11 ms·

I like to drive around thinking about what it is like to be a driving (human) computer. Every time I touch the brake because I see a kid standing a few feet fro

by todd8 9y ago

I like to drive around thinking about what it is like to be a driving (human) computer. Every time I touch the brake because I see a kid standing a few feet from the curb and a small dog on the other side of the street is running, I wonder when an electronic computer will understand that the child might dart across the street after the dog. Of course, I've learned these things from growing up human, but only one computer needs to conquer a driving challenge, maybe driving on a snow hidden road (watch out for barely noticeable ditches on the sides of the road), and then all self-driving cars can do it. It will be interesting to see how long it will take to achieve level 5.

user5994461 9y ago
The computer has 360 vision. It should be easy for it to see the child and notice it jumping onto the road. The situation is super dangerous with human drivers anyway. Children are too small to be noticed and they don't hesitate to jump in front of cars.
- irq11 9y ago
  360 vision doesn’t change physics, and even the best vision system doesn’t help you when a child darts ten feet in front of your car. If you don’t anticipate the possible movement, you will be too slow. I have very little faith that we are anywhere near systems that can handle this kind of situational awareness, because it requires classification systems and object models of the world that modern AI has yet to reproduce. The average level of human intelligence is a lot higher than most casual observers realize.
  - trhway 9y ago
    > it requires classification systems and object models of the world that modern AI has yet to reproduce. i'm pretty sure that during millions of miles of say Waymo's video captured, there has been a lot of people (incl. children) stepping off the sidewalk to cross the road - you don't need that to happen right in front of your car - so their system analyzing the images does recognize the pedestrians and thus their potential for movement.
    - sampl 9y ago
      This was my assumption as well, curious why it’s being downvoted.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    Waymo models "dynamic objects" and predicts what they are going to do. There's some diagrams of it in this report (page 9): https://waymo.com/safetyreport/ https://waymo.com/safetyreport/ I would guess that they already identify and track pedestrians better than the average human driver (mostly because I expect they do it at greater distance). Whether they model kids standing by the curb better is hard to say.
    - irq11 9y ago
      A marketing document does not convince me. But even if I take this at face value, they’re talking about estimating future movements based on current trajectory, which is fine and good, but not the scenario raised by the OP. If I see a child standing near the side of the road, I use more than the velocity and trajectory of the child to estimate future behavior: I look at the direction the child is facing, the overall situation (e.g. is the child playing a game?), what the child is paying attention to, and so on. A child waiting at a bus stop is a dramatically different scenario than a child looking across the street at a puppy. A short adult standing on the side of the road is dramatically different than a child. This is a hard problem involving multiple levels of recognition and inference. I have little faith that it is solved. My suspicion is that the “engineering solution” is used (i.e. slow down when a human-probable object is near the road). That might work, but will lead to a car thar drives like a paranoid senior citizen with bad eyesight. I have a suspicion that we’re going to look back in a decade and realize that most of these problems are fundamentally intractable, and that the best any system can do is react via human-encoded heuristics. If so, the path to full autonomy will be an asymptotic one; it will not happen quickly, but through decades of gradual refinement, with lots of fatalities along the way.
      - maxerickson 9y ago
        "human-encoded heuristics" contradicts intractable. I think that the always-sensible speed choices of the automated system will result in a much larger reduction in pedestrian fatalities than any increase from the lack of subtle inference you are concerned with.
  - stale2002 9y ago
    If the car is unable to slow down in time, then it was driving too fast in the first place. The solution for self driving cars is easy. Don't ever put yourself in a position where physics prevents you from breaking in time. They can do this by driving conservatively and not doing dumb things like driving around a corner quickly.
    - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
