21 ms·

I'm curious what degree of "cultural context" is built into automated cars - I feel that there has to be a lot of locale-specific techniques for driving. For e

I'm curious what degree of "cultural context" is built into automated cars - I feel that there has to be a lot of locale-specific techniques for driving. For example, in NYC, there's nothing at all uncommon about a pedestrian beginning to cross the street in front of you and approaching the area of your lane where you will shortly be. Pedestrians typically then stop about a foot away from your lane, let you drive past them, and then continue walking. If a car slammed on the brakes in this situation, it would likely cause more accidents than not braking would cause. On the contrary, in Tempe, a pedestrian starting to do the exact same thing as above is likely much more a case of them not realizing your car is coming at all, in which case slamming on the brakes is appropriate. This isn't to defend Uber, clearly their car did do the wrong thing in the Tempe situation (though I make no judgment on who was at fault). And clearly cars need to be able to handle the variety of unwritten, localized driving quirks different regions have. But it seems like a very non-trivial problem to do this correctly.

GenerocUsername 8y ago
And welcome to why self-driving cars will always be 3 years away. I think we should be targeting self driving for long-haul freeway scenarios where the rules are relatively simple and predictable. Trying to control for the infinite number of scenarios in cities is a nightmare which will ultimately bog down the development of any company which makes that its goal.
- joncrane 8y ago
  > And welcome to why self-driving cars will always be 3 years away. It's also possible that human/pedestrian behavior will adapt to the consistent behavior of driverless cars.
  - splouk 8y ago
    Or jaywalking will become more strictly enforced with policing or physical barriers. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/4/2/automated-vehicles https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/4/2/automated-vehic...
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - vinay427 8y ago
      We do it for many pedestrian crossings across railroad tracks, so it's not unprecedented, but obviously on a different scale.
    - bryanlarsen 8y ago
      That's a very good argument but I don't think it will come to pass, for this reason: http://theoatmeal.com/pl/minor_differences/cutting_off http://theoatmeal.com/pl/minor_differences/cutting_off There's something about driving that turns ordinary people into assholes. I've observed it in myself. Bus passengers are much more considerate, and I think that passengers in self-driving vehicles will behave like passengers, not like drivers. So if a pedestrian cuts them off they'll just shrug and keep playing their game or whatever they're doing. I hope.
      - ksenzee 8y ago
        My theory is that people act like jerks behind the wheel, and come across as jerks even when they're not, because drivers have no way to apologize or ask please or do any other polite thing. All they can do is honk the horn, which is like yelling "HEY!!" If there were a communication mechanism for "excuse me, the light is green now" and "oops, so sorry, didn't see you there" driving would be easier and more pleasant.
        rm_-rf_slash 8y ago
        Dangerous driving can result in damage, injury, or death. That is why people are so volatile behind the wheel. I don’t think there is any system of communication that can prevent or stop road rage. Dampen, maybe, but that’s about it.
        eric_h 8y ago
        If the internet has taught us anything, it's that anything that facilitates conversation facilitates all types and styles of conversation. I'd posit that a more sophisticated inter-car communication system would add at least one new road rage incident for every one it prevents.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    Adaptations are still localized. Pedestrians have "adapted" to just expect everyone to brake always on most college campuses. If you treat a factory floor or intermodal facility like a collage campus nobody will be surprised when someone has to use a garden hose to wash you off of whatever multi-thousand pound metal thing you got in the way of.
  - stale2002 8y ago
    On a similar note, the innovation of Serri, and other "AI" programs was not to get computers to understand how humans talk. The innovation was getting humans to speak in a way that computers understand.
  - matte_black 8y ago
    Nope. You can never count on humans to change behavior to fit a technology. As soon as self-driving cars learn local customs, the customs will have been changed. Self-driving cars will always be 3 years away.
    - fjsolwmv 8y ago
      Pittsburgh left custom is 50years old or more
    - Someone 8y ago
      It may be worse. If cars are very good at avoiding colliding with pedestrians, why would pedestrians look out for cars at all before stepping onto a street? We may have to tweak the car’s software to be assertive, bordering aggressive, in busy neighborhoods, if the car is to make progress at all.
      - icebraining 8y ago
        No. Let the passenger deal with that if they're annoyed. Machines should be always "humble". A human in front may be an inconsiderate jerk, or they may be trying to prevent the car from hitting something they're unlikely to detect.
- rockostrich 8y ago
  This is already happening in the trucking industry. Self-driving trucks are being developed to be able to drive 99% of the trip that's on highways and then human drivers take over for the local 1%. To make it easier, transfer hubs are being built near cities off major highways to make everything easier and non-disruptive. The same thing could be done with cars without the need for the transfer hubs and it basically is already done.
  - frankharv 8y ago
    I can't beleive they would do a trail run with an automous truck weighing 80,000lbs barreling down the freeway. This revolution should have started with mundane tasks, such as city street sweepers and perhaps garbage trucks. Vehicles that move slow on a predefined path in the night. Then advance to faster moving objects like taxis. Just like the DARPA Grand Challenge that started this mess. Many of those vehicles were industrial usage, not consumer.
    - chris11 8y ago
      > This revolution should have started with mundane tasks, such as city street sweepers and perhaps garbage trucks. Honestly I would think that automating a slow moving vehicle in the city would be a much harder engineering challenge. City driving can be a lot messier than driving on the freeway.
      - 0x00000000 8y ago
        The stakes are much lower though. A standard car drifting into the oncoming lane is basically death. If it can't handle city driving, the methods are probably too immature to put people's lives against.
