9 ms·

You've hit the nail on the head - audio recognition is quite poor after (a lot of) concerted effort over decades. Driving a car safely is significantly more di

You've hit the nail on the head - audio recognition is quite poor after (a lot of) concerted effort over decades. Driving a car safely is significantly more difficult (and dangerous). That being said, Toyota's (and Subaru's) approach is the smart way forward - add sensors and capabilities that augment the human, but leave the human always responsible and in control. In order for a crash to happen, the human AND the machine BOTH have to miss it. Once the machine is good enough (and we figure out what "good enough" means), then it can take over driving. But not before.

jason_pomerleau 9y ago
Once the machines are better than humans at a macro level, insurance companies will notice, and I think this will cause widespread adoption pretty quickly.
- deleted 9y ago
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- lern_too_spel 9y ago
  California allows drivers to self-insure. The existing auto insurers are going to lose that business to automated taxi fleets.
- strebler 9y ago
  This has already started - look up the discount some insurers give to owners of Subarus that are equipped with EyeSight. The numbers show their collision avoidance is making roads safer. Also, interesting fact: Subaru is achieving these impressive stats using stereo vision, not lidar.
  - dboreham 9y ago
    I recently bought a Subaru, and I agree. However, this is in no way at all related to "self driving cars" (which don't actually exist and therefore nobody knows how the insurance companies and general public will react to the liability/safety/skin-in-the-game issues).
- tspike 9y ago
  Folks are glossing over this quote too easily: > “Historically human beings have shown zero tolerance for injury or death caused by flaws in a machine,” It doesn't matter if it's objectively safer; people have no issue doing dangerous things so long as they can maintain the illusion of control.
  - Retric 9y ago
    I don' think that's true in terms of transportation systems. In terms of cars: Streets where built for people or animals walking on them and cars quickly started killing large numbers of people. The response was not to make cars safer by say physically limiting them to 10 MPH, but to remove people from streets. A fairly high fraction of early aviators where killed, that did little to slow adoption of aircraft. Astronaut deaths where sadly common, but also expected and did little to slow progress.
    - zip1234 9y ago
      Cost/benefit--if the rewards are judged to outweigh the risks and there is a clear benefit, people will adopt it. If money/time can be saved, it will be very popular.
    - vertex-four 9y ago
      > The response was not to make cars safer by say physically limiting them to 10 MPH Umm, reasonably sure that implementing a legal speed limit was an initial response, in the UK at least. It took a number of years (and likely a lot of propaganda, though I haven't looked that closely into it and history is, of course, written by the victors) to allow motorcars to use roads at anything close to a reasonable speed. Check wikipedia out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limit#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limit#History
      - Retric 9y ago
        I am referring to a governor which would prevent cars from being capable of 10MPH even on empty roads. Actual in town speed limits would presumably be lower. Now, with our infrastructure that seems like a huge issue, but cites used to be built for walking and even small towns simply had vastly higher density. Watch this and suddenly those mentioned speed limits are completely reasonable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=954L9MpfCEo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=954L9MpfCEo Note, 10MPH would allow for 2-3x the speed of a horse over long distances. So, in this alternate history cars would still have been very useful.
- brudgers 9y ago
  The scenario in which insurance companies drive adoption of self driving cars depends upon insurance companies accepting the risk of system failure due to manufacturing defects or limitations that generate the wrong response in particular conditions.
  - gaius 9y ago
    Indeed. You aren't insuring one driver anymore, you're insuring a million instances of the same algo.
kajecounterhack 9y ago
I don't know by what metrics you're making these comparisons. Audio recognition and self-driving vehicles are apples and oranges. Autonomous driving is difficult primarily because of a changing world and low tolerance for mistakes. The state space of situations you're trying to map is just large. It will take time. But it's not even close to impossible. Audio recognition is difficult for a different reason: language is difficult to disambiguate without context. So today the limits of our audio recognition bump up against knowing the context of words you're saying. It used to be the case that audio recognition had fundamental difficulties e.g at word boundaries but those challenges are mostly solved. Some of these challenges might not be solved without improvements in areas outside of the raw listening part of ASR. > That being said, Toyota's (and Subaru's) approach is the smart way forward - add sensors and capabilities that augment the human, but leave the human always responsible and in control. In order for a crash to happen, the human AND the machine BOTH have to miss it. This is your opinion. Folks at some other companies (e.g waymo) don't think this makes you safer. Human attention might not work the way you think it does.
- kpil 9y ago
  I think that audio recognition is an order of magnitude less complicated than fully autonomous driving. The world is fully contextless outside the road to an not-even-at-insect-level brain driving two tons of metal, and anything can happen. Voice recognition is getting just barely tolerable. If you have tried to do something important using voice recognition you'd probably go bat shit crazy after a while. If it had the potential to kill people no sane human would allow it.
  - sol_remmy 9y ago
    Voice recognition also has a lot less market demand than self driving cars. Technology can be invented that is decades ahead of other fields if enough money is invested. That is why I think self-driving cars and voice recognition are not comparable problems.
    - LrnByTeach 9y ago
Animats 9y ago
That being said, Toyota's (and Subaru's) approach is the smart way forward - add sensors and capabilities that augment the human, but leave the human always responsible and in control. In order for a crash to happen, the human AND the machine BOTH have to miss it. That's the approach we know won't work. That was Tesla's first-round autopilot, the self-crashing car. The one that would happily run into obstacles protruding into a lane.[1][2][3] There are two big flaws with that approach. First, if it's good enough that people can tune out, they will tune out. Second, if the driver waits until the self-driving system has clearly made a mistake before taking over, they will be slower at reacting than if they were driving, and may be too late. See especially [3]. Volvo's CEO takes the position that if one of their cars crashes in self-driving mode, it's Volvo's fault. Urmson, while at Google, pointed out the first problem coming up even with their test drivers. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fc0yYJ8-Dyo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fc0yYJ8-Dyo [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvRkSMCDX3o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvRkSMCDX3o [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2ml6sjk_8c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2ml6sjk_8c
- Skunkleton 9y ago
  Perhaps a portion of Tesla's problem was with marketing? Autopilot gives very different cues than something like LKAS (lane keep assist).
  - memnips 9y ago
    And it's also called "Autopilot" which sets an extremely different tone and expectation than other driver-assistance/safety technologies.
    - will_hughes 9y ago
      > And it's also called "Autopilot" which sets an extremely different tone and expectation than other driver-assistance/safety technologies. Only to those not familiar with autopilot systems in aircraft. It's like the use of "hacker" - here on this site it still (probably) has most of it's original meaning. To the rest of the world it means a guy in a ski-mask with a russian/chinese accent who's after your bank account. Unfortunately most of the world thinks pilots in commercial aircraft turn on the autopilot and can then go for a sleep, so when they see "Autopilot" on a Tesla, they think they can do the same.