      Then everybody will hate them because our expectations of the speed at which a car gets from A to B tolerate an amount of risk larger than the what BigCorp is willing to tolerate. Nobody wants a self driving car that's always driving like a student driver.
      - TeMPOraL 9y ago
        I would live a car like this, because it'll make throughput on the roads go up, and ultimately make trips more predictable and much less risky.
      - stubish 9y ago
        It is an assumption that going to A to B with little risk will be slower. With the sensors available and lower reaction times the opposite could well happen. A computer can look every way at once at a stop sign, doesn't have to waste time making a judgement call because it already knows the answer, and doesn't have to wait for its foot to hit the break or accelerator.
      - stale2002 9y ago
        Personally I don't really care if it takes 5% longer to get where I needed to go or not. Especially if I get the huge benefit of not having to drive. Driving risky really doesnt speed up your commute very much.
        dsfyu404ed 9y ago
        >Personally I don't really care if it takes 5% longer to get where I needed to go or not. >Especially if I get the huge benefit of not having to drive. >Driving risky really doesnt speed up your commute very much. A car behaving will be like a student driver (or delivery truck) at every intersection at which it needs to pull into traffic could easily double or triple your commute time depending on your commute. Pulling out into traffic should be something that a driver-less car can be much better at. If it isn't at least as good as the average perspective customer people won't buy it. I would say this is particularly critical metric for taxi fleets since they do a lot of driving on city side streets. People will take taxi with the human if it's faster.
- squiggleblaz 9y ago
  Children are absolutely large enough to be noticed. The issue is that car drivers think it's okay to ignore them. They're choosing only to look at cars because we train people from a young age to think of the black stuff as a space where only cars go. And because we make it illegal to drive safely. If you knew you were going to get treated the same for threatening a small child with a car as with any other lethal weapon, you'd drive much more safely.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
lobotryas 9y ago
The difference is patience and reaction time. A computer won't be speeding on a residential street. It will identify a child standing on a curb for tracking but otherwise not react to it until it determined that the kid's trajectory would likely intersect the car's. In that case it would break as hard as it needs to bring a car to a quick and safe stop.
- dmoy 9y ago
  Why would the computer not slow down ahead of time if it saw a kid (or anything really) standing on the curb?
  - ghaff 9y ago
    Because people and, perhaps, objects that can't be readily distinguished from people stand on sidewalks and at curbs all the time without an intent to walk into the street. There's a fine line between defensive driving and driving so conservatively that you're constantly applying brakes because "something" might happen.
    - squiggleblaz 9y ago
      But there isn't a fine line between charging into someone with a lethal force so you can get home a little quicker, and letting them live. Cars driven by humans redesigned our cities. Cars driven by computers will probably redesign them again.
  - ZeroGravitas 9y ago
    It probably shouldn't be going fast enough in the first place for it to be an issue in suburban situations. It should be able to react in time even if a dog/child appears from behind a large parked vehicle. This should also be true of human drvers, but probably isn't. But yes, deer beside faster roads etc. should probably trigger precautionary measures to ensure reaction times will be sufficient.
    - mlinksva 9y ago
paulsutter 9y ago
Humans have atrocious reaction time to become aware of danger/lift foot/press brake, whereas machines can react instantly > Reaction times vary greatly with situation and from person to person between about 0.7 to 3 seconds (sec or s) or more. Some accident reconstruction specialists use 1.5 seconds. A controlled study in 2000 (IEA2000_ABS51.pdf) found average driver reaction brake time to be 2.3 seconds From http://copradar.com/redlight/factors/ http://copradar.com/redlight/factors/
- foob 9y ago