        mrep 8y ago
        Pretty much all interstates have barriers between the directions to prevent head on collisions.
- aurailious 8y ago
  Essentially make the freeways "car trains" as the autobahn implies. Eventually over time you add automation to other kinds of roads.
  - hughw 8y ago
    I think "bahn" translates to "path". Autobahn doesn't connote "car train". (Disclaimer: 1 year of college German)
    - detaro 8y ago
      Pretty much. See in English railway (Eisenbahn in German) or runway (Startbahn/Landebahn) for the equivalent patterns. Especially since in the beginning railway and Eisenbahn meant primarily the way with rails only, not the entire enterprise. Autobahn might actually be derived from Eisenbahn in that Wikipedia says some group choose it because of the similarity, but it only works because Bahn is the more general concept.
- oldgradstudent 8y ago
  You're underestimating the difficulty. Self-driving cars will always be 5 years away.
- kiliantics 8y ago
  We should anyway just remove cars from cities altogether
ShabbosGoy 8y ago
> But it seems like a very non-trivial problem to do this correctly. I had this same thought. You could theoretically have a universal rule where the self-driving car stops 100% of the time if it detects an object that is determined to be a pedestrian. But there are unforeseen problems with this approach. What if the model is overly cautious and there are many false positives? That could be extremely dangerous too, if a self-driving car is constantly stopping and going.
- Retric 8y ago
  Stopping is only one option slowing down is another. However, I suspect a car may be aware a person has stopped significantly before a person would enter their lane. At 30 mph a car takes ~2 seconds to physically brake and at an average walking speed a mph moves 9 feet in 2 seconds. However, to stop before entering the cars lane they would need to start slowing down even sooner. So, I guess you really need videos with calculated velocities of people jaywalking to really tell if this is going to be a problem or not.
infogulch 8y ago
This really speaks to other cues that we use while driving that are more complex that just the location and velocity of objects/people. In this case: attention and gaze. I sometimes do the "walk up to the lane and wait" thing, but I always look up and make eye contact with the driver to communicate that I know they exist and I'm not walking out in front of them. And when I'm driving and someone is walking up to my lane, the presence of their gaze is what I use to decide whether to continue (cautiously) or slow down and be ready to stop. I know that CV as a field has pretty advanced gaze/attention detection (e.g. see faceid), but I wonder if it's actually a part of self-driving car tech yet.
- s_m_t 8y ago
  I think body language might be more important, and seems to me should be harder to detect. Eye's are pretty easy to detect because of the contrast between the whites and iris, and, of course they reflect light. Detecting the difference between a hustle, a saunter, and a day dream might be a tad more difficult.
  - jschwartzi 8y ago
    Gaze is actually more important when you're trying to figure out whether someone sees you. If I don't see your eyes, I would assume that you don't see me at all.
    - eric_h 8y ago
      > If I don't see your eyes I think you really mean if you don't make eye contact. Eye contact is a two-person activity. How does an autonomous car make eye contact with a person?
      - c22 8y ago
        Something like this could be developed. For instance, the car could have an array of lights on its grill (think Knight Rider) that track in the direction of detected obstacles, if you don't see a light facing towards you then you know you are not detected and to use caution. Alternately a light on the front of the car could turn from yellow to blue to indicate its intent to yield.
Rotdhizon 8y ago
Not related to the article but I want to chime in on your point. Having spent some time in VA, aggressive driving and dangerous scenarios were infrequent from my experience. Then having spent some time in FL, aggressive driving was the norm and driving laws did not exist for most people. So I wonder, do self-driving cars needs something like driving profiles for certain regions, where defensive/aggressive response behavior is ramped up or down in accordance to what is observed? In a passive region where you only have to slam your breaks or jerk the wheel in rare instances, the profile would be tuned to give gentle responses to changes in traffic conditions However, in regions where aggressive driving is rampant, the profile would have to be tuned to be alert that sudden responses to other drivers frequently breaking the law and putting people in dangerous situations is common and to respond in kind. For example, to not slam the breaks when you get cut off, or not to speed up when an impatient person is literally 1 foot away from your bumper even thought you're doing 5 over the limit already. Now that can all be bundled into one, and already is I think in current self driving cars. I'm asking specifically if it would help self driving performance and decision making if the decisions could be influenced by knowing how rough things can or can't get in that area.
- sudouser 8y ago
  exactly, act according to context. driving in SF is totally different from nearby places like Lakeshore or San Leandro (people from those places complain about how bad people drive in SF)
- dahart 8y ago
  Personally, I’d rather see driving behavior normalize nationally than cater to regional differences in enforcement. The driving laws in each city & state the US are less different than the locally accepted behaviors, but it would be safer all around if drivers and pedestrians all expected the same things, and if we took traffic & safety laws more seriously. More enforcement of existing traffic laws will save many orders of magnitude more lives than customizing autonomous cars for various cities.
  - Sangermaine 8y ago
    The "reality should conform to my ideal, not my ideal to the reality" approach is and has always been a guaranteed recipe for failure. "Let's change everyone's minds and behavior everywhere" is much harder than changing software.
Waterluvian 8y ago
There's a road near the University of Waterloo where students get hit, some killed, on pretty much an annual basis. Often it boils down to the large number of foreign students who come from a part of the world where for one reason or another, you just don't need to bother looking before crossing, so they don't and walk right in front of cars (and in one case a city bus). To me this is an example of the overwhelming importance of locale-specific context. When I'm near UW, my driving behaviour changes significantly even though the laws do not.
