6 ms·

He's arguing from foundations. The hypothesis is that autonomous drivers should perform better at task X than the null hypothesis (aka human drivers). So any in

He's arguing from foundations. The hypothesis is that autonomous drivers should perform better at task X than the null hypothesis (aka human drivers). So any instances where autonomous drivers do not seem to perform better are all potential counter-arguments to that hypothesis. The fact that human drivers aren't particularly good isn't really relevant, beyond setting a correspondingly low bar within the null hypothesis. This all ties to regulation allowing these vehicles to drive on public roads, because that regulation was permitted due to the above hypothesis and hopeful expectations that it would be true. Obviously, I haven't seen the entirety of the data set to know fatalities per car-mile. Which would be the relevant statistic here. I also didn't see such a number in your post, which I'm assuming means you are probably not aware either. But simply providing the numbers for the null hypothesis doesn't do anything.

kerkeslager 9y ago
> He's arguing from foundations. The hypothesis is that autonomous drivers should perform better at task X than the null hypothesis (aka human drivers). So any instances where autonomous drivers do not seem to perform better are all potential counter-arguments to that hypothesis. > The fact that human drivers aren't particularly good isn't really relevant, beyond setting a correspondingly low bar within the null hypothesis. These two paragraphs are so contradictory to each other that I'm just not even sure how to attempt to correct your confusion.
- jdmichal 9y ago
  You'll have to make an attempt, because I don't see anything contradictory. If human drivers are your null hypothesis, than you cannot use the fact that "humans are bad" as a blanket acceptance of autonomous vehicles. They are already built into the equation, by virtue of being the null hypothesis. So you can argue that hypothesis, but that's not what your comment did. Your comment stated some numbers for the null hypothesis, but had no numbers for the hypothesis under test, and so therefore didn't really mean much at all. I'd like to note that I am not the person you replied to, and I personally am not arguing that any program should be shut down based on this one incident. But it's certainly not encouraging that the autonomous vehicle seems to have failed a test at which everyone would have expected it to perform well at. Also, to quote from your previous post: > Why is it that you see one death from an autonomous car and conclude that autonomous cars aren't ready to be driving, but you see 37,461 deaths from human drivers and don't conclude that humans aren't ready to be driving? I think we conclude, quite often in fact, that individual humans aren't fit to be driving. Death is one of those scenarios that will quickly lead to such a conclusion. One huge difference between individual humans and autonomous vehicles is that we can reasonably argue that any Uber vehicle would have performed the same in this scenario. So this is perhaps more akin to saying that this particular driver is not fit for the task, except that this particular driver happens to be driving dozens or more vehicles all at once.
  - kerkeslager 9y ago
    > You'll have to make an attempt, because I don't see anything contradictory. If human drivers are your null hypothesis, than you cannot use the fact that "humans are bad" as a blanket acceptance of autonomous vehicles. I said, "I admit that there just aren't enough autonomous cars on the road to prove conclusively that autonomous cars are safer than human-operated cars at this point." and I've vocally criticized autonomous cars elsewhere, so I'm not sure where you get the idea that I favor a blanket acceptance of autonomous vehicles. I'm not saying that autonomous vehicles are safer, I'm saying this isn't evidence that autonomous vehicles are less safe. > One huge difference between individual humans and autonomous vehicles is that we can reasonably argue that any Uber vehicle would have performed the same in this scenario. I disagree: you can argue that the autonomous vehicles will behave the same given the same inputs, but they will never have exactly the same inputs even if the situation were identical to a human observer, so that's a fairly moot point. If you step back to a larger description of the situation (car crossing bike lane to get into a turn lane, car doesn't identify and avoid bicyclist in bike lane) then you are going to be looking at a percentage of the time where autonomous car will make a mistake. There's also a percentage of the time where a human driver will make the same mistake. The only way you can compare the safety autonomous cars to human drivers in this situation is to compare those percentages. And that's ignoring the fact that there are thousands of other situations in driving--even if autonomous cars fail 100% of the time in this situation, there may be enough other situations where they perform better enough than human drivers that they're safer. Simply saying that a car made a mistake in this situation doesn't give us any information at all.
    - jdmichal 9y ago
      > I'm not saying that autonomous vehicles are safer, I'm saying this isn't evidence that autonomous vehicles are less safe. > And that's ignoring the fact that there are thousands of other situations in driving--even if autonomous cars fail 100% of the time in this situation, there may be enough other situations where they perform better enough than human drivers that they're safer. Simply saying that a car made a mistake in this situation doesn't give us any information at all. But it does give us information. This incident, along with all the other incidents and non-incidents that do or do not occur, as measured by incidents per car-mile. One cannot simply wish away this one incident and make it disappear. It is now forever part of the statistics which will either prove or disprove the hypothesis of autonomous cars being safer. > I disagree: you can argue that the autonomous vehicles will behave the same given the same inputs, but they will never have exactly the same inputs even if the situation were identical to a human observer, so that's a fairly moot point. It's not a moot point. Yes, this exact scenario with these exact parameters only occurred once. However, we can still reasonably argue that if we reversed time and replaced that exact Uber autonomous driver with another instance of the autonomous Uber driver and turned time back on, it would have reacted exactly the same. The same way that I expect the same version of Notepad to open my text file exactly the same on this computer as on another computer. The alternative being that there is some undeterministic behavior in the driver that is not tied to input... In which case, good luck with that in court. However, we cannot make that same argument by replacing human drivers. Because each human is, in fact, different. This is only important in the context that a fanciful revocation of Uber's "autonomous driver's license" would apply to all instances of the autonomous driver, since they would all have been reasonably expected to perform the same.

