while humans can easily misjudge and end up skidding. You could make the opposite argument and say only the most malfunctioning self driving car would choose the wrong speed for a corner yet humans make that error all the time, so humans are even worse than the worst self-driving cars. Another example. If a self driving car is hit by another car that's running a red light while speeding, we might be more forgiving and say "well nobody could have avoided that accident" but actually we'd be being too soft on the self driving car since it has access to more data and faster reaction times and should probably be expected to avoid that type of crash even when a human can't.
pps43 10y ago
On the flip side a large percentage of human drivers is unlikely to suddenly run into the nearest stationary object because of the botched software update.
- drspacemonkey 10y ago
  True, but they often run into the nearest stationary object because they're texting, or eating, or putting on makeup (an ex-gf of mine caused TWO accidents that way), or arguing with a passenger, or speeding, or driving tired after a long day of work, or driving after having a few beers but I'm totally fine I swear I'm cool to drive home, etc... You're absolutely right that there are risks. But honestly, I suspect drunk drivers alone cause more fatal accidents than autonomous cars ever could.
YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
Sorry, what is this based on? I for one don't like the idea of self-driving cars and that has nothing to do with wanting them to be "100% perfect", or forgetting that human drivers are not safe either. On the one hand, there are very good ethical arguments, for example about who bears the moral responsibility when a self-driving car is involved in a fatal accident. Further, there is a great risk that self-driving cars will become available long before they are advanced enough to be less of a risk than humans, exactly because people may implicitly trust an automated system to be less error-prone than a human, which is not currently the state of the art.
- drspacemonkey 10y ago
  >Sorry, what is this based on? Conversations I've had where people have told me that self-driving cars will need to be 100% perfect before they should be used. Ironically, one of those people was an ex-gf of mine who caused two car accidents because she was putting on makeup while driving. Anyway, based on Google's extensive test results, I'm pretty sure self-driving cars are already advanced enough to be less of a risk than humans. Right now, the sensors seem to be the limiting the factor.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
    Try looking for results where the Google car is driving off-road. There aren't any. That's because it can't drive off-road. It can't, because it needs its environment to be fully mapped. In other words: it's not about the sensors. This should make, er, sense. Sensing your surroundings is only the first step in taking complex decisions based on those surroundings. The AI field as a whole has not yet solved this, so there's no reason to expect that self-driving cars have. Seen another way, if self-driving cars could really drive themselves at least as good as humans drive them, we wouldn't have compilations of videos of robots falling off while trying to turn door knobs, on youtube. The state of the art in AI is such that self-driving cars are not yet less dangerous than humans. >> an ex-gf of mine who caused two car accidents because she was putting on makeup while driving. Honestly.
    - 10y ago

M_Grey 10y ago

That's the point though... people who want 100% perfect automation have no leg to stand on when presented with a more reliable option than a human. That's not the case with speech recognition yet, and I'd say as a result people would be well justified in demanding at least as much capability as they're capable of themselves.

taneq 10y ago
Really? I expect there to be huge resistance to driverless cars (at first) as people come up with crazy scenarios in which they're certain that their own elite driving skills could save them but the car could not. Then there'll be a reversal as people start to actually accept that the car is a better driver than they are, and surprisingly quickly they'll start saying anyone who wants to drive manually is a dangerous egotist.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  Maybe, but the "upside" of humans being such terrible drivers is that we've almost all either gotten into a bad accident, or know someone close who has. The fact that it's not going to be hard to empirically prove a difference between machine reliability in this case, and human reliability may help as well. Unfortunately... I think the big issue is going to be pure anxiety; a bigger and more immediate form of what a lot of people experience on an airplane. Giving up even the illusion of control is supremely hard for us as a species, in general. Then there's just the fact that as a species we're terrible at risk assessment. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/11/perceived_risk_2.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/11/perceived_ris...