- megablast 8y ago
  > To me this is an example of the overwhelming importance of locale-specific context. When I'm near UW, my driving behaviour changes significantly even though the laws do not. To me this is the incredibly danger of road and our current reliance on cars. Should it be ok to be killed if you aren't paying attention.
Symmetry 8y ago
I think you're overselling the extent of the difficulty here. People from out of state usually manage to get through New York, pedestrians and all, without getting into an accident. A car won't get through a block as quickly as it could if it merely obeys the laws makes sure it doesn't run into anybody. I'm sure this will cause great joy among people crossing the street and consternation among other drivers but the problem isn't a blocking one as long as the car can actually avoid hitting people - even if it's more cautious than it needs to be.
- Maybestring 8y ago
  >I think you're overselling the extent of the difficulty here. People from out of state usually manage to get through New York, pedestrians and all, without getting into an accident. At this point, "it's easy for a person to do it" is probably better evidence that it's a hard problem in AI. In this case, I believe it's an inverse learning problem. We observe other agents acting in an environment, deduce their policy, then implement that policy ourselves. A self-driving car that can reconfigure it's software to mimic the behavior of other cars it observes, sounds difficult to me.
  - Symmetry 8y ago
    That sounds much harder than just stopping if a pedestrian is on a trajectory to enter your lane. I mean, obviously it would be better to deduce their intentions and act according to that but I don't see any reason to say that that's necessary to have useful self driving cars.
    - flyingfences 8y ago
      A car that defaults to braking without any deduction beyond detection will never make it through an intersection, let alone a whole trip, in some parts of the world.
      - isostatic 8y ago
        New York looks like a well regulated army training course compared with somewhere like Cairo. Never is a long time, but I don't see self driving cars coping well when traffic is coming the wrong way down the street, let alone when cars are driving along the sidewalk
chris11 8y ago
I think that cultural context definitely influences driving safely. And that's going to be a very hard problem for companies to solve. But I think it's solvable, and part of the solution may be to change how people interact with streets. The introduction of the car caused a lot of problems in cities. People didn't know how to safely drive them, pedestrians didn't know how to deal with drivers, regulation was poor to non-existent, and city infrastructure couldn't handle large numbers of cars. But those problems eventually got fixed.https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan-history/2015/04/26/auto-traffic-history-detroit/26312107/ https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan-histor...
Johnny555 8y ago
I think legally, the car has to stop for an approaching pedestrian if it's physically able to stop, so if the pedestrian doesn't "stop about a foot away from your lane" as expected, you don't run into him. Though I don't know the NYC traffic code. In California, I believe 21950 paragraph C applies... the pedestrian that stops just before walking into the path of the car might be violating paragraph B since the driver may reasonably expect the pedestrian to continue walking. (b) This section does not relieve a pedestrian from the duty of using due care for his or her safety. No pedestrian may suddenly leave a curb or other place of safety and walk or run into the path of a vehicle that is so close as to constitute an immediate hazard. No pedestrian may unnecessarily stop or delay traffic while in a marked or unmarked crosswalk. (c) The driver of a vehicle approaching a pedestrian within any marked or unmarked crosswalk shall exercise all due care and shall reduce the speed of the vehicle or take any other action relating to the operation of the vehicle as necessary to safeguard the safety of the pedestrian.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  Typically the law is broad enough and redundant enough that who's in violation is simply up to the discretion of whoever has the blue lights.
  - Johnny555 8y ago
    Almost, but not exactly true -- the cop can issue a ticket, but a judge decides who is actually in violation (assuming that the person that got the ticket contests it). Always-on cameras in self-driving cars will help protect the innocent (assuming the footage is saved and available through subpoena, otherwise, like police dash and body cams, few people will let their own camera prove them guilty)
    - Piskvorrr 8y ago
      Oh, you mean like the "too-dark-to-see" scapegoat camera in that very case the article is about? Riiiiight.
- volkl48 8y ago
TheCoelacanth 8y ago
There is an obvious solution: don't stop, just slow down to <25 mph. On the streets where it is normal for pedestrians to approach that close, the speed limit is almost always 25 mph or lower and often the typical speed is much lower because of traffic. On streets with higher speeds, if a pedestrian is approaching that close to traffic, they either don't see the car or they have a death wish.
- cpeterso 8y ago
  The car could also honk to warn and check for a reaction. I wonder what the rules and social conventions well be for autonomous horns!
arich 8y ago
George Hotz had a great point about this and how Comma.ai handles defining the driving problem and what "driving badly" actually means, aka, interacting with and driving as other humans are expected to drive, quirks included. His whole talk is interesting but the short part about that is here: https://youtu.be/IxuU5L2MEII?t=38m11s https://youtu.be/IxuU5L2MEII?t=38m11s
uptown 8y ago
NPR had a story about how self-driving cars in Pittsburgh wouldn't be adhering to the "Pittsburgh-left": "Even harder for autonomous cars to master are local quirks; things like "the Pittsburgh left." That's a custom unique to the city that allows the first driver trying to make a left turn to do so before oncoming cars pass through an intersection. It's one thing that Emily Duff Bartel says Uber's fleet of self-driving cars won't be programmed to practice. "We're following the rules on this one," she says." https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/04/03/522099560/pittsburgh-offers-driving-lessons-for-ubers-autonomous-cars https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/04/03/52...
- forgotmypw 8y ago
  This custom is prevalent in places other than Pittsburgh. It can also get you a citation if a cop sees it.
  - bsder 8y ago