jason_pomerleau 9y ago

Once the machines are better than humans at a macro level, insurance companies will notice, and I think this will cause widespread adoption pretty quickly.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
lern_too_spel 9y ago
California allows drivers to self-insure. The existing auto insurers are going to lose that business to automated taxi fleets.
strebler 9y ago
This has already started - look up the discount some insurers give to owners of Subarus that are equipped with EyeSight. The numbers show their collision avoidance is making roads safer. Also, interesting fact: Subaru is achieving these impressive stats using stereo vision, not lidar.
- dboreham 9y ago
  I recently bought a Subaru, and I agree. However, this is in no way at all related to "self driving cars" (which don't actually exist and therefore nobody knows how the insurance companies and general public will react to the liability/safety/skin-in-the-game issues).
tspike 9y ago
Folks are glossing over this quote too easily: > “Historically human beings have shown zero tolerance for injury or death caused by flaws in a machine,” It doesn't matter if it's objectively safer; people have no issue doing dangerous things so long as they can maintain the illusion of control.
- Retric 9y ago
  I don' think that's true in terms of transportation systems. In terms of cars: Streets where built for people or animals walking on them and cars quickly started killing large numbers of people. The response was not to make cars safer by say physically limiting them to 10 MPH, but to remove people from streets. A fairly high fraction of early aviators where killed, that did little to slow adoption of aircraft. Astronaut deaths where sadly common, but also expected and did little to slow progress.
  - zip1234 9y ago
    Cost/benefit--if the rewards are judged to outweigh the risks and there is a clear benefit, people will adopt it. If money/time can be saved, it will be very popular.
  - vertex-four 9y ago
    > The response was not to make cars safer by say physically limiting them to 10 MPH Umm, reasonably sure that implementing a legal speed limit was an initial response, in the UK at least. It took a number of years (and likely a lot of propaganda, though I haven't looked that closely into it and history is, of course, written by the victors) to allow motorcars to use roads at anything close to a reasonable speed. Check wikipedia out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limit#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limit#History
    - Retric 9y ago
      I am referring to a governor which would prevent cars from being capable of 10MPH even on empty roads. Actual in town speed limits would presumably be lower. Now, with our infrastructure that seems like a huge issue, but cites used to be built for walking and even small towns simply had vastly higher density. Watch this and suddenly those mentioned speed limits are completely reasonable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=954L9MpfCEo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=954L9MpfCEo Note, 10MPH would allow for 2-3x the speed of a horse over long distances. So, in this alternate history cars would still have been very useful.
brudgers 9y ago
The scenario in which insurance companies drive adoption of self driving cars depends upon insurance companies accepting the risk of system failure due to manufacturing defects or limitations that generate the wrong response in particular conditions.
- gaius 9y ago
  Indeed. You aren't insuring one driver anymore, you're insuring a million instances of the same algo.

