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Self-driving will always be held back by municipalities doing weird things with their traffic lanes and lines (and cones and hazards and signal trucks and road

Self-driving will always be held back by municipalities doing weird things with their traffic lanes and lines (and cones and hazards and signal trucks and road construction) as long as the AI puts as much faith in the lines as it does. And you'll never track down everything because construction is constant in the world, with the possibility of introducing a novel road-weirdness. It's a road system designed for humans, and with current tech, you'll always have issues chasing the long tail down. Though I'm fairly sure self-driving is still statistically better than humans behind the wheel, especially distracted humans as the information age has made us. The more immediate solution is white-listing safe roads that have sane paint lines and are relatively straight-forward roads. That way, the chance of the AI getting it wrong is drastically reduced. This covers most highways where you get the most out of self-driving systems anyway. Bonus points if you can automate this decision-making with recent satellite imagery.

icc97 8y ago
> as long as the AI puts as much faith in the lines as it does. The need for lines is only a temporary crux. AI systems will continually improve until the white lines are guidelines only. There are lots of other factors in an image that can be used to deduce where the lines should be. But there will have to be handling of uncertainty which humans have to do too, simply just slowing down (not sharp braking) will help most cases.
phaedrus 8y ago
Maybe the responsibility (and liability) for accidents due to weirdly designed or badly marked lanes would have to fall upon the municipality. You could make an analogy to trains: if a local government commissioned a rail line that included a junction that can't be navigated without derailing 1% of the time, you would not blame the trains for not being able to deal with it. Another analogy could me made to data entry: you could allow free-form text input and try to process all of the long tail of unexpected inputs, or else set out a format that the data has to follow and enforce validation at the input.

icc97 8y ago

> as long as the AI puts as much faith in the lines as it does. The need for lines is only a temporary crux. AI systems will continually improve until the white lines are guidelines only. There are lots of other factors in an image that can be used to deduce where the lines should be. But there will have to be handling of uncertainty which humans have to do too, simply just slowing down (not sharp braking) will help most cases.

phaedrus 8y ago

Maybe the responsibility (and liability) for accidents due to weirdly designed or badly marked lanes would have to fall upon the municipality. You could make an analogy to trains: if a local government commissioned a rail line that included a junction that can't be navigated without derailing 1% of the time, you would not blame the trains for not being able to deal with it. Another analogy could me made to data entry: you could allow free-form text input and try to process all of the long tail of unexpected inputs, or else set out a format that the data has to follow and enforce validation at the input.