    It depends. Most cities whose road network predates cars have "local customs" which are essential to keep traffic flowing. These "local customs" may not be strictly legal, but you rarely will wind up with a ticket for it.
  - megablast 8y ago
    As it should, what a ridiculous thing to do.
    - chcknsammich 8y ago
      Says the person who has never seen the ridiculous thing that is single lane road deadlock.
      - lttlrck 8y ago
        Indeed. When I first came to the US I lived in Boston and this happens quite frequently inside the I95. It used to drive me crazy, I hated it, I though it was dangerous and uncivilized :-) it didn’t take long for me to understand why it was necessary and to start doing it myself.
imnotadoctor999 8y ago
Thinking about it this way is interesting. It could be an issue with bias or unbalanced training data.
Zenbit_UX 8y ago
Your examples are absurd. Would you program a car to assume that all New Yorkers won't Jay walk? How about all people in Tempe will rush into the streets? Cultural context definetly matters, but for none of the reasons you've mentioned. Writing specific use cases is insane for more reasons than I should have to point out to you. What if someone from tempe is on vacation in NY, should they be in danger because they follow a different culture? You need to rely on universal rules and implement the most cautious strategies. Pedestrian shows up at the curb, slow to a speed in which you can safely stop on a dime, resume cruising speed when the pedestrians intent is known.
- jarfil 8y ago
  Or... make Jay walking punishable by death, and autonomous cars won't need to stop, or even look for random pedestrians.
  - userbinator 8y ago
    This, absolutely this. It's always bothered me why pedestrians seem to be universally given the right of way, when the irrefutable laws of physics dictate otherwise: a human, although having a lower speed, has a far wider view of its surroundings, and can change direction much quicker than a car whose driver is relatively slow to react and has a much more restricted view. In a collision, the bare human is always going to lose. To take another example, it's pretty well accepted that it's entirely your fault if you drive into the path of an oncoming train and get killed. Then why does it seem so controversial that the driver should not be at fault if you get hit because you didn't look and just stepped into the road expecting the oncoming car to avoid you?
    - c22 8y ago
      Because the train is on tracks.
      - userbinator 8y ago
        That doesn't change the fact that pedestrians are still far more agile than cars. (Anyone else want to explain the downvotes?)
noobermin 8y ago
The entire thing that the ML fanboys need to figure out is the entire underlying logic of ML and statistical methods in general is that averages wash away quirks. In fact, that is their power and what people who traditionally deal with numbers know and use daily when we utilize averaging. So, ML and statistically derived math will work in the typical case but will not deal with exceptions well. This is why people (people whom I've found are NOT actual researchers) who are predicting we'll all be jobless by 2050 need to chill it out and realize the limits of current statistical methods.
iambateman 8y ago
I love this question. And while I’m sure it’s a two way street, I would expect traffic patterns to normalize as pedestrians learn to anticipate what a driverless car does. Pedestrians (and culture in general) will wrap itself around the technology. It’s sort of analogous to how wagon roads were different until fast cars required some standardization. The new technology shapes expectations for what normal means in Tempe and in NY and in Pittsburgh. The prssent cultural context assumes that a human brain is driving a car. Take the brain away, and the context has already changed. couldn’t resist. P.s. standardization has beaten back the whimsical variability of culture in fast food, housing, cars, most clothing, computers, phones, etc. I want more whimsical stuff.
- krainboltgreene 8y ago
  > I would expect traffic patterns to normalize as pedestrians learn to anticipate what a driverless car does In this case normalizing means running people over less and less?
  - iambateman 8y ago
    One can only hope. We're in a safety arms race, where to win, the car companies have to emphasize how much more safe they are than everyone else. It's a nice change from the horsepower arms race of the past.
i_feel_great 8y ago
Soon, Uber et al will lobby government to outlaw normal pedestrian behaviour like this. Any accidents will be due to illegal behaviour.
- taneq 8y ago
  Well, that wouldn't be without precedent either. Apparently in the 20s, pro-car groups pushed social and political agendas against "jay-walkers", and indeed were responsible for popularising the term. Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/transport/2009/11/in_defense_of_jaywalking.html http://www.slate.com/articles/life/transport/2009/11/in_defe...
csomar 8y ago
My impression looking at self-driving cars given these incident is that the whole thing was a pump scheme. They are simply not ready. Roads are not rail tracks. They are highly random and dangerous. You'd need something with a high level of awareness and not just visibility. Humans have that awareness and lack on visibility (you can't see 360degrees, you can't see a wide range, you can't see beyond your car Caracas...). The awareness was enough to let us move but the lack of visibility did certainly kill people. The best we could have done today was a system that helps human visually. Then the system reports back how human interacted with that particular situation (ignore, brake, etc...) Then maybe 5 years later of work we could have had something.
masklinn 8y ago
> For example, in NYC, there's nothing at all uncommon about a pedestrian beginning to cross the street in front of you and approaching the area of your lane where you will shortly be. Pedestrians typically then stop about a foot away from your lane, let you drive past them, and then continue walking. If a car slammed on the brakes in this situation, it would likely cause more accidents than not braking would cause. > On the contrary, in Tempe, a pedestrian starting to do the exact same thing as above is likely much more a case of them not realizing your car is coming at all, in which case slamming on the brakes is appropriate. And in many SEA country you're expected to just drive around a pedestrian crossing the road (or a cow lying on it).
hobochili 8y ago
It's a hard problem to solve that doesn't need solving. Glorifying the complexity of the challenge shouldn't distract from the questionable ethics of endangering lives in the pursuit of luxury.
rmc 8y ago
A similar thing happens to voice recognition systems trained on American English. There are lots of videos of frustrated Scottish, or northern England people not being understood.

