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That, and the inattentive safety driver. It's quite infuriating really, letting lose a ton and a half of fast-moving mass without even the decency of looking wh

That, and the inattentive safety driver. It's quite infuriating really, letting lose a ton and a half of fast-moving mass without even the decency of looking where it's going. There's really no excuse.

CobrastanJorji 8y ago
Unfortunately I think it's one of those things that is both inexcusable and guaranteed to happen. It absolutely makes sense to put a human in a car you're testing and don't have full confidence in yet but are sending into real traffic. Not doing so would be ludicrously negligent. However, humans simply don't maintain focus for a long period of time without some sort of extreme, years-long training. The ability of monks to concentrate on a single thought for hours is correctly seen as very, very difficult. There's no way any regular person could deal well with a scenario like "sometime in the next 8 hours, you may or may not need to smash this brake pedal with a second's notice, but other than that you have no task." That's one of the things that most worries me about "almost there" systems like Tesla's. That said, if you've decided to attempt this anyway, checking your phone is definitely not okay.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- Rjevski 8y ago
  However, if the car saw the pedestrian, even as a false positive (presumably from far enough away to have enough time to brake/avoid it), I think it should’ve alerted the driver. The driver would’ve most likely started paying attention and avoided the crash.
  - dllthomas 8y ago
    > I think it should’ve alerted the driver. I like the idea, and if these pruned false positives are rare enough I think it would be a great safety measure - you could even have the driver verbally label things, which might have both training (in the AI sense) and awareness (for the humans) benefits (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_and_calling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_and_calling). Note that "rare enough" needn't be all that rare, just that if it is multiple every second or something it clearly wouldn't be practical.
    - mehrdadn 8y ago
      >> I think it should’ve alerted the driver. > I like the idea I'm not sure how well I would respond to a sudden alarm when everything has been deemed safe until a moment ago. I'd potentially need several seconds to figure out what is going on. I would hazard a guess that an approach that might be more fruitful be to have a meter that dynamically adjusts the "riskiness" of the situation between a yellow, orange, and red zone, so that the driver (a) has to pay attention constantly, (b) gets information constantly, and hence (c) has a better chance to react earlier. I know if I see a "danger meter" getting into the orange zone, I'm not going to wait until it goes into the red before I start paying attention.
      - dllthomas 8y ago
        "I like the idea" doesn't mean I will like any given implementation of the idea - I certainly agree that there's plenty of room to get the interface wrong. I want the driver paying attention constantly, but I want them paying attention to the environment, not a meter. A periodic "things are unusually interesting, what's going on?" query seems like a way to motivate that. But any actual attempt at a solution should be validated in testing...
- SilasX 8y ago
  I think there's some room for improvement though. Instead of "just one human in there", they could put them out in teams of two, and have periodic "awareness checks" that you have to respond to by pressing a driving-irrelevant button.
  - blattimwind 8y ago
    Dead-man switches do not work.
    - SilasX 8y ago
