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If I was driving a car like that I think I'd feel safer if there was a "confidence meter" available, I have no idea about how these auto-drive systems work but

If I was driving a car like that I think I'd feel safer if there was a "confidence meter" available, I have no idea about how these auto-drive systems work but I'm guessing there's some metric for how confident the car is that it's going in the correct direction. Exposing that information as a basic percentage meter on the dash somewhere would make me feel more confident about using the auto-drive. I can understand why this wouldn't happen from a business perspective, and it's also presumably not as simple to implement as I'm implying, but I can't think of a better way to get around the uncertainty of whether the car's operating in an expected way or not.

serpix 9y ago
On top of all that is going on in traffic you would add interpreting one more abstracted symbol to your cognitive load? The situation can change in milliseconds during driving, you can never ever be entirely sure nothing unexpected could happen. Personally having tried Tesla AP1 iit was painfully clear I can never fully trust any assisted driving aid, they can fail at any point and I need to be ready to take over immediately. Particularly having to wrestle the steering wheel from AP1 as it slightly resists is reason enough to stop using it.
- corney91 9y ago
  > On top of all that is going on in traffic you would add interpreting one more abstracted symbol to your cognitive load? I think I'd find it a simpler metric to follow than the more qualitative information about car behaviour, as well as more useful to decide whether the car or I should be in control. You're quite right about timing, I have no idea whether this metric would plummet quickly or gracefully drop so the driver would have time to take charge once a threshold was hit. I want to stress that this is an underbaked idea and really just a thought experiment about what would make me personally feel more comfortable with driving a semi-autonomous vehicle.
shawabawa3 9y ago
If they had the ability to measure confidence in the system, they would use it to issue warnings or disable autopilot The "confidence meter" would almost certainly be 100% right up until it crashes into an obvious obstacle
- corney91 9y ago
  > If they had the ability to measure confidence in the system, they would use it to issue warnings or disable autopilot Yeah, that's basically what I'm asking for, maybe a warning light at a certain threshold would be a better default, personally I'd still find a number more trustworthy though. > The "confidence meter" would almost certainly be 100% right up until it crashes into an obvious obstacle If image recognition algorithms have associated confidence levels, I'd be surprised something more complicated like road navigation was 100% certain all the time.
  - simias 9y ago
    >I'd be surprised something more complicated like road navigation was 100% certain all the time. If for instance it failed to detect an obstacle how could it tell you that it failed detecting an obstacle? Or that it got the road markings wrong? Given that the consequences for making a mistake might be people dying I certainly hope that's not how it works under the hood. Anything less than "I'm absolutely sure that I'm not currently speeding towards an obstacle" should automatically trigger a safety system that would cause the autopilot to disengage and give the control back to the driver, maybe engaging the emergency lights to let the other drivers know that something is amiss. I wouldn't be surprised if in the moments preceding these crashes the autopilot algorithm was completely sure it was doing the right thing. Of course these various crashes show that in fact the algorithm makes mistakes sometimes but I certainly hope that it's not aware that it's making mistakes, it just messes up while it thinks everything is going as planned.
    - Piskvorrr 9y ago
      Anything less than "I'm absolutely sure that I'm not currently speeding towards an obstacle" - that's an unattainable goal; there's no way to actually reach this, whether a human or a robot is driving. I'm overwhelmingly sure during the most part of my drives, and mostly sure for the rest - but absolutely? Never.
  - salawat 9y ago
    The problem is, given a neural network, the decided course of action IS at 100% confidence. Unless you design the network to specifically answer "how similar is this?" and pair it with a training set and the output of another executing neural net, a "confidence meter" isn't possible. This is one of the trickier bits to wrap one's mind around with neural networks. The systems we train for specialized tasks have no concept of 'confidence' or being wrong. There is no meta-awareness that judges how well a task is being performed in real-time outside of the training environment. Humans don't suffer from this issue (as much) due to the mind bogglingly large and complex neural nets we have to deal with the world. Every time you set yourself to practicing a task, you are putting a previously trained neural network through further training and evolution. You can recognize when you are doing it because the process of doing so takes conscious effort. You are not 'just doing <the task>', you are 'doing <the task>, and comparing your performance against an ideation or metric of how you WANT <the task> to be performed'. This process is basically your pre-frontal cortex and occipital lobe for instance, tuning your hippocampus, sensory and motor cortex to perfect the perfect tennis swing. When we train visual neural networks, we're talking levels of intelligence supplied by the occipital lobe , hippocampus, alone. Imagine every time you hear about a neural net that a human was lobotomized until they could perform ONLY that task with any reliability. Kinda changes the comfort level with letting one of these take the wheel doesn't it? Neural nets are REALLY neat. Don't get me wrong. I love them. Unfortunately, the real world is also INCREDIBLY hard to safely operate in. Many little things that humans 'just do' are the results of our own brains 'hacking' together older neural nets with a higher level one.
bigmanwalter 9y ago
Confidence can flatline in a matter of seconds. It would not likely help all that much.
ChoGGi 9y ago
Couldn't they use that fancy LCD screen to show what the autopilot sees (or an approximation of it) for the next 150 feet or so? At least then you'd know if you were about to plow into a barrier.