  There's no question that machines have faster reaction times, but the other part of the equation is predicting how much a vehicle should slow down in any given situation in order to reduce braking time. The parent was talking about looking at a fairly complicated scene and making a decision about reducing their speed so that they could stop more quickly if it becomes necessary. We all know that there's a big difference between driving by a child playing aimlessly and somebody walking predictably on a sidewalk. It's much more difficult for an automated system to make these sort of predictions than it is for them to react quickly to emergency situations. My guess is that automated driving systems will have to err on the side of caution and that this will result in seemingly (to the passenger) unnecessary slow-downs. I don't personally think that this is a huge problem, but it's fair to say that reaction time is only one one of several significant factors in avoiding accidents.
  - codebolt 9y ago
    > My guess is that automated driving systems will have to err on the side of caution and that this will result in seemingly (to the passenger) unnecessary slow-downs. How are you expecting to be able to regulate implementation specific details like this across the industry? How would you enforce entirely requirements like this? If it's left to invisible hand of the market I would assume that the demand would be higher for cars with more aggressive driving styles, that will get you from A to B faster.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    A computer can compute that the maximum expected velocity of that child-looking object on the sidewalk is min(hardcoded maximum velocity of a human, maximum observed velocity), and use that in order to quickly calculate whether or not it will have enough time to break, assuming the child-like object suddenly starts moving straight towards the road with maximum velocity. Unless you expect rocket-propelled children being launched from the sidewalk, that's pretty much it. (Of course the actual implementation within the entire system will be more complicated, but my point is - a computer can precisely compute what a human tends to intuit.)
stephengillie 9y ago
In an object-oriented language, specify the functions which an object may call, and how that object calling those functions (move("run","100%-speed","straight-forward","low-alertness")) might interfere with functions you may call (move("drive-car","2%-speed","straight-forward","full-alertness"). Pre-process a few of the child's available functions, and some of yours, to find any collisions in the data. Decrease speed on a gradient equivalent to the probability of collision. (Step 1 - access child's datastore, or be a similar-enough neuroprocessor that the same data is replicated to you locally.) The number of objects in motion in a roadway space can make this processing prohibitive, which is why we failover to humans. Also, adult humans have more experience (data) at being a child, and so are much more capable of analyzing and predicting with this data, than a self-driving car - at least today.
bsder 9y ago
> I wonder when an electronic computer will understand that the child might dart across the street after the dog. It already does. Google colloquially calls it the "idiot detector". It includes things like small children, teenagers on skateboards, bicyclists, etc. It was responsible for a bit of hilarity that when a hipster was rocking on his fixie at a stop sign, the car would start and stop entering the intersection. Cars are probably better than humans at detection now.
- empthought 9y ago
  You missed the point of the question. The point is that a human will see a child and a dog playing somewhat close to the road, will see the dog run out, and will infer that the child will dart after it before the child makes a move.
  - anonydsfsfs 9y ago
    Waymo is capable of making these kinds of inferences, though I don't know if it can handle that specific case. From the safety report: > Waymo’s planner can also think several steps ahead. For example, if our software perceives that an adjacent lane ahead is closed due to construction, and predicts that a cyclist in that lane will move over, our planner can make the decision to slow down or make room for the cyclist well ahead of time. https://storage.googleapis.com/sdc-prod/v1/safety-report/waymo-safety-report-2017.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/sdc-prod/v1/safety-report/way...
    - rohit2412 9y ago
      These edge cases are pretty likely hard coded, and human inference is much more general.
  - stale2002 9y ago
    Solution easy. If anything at all happens, hit the breaks. Drive slowly and conservatively, and never ever be in a situation where physics would prevent the car from slowing down in time.
cma 9y ago
On the other hand, computers can pay attention to many things at once. We are terrible at that. It seems a human augmented with computers should be the first step before any kind of full autonomy.
stmfreak 9y ago
Humans require little training, but lack attention. Computers have the attention, but require near infinite training.

