3 ms·

In the US anyway, doctor review is standard-of-care anyway for most of these things. Not necessarily for performance or technical reasons (although it may be)

by ska 8y ago

In the US anyway, doctor review is standard-of-care anyway for most of these things. Not necessarily for performance or technical reasons (although it may be) but for liability. I suppose if you know this is the case, you may tune differently on your ROC curve based on joint performance, although I don't know personally of a system that does that explicitly. It isn't really interesting to talk about performance (what I think you mean by "unreliable") in some absolute sense - it's interesting compared to current performance only. So - sure, if the automatic driving systems are significantly enough below human performance in general it's premature to use them on public roads. However, if they are approaching human performance (again, in general), they aren't. And you may see specific new failure modes coming up because of that, but focusing on those modes in isolation is a mistake. I have no knowledge of where the overall performance is for self-driving cars, and hence no opinion as to whether or not we are being premature. I'm just pointing out that the trade off is fundamental, and will effectively never go away regardless of improvements in classifiers.

joe_the_user 8y ago
If you had a CAD system that could not only diagnose but take immediate action (though surgery or otherwise). If on occasion, this system took actions that would appear to a human being as "completely illogical" and those actions killed people, it would be hard to explain to a person's family or to a jury that "this reduces fatalities on average", even if a company had nice charts that claimed to show this. That's sort of the problem one has in explaining self-driving cars, along with the problem that it hasn't yet been shown they are capable of reducing fatalities.
- ska 8y ago
  it would be hard to explain to a person's family or to a jury that "this reduces fatalities on average" Yes, that's true. However it is a problem that has to be solved if you want the best outcomes. Anything else will be effectively making things worse for people in general. This isn't a new problem at all, the saying "hard cases make bad law" encodes a similar sentiment from an area with far less empirical outputs.
  - marcosdumay 8y ago
    > However it is a problem that has to be solved if you want the best outcomes. Or you could invest some more and get a system that does not act crazy sometimes. Yes, assuming the car company is honest, this is a sub-optimal strategy. But blind trust is not an optimal strategy. There are plenty of costs born out of lack of trust, and this is just another one.
    - ska 8y ago
      I think you missed the point I was trying to make. After all people act “crazy” sometimes, and we have constructs to undertstand it. It is unreasonable to spect that we will be able to create an computer that doesn’t make surprising calls sometimes. The trade off between type I and II errors is fundamental, expecting to engineer our way out of it is naive. Now that isn’t to say I believe we can have higher performance systems. It they will also have a version of this behaviour. Making them behave worse to hide some of the cases won’t make it go away either. Nobody was suggesting blind trust.
      - joe_the_user 8y ago
        I think you missed the point I was trying to make. After all people act “crazy” sometimes, and we have constructs to undertstand it. It is unreasonable to spect that we will be able to create an computer that doesn’t make surprising calls sometimes. If a person acts crazy, we certainly do blame them. However, the point is people accept the position "if a computer is irrational no more often than a person, it's no worse a situation" in the abstract but have a harder time accepting a situation where a computer irrationally kills someone than when a person irrationally kills someone. Moreover, having a person make the mistake "gives you someone to blame." If computer builds a system and that system can be shown to gratuitously kill a person, the amount of liability a jury is inclined to hand out may be quite large since it's spread about a large amount of people. Also, in the self-driving car situation, you really are going to have to have situation where blind is required.
        ska 8y ago
- deleted 8y ago
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by ska 8y ago

joe_the_user 8y ago

If you had a CAD system that could not only diagnose but take immediate action (though surgery or otherwise). If on occasion, this system took actions that would appear to a human being as "completely illogical" and those actions killed people, it would be hard to explain to a person's family or to a jury that "this reduces fatalities on average", even if a company had nice charts that claimed to show this. That's sort of the problem one has in explaining self-driving cars, along with the problem that it hasn't yet been shown they are capable of reducing fatalities.

ska 8y ago
it would be hard to explain to a person's family or to a jury that "this reduces fatalities on average" Yes, that's true. However it is a problem that has to be solved if you want the best outcomes. Anything else will be effectively making things worse for people in general. This isn't a new problem at all, the saying "hard cases make bad law" encodes a similar sentiment from an area with far less empirical outputs.
- marcosdumay 8y ago
  > However it is a problem that has to be solved if you want the best outcomes. Or you could invest some more and get a system that does not act crazy sometimes. Yes, assuming the car company is honest, this is a sub-optimal strategy. But blind trust is not an optimal strategy. There are plenty of costs born out of lack of trust, and this is just another one.
  - ska 8y ago
    I think you missed the point I was trying to make. After all people act “crazy” sometimes, and we have constructs to undertstand it. It is unreasonable to spect that we will be able to create an computer that doesn’t make surprising calls sometimes. The trade off between type I and II errors is fundamental, expecting to engineer our way out of it is naive. Now that isn’t to say I believe we can have higher performance systems. It they will also have a version of this behaviour. Making them behave worse to hide some of the cases won’t make it go away either. Nobody was suggesting blind trust.
    - joe_the_user 8y ago
      I think you missed the point I was trying to make. After all people act “crazy” sometimes, and we have constructs to undertstand it. It is unreasonable to spect that we will be able to create an computer that doesn’t make surprising calls sometimes. If a person acts crazy, we certainly do blame them. However, the point is people accept the position "if a computer is irrational no more often than a person, it's no worse a situation" in the abstract but have a harder time accepting a situation where a computer irrationally kills someone than when a person irrationally kills someone. Moreover, having a person make the mistake "gives you someone to blame." If computer builds a system and that system can be shown to gratuitously kill a person, the amount of liability a jury is inclined to hand out may be quite large since it's spread about a large amount of people. Also, in the self-driving car situation, you really are going to have to have situation where blind is required.
      - ska 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
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