      Don't work for what purpose, according to whom? Are you sure that applies here? What I suggested there isn't really a deadman's switch ("stop if no one is around to do task x"), but something to periodically, randomly check the driver's attentiveness, and can raise a red flag if they take too long to respond. A deadman's switch is different and enforces "do X if person Y stops doing this thing at this predictable interval" -- not what I was proposing.
      - blattimwind 8y ago
        Vigilance control. But even these fail with more experienced users, similar to how alarm clocks fail some people (they wake up just enough to get up and turn the alarm off, then continue sleeping).
        SilasX 8y ago
        I was proposing it as a way to validate engagement by the testing teams, not the mass market.
        blattimwind 8y ago
        Like I said, these are especially hard to get right for frequent users, presumably your testing teams would log a lot of hours on these - just like train drivers, which have had this exact same problem.
- Lionsion 8y ago
  > However, humans simply don't maintain focus for a long period of time without some sort of extreme, years-long training. And anyone who's achieved this ability is unlikely to be willing to be hired as 1099 contractor for whatever low pay is being offered.
  - Piskvorrr 8y ago
    Immaterial. "Let's keep killing bystanders, that's cheaper" is a good way to rouse a mob with torches and pitchforks; conversely, not very useful for getting the technology approved.
- taneq 8y ago
  GM SuperCruise uses a driver-facing camera to confirm that the driver does in fact have eyes on the road. Something like that would be trivial for Uber to add to its self-driving car fleet.
- JorgeGT 8y ago
  > but other than that you have no task. Then give them a task! Install a HUD drawing a box in real time with the classification of nearest detected object (bike, pedestrian, car, mailbox) and put buttons in the wheel for the driver to confirm/reject the classification. This way: a) you improve your machine learning b) driver has wheels on the road c) driver has hands on the wheel d) driver is focused on incoming objects
gizmo686 8y ago
Humans are terrible for supervising mostly functional machines. This was researched in the context of security guards, who had a 95% missrate after just 20 minutes on the job. It is entirely unreasonable to expect a human supervise to detect and correct this type of situation in time.
trgn 8y ago
yes for sure. I wish articles about this crash would continue to hammer on the basics, to keep front&center this crash was completely avoidable. Even if there were no technical issues, (1) the driver was on her phone before and during the crash. The whole reason for the driver to be present is to intervene in a situation like this. (2) the car was driving too fast for conditions. Nobody should drive this fast in the middle of the city in the middle of night. It doesn't look like the car could have come to any kind emergency stop. Self-driving cars should drive more carefully than humans, not push against and over the speed limit regardless of outside conditions.
- Aspyre 8y ago
  It was 38 mph in a 45.
  - lewiseason 8y ago
    The overriding principle is normally about driving to the conditions, not achieving a "target" speed.
  - Piskvorrr 8y ago
    This is one of the core problems of the car culture: ignoring the envelope except where mandated by law. A speed limit means, literally, "you are not allowed to go any faster than this" - but is interpreted as "you are supposed to go at this speed, or better 5 above". Nowhere else is this so prevalent: "there are 50 apples here, so you can't eat any more" is "you must eat all 50 of them" by the same logic.
syncsynchalt 8y ago
I both can and can't blame the safety driver. To expect full attention from a person that is not supposed to have anything to do for hours on end (different from driving, which requires constant inputs and adjustments) is not something that's compatible with humans. With that said they were looking at their phone instead of zoning out eyes front.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