by todd8 9y ago

user5994461 9y ago

The computer has 360 vision. It should be easy for it to see the child and notice it jumping onto the road. The situation is super dangerous with human drivers anyway. Children are too small to be noticed and they don't hesitate to jump in front of cars.

irq11 9y ago
360 vision doesn’t change physics, and even the best vision system doesn’t help you when a child darts ten feet in front of your car. If you don’t anticipate the possible movement, you will be too slow. I have very little faith that we are anywhere near systems that can handle this kind of situational awareness, because it requires classification systems and object models of the world that modern AI has yet to reproduce. The average level of human intelligence is a lot higher than most casual observers realize.
- trhway 9y ago
  > it requires classification systems and object models of the world that modern AI has yet to reproduce. i'm pretty sure that during millions of miles of say Waymo's video captured, there has been a lot of people (incl. children) stepping off the sidewalk to cross the road - you don't need that to happen right in front of your car - so their system analyzing the images does recognize the pedestrians and thus their potential for movement.
  - sampl 9y ago
    This was my assumption as well, curious why it’s being downvoted.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  Waymo models "dynamic objects" and predicts what they are going to do. There's some diagrams of it in this report (page 9): https://waymo.com/safetyreport/ https://waymo.com/safetyreport/ I would guess that they already identify and track pedestrians better than the average human driver (mostly because I expect they do it at greater distance). Whether they model kids standing by the curb better is hard to say.
  - irq11 9y ago
    A marketing document does not convince me. But even if I take this at face value, they’re talking about estimating future movements based on current trajectory, which is fine and good, but not the scenario raised by the OP. If I see a child standing near the side of the road, I use more than the velocity and trajectory of the child to estimate future behavior: I look at the direction the child is facing, the overall situation (e.g. is the child playing a game?), what the child is paying attention to, and so on. A child waiting at a bus stop is a dramatically different scenario than a child looking across the street at a puppy. A short adult standing on the side of the road is dramatically different than a child. This is a hard problem involving multiple levels of recognition and inference. I have little faith that it is solved. My suspicion is that the “engineering solution” is used (i.e. slow down when a human-probable object is near the road). That might work, but will lead to a car thar drives like a paranoid senior citizen with bad eyesight. I have a suspicion that we’re going to look back in a decade and realize that most of these problems are fundamentally intractable, and that the best any system can do is react via human-encoded heuristics. If so, the path to full autonomy will be an asymptotic one; it will not happen quickly, but through decades of gradual refinement, with lots of fatalities along the way.
    - maxerickson 9y ago
      "human-encoded heuristics" contradicts intractable. I think that the always-sensible speed choices of the automated system will result in a much larger reduction in pedestrian fatalities than any increase from the lack of subtle inference you are concerned with.
- stale2002 9y ago
  If the car is unable to slow down in time, then it was driving too fast in the first place. The solution for self driving cars is easy. Don't ever put yourself in a position where physics prevents you from breaking in time. They can do this by driving conservatively and not doing dumb things like driving around a corner quickly.
  - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
    Then everybody will hate them because our expectations of the speed at which a car gets from A to B tolerate an amount of risk larger than the what BigCorp is willing to tolerate. Nobody wants a self driving car that's always driving like a student driver.
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      I would live a car like this, because it'll make throughput on the roads go up, and ultimately make trips more predictable and much less risky.
    - stubish 9y ago
      It is an assumption that going to A to B with little risk will be slower. With the sensors available and lower reaction times the opposite could well happen. A computer can look every way at once at a stop sign, doesn't have to waste time making a judgement call because it already knows the answer, and doesn't have to wait for its foot to hit the break or accelerator.
    - stale2002 9y ago
      Personally I don't really care if it takes 5% longer to get where I needed to go or not. Especially if I get the huge benefit of not having to drive. Driving risky really doesnt speed up your commute very much.
      - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
        >Personally I don't really care if it takes 5% longer to get where I needed to go or not. >Especially if I get the huge benefit of not having to drive. >Driving risky really doesnt speed up your commute very much. A car behaving will be like a student driver (or delivery truck) at every intersection at which it needs to pull into traffic could easily double or triple your commute time depending on your commute. Pulling out into traffic should be something that a driver-less car can be much better at. If it isn't at least as good as the average perspective customer people won't buy it. I would say this is particularly critical metric for taxi fleets since they do a lot of driving on city side streets. People will take taxi with the human if it's faster.
squiggleblaz 9y ago
Children are absolutely large enough to be noticed. The issue is that car drivers think it's okay to ignore them. They're choosing only to look at cars because we train people from a young age to think of the black stuff as a space where only cars go. And because we make it illegal to drive safely. If you knew you were going to get treated the same for threatening a small child with a car as with any other lethal weapon, you'd drive much more safely.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

lobotryas 9y ago

The difference is patience and reaction time. A computer won't be speeding on a residential street. It will identify a child standing on a curb for tracking but otherwise not react to it until it determined that the kid's trajectory would likely intersect the car's. In that case it would break as hard as it needs to bring a car to a quick and safe stop.

dmoy 9y ago
Why would the computer not slow down ahead of time if it saw a kid (or anything really) standing on the curb?
- ghaff 9y ago
  Because people and, perhaps, objects that can't be readily distinguished from people stand on sidewalks and at curbs all the time without an intent to walk into the street. There's a fine line between defensive driving and driving so conservatively that you're constantly applying brakes because "something" might happen.
  - squiggleblaz 9y ago
    But there isn't a fine line between charging into someone with a lethal force so you can get home a little quicker, and letting them live. Cars driven by humans redesigned our cities. Cars driven by computers will probably redesign them again.
- ZeroGravitas 9y ago
  It probably shouldn't be going fast enough in the first place for it to be an issue in suburban situations. It should be able to react in time even if a dog/child appears from behind a large parked vehicle. This should also be true of human drvers, but probably isn't. But yes, deer beside faster roads etc. should probably trigger precautionary measures to ensure reaction times will be sufficient.
  - mlinksva 9y ago

