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> AI is not preprogrammed to monitor a known input from a sensor to take a predefined action. I guess one of my outstanding questions, which reading this only

> AI is not preprogrammed to monitor a known input from a sensor to take a predefined action. I guess one of my outstanding questions, which reading this only confirmed, is why this is the case? I mean, humans are pretty good examples of intelligence. And yet we still have and use these anti-collision systems. Because, in the end, when wrong decisions are made these systems save lives. Why would AI-driven vehicles not have dedicated, single-purpose subsystems such as anti-collision? I mean, are we going to also remove ABS, because the AI could learn to modulate the brakes itself? How much are we going to push into AI, when the purpose-built systems are both functional and effective?

SlowRobotAhead 9y ago
>I mean, are we going to also remove ABS, because the AI could learn to modulate the brakes itself? This is the topic that I feel SDC enthusiasts forget. Not everything HAS TO BE AI. And we could maybe make steps towards SDC, not fantastic leaps that get people killed and really just get government involved where it doesn't need to be yet. We could replace the ABS/ESP/traction control systems in current vehicles with a machine learning / deep learning system absolutely - that's not sexy though! No one wants increments, they want whole self-driving cars right now - and while I have opinions about that, there is no doubt it's driving (pun intended) the industry. Ideally, at first, we'd see components in consumer vehicles, and completely automated long haul trucks from A to B determined routes - but like I said, not sexy.
- couchand 9y ago
  > Ideally, at first, we'd see components in consumer vehicles We do, though. Look at the cruise control or auto-park on a vehicle produced in the last few years. The totally autonomous car may make headlines, but these sorts of features will be what really make the technology ubiquitous.
  - SlowRobotAhead 9y ago
    I work on ECUs like this. High end stuff is doing computer vision, but 99% of what is on the road is pre-calibrated motor/solenoid control and that’s all. Even adaptive cruise, steel camera object “detection” are just pretty simple systems. Almost nothing is doing even pieces of what the whole-package SDCs are.
mulmen 9y ago
I don't know much about AI or ML and even less about how it relates to automotive engineering but I imagine this is already how it works. I don't think there is one model for everything as much as there are models for individual components of driving. Something for steering, something(s?) for identifying obstructions, etc. In this case maybe letting a model modulate brake pulses based on conditions like temperature and velocity makes more sense? Hopefully someone with more experience in this domain can enlighten us.
- skgoa 9y ago
  It is exactly how it works. There ~40-115 different computers in a modern car that often have completely walled-off modules running on them. Most 'models' you will find in a car's software aren't even generated through machine learning, but tried and true engineering/statistics. No one in their right mind is proposing to replace those with one big AI monolith. That's marketing BS from the likes of NVidia, who would stand to gain from it. AI is being used in certain subfunctions like visual object detection. In the future, AI will be used to make higher level decisions like trajectory (lane choice, overtaking etc.) and route planning. But it will only hand those higher level plans down to the mostly 'dumb' computer systems of the car to be carried out just as with a manually driven car.
phaedrus 9y ago
This is a design trade-off that comes up all the time in automotive engineering. I own a couple of 90's-era Honda vehicles and what's interesting is although the cars are computerized, they also employ a number of semi-independent systems such as instrument gauges which directly connect to their own sensors even though a similar sensor connected to the engine control unit is right next to it, mechanical choke and coolant temperature modulators to intake air despite fuel injection, an "hydraulic computer" controlling part of the automatic transmission even though there is also a dedicated transmission control computer (which is itself redundant to making the transmission control an integrated feature of the engine control module). To me this seems to make no design sense; why not bring all of the inputs into one central box with one computer control, and drive all of the outputs from this central box? But then who am I to argue that the separate / bespoke approach is not better, given Honda's reputation for reliability?
- majormajor 9y ago
  Seems like classic, prudent, avoiding of single points of failure. Sounds reasonable, especially since computerization in cars was still pretty new back then. For something like ABS, or emergency braking, we have established algorithms for this already, so why be in a hurry to offload that to a machine-learning black box? Is the math behind "we need to stop this car" so complex that AI is needed?
martinrebane 9y ago
Author here :) I cannot answer for Uber, but the grand reason why we cannot put deterministic parts into the AI is the same as for humans - we do not control the internals of it, the complexity is too high. Although we can build systems that are composed of both AI and deterministic collision avoidance (as seen on new cars today). It is what I also suggested in the article.
- wnoise 9y ago
  Ah, then I should complain to you that "AI" is a broad suite of techniques and goals, rather than a specific black-box technique which has these flaws.
  - andreyk 9y ago
    Yes - you really seem to be talking about Machine Learning (a subset of AI). And as another comment says 'This makes me want to pull my hair out. No reasonable system relies on AI [or ML] from top to bottom. Take this article with a grain of salt, it is attacking a straw-man.'
CardenB 9y ago
The false positive rate of this system could be very noisy. At what point should you brake, even if the AI says not to? When you might collide with a lidar point? You want to collide with lidar points all the time (the ground beneath the vehicle, for example, or any reflective noise). The AI is there to tell you what lidar points are actual obstacles that you can't collide with, otherwise it's not really meaningful.
- jdmichal 9y ago
  This line of argument doesn't mean anything when we already have cars with intelligent, independent drivers, and these systems. And yes, their purpose would be to override the AI control when they trigger. Exactly the same as they do right now.
jmalicki 9y ago
" I mean, are we going to also remove ABS, because the AI could learn to modulate the brakes itself?" I think that's a reasonable definition of ABS - an AI (in most cases for ABS, an expert system AI) that knows how to best mediate the brakes, with levels of performance that exceed the vast majority of humans.
- ams6110 9y ago
  The conventional ABS system is not AI in any sense. It is a few sensors and maybe some look up tables of what to do under various speed / brake pressure / wheel rotation situations
  - randomdata 9y ago
    Does that not fit the definition of artificial intelligence? The system makes decisions – ones that would be otherwise done by a human – based on its perception of the world. That is what I have always understood AI to mean. To be sure, a conventional ABS system does not use machine learning, but machine learning is only a subset of AI.
    - skgoa 9y ago
      The core of this debate is the matter of what intelligence actually is. We don't really know, but the most common definition I have heard/read is that intelligence is the ability to generate new solutions when presented with previously unseen input. An ABS would not qualify under this definition, because its output is predefined rigorously for all possible combinations of input values.
      - randomdata 9y ago
        On the other hand, artificial intelligence is not actual intelligence. The definition of artificial intelligence is the ability to perform a task that would normally require human intelligence. An ABS system would fit into this definition as it is a task that normally would require human sensing the conditions to know how to apply the breaks. Although I can see why some point out that AI is a moving target, representing only what still seems 'magical'. If you showed an ABS system to someone in the early 1900s, I truly believe they would see it as some kind of intelligence. Now that we have acclimated to the technology, we don't see it the same way.
jvanderbot 9y ago
> Why would AI-driven vehicles not have dedicated, single-purpose subsystems such as anti-collision? I mean, are we going to also remove ABS, because the AI could learn to modulate the brakes itself? How much are we going to push into AI, when the purpose-built systems are both functional and effective? This makes me want to pull my hair out. No reasonable system relies on AI from top to bottom. Take this article with a grain of salt, it is attacking a straw-man.
andreyk 9y ago
"Why would AI-driven vehicles not have dedicated, single-purpose subsystems such as anti-collision? " The answer is that they will. And probably already mostly do (at least for Waymo/Cruise/most of them). It's not clear why Uber's vehicle did not brake.