GenerocUsername 8y ago

And welcome to why self-driving cars will always be 3 years away. I think we should be targeting self driving for long-haul freeway scenarios where the rules are relatively simple and predictable. Trying to control for the infinite number of scenarios in cities is a nightmare which will ultimately bog down the development of any company which makes that its goal.

joncrane 8y ago
> And welcome to why self-driving cars will always be 3 years away. It's also possible that human/pedestrian behavior will adapt to the consistent behavior of driverless cars.
- splouk 8y ago
  Or jaywalking will become more strictly enforced with policing or physical barriers. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/4/2/automated-vehicles https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/4/2/automated-vehic...
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - vinay427 8y ago
    We do it for many pedestrian crossings across railroad tracks, so it's not unprecedented, but obviously on a different scale.
  - bryanlarsen 8y ago
    That's a very good argument but I don't think it will come to pass, for this reason: http://theoatmeal.com/pl/minor_differences/cutting_off http://theoatmeal.com/pl/minor_differences/cutting_off There's something about driving that turns ordinary people into assholes. I've observed it in myself. Bus passengers are much more considerate, and I think that passengers in self-driving vehicles will behave like passengers, not like drivers. So if a pedestrian cuts them off they'll just shrug and keep playing their game or whatever they're doing. I hope.
    - ksenzee 8y ago
      My theory is that people act like jerks behind the wheel, and come across as jerks even when they're not, because drivers have no way to apologize or ask please or do any other polite thing. All they can do is honk the horn, which is like yelling "HEY!!" If there were a communication mechanism for "excuse me, the light is green now" and "oops, so sorry, didn't see you there" driving would be easier and more pleasant.
      - rm_-rf_slash 8y ago
        Dangerous driving can result in damage, injury, or death. That is why people are so volatile behind the wheel. I don’t think there is any system of communication that can prevent or stop road rage. Dampen, maybe, but that’s about it.
        eric_h 8y ago
        If the internet has taught us anything, it's that anything that facilitates conversation facilitates all types and styles of conversation. I'd posit that a more sophisticated inter-car communication system would add at least one new road rage incident for every one it prevents.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  Adaptations are still localized. Pedestrians have "adapted" to just expect everyone to brake always on most college campuses. If you treat a factory floor or intermodal facility like a collage campus nobody will be surprised when someone has to use a garden hose to wash you off of whatever multi-thousand pound metal thing you got in the way of.
- stale2002 8y ago
  On a similar note, the innovation of Serri, and other "AI" programs was not to get computers to understand how humans talk. The innovation was getting humans to speak in a way that computers understand.
- matte_black 8y ago
  Nope. You can never count on humans to change behavior to fit a technology. As soon as self-driving cars learn local customs, the customs will have been changed. Self-driving cars will always be 3 years away.
  - fjsolwmv 8y ago
    Pittsburgh left custom is 50years old or more
  - Someone 8y ago
    It may be worse. If cars are very good at avoiding colliding with pedestrians, why would pedestrians look out for cars at all before stepping onto a street? We may have to tweak the car’s software to be assertive, bordering aggressive, in busy neighborhoods, if the car is to make progress at all.
    - icebraining 8y ago
      No. Let the passenger deal with that if they're annoyed. Machines should be always "humble". A human in front may be an inconsiderate jerk, or they may be trying to prevent the car from hitting something they're unlikely to detect.
rockostrich 8y ago
This is already happening in the trucking industry. Self-driving trucks are being developed to be able to drive 99% of the trip that's on highways and then human drivers take over for the local 1%. To make it easier, transfer hubs are being built near cities off major highways to make everything easier and non-disruptive. The same thing could be done with cars without the need for the transfer hubs and it basically is already done.
- frankharv 8y ago
  I can't beleive they would do a trail run with an automous truck weighing 80,000lbs barreling down the freeway. This revolution should have started with mundane tasks, such as city street sweepers and perhaps garbage trucks. Vehicles that move slow on a predefined path in the night. Then advance to faster moving objects like taxis. Just like the DARPA Grand Challenge that started this mess. Many of those vehicles were industrial usage, not consumer.
  - chris11 8y ago
    > This revolution should have started with mundane tasks, such as city street sweepers and perhaps garbage trucks. Honestly I would think that automating a slow moving vehicle in the city would be a much harder engineering challenge. City driving can be a lot messier than driving on the freeway.
    - 0x00000000 8y ago
      The stakes are much lower though. A standard car drifting into the oncoming lane is basically death. If it can't handle city driving, the methods are probably too immature to put people's lives against.
      - mrep 8y ago
        Pretty much all interstates have barriers between the directions to prevent head on collisions.
aurailious 8y ago
Essentially make the freeways "car trains" as the autobahn implies. Eventually over time you add automation to other kinds of roads.
- hughw 8y ago
  I think "bahn" translates to "path". Autobahn doesn't connote "car train". (Disclaimer: 1 year of college German)
  - detaro 8y ago
    Pretty much. See in English railway (Eisenbahn in German) or runway (Startbahn/Landebahn) for the equivalent patterns. Especially since in the beginning railway and Eisenbahn meant primarily the way with rails only, not the entire enterprise. Autobahn might actually be derived from Eisenbahn in that Wikipedia says some group choose it because of the similarity, but it only works because Bahn is the more general concept.
oldgradstudent 8y ago
You're underestimating the difficulty. Self-driving cars will always be 5 years away.
kiliantics 8y ago
We should anyway just remove cars from cities altogether