paulsutter 9y ago

Humans have atrocious reaction time to become aware of danger/lift foot/press brake, whereas machines can react instantly > Reaction times vary greatly with situation and from person to person between about 0.7 to 3 seconds (sec or s) or more. Some accident reconstruction specialists use 1.5 seconds. A controlled study in 2000 (IEA2000_ABS51.pdf) found average driver reaction brake time to be 2.3 seconds From http://copradar.com/redlight/factors/ http://copradar.com/redlight/factors/

foob 9y ago
There's no question that machines have faster reaction times, but the other part of the equation is predicting how much a vehicle should slow down in any given situation in order to reduce braking time. The parent was talking about looking at a fairly complicated scene and making a decision about reducing their speed so that they could stop more quickly if it becomes necessary. We all know that there's a big difference between driving by a child playing aimlessly and somebody walking predictably on a sidewalk. It's much more difficult for an automated system to make these sort of predictions than it is for them to react quickly to emergency situations. My guess is that automated driving systems will have to err on the side of caution and that this will result in seemingly (to the passenger) unnecessary slow-downs. I don't personally think that this is a huge problem, but it's fair to say that reaction time is only one one of several significant factors in avoiding accidents.
- codebolt 9y ago
  > My guess is that automated driving systems will have to err on the side of caution and that this will result in seemingly (to the passenger) unnecessary slow-downs. How are you expecting to be able to regulate implementation specific details like this across the industry? How would you enforce entirely requirements like this? If it's left to invisible hand of the market I would assume that the demand would be higher for cars with more aggressive driving styles, that will get you from A to B faster.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  A computer can compute that the maximum expected velocity of that child-looking object on the sidewalk is min(hardcoded maximum velocity of a human, maximum observed velocity), and use that in order to quickly calculate whether or not it will have enough time to break, assuming the child-like object suddenly starts moving straight towards the road with maximum velocity. Unless you expect rocket-propelled children being launched from the sidewalk, that's pretty much it. (Of course the actual implementation within the entire system will be more complicated, but my point is - a computer can precisely compute what a human tends to intuit.)

stephengillie 9y ago

In an object-oriented language, specify the functions which an object may call, and how that object calling those functions (move("run","100%-speed","straight-forward","low-alertness")) might interfere with functions you may call (move("drive-car","2%-speed","straight-forward","full-alertness"). Pre-process a few of the child's available functions, and some of yours, to find any collisions in the data. Decrease speed on a gradient equivalent to the probability of collision. (Step 1 - access child's datastore, or be a similar-enough neuroprocessor that the same data is replicated to you locally.) The number of objects in motion in a roadway space can make this processing prohibitive, which is why we failover to humans. Also, adult humans have more experience (data) at being a child, and so are much more capable of analyzing and predicting with this data, than a self-driving car - at least today.

bsder 9y ago

> I wonder when an electronic computer will understand that the child might dart across the street after the dog. It already does. Google colloquially calls it the "idiot detector". It includes things like small children, teenagers on skateboards, bicyclists, etc. It was responsible for a bit of hilarity that when a hipster was rocking on his fixie at a stop sign, the car would start and stop entering the intersection. Cars are probably better than humans at detection now.

empthought 9y ago
You missed the point of the question. The point is that a human will see a child and a dog playing somewhat close to the road, will see the dog run out, and will infer that the child will dart after it before the child makes a move.
- anonydsfsfs 9y ago
  Waymo is capable of making these kinds of inferences, though I don't know if it can handle that specific case. From the safety report: > Waymo’s planner can also think several steps ahead. For example, if our software perceives that an adjacent lane ahead is closed due to construction, and predicts that a cyclist in that lane will move over, our planner can make the decision to slow down or make room for the cyclist well ahead of time. https://storage.googleapis.com/sdc-prod/v1/safety-report/waymo-safety-report-2017.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/sdc-prod/v1/safety-report/way...
  - rohit2412 9y ago
    These edge cases are pretty likely hard coded, and human inference is much more general.
- stale2002 9y ago
  Solution easy. If anything at all happens, hit the breaks. Drive slowly and conservatively, and never ever be in a situation where physics would prevent the car from slowing down in time.

cma 9y ago

On the other hand, computers can pay attention to many things at once. We are terrible at that. It seems a human augmented with computers should be the first step before any kind of full autonomy.

stmfreak 9y ago

Humans require little training, but lack attention. Computers have the attention, but require near infinite training.