7 ms·

>That being said, I still want this tech on the road ASAP, not because it's perfect, but because human drivers are So. Fucking. Awful. This narrative is so per

>That being said, I still want this tech on the road ASAP, not because it's perfect, but because human drivers are So. Fucking. Awful. This narrative is so pervasive and I must admit a bit strange to me. Millions and millions of people strap themselves into thousands of pounds of metal and then drive 80 down the highway while texting and changing the radio and telling your kids to please stop fighting surrounded by other people doing the exact same thing. And we do that every single day and almost all of us are fine and will never have a 'major' accident. Humans are pretty fucking great at driving. Besides to say that human are bad (or good) at driving would require some comparison, we're bad at it compared to what? As far as we know humans are the best drivers in universe. There's no evidence that self-driving is currently better than human drivers and there's no evidence that self-driving cars will soon be better than human drivers and there's no evidence that if we allow tons of self-driving cars on the roads then they will be better than humans. It's just blind hope, it really makes me want a word for whatever the opposite of a luddite is, instead of a belief that we can destroy machines to benefit people we believe we can destroy people to benefit machines. It's all twisted up. If you want to be an Uber or Tesla crash test dummy and walk/bike across a test track while they see if their vehicle can avoid you then by all means go for it. But don't just foist that upon average people.