ShabbosGoy 8y ago

> But it seems like a very non-trivial problem to do this correctly. I had this same thought. You could theoretically have a universal rule where the self-driving car stops 100% of the time if it detects an object that is determined to be a pedestrian. But there are unforeseen problems with this approach. What if the model is overly cautious and there are many false positives? That could be extremely dangerous too, if a self-driving car is constantly stopping and going.

Retric 8y ago
Stopping is only one option slowing down is another. However, I suspect a car may be aware a person has stopped significantly before a person would enter their lane. At 30 mph a car takes ~2 seconds to physically brake and at an average walking speed a mph moves 9 feet in 2 seconds. However, to stop before entering the cars lane they would need to start slowing down even sooner. So, I guess you really need videos with calculated velocities of people jaywalking to really tell if this is going to be a problem or not.

infogulch 8y ago

This really speaks to other cues that we use while driving that are more complex that just the location and velocity of objects/people. In this case: attention and gaze. I sometimes do the "walk up to the lane and wait" thing, but I always look up and make eye contact with the driver to communicate that I know they exist and I'm not walking out in front of them. And when I'm driving and someone is walking up to my lane, the presence of their gaze is what I use to decide whether to continue (cautiously) or slow down and be ready to stop. I know that CV as a field has pretty advanced gaze/attention detection (e.g. see faceid), but I wonder if it's actually a part of self-driving car tech yet.

s_m_t 8y ago
I think body language might be more important, and seems to me should be harder to detect. Eye's are pretty easy to detect because of the contrast between the whites and iris, and, of course they reflect light. Detecting the difference between a hustle, a saunter, and a day dream might be a tad more difficult.
- jschwartzi 8y ago
  Gaze is actually more important when you're trying to figure out whether someone sees you. If I don't see your eyes, I would assume that you don't see me at all.
  - eric_h 8y ago
    > If I don't see your eyes I think you really mean if you don't make eye contact. Eye contact is a two-person activity. How does an autonomous car make eye contact with a person?
    - c22 8y ago
      Something like this could be developed. For instance, the car could have an array of lights on its grill (think Knight Rider) that track in the direction of detected obstacles, if you don't see a light facing towards you then you know you are not detected and to use caution. Alternately a light on the front of the car could turn from yellow to blue to indicate its intent to yield.

Rotdhizon 8y ago

Not related to the article but I want to chime in on your point. Having spent some time in VA, aggressive driving and dangerous scenarios were infrequent from my experience. Then having spent some time in FL, aggressive driving was the norm and driving laws did not exist for most people. So I wonder, do self-driving cars needs something like driving profiles for certain regions, where defensive/aggressive response behavior is ramped up or down in accordance to what is observed? In a passive region where you only have to slam your breaks or jerk the wheel in rare instances, the profile would be tuned to give gentle responses to changes in traffic conditions However, in regions where aggressive driving is rampant, the profile would have to be tuned to be alert that sudden responses to other drivers frequently breaking the law and putting people in dangerous situations is common and to respond in kind. For example, to not slam the breaks when you get cut off, or not to speed up when an impatient person is literally 1 foot away from your bumper even thought you're doing 5 over the limit already. Now that can all be bundled into one, and already is I think in current self driving cars. I'm asking specifically if it would help self driving performance and decision making if the decisions could be influenced by knowing how rough things can or can't get in that area.

sudouser 8y ago
exactly, act according to context. driving in SF is totally different from nearby places like Lakeshore or San Leandro (people from those places complain about how bad people drive in SF)
dahart 8y ago
Personally, I’d rather see driving behavior normalize nationally than cater to regional differences in enforcement. The driving laws in each city & state the US are less different than the locally accepted behaviors, but it would be safer all around if drivers and pedestrians all expected the same things, and if we took traffic & safety laws more seriously. More enforcement of existing traffic laws will save many orders of magnitude more lives than customizing autonomous cars for various cities.
- Sangermaine 8y ago
  The "reality should conform to my ideal, not my ideal to the reality" approach is and has always been a guaranteed recipe for failure. "Let's change everyone's minds and behavior everywhere" is much harder than changing software.

Waterluvian 8y ago

There's a road near the University of Waterloo where students get hit, some killed, on pretty much an annual basis. Often it boils down to the large number of foreign students who come from a part of the world where for one reason or another, you just don't need to bother looking before crossing, so they don't and walk right in front of cars (and in one case a city bus). To me this is an example of the overwhelming importance of locale-specific context. When I'm near UW, my driving behaviour changes significantly even though the laws do not.

megablast 8y ago
> To me this is an example of the overwhelming importance of locale-specific context. When I'm near UW, my driving behaviour changes significantly even though the laws do not. To me this is the incredibly danger of road and our current reliance on cars. Should it be ok to be killed if you aren't paying attention.