serpix 9y ago

On top of all that is going on in traffic you would add interpreting one more abstracted symbol to your cognitive load? The situation can change in milliseconds during driving, you can never ever be entirely sure nothing unexpected could happen. Personally having tried Tesla AP1 iit was painfully clear I can never fully trust any assisted driving aid, they can fail at any point and I need to be ready to take over immediately. Particularly having to wrestle the steering wheel from AP1 as it slightly resists is reason enough to stop using it.

corney91 9y ago
> On top of all that is going on in traffic you would add interpreting one more abstracted symbol to your cognitive load? I think I'd find it a simpler metric to follow than the more qualitative information about car behaviour, as well as more useful to decide whether the car or I should be in control. You're quite right about timing, I have no idea whether this metric would plummet quickly or gracefully drop so the driver would have time to take charge once a threshold was hit. I want to stress that this is an underbaked idea and really just a thought experiment about what would make me personally feel more comfortable with driving a semi-autonomous vehicle.

shawabawa3 9y ago

If they had the ability to measure confidence in the system, they would use it to issue warnings or disable autopilot The "confidence meter" would almost certainly be 100% right up until it crashes into an obvious obstacle

corney91 9y ago
> If they had the ability to measure confidence in the system, they would use it to issue warnings or disable autopilot Yeah, that's basically what I'm asking for, maybe a warning light at a certain threshold would be a better default, personally I'd still find a number more trustworthy though. > The "confidence meter" would almost certainly be 100% right up until it crashes into an obvious obstacle If image recognition algorithms have associated confidence levels, I'd be surprised something more complicated like road navigation was 100% certain all the time.
- simias 9y ago
  >I'd be surprised something more complicated like road navigation was 100% certain all the time. If for instance it failed to detect an obstacle how could it tell you that it failed detecting an obstacle? Or that it got the road markings wrong? Given that the consequences for making a mistake might be people dying I certainly hope that's not how it works under the hood. Anything less than "I'm absolutely sure that I'm not currently speeding towards an obstacle" should automatically trigger a safety system that would cause the autopilot to disengage and give the control back to the driver, maybe engaging the emergency lights to let the other drivers know that something is amiss. I wouldn't be surprised if in the moments preceding these crashes the autopilot algorithm was completely sure it was doing the right thing. Of course these various crashes show that in fact the algorithm makes mistakes sometimes but I certainly hope that it's not aware that it's making mistakes, it just messes up while it thinks everything is going as planned.
  - Piskvorrr 9y ago
    Anything less than "I'm absolutely sure that I'm not currently speeding towards an obstacle" - that's an unattainable goal; there's no way to actually reach this, whether a human or a robot is driving. I'm overwhelmingly sure during the most part of my drives, and mostly sure for the rest - but absolutely? Never.
- salawat 9y ago
  The problem is, given a neural network, the decided course of action IS at 100% confidence. Unless you design the network to specifically answer "how similar is this?" and pair it with a training set and the output of another executing neural net, a "confidence meter" isn't possible. This is one of the trickier bits to wrap one's mind around with neural networks. The systems we train for specialized tasks have no concept of 'confidence' or being wrong. There is no meta-awareness that judges how well a task is being performed in real-time outside of the training environment. Humans don't suffer from this issue (as much) due to the mind bogglingly large and complex neural nets we have to deal with the world. Every time you set yourself to practicing a task, you are putting a previously trained neural network through further training and evolution. You can recognize when you are doing it because the process of doing so takes conscious effort. You are not 'just doing <the task>', you are 'doing <the task>, and comparing your performance against an ideation or metric of how you WANT <the task> to be performed'. This process is basically your pre-frontal cortex and occipital lobe for instance, tuning your hippocampus, sensory and motor cortex to perfect the perfect tennis swing. When we train visual neural networks, we're talking levels of intelligence supplied by the occipital lobe , hippocampus, alone. Imagine every time you hear about a neural net that a human was lobotomized until they could perform ONLY that task with any reliability. Kinda changes the comfort level with letting one of these take the wheel doesn't it? Neural nets are REALLY neat. Don't get me wrong. I love them. Unfortunately, the real world is also INCREDIBLY hard to safely operate in. Many little things that humans 'just do' are the results of our own brains 'hacking' together older neural nets with a higher level one.

bigmanwalter 9y ago

Confidence can flatline in a matter of seconds. It would not likely help all that much.

ChoGGi 9y ago

Couldn't they use that fancy LCD screen to show what the autopilot sees (or an approximation of it) for the next 150 feet or so? At least then you'd know if you were about to plow into a barrier.