kerkeslager 9y ago

> He's arguing from foundations. The hypothesis is that autonomous drivers should perform better at task X than the null hypothesis (aka human drivers). So any instances where autonomous drivers do not seem to perform better are all potential counter-arguments to that hypothesis. > The fact that human drivers aren't particularly good isn't really relevant, beyond setting a correspondingly low bar within the null hypothesis. These two paragraphs are so contradictory to each other that I'm just not even sure how to attempt to correct your confusion.

jdmichal 9y ago
You'll have to make an attempt, because I don't see anything contradictory. If human drivers are your null hypothesis, than you cannot use the fact that "humans are bad" as a blanket acceptance of autonomous vehicles. They are already built into the equation, by virtue of being the null hypothesis. So you can argue that hypothesis, but that's not what your comment did. Your comment stated some numbers for the null hypothesis, but had no numbers for the hypothesis under test, and so therefore didn't really mean much at all. I'd like to note that I am not the person you replied to, and I personally am not arguing that any program should be shut down based on this one incident. But it's certainly not encouraging that the autonomous vehicle seems to have failed a test at which everyone would have expected it to perform well at. Also, to quote from your previous post: > Why is it that you see one death from an autonomous car and conclude that autonomous cars aren't ready to be driving, but you see 37,461 deaths from human drivers and don't conclude that humans aren't ready to be driving? I think we conclude, quite often in fact, that individual humans aren't fit to be driving. Death is one of those scenarios that will quickly lead to such a conclusion. One huge difference between individual humans and autonomous vehicles is that we can reasonably argue that any Uber vehicle would have performed the same in this scenario. So this is perhaps more akin to saying that this particular driver is not fit for the task, except that this particular driver happens to be driving dozens or more vehicles all at once.
- kerkeslager 9y ago
  > You'll have to make an attempt, because I don't see anything contradictory. If human drivers are your null hypothesis, than you cannot use the fact that "humans are bad" as a blanket acceptance of autonomous vehicles. I said, "I admit that there just aren't enough autonomous cars on the road to prove conclusively that autonomous cars are safer than human-operated cars at this point." and I've vocally criticized autonomous cars elsewhere, so I'm not sure where you get the idea that I favor a blanket acceptance of autonomous vehicles. I'm not saying that autonomous vehicles are safer, I'm saying this isn't evidence that autonomous vehicles are less safe. > One huge difference between individual humans and autonomous vehicles is that we can reasonably argue that any Uber vehicle would have performed the same in this scenario. I disagree: you can argue that the autonomous vehicles will behave the same given the same inputs, but they will never have exactly the same inputs even if the situation were identical to a human observer, so that's a fairly moot point. If you step back to a larger description of the situation (car crossing bike lane to get into a turn lane, car doesn't identify and avoid bicyclist in bike lane) then you are going to be looking at a percentage of the time where autonomous car will make a mistake. There's also a percentage of the time where a human driver will make the same mistake. The only way you can compare the safety autonomous cars to human drivers in this situation is to compare those percentages. And that's ignoring the fact that there are thousands of other situations in driving--even if autonomous cars fail 100% of the time in this situation, there may be enough other situations where they perform better enough than human drivers that they're safer. Simply saying that a car made a mistake in this situation doesn't give us any information at all.
  - jdmichal 9y ago
    > I'm not saying that autonomous vehicles are safer, I'm saying this isn't evidence that autonomous vehicles are less safe. > And that's ignoring the fact that there are thousands of other situations in driving--even if autonomous cars fail 100% of the time in this situation, there may be enough other situations where they perform better enough than human drivers that they're safer. Simply saying that a car made a mistake in this situation doesn't give us any information at all. But it does give us information. This incident, along with all the other incidents and non-incidents that do or do not occur, as measured by incidents per car-mile. One cannot simply wish away this one incident and make it disappear. It is now forever part of the statistics which will either prove or disprove the hypothesis of autonomous cars being safer. > I disagree: you can argue that the autonomous vehicles will behave the same given the same inputs, but they will never have exactly the same inputs even if the situation were identical to a human observer, so that's a fairly moot point. It's not a moot point. Yes, this exact scenario with these exact parameters only occurred once. However, we can still reasonably argue that if we reversed time and replaced that exact Uber autonomous driver with another instance of the autonomous Uber driver and turned time back on, it would have reacted exactly the same. The same way that I expect the same version of Notepad to open my text file exactly the same on this computer as on another computer. The alternative being that there is some undeterministic behavior in the driver that is not tied to input... In which case, good luck with that in court. However, we cannot make that same argument by replacing human drivers. Because each human is, in fact, different. This is only important in the context that a fanciful revocation of Uber's "autonomous driver's license" would apply to all instances of the autonomous driver, since they would all have been reasonably expected to perform the same.