Symmetry 8y ago

I think you're overselling the extent of the difficulty here. People from out of state usually manage to get through New York, pedestrians and all, without getting into an accident. A car won't get through a block as quickly as it could if it merely obeys the laws makes sure it doesn't run into anybody. I'm sure this will cause great joy among people crossing the street and consternation among other drivers but the problem isn't a blocking one as long as the car can actually avoid hitting people - even if it's more cautious than it needs to be.

Maybestring 8y ago
>I think you're overselling the extent of the difficulty here. People from out of state usually manage to get through New York, pedestrians and all, without getting into an accident. At this point, "it's easy for a person to do it" is probably better evidence that it's a hard problem in AI. In this case, I believe it's an inverse learning problem. We observe other agents acting in an environment, deduce their policy, then implement that policy ourselves. A self-driving car that can reconfigure it's software to mimic the behavior of other cars it observes, sounds difficult to me.
- Symmetry 8y ago
  That sounds much harder than just stopping if a pedestrian is on a trajectory to enter your lane. I mean, obviously it would be better to deduce their intentions and act according to that but I don't see any reason to say that that's necessary to have useful self driving cars.
  - flyingfences 8y ago
    A car that defaults to braking without any deduction beyond detection will never make it through an intersection, let alone a whole trip, in some parts of the world.
    - isostatic 8y ago
      New York looks like a well regulated army training course compared with somewhere like Cairo. Never is a long time, but I don't see self driving cars coping well when traffic is coming the wrong way down the street, let alone when cars are driving along the sidewalk

chris11 8y ago

I think that cultural context definitely influences driving safely. And that's going to be a very hard problem for companies to solve. But I think it's solvable, and part of the solution may be to change how people interact with streets. The introduction of the car caused a lot of problems in cities. People didn't know how to safely drive them, pedestrians didn't know how to deal with drivers, regulation was poor to non-existent, and city infrastructure couldn't handle large numbers of cars. But those problems eventually got fixed.https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan-history/2015/04/26/auto-traffic-history-detroit/26312107/ https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan-histor...

Johnny555 8y ago

I think legally, the car has to stop for an approaching pedestrian if it's physically able to stop, so if the pedestrian doesn't "stop about a foot away from your lane" as expected, you don't run into him. Though I don't know the NYC traffic code. In California, I believe 21950 paragraph C applies... the pedestrian that stops just before walking into the path of the car might be violating paragraph B since the driver may reasonably expect the pedestrian to continue walking. (b) This section does not relieve a pedestrian from the duty of using due care for his or her safety. No pedestrian may suddenly leave a curb or other place of safety and walk or run into the path of a vehicle that is so close as to constitute an immediate hazard. No pedestrian may unnecessarily stop or delay traffic while in a marked or unmarked crosswalk. (c) The driver of a vehicle approaching a pedestrian within any marked or unmarked crosswalk shall exercise all due care and shall reduce the speed of the vehicle or take any other action relating to the operation of the vehicle as necessary to safeguard the safety of the pedestrian.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago
Typically the law is broad enough and redundant enough that who's in violation is simply up to the discretion of whoever has the blue lights.
- Johnny555 8y ago
  Almost, but not exactly true -- the cop can issue a ticket, but a judge decides who is actually in violation (assuming that the person that got the ticket contests it). Always-on cameras in self-driving cars will help protect the innocent (assuming the footage is saved and available through subpoena, otherwise, like police dash and body cams, few people will let their own camera prove them guilty)
  - Piskvorrr 8y ago
    Oh, you mean like the "too-dark-to-see" scapegoat camera in that very case the article is about? Riiiiight.
volkl48 8y ago

TheCoelacanth 8y ago

There is an obvious solution: don't stop, just slow down to <25 mph. On the streets where it is normal for pedestrians to approach that close, the speed limit is almost always 25 mph or lower and often the typical speed is much lower because of traffic. On streets with higher speeds, if a pedestrian is approaching that close to traffic, they either don't see the car or they have a death wish.

cpeterso 8y ago
The car could also honk to warn and check for a reaction. I wonder what the rules and social conventions well be for autonomous horns!

arich 8y ago

George Hotz had a great point about this and how Comma.ai handles defining the driving problem and what "driving badly" actually means, aka, interacting with and driving as other humans are expected to drive, quirks included. His whole talk is interesting but the short part about that is here: https://youtu.be/IxuU5L2MEII?t=38m11s https://youtu.be/IxuU5L2MEII?t=38m11s

uptown 8y ago

NPR had a story about how self-driving cars in Pittsburgh wouldn't be adhering to the "Pittsburgh-left": "Even harder for autonomous cars to master are local quirks; things like "the Pittsburgh left." That's a custom unique to the city that allows the first driver trying to make a left turn to do so before oncoming cars pass through an intersection. It's one thing that Emily Duff Bartel says Uber's fleet of self-driving cars won't be programmed to practice. "We're following the rules on this one," she says." https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/04/03/522099560/pittsburgh-offers-driving-lessons-for-ubers-autonomous-cars https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/04/03/52...

forgotmypw 8y ago
This custom is prevalent in places other than Pittsburgh. It can also get you a citation if a cop sees it.
- bsder 8y ago
  It depends. Most cities whose road network predates cars have "local customs" which are essential to keep traffic flowing. These "local customs" may not be strictly legal, but you rarely will wind up with a ticket for it.
- megablast 8y ago
  As it should, what a ridiculous thing to do.
  - chcknsammich 8y ago
    Says the person who has never seen the ridiculous thing that is single lane road deadlock.
    - lttlrck 8y ago
      Indeed. When I first came to the US I lived in Boston and this happens quite frequently inside the I95. It used to drive me crazy, I hated it, I though it was dangerous and uncivilized :-) it didn’t take long for me to understand why it was necessary and to start doing it myself.

imnotadoctor999 8y ago

Thinking about it this way is interesting. It could be an issue with bias or unbalanced training data.