CobrastanJorji 8y ago

Unfortunately I think it's one of those things that is both inexcusable and guaranteed to happen. It absolutely makes sense to put a human in a car you're testing and don't have full confidence in yet but are sending into real traffic. Not doing so would be ludicrously negligent. However, humans simply don't maintain focus for a long period of time without some sort of extreme, years-long training. The ability of monks to concentrate on a single thought for hours is correctly seen as very, very difficult. There's no way any regular person could deal well with a scenario like "sometime in the next 8 hours, you may or may not need to smash this brake pedal with a second's notice, but other than that you have no task." That's one of the things that most worries me about "almost there" systems like Tesla's. That said, if you've decided to attempt this anyway, checking your phone is definitely not okay.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Rjevski 8y ago
However, if the car saw the pedestrian, even as a false positive (presumably from far enough away to have enough time to brake/avoid it), I think it should’ve alerted the driver. The driver would’ve most likely started paying attention and avoided the crash.
- dllthomas 8y ago
  > I think it should’ve alerted the driver. I like the idea, and if these pruned false positives are rare enough I think it would be a great safety measure - you could even have the driver verbally label things, which might have both training (in the AI sense) and awareness (for the humans) benefits (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_and_calling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_and_calling). Note that "rare enough" needn't be all that rare, just that if it is multiple every second or something it clearly wouldn't be practical.
  - mehrdadn 8y ago
    >> I think it should’ve alerted the driver. > I like the idea I'm not sure how well I would respond to a sudden alarm when everything has been deemed safe until a moment ago. I'd potentially need several seconds to figure out what is going on. I would hazard a guess that an approach that might be more fruitful be to have a meter that dynamically adjusts the "riskiness" of the situation between a yellow, orange, and red zone, so that the driver (a) has to pay attention constantly, (b) gets information constantly, and hence (c) has a better chance to react earlier. I know if I see a "danger meter" getting into the orange zone, I'm not going to wait until it goes into the red before I start paying attention.
    - dllthomas 8y ago
      "I like the idea" doesn't mean I will like any given implementation of the idea - I certainly agree that there's plenty of room to get the interface wrong. I want the driver paying attention constantly, but I want them paying attention to the environment, not a meter. A periodic "things are unusually interesting, what's going on?" query seems like a way to motivate that. But any actual attempt at a solution should be validated in testing...
SilasX 8y ago
I think there's some room for improvement though. Instead of "just one human in there", they could put them out in teams of two, and have periodic "awareness checks" that you have to respond to by pressing a driving-irrelevant button.
- blattimwind 8y ago
  Dead-man switches do not work.
  - SilasX 8y ago
    Don't work for what purpose, according to whom? Are you sure that applies here? What I suggested there isn't really a deadman's switch ("stop if no one is around to do task x"), but something to periodically, randomly check the driver's attentiveness, and can raise a red flag if they take too long to respond. A deadman's switch is different and enforces "do X if person Y stops doing this thing at this predictable interval" -- not what I was proposing.
    - blattimwind 8y ago
      Vigilance control. But even these fail with more experienced users, similar to how alarm clocks fail some people (they wake up just enough to get up and turn the alarm off, then continue sleeping).
      - SilasX 8y ago
        I was proposing it as a way to validate engagement by the testing teams, not the mass market.
        blattimwind 8y ago
        Like I said, these are especially hard to get right for frequent users, presumably your testing teams would log a lot of hours on these - just like train drivers, which have had this exact same problem.
Lionsion 8y ago
> However, humans simply don't maintain focus for a long period of time without some sort of extreme, years-long training. And anyone who's achieved this ability is unlikely to be willing to be hired as 1099 contractor for whatever low pay is being offered.
- Piskvorrr 8y ago
  Immaterial. "Let's keep killing bystanders, that's cheaper" is a good way to rouse a mob with torches and pitchforks; conversely, not very useful for getting the technology approved.
taneq 8y ago
GM SuperCruise uses a driver-facing camera to confirm that the driver does in fact have eyes on the road. Something like that would be trivial for Uber to add to its self-driving car fleet.
JorgeGT 8y ago
> but other than that you have no task. Then give them a task! Install a HUD drawing a box in real time with the classification of nearest detected object (bike, pedestrian, car, mailbox) and put buttons in the wheel for the driver to confirm/reject the classification. This way: a) you improve your machine learning b) driver has wheels on the road c) driver has hands on the wheel d) driver is focused on incoming objects

gizmo686 8y ago

Humans are terrible for supervising mostly functional machines. This was researched in the context of security guards, who had a 95% missrate after just 20 minutes on the job. It is entirely unreasonable to expect a human supervise to detect and correct this type of situation in time.

trgn 8y ago

yes for sure. I wish articles about this crash would continue to hammer on the basics, to keep front&center this crash was completely avoidable. Even if there were no technical issues, (1) the driver was on her phone before and during the crash. The whole reason for the driver to be present is to intervene in a situation like this. (2) the car was driving too fast for conditions. Nobody should drive this fast in the middle of the city in the middle of night. It doesn't look like the car could have come to any kind emergency stop. Self-driving cars should drive more carefully than humans, not push against and over the speed limit regardless of outside conditions.

Aspyre 8y ago
It was 38 mph in a 45.
- lewiseason 8y ago
  The overriding principle is normally about driving to the conditions, not achieving a "target" speed.
- Piskvorrr 8y ago
  This is one of the core problems of the car culture: ignoring the envelope except where mandated by law. A speed limit means, literally, "you are not allowed to go any faster than this" - but is interpreted as "you are supposed to go at this speed, or better 5 above". Nowhere else is this so prevalent: "there are 50 apples here, so you can't eat any more" is "you must eat all 50 of them" by the same logic.

syncsynchalt 8y ago

I both can and can't blame the safety driver. To expect full attention from a person that is not supposed to have anything to do for hours on end (different from driving, which requires constant inputs and adjustments) is not something that's compatible with humans. With that said they were looking at their phone instead of zoning out eyes front.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]