SlowRobotAhead 9y ago

>I mean, are we going to also remove ABS, because the AI could learn to modulate the brakes itself? This is the topic that I feel SDC enthusiasts forget. Not everything HAS TO BE AI. And we could maybe make steps towards SDC, not fantastic leaps that get people killed and really just get government involved where it doesn't need to be yet. We could replace the ABS/ESP/traction control systems in current vehicles with a machine learning / deep learning system absolutely - that's not sexy though! No one wants increments, they want whole self-driving cars right now - and while I have opinions about that, there is no doubt it's driving (pun intended) the industry. Ideally, at first, we'd see components in consumer vehicles, and completely automated long haul trucks from A to B determined routes - but like I said, not sexy.

couchand 9y ago
> Ideally, at first, we'd see components in consumer vehicles We do, though. Look at the cruise control or auto-park on a vehicle produced in the last few years. The totally autonomous car may make headlines, but these sorts of features will be what really make the technology ubiquitous.
- SlowRobotAhead 9y ago
  I work on ECUs like this. High end stuff is doing computer vision, but 99% of what is on the road is pre-calibrated motor/solenoid control and that’s all. Even adaptive cruise, steel camera object “detection” are just pretty simple systems. Almost nothing is doing even pieces of what the whole-package SDCs are.

mulmen 9y ago

I don't know much about AI or ML and even less about how it relates to automotive engineering but I imagine this is already how it works. I don't think there is one model for everything as much as there are models for individual components of driving. Something for steering, something(s?) for identifying obstructions, etc. In this case maybe letting a model modulate brake pulses based on conditions like temperature and velocity makes more sense? Hopefully someone with more experience in this domain can enlighten us.

skgoa 9y ago
It is exactly how it works. There ~40-115 different computers in a modern car that often have completely walled-off modules running on them. Most 'models' you will find in a car's software aren't even generated through machine learning, but tried and true engineering/statistics. No one in their right mind is proposing to replace those with one big AI monolith. That's marketing BS from the likes of NVidia, who would stand to gain from it. AI is being used in certain subfunctions like visual object detection. In the future, AI will be used to make higher level decisions like trajectory (lane choice, overtaking etc.) and route planning. But it will only hand those higher level plans down to the mostly 'dumb' computer systems of the car to be carried out just as with a manually driven car.