wetpaws 8y ago
It's not that humans are bad, it's more about humans being unreliable by definition. That's why we have autopilots, industrial robots, elevator or traffic light control system, or, in general trying to automate stuff.
- occamrazor 8y ago
  The point is that, until now, humans are _better_ drivers than self driving cars.
  - w_t_payne 8y ago
    An alert, attentive, sober human will be a better driver than a self driving car for some time to come.
    - w_t_payne 8y ago
      It's the exhausted, distracted, drunk ones you need to look out for.
      - simion314 8y ago
        And we could install some cheap device in each cars to detect when a driver is tired and keep him awake, and detect a drunk driver and stop him drive or perform some other action. Until most of people will afford a self driving car you would still have to face the drunk, or the ones that text so you will not remove those of the roads.
        w_t_payne 8y ago
        Not a bad idea.
        perl4ever 8y ago
        There are luxury cars that attempt to detect when a driver is falling asleep, and people are sometimes mandated to have an interlock on their cars that prevents starting if they have alcohol in their breath. So if these things are not universal, presumably it's because of cost-benefit analysis, not because they need to be invented.
        w_t_payne 8y ago
        I was involved back in 2003-2004 with an Australian company called SeeingMachines (I worked for a UK redistributor). These guys made a remote video face-and-eye tracker that they sold to automotive companies wanting to research different dashboard designs -- they would look for blinks and head-nods to measure how fatigued a driver was, and to optimise the dashboard design to keep the driver awake. I'm sure they are now selling their technology to automotive OEMs for placement in driver-facing camera ECUs. Their technology worked OK back in 2003. I'm sure it is very robust and mature by now.
  - wetpaws 8y ago
    The key part here is "until now"
  - ajross 8y ago
    Which is why they aren't quite legal yet. And it's arguable anyway, given the noise in the signal (a tiny handful of fatalities to compare with the ~100k "normal" traffic deaths over the same period). But like all new technology, it's improving. People aren't.
  - beat 8y ago
    So at what point will automation become better than humans at this task? Are you saying "never"? Or just "not now"?
  - CPLX 8y ago
    They are also better pilots than self-flying planes. And better writers then self-writing blogs. And so on. There, of course, are many examples of things in which computers have outpaced human capabilities, and it's certainly plausible that some day this could apply to cars. But it hasn't happened yet and it's also more than plausible that none of this will happen in the lifetime of anyone now living.
  - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
    For some values of 'human' e.g. alert, sober. Which is sadly, a minority? Its arguable that self-driving cars are better already. What we need to do is, secure the roads so they won't get confused (fence them & remove pedestrians/bikes). I know, we can't do that everywhere but we could do it for long-haul etc. Like freeways already do.
    - ummonk 8y ago
      >For some values of 'human' e.g. alert, sober. Which is sadly, a minority? I think the vast majority of human drivers are alert and sober. It's the long tail of drunk / aggressive / distracted drivers that causes crashes. >Its arguable that self-driving cars are better already. What we need to do is, secure the roads so they won't get confused (fence them & remove pedestrians/bikes). I know, we can't do that everywhere but we could do it for long-haul etc. Like freeways already do. I mean as a human driver, I obviously love limited access roads (and human drivers perform very well on limited access roads). We won't have more of those though - the cultural paradigm for urban planning is one of tearing down freeways, adding bike-lanes, and ensuring pedestrian friendliness for maximum walkability.
- eezurr 8y ago
  Everything you've listed involves repetitive actions (or complete lack there of, if my limited understanding of aviation is accurate), which is known to cause humans to lose focus (and make mistakes). Driving a car, on the other hand, is usually NOT a repetitive, dull process. You're comparing apples to oranges.
  - CodeCube 8y ago
    Have you never commuted a long-ish distance?
  - beat 8y ago
    Driving a car is absolutely a repetitive process. It's improvisational to a degree, but the mechanics and decision-making in response to stimuli are consistent, learned behaviors. And it's hard to argue that humans are mechanically better at driving than machines can be - better sensors, better feedback, more direct connections, better reflexes. So we're only questioning whether self-driving cars can respond to unexpected stimuli better than humans.
    - eezurr 8y ago
      Technically, you are correct, but the spirit of my argument is in disagreement. Driving has a repetitive list of tasks, but unlike an elevator, the "buttons" to accomplish the task are moved around every single time. Sometimes new buttons appear, and sometimes some go missing. It's a chaotic environment. Thus, it is not a repetitive process in my mind, because a chaotic environment is not repetitive. It's like saying "A chaotic environment is repetitive because it's always chaotic".
- simion314 8y ago
  The problem is there is no proof AI is better then humans, probably it can't ever be better then a human with the current hardware in the current cars, but we have "hopeful" people that want to sacrifice lives to gather data for shitty startups that need the self driving cars ready this year or it will fail. So we need this: -real numbers of AI to have a meaningful discussion on real statistics -we need good statistics, so not compare different car types and driver ages/categories -IMO we have a low hanging fruit related to preventing drunk drivers to use a car, a system to detect a driver that is not looking ahead for more then n seconds, someone needs to handle this, it would improve the numbers a lot -when we compare say a chess AI we compare it with professionals so it would be more honest if we want to say that self driving AI is better we should compare with a driver with experience that is not drunk -we should not RUSH this because it will backfire,wait for hardware and software to be ready so if a concrete object is in the front of the car the radar can detect it's position and the cameras and image recognition can detect what it is and not ignore it like it is a road sign, hardware and software should be ready to detect signs, bottles, people, bikes, animals as good as humans, if is not as good as a human then we already lost since a human also many more "features" like intuition,