jmde 10y ago

I agree with your general sentiment, but think those error rates hide a lot as well. Human error might be at x% overall, but when you eliminate malfunctioning humans, broadly defined, it's probably much lower than x%. The recent death of the Tesla owner, for example, as far as I know, was due to the vehicle accelerating into a semi. This is something that most people would not do even in their worst driving state unless they were intoxicated or seriously mentally impaired. I don't want AI driving errors to be compared to human benchmarks that include people who are seriously intoxicated. A lot of speech frustration problems, similarly, are not only about poor recognition in general, or lack of appropriate prompting to increase classification certainty, but recognition failures in situations where a human would not have any trouble at all, such as in recognizing names of loved ones, or things that would be clear in context to a human. I.e., maybe humans listening to speech corpora would have x% error rate, but that's strangers listening to the corpora. The real question is, if I listen to a recording of my spouse or coworker having a conversation what's the error rate there? So, although humans are far from perfect, which is something that's often forgotten, the true AI target is also probably not "humans broadly defined" but rather "functional humans" or something like that. AI research often sets the bar misleadingly low because it's so hard to reach as it is.

greglindahl 10y ago
Sorry, but did you get the Tesla story right? The Tesla driver was not paying attention, and the car drove at constant speed into an obstacle of the sort that it is known to not be able to see. I know people are posting all kinds of things on the Internet and HN about this accident, but that doesn't make it true. If an actual self-driving car did the same thing, you'd have a great example. But not this one.
Hondor 10y ago
The types of mistakes a human and a car are prone to making are different. Neither one has to be a superset of the other. For example, cars are probably better at going round corners at a safe speed while humans can easily misjudge and end up skidding. You could make the opposite argument and say only the most malfunctioning self driving car would choose the wrong speed for a corner yet humans make that error all the time, so humans are even worse than the worst self-driving cars. Another example. If a self driving car is hit by another car that's running a red light while speeding, we might be more forgiving and say "well nobody could have avoided that accident" but actually we'd be being too soft on the self driving car since it has access to more data and faster reaction times and should probably be expected to avoid that type of crash even when a human can't.

pps43 10y ago

On the flip side a large percentage of human drivers is unlikely to suddenly run into the nearest stationary object because of the botched software update.

drspacemonkey 10y ago
True, but they often run into the nearest stationary object because they're texting, or eating, or putting on makeup (an ex-gf of mine caused TWO accidents that way), or arguing with a passenger, or speeding, or driving tired after a long day of work, or driving after having a few beers but I'm totally fine I swear I'm cool to drive home, etc... You're absolutely right that there are risks. But honestly, I suspect drunk drivers alone cause more fatal accidents than autonomous cars ever could.

YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago

Sorry, what is this based on? I for one don't like the idea of self-driving cars and that has nothing to do with wanting them to be "100% perfect", or forgetting that human drivers are not safe either. On the one hand, there are very good ethical arguments, for example about who bears the moral responsibility when a self-driving car is involved in a fatal accident. Further, there is a great risk that self-driving cars will become available long before they are advanced enough to be less of a risk than humans, exactly because people may implicitly trust an automated system to be less error-prone than a human, which is not currently the state of the art.

drspacemonkey 10y ago
>Sorry, what is this based on? Conversations I've had where people have told me that self-driving cars will need to be 100% perfect before they should be used. Ironically, one of those people was an ex-gf of mine who caused two car accidents because she was putting on makeup while driving. Anyway, based on Google's extensive test results, I'm pretty sure self-driving cars are already advanced enough to be less of a risk than humans. Right now, the sensors seem to be the limiting the factor.
- YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
  Try looking for results where the Google car is driving off-road. There aren't any. That's because it can't drive off-road. It can't, because it needs its environment to be fully mapped. In other words: it's not about the sensors. This should make, er, sense. Sensing your surroundings is only the first step in taking complex decisions based on those surroundings. The AI field as a whole has not yet solved this, so there's no reason to expect that self-driving cars have. Seen another way, if self-driving cars could really drive themselves at least as good as humans drive them, we wouldn't have compilations of videos of robots falling off while trying to turn door knobs, on youtube. The state of the art in AI is such that self-driving cars are not yet less dangerous than humans. >> an ex-gf of mine who caused two car accidents because she was putting on makeup while driving. Honestly.
  - 10y ago