phaedrus 9y ago

This is a design trade-off that comes up all the time in automotive engineering. I own a couple of 90's-era Honda vehicles and what's interesting is although the cars are computerized, they also employ a number of semi-independent systems such as instrument gauges which directly connect to their own sensors even though a similar sensor connected to the engine control unit is right next to it, mechanical choke and coolant temperature modulators to intake air despite fuel injection, an "hydraulic computer" controlling part of the automatic transmission even though there is also a dedicated transmission control computer (which is itself redundant to making the transmission control an integrated feature of the engine control module). To me this seems to make no design sense; why not bring all of the inputs into one central box with one computer control, and drive all of the outputs from this central box? But then who am I to argue that the separate / bespoke approach is not better, given Honda's reputation for reliability?

majormajor 9y ago
Seems like classic, prudent, avoiding of single points of failure. Sounds reasonable, especially since computerization in cars was still pretty new back then. For something like ABS, or emergency braking, we have established algorithms for this already, so why be in a hurry to offload that to a machine-learning black box? Is the math behind "we need to stop this car" so complex that AI is needed?

martinrebane 9y ago

Author here :) I cannot answer for Uber, but the grand reason why we cannot put deterministic parts into the AI is the same as for humans - we do not control the internals of it, the complexity is too high. Although we can build systems that are composed of both AI and deterministic collision avoidance (as seen on new cars today). It is what I also suggested in the article.

wnoise 9y ago
Ah, then I should complain to you that "AI" is a broad suite of techniques and goals, rather than a specific black-box technique which has these flaws.
- andreyk 9y ago
  Yes - you really seem to be talking about Machine Learning (a subset of AI). And as another comment says 'This makes me want to pull my hair out. No reasonable system relies on AI [or ML] from top to bottom. Take this article with a grain of salt, it is attacking a straw-man.'

CardenB 9y ago

The false positive rate of this system could be very noisy. At what point should you brake, even if the AI says not to? When you might collide with a lidar point? You want to collide with lidar points all the time (the ground beneath the vehicle, for example, or any reflective noise). The AI is there to tell you what lidar points are actual obstacles that you can't collide with, otherwise it's not really meaningful.

jdmichal 9y ago
This line of argument doesn't mean anything when we already have cars with intelligent, independent drivers, and these systems. And yes, their purpose would be to override the AI control when they trigger. Exactly the same as they do right now.

jmalicki 9y ago

" I mean, are we going to also remove ABS, because the AI could learn to modulate the brakes itself?" I think that's a reasonable definition of ABS - an AI (in most cases for ABS, an expert system AI) that knows how to best mediate the brakes, with levels of performance that exceed the vast majority of humans.

ams6110 9y ago
The conventional ABS system is not AI in any sense. It is a few sensors and maybe some look up tables of what to do under various speed / brake pressure / wheel rotation situations
- randomdata 9y ago
  Does that not fit the definition of artificial intelligence? The system makes decisions – ones that would be otherwise done by a human – based on its perception of the world. That is what I have always understood AI to mean. To be sure, a conventional ABS system does not use machine learning, but machine learning is only a subset of AI.
  - skgoa 9y ago
    The core of this debate is the matter of what intelligence actually is. We don't really know, but the most common definition I have heard/read is that intelligence is the ability to generate new solutions when presented with previously unseen input. An ABS would not qualify under this definition, because its output is predefined rigorously for all possible combinations of input values.
    - randomdata 9y ago
      On the other hand, artificial intelligence is not actual intelligence. The definition of artificial intelligence is the ability to perform a task that would normally require human intelligence. An ABS system would fit into this definition as it is a task that normally would require human sensing the conditions to know how to apply the breaks. Although I can see why some point out that AI is a moving target, representing only what still seems 'magical'. If you showed an ABS system to someone in the early 1900s, I truly believe they would see it as some kind of intelligence. Now that we have acclimated to the technology, we don't see it the same way.

jvanderbot 9y ago

> Why would AI-driven vehicles not have dedicated, single-purpose subsystems such as anti-collision? I mean, are we going to also remove ABS, because the AI could learn to modulate the brakes itself? How much are we going to push into AI, when the purpose-built systems are both functional and effective? This makes me want to pull my hair out. No reasonable system relies on AI from top to bottom. Take this article with a grain of salt, it is attacking a straw-man.

andreyk 9y ago

"Why would AI-driven vehicles not have dedicated, single-purpose subsystems such as anti-collision? " The answer is that they will. And probably already mostly do (at least for Waymo/Cruise/most of them). It's not clear why Uber's vehicle did not brake.