kajecounterhack 9y ago

I don't know by what metrics you're making these comparisons. Audio recognition and self-driving vehicles are apples and oranges. Autonomous driving is difficult primarily because of a changing world and low tolerance for mistakes. The state space of situations you're trying to map is just large. It will take time. But it's not even close to impossible. Audio recognition is difficult for a different reason: language is difficult to disambiguate without context. So today the limits of our audio recognition bump up against knowing the context of words you're saying. It used to be the case that audio recognition had fundamental difficulties e.g at word boundaries but those challenges are mostly solved. Some of these challenges might not be solved without improvements in areas outside of the raw listening part of ASR. > That being said, Toyota's (and Subaru's) approach is the smart way forward - add sensors and capabilities that augment the human, but leave the human always responsible and in control. In order for a crash to happen, the human AND the machine BOTH have to miss it. This is your opinion. Folks at some other companies (e.g waymo) don't think this makes you safer. Human attention might not work the way you think it does.

kpil 9y ago
I think that audio recognition is an order of magnitude less complicated than fully autonomous driving. The world is fully contextless outside the road to an not-even-at-insect-level brain driving two tons of metal, and anything can happen. Voice recognition is getting just barely tolerable. If you have tried to do something important using voice recognition you'd probably go bat shit crazy after a while. If it had the potential to kill people no sane human would allow it.
- sol_remmy 9y ago
  Voice recognition also has a lot less market demand than self driving cars. Technology can be invented that is decades ahead of other fields if enough money is invested. That is why I think self-driving cars and voice recognition are not comparable problems.
  - LrnByTeach 9y ago

Animats 9y ago

That being said, Toyota's (and Subaru's) approach is the smart way forward - add sensors and capabilities that augment the human, but leave the human always responsible and in control. In order for a crash to happen, the human AND the machine BOTH have to miss it. That's the approach we know won't work. That was Tesla's first-round autopilot, the self-crashing car. The one that would happily run into obstacles protruding into a lane.[1][2][3] There are two big flaws with that approach. First, if it's good enough that people can tune out, they will tune out. Second, if the driver waits until the self-driving system has clearly made a mistake before taking over, they will be slower at reacting than if they were driving, and may be too late. See especially [3]. Volvo's CEO takes the position that if one of their cars crashes in self-driving mode, it's Volvo's fault. Urmson, while at Google, pointed out the first problem coming up even with their test drivers. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fc0yYJ8-Dyo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fc0yYJ8-Dyo [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvRkSMCDX3o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvRkSMCDX3o [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2ml6sjk_8c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2ml6sjk_8c

Skunkleton 9y ago
Perhaps a portion of Tesla's problem was with marketing? Autopilot gives very different cues than something like LKAS (lane keep assist).
- memnips 9y ago
  And it's also called "Autopilot" which sets an extremely different tone and expectation than other driver-assistance/safety technologies.
  - will_hughes 9y ago
    > And it's also called "Autopilot" which sets an extremely different tone and expectation than other driver-assistance/safety technologies. Only to those not familiar with autopilot systems in aircraft. It's like the use of "hacker" - here on this site it still (probably) has most of it's original meaning. To the rest of the world it means a guy in a ski-mask with a russian/chinese accent who's after your bank account. Unfortunately most of the world thinks pilots in commercial aircraft turn on the autopilot and can then go for a sleep, so when they see "Autopilot" on a Tesla, they think they can do the same.