Zenbit_UX 8y ago

Your examples are absurd. Would you program a car to assume that all New Yorkers won't Jay walk? How about all people in Tempe will rush into the streets? Cultural context definetly matters, but for none of the reasons you've mentioned. Writing specific use cases is insane for more reasons than I should have to point out to you. What if someone from tempe is on vacation in NY, should they be in danger because they follow a different culture? You need to rely on universal rules and implement the most cautious strategies. Pedestrian shows up at the curb, slow to a speed in which you can safely stop on a dime, resume cruising speed when the pedestrians intent is known.

jarfil 8y ago
Or... make Jay walking punishable by death, and autonomous cars won't need to stop, or even look for random pedestrians.
- userbinator 8y ago
  This, absolutely this. It's always bothered me why pedestrians seem to be universally given the right of way, when the irrefutable laws of physics dictate otherwise: a human, although having a lower speed, has a far wider view of its surroundings, and can change direction much quicker than a car whose driver is relatively slow to react and has a much more restricted view. In a collision, the bare human is always going to lose. To take another example, it's pretty well accepted that it's entirely your fault if you drive into the path of an oncoming train and get killed. Then why does it seem so controversial that the driver should not be at fault if you get hit because you didn't look and just stepped into the road expecting the oncoming car to avoid you?
  - c22 8y ago
    Because the train is on tracks.
    - userbinator 8y ago
      That doesn't change the fact that pedestrians are still far more agile than cars. (Anyone else want to explain the downvotes?)

noobermin 8y ago

The entire thing that the ML fanboys need to figure out is the entire underlying logic of ML and statistical methods in general is that averages wash away quirks. In fact, that is their power and what people who traditionally deal with numbers know and use daily when we utilize averaging. So, ML and statistically derived math will work in the typical case but will not deal with exceptions well. This is why people (people whom I've found are NOT actual researchers) who are predicting we'll all be jobless by 2050 need to chill it out and realize the limits of current statistical methods.

iambateman 8y ago

I love this question. And while I’m sure it’s a two way street, I would expect traffic patterns to normalize as pedestrians learn to anticipate what a driverless car does. Pedestrians (and culture in general) will wrap itself around the technology. It’s sort of analogous to how wagon roads were different until fast cars required some standardization. The new technology shapes expectations for what normal means in Tempe and in NY and in Pittsburgh. The prssent cultural context assumes that a human brain is driving a car. Take the brain away, and the context has already changed. couldn’t resist. P.s. standardization has beaten back the whimsical variability of culture in fast food, housing, cars, most clothing, computers, phones, etc. I want more whimsical stuff.

krainboltgreene 8y ago
> I would expect traffic patterns to normalize as pedestrians learn to anticipate what a driverless car does In this case normalizing means running people over less and less?
- iambateman 8y ago
  One can only hope. We're in a safety arms race, where to win, the car companies have to emphasize how much more safe they are than everyone else. It's a nice change from the horsepower arms race of the past.

i_feel_great 8y ago

Soon, Uber et al will lobby government to outlaw normal pedestrian behaviour like this. Any accidents will be due to illegal behaviour.

taneq 8y ago
Well, that wouldn't be without precedent either. Apparently in the 20s, pro-car groups pushed social and political agendas against "jay-walkers", and indeed were responsible for popularising the term. Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/transport/2009/11/in_defense_of_jaywalking.html http://www.slate.com/articles/life/transport/2009/11/in_defe...

csomar 8y ago

My impression looking at self-driving cars given these incident is that the whole thing was a pump scheme. They are simply not ready. Roads are not rail tracks. They are highly random and dangerous. You'd need something with a high level of awareness and not just visibility. Humans have that awareness and lack on visibility (you can't see 360degrees, you can't see a wide range, you can't see beyond your car Caracas...). The awareness was enough to let us move but the lack of visibility did certainly kill people. The best we could have done today was a system that helps human visually. Then the system reports back how human interacted with that particular situation (ignore, brake, etc...) Then maybe 5 years later of work we could have had something.

masklinn 8y ago

> For example, in NYC, there's nothing at all uncommon about a pedestrian beginning to cross the street in front of you and approaching the area of your lane where you will shortly be. Pedestrians typically then stop about a foot away from your lane, let you drive past them, and then continue walking. If a car slammed on the brakes in this situation, it would likely cause more accidents than not braking would cause. > On the contrary, in Tempe, a pedestrian starting to do the exact same thing as above is likely much more a case of them not realizing your car is coming at all, in which case slamming on the brakes is appropriate. And in many SEA country you're expected to just drive around a pedestrian crossing the road (or a cow lying on it).

hobochili 8y ago

It's a hard problem to solve that doesn't need solving. Glorifying the complexity of the challenge shouldn't distract from the questionable ethics of endangering lives in the pursuit of luxury.

rmc 8y ago

A similar thing happens to voice recognition systems trained on American English. There are lots of videos of frustrated Scottish, or northern England people not being understood.