  - beat 8y ago
    Why does everyone assume the vendors don't have data? They're recording full sensor logs in these tests, tracking everything they can. They wouldn't even be in this field if they didn't think they could outperform humans - and dozens of companies are doing this, from tiny startups to Google to General Motors. No one wants to take on the liability of crappy systems that perform worse than humans. One interesting point of the development is that every failure is an opportunity to learn. The same cannot be said for human drivers. When the automation doesn't detect a hazard correctly, they can analyze it and tweak it so it detects better next time. Do humans do that?
    - crankylinuxuser 8y ago
      A single human can potentially learn from experience. The result is 1 human learns. A "auto" can learn from a failure, and every car using that AI system learns. 1 car results in thousands of systems all learning together. That's the win of cooperative cybernetics, and something we humans haven't grasped very well at all.
coding123 8y ago
Well said. These SDV threads are getting pretty annoying that we keep cycling the same arguments at each other and there is no substantive change to how good SDVs are yet.
beat 8y ago
Interesting factoid... half of US traffic fatalities occur between the hours of 9pm and 3am on friday and saturday nights. Average drivers in average situations are, indeed, pretty safe. But drunk drivers? Angry drivers? Texting drivers? If autonomous cars can drive at the skill level of average drivers - and not get drunk or angry or distracted by forwarding cat videos - then they will significantly outperform humans. Additional evidence in the form of reason... autonomous drivers have better sensors than humans. Human drivers have limited vision, that only points in one direction at a time. Mirrors offer some slight augmentation, but. Ever backed out of a parking space in a crowded parking lot and gotten into an accident because a car you couldn't see before was suddenly right behind you? Common situation. Autonomous drivers won't have that problem. They can see out the back and to the sides, 360 degrees at all times. (I'll note that some of the first deployed autonomous tech was cars that can parallel-park themselves.) Additionally, autonomous systems have better reflexes. Remember the two second rule? That's to deal with the delay from your eyes to your brain to your hands and feet. Machines can physically respond to changes in situation faster than humans. Now, let's level up. Imagine a system where autonomous vehicles are transmitting short-range telemetry to nearby vehicles, letting them know their status, including velocity. They can relay back emergency status info - so the car that slams its brakes to avoid a pedestrian doesn't cause someone six cars back to rear-end the car in front of them. Merge-related accidents (related to parking-lot problems) can be reduced to nothingness with telemetry. Think about how Waze is doing this already with driving data for their mapping software. It'd work better with less human involvement. I can go on and on, but really, I'm gonna throw a bullshit card here. Fear of autonomous vehicles is magical thinking trumping reason. Humans do magical thinking all the time. We think safe things are scary, and we think scary things are safe, for symbolism rather than fact. That's why people in this discussion used the phrase "murderbot", but not "murderer".
- frgtpsswrdlame 8y ago
  >Interesting factoid... half of US traffic fatalities occur between the hours of 9pm and 3am on friday and saturday nights. Average drivers in average situations are, indeed, pretty safe. But drunk drivers? Angry drivers? Texting drivers? There is exactly zero proof that self-driving vehicles are better than drunk drivers. There is exactly zero proof that self-driving vehicles are better than angry drivers. There is exactly zero proof that self-driving vehicles are better than texting drivers. There is zero proof they will soon overtake any of those categories. >Additional evidence in the form of reason... autonomous drivers have better sensors than humans. Teslas have to ignore stationary objects because they can't accurately estimate the height of those objects. My 'sensors' know when a tire shred is on the ground and about 2 inches high and when a bicyclist is on the ground and about 5 feet high. >Additionally, autonomous systems have better reflexes. Remember the two second rule? That's to deal with the delay from your eyes to your brain to your hands and feet. Machines can physically respond to changes in situation faster than humans. Watch the video here: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44439523 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44439523 I have driven while texting, I still sometimes drive angry and I have (unfortunately) driven drunk in the past. I have never made the very simple mistake made in that video. Where is the quick mechanical reflex you are leading me to believe exists in self-driving vehicles? >Now, let's level up. Imagine a... No. Your imagination is running wild imagining something that doesn't and won't in the near future exist. Your imaginary car not only is covered in sensors, but can p2p communicate with the cars around it, has no lag in processing complex input, can behave itself among human drivers, etc. None of this actually exists, none of it is actually out there and we really don't have good reason to expect it any time soon. >I can go on and on, I believe you could, but it's just your fantasizing, it's not a realistic portrait of what is actually happening. >I'm gonna throw a bullshit card here. Going to? What about the several you've already sent my way lol. >Humans do magical thinking all the time. We think safe things are scary, and we think scary things are safe, for symbolism rather than fact. Exactly! That's why people in this discussion called humans "So. Fucking. Awful." at driving and then wrote three paragraphs imagining a utopian, non-existent self-driving system which magically solves all problems and is really quite safe. Before diagnosing magical thinking in others you might attempt detecting it in yourself.

