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I wonder if companies, like Apple, will segment their tech stack to extract areas where one could argue that it’s not ethical to have an intellectual advantage.
by dogruck 9y ago
I wonder if companies, like Apple, will segment their tech stack to extract areas where one could argue that it’s not ethical to have an intellectual advantage. Perhaps pedestrian detection is one such area.
If two autonomous car companies are competing, it makes sense to fight on many feature sets. It feels wrong to compete on “ability to detect a bike rider.”
- malux85 9y agoI like the idea of this, from a practical point of view maybe the first step is sharing datasets ...
- ben_w 9y agoI agree with the sentiment, but the details will contain fractal devils. The most unusual pedestrians contain the most important learning experiences, but are also the most significant from a privacy perspective. Edit: or, to put it another way, you don’t want to find out the hard way your machine vision system just mistook a drunk furry thalidomide victim for a wild coyote, but they might not be too thrilled to be on a database of “freaky humans”.
- Retric 9y agoGoogle shared some of their oddities in the past: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hsr3Fzi5clw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hsr3Fzi5clw (Including a lady in a motorized wheelchair chasing a duck with a broom?) Legally, if you can see it from a car on a public road their is minimal expectations of privacy.
- zaarn 9y agoDepends on your legislation. In Germany you would violate the rights of third parties by filming the road with intentions of sharing it with other third parties while not also making the former third parties unrecognizable (black bar)
- Retric 9y agoI doubt that applies to Moderate resolution LIDAR images which provide ~20 or fewer data points about someones face. https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*vrB0Jrbt4Sjhkw2g_ZOqhA.jpeg https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*vrB0Jrbt4Sjhkw2g_... Might allow you to detect a long beard or very large hat, but don't allow for identification without other evidence.
- hanbura 9y agoThese questions will get very interesting when self-driving car manufacturers try to enter markets outside the US. It is highly desirable to have local training data, but any large enough effort to collect that data looks indistinguishable from mass surveillance. In Western Continental Europe this is bound to conflict with their expectation of privacy in public spaces. Meanwhile Russia and China might not be so thrilled about the USA having LIDAR scans of their entire country
- sxg 9y agoThis is an interesting point. It's in every self-driving vehicle company's best interest to gain public trust in the industry as a whole. A high pedestrian injury/fatality rate from Google's self-driving tech reduces confidence in Apple's tech and the entire idea of self-driving vehicles. The incentives are there for these companies to work together to create highly reliable self-driving tech.
- Eridrus 9y agoI don't think this is completely true. If someone actually has a meaningful advantage in safety, it's in their best interest to publicize that and use it as a wedge between them and the competition. Bonus points if you can use the ensuing backlash of your competitors killing people to write regulations that lock them out of the market. Not necessarily what is best for people, but I don't think their incentives are as aligned as you make it seem.
- dboreham 9y agoWell known from the airline industry decades ago that you just don't talk about safety vs your competitors.
- MrBuddyCasino 9y agoI would expect Volvo to do something like that, and repeat what they once did with the seat belt.
- criddell 9y ago> repeat what they once did with the seat belt Make it standard equipment a decade after competitors offer it as an option?
- oblio 9y agoThey were the first ones to offer a three points safety belt. That was the real breakthrough for consumer cars ;) They also offered the patent for free.
- ajnin 9y agoHistorically competition has been one of the best ways to foster innovation, and as a society achieving a good "ability to detect bikers" is probably something we want in an automatic car. However, it is relatively wasteful since many resources need to be allocated to do the same thing several times. Alternatives could be : 1) deals between companies to not innovate in those specific areas, 2) a workgroup formed by companies working together on that subject 3) a government program to research that specific area.
- gutnor 9y agoThis is actually a field where competition is working as it should: cars are reviewed based on their safety rating which are common in the industry, car insurance is also based on that. The law is also very strong, there are strict road and driving regulation, so there is little chance for externality like "oh yeah, sometimes cyclist die around our car", ... Really looks like the ideal environment to let the private sector figure it out by itself, no need for more government.
- ashark 9y ago> 2) a workgroup formed by companies working together on that subject 3) a government program to research that specific area. Part of Japan's postwar economic miracle involved doing both of these things at once: "hey three giant Japanese companies making products using [some technology], here's a pile of money, if you each also contribute a pile of money, we'll run some R&D on [some technology] to make it better, more efficiently than if the four of us spent the same money separately, and you can all three use it to compete with foreign companies"
- KKKKkkkk1 9y agoIf Apple cannot gain on their competition by being able to better detect bikers, what would be their incentive to put money into developing that technology?
- loxs 9y agoProbably the only ethical solution is to develop everything open-source
- StavrosK 9y agoThey do compete on braking distance right now, isn't that the same?