wetpaws 8y ago

It's not that humans are bad, it's more about humans being unreliable by definition. That's why we have autopilots, industrial robots, elevator or traffic light control system, or, in general trying to automate stuff.

occamrazor 8y ago
The point is that, until now, humans are _better_ drivers than self driving cars.
- w_t_payne 8y ago
  An alert, attentive, sober human will be a better driver than a self driving car for some time to come.
  - w_t_payne 8y ago
    It's the exhausted, distracted, drunk ones you need to look out for.
    - simion314 8y ago
      And we could install some cheap device in each cars to detect when a driver is tired and keep him awake, and detect a drunk driver and stop him drive or perform some other action. Until most of people will afford a self driving car you would still have to face the drunk, or the ones that text so you will not remove those of the roads.
      - w_t_payne 8y ago
        Not a bad idea.
      - perl4ever 8y ago
        There are luxury cars that attempt to detect when a driver is falling asleep, and people are sometimes mandated to have an interlock on their cars that prevents starting if they have alcohol in their breath. So if these things are not universal, presumably it's because of cost-benefit analysis, not because they need to be invented.
        w_t_payne 8y ago
        I was involved back in 2003-2004 with an Australian company called SeeingMachines (I worked for a UK redistributor). These guys made a remote video face-and-eye tracker that they sold to automotive companies wanting to research different dashboard designs -- they would look for blinks and head-nods to measure how fatigued a driver was, and to optimise the dashboard design to keep the driver awake. I'm sure they are now selling their technology to automotive OEMs for placement in driver-facing camera ECUs. Their technology worked OK back in 2003. I'm sure it is very robust and mature by now.
- wetpaws 8y ago
  The key part here is "until now"
- ajross 8y ago
  Which is why they aren't quite legal yet. And it's arguable anyway, given the noise in the signal (a tiny handful of fatalities to compare with the ~100k "normal" traffic deaths over the same period). But like all new technology, it's improving. People aren't.
- beat 8y ago
  So at what point will automation become better than humans at this task? Are you saying "never"? Or just "not now"?
- CPLX 8y ago
  They are also better pilots than self-flying planes. And better writers then self-writing blogs. And so on. There, of course, are many examples of things in which computers have outpaced human capabilities, and it's certainly plausible that some day this could apply to cars. But it hasn't happened yet and it's also more than plausible that none of this will happen in the lifetime of anyone now living.
- JoeAltmaier 8y ago
  For some values of 'human' e.g. alert, sober. Which is sadly, a minority? Its arguable that self-driving cars are better already. What we need to do is, secure the roads so they won't get confused (fence them & remove pedestrians/bikes). I know, we can't do that everywhere but we could do it for long-haul etc. Like freeways already do.
  - ummonk 8y ago
    >For some values of 'human' e.g. alert, sober. Which is sadly, a minority? I think the vast majority of human drivers are alert and sober. It's the long tail of drunk / aggressive / distracted drivers that causes crashes. >Its arguable that self-driving cars are better already. What we need to do is, secure the roads so they won't get confused (fence them & remove pedestrians/bikes). I know, we can't do that everywhere but we could do it for long-haul etc. Like freeways already do. I mean as a human driver, I obviously love limited access roads (and human drivers perform very well on limited access roads). We won't have more of those though - the cultural paradigm for urban planning is one of tearing down freeways, adding bike-lanes, and ensuring pedestrian friendliness for maximum walkability.
eezurr 8y ago
Everything you've listed involves repetitive actions (or complete lack there of, if my limited understanding of aviation is accurate), which is known to cause humans to lose focus (and make mistakes). Driving a car, on the other hand, is usually NOT a repetitive, dull process. You're comparing apples to oranges.
- CodeCube 8y ago
  Have you never commuted a long-ish distance?
- beat 8y ago
  Driving a car is absolutely a repetitive process. It's improvisational to a degree, but the mechanics and decision-making in response to stimuli are consistent, learned behaviors. And it's hard to argue that humans are mechanically better at driving than machines can be - better sensors, better feedback, more direct connections, better reflexes. So we're only questioning whether self-driving cars can respond to unexpected stimuli better than humans.
  - eezurr 8y ago
    Technically, you are correct, but the spirit of my argument is in disagreement. Driving has a repetitive list of tasks, but unlike an elevator, the "buttons" to accomplish the task are moved around every single time. Sometimes new buttons appear, and sometimes some go missing. It's a chaotic environment. Thus, it is not a repetitive process in my mind, because a chaotic environment is not repetitive. It's like saying "A chaotic environment is repetitive because it's always chaotic".
simion314 8y ago
The problem is there is no proof AI is better then humans, probably it can't ever be better then a human with the current hardware in the current cars, but we have "hopeful" people that want to sacrifice lives to gather data for shitty startups that need the self driving cars ready this year or it will fail. So we need this: -real numbers of AI to have a meaningful discussion on real statistics -we need good statistics, so not compare different car types and driver ages/categories -IMO we have a low hanging fruit related to preventing drunk drivers to use a car, a system to detect a driver that is not looking ahead for more then n seconds, someone needs to handle this, it would improve the numbers a lot -when we compare say a chess AI we compare it with professionals so it would be more honest if we want to say that self driving AI is better we should compare with a driver with experience that is not drunk -we should not RUSH this because it will backfire,wait for hardware and software to be ready so if a concrete object is in the front of the car the radar can detect it's position and the cameras and image recognition can detect what it is and not ignore it like it is a road sign, hardware and software should be ready to detect signs, bottles, people, bikes, animals as good as humans, if is not as good as a human then we already lost since a human also many more "features" like intuition,
- beat 8y ago
  Why does everyone assume the vendors don't have data? They're recording full sensor logs in these tests, tracking everything they can. They wouldn't even be in this field if they didn't think they could outperform humans - and dozens of companies are doing this, from tiny startups to Google to General Motors. No one wants to take on the liability of crappy systems that perform worse than humans. One interesting point of the development is that every failure is an opportunity to learn. The same cannot be said for human drivers. When the automation doesn't detect a hazard correctly, they can analyze it and tweak it so it detects better next time. Do humans do that?
  - crankylinuxuser 8y ago
    A single human can potentially learn from experience. The result is 1 human learns. A "auto" can learn from a failure, and every car using that AI system learns. 1 car results in thousands of systems all learning together. That's the win of cooperative cybernetics, and something we humans haven't grasped very well at all.

coding123 8y ago

Well said. These SDV threads are getting pretty annoying that we keep cycling the same arguments at each other and there is no substantive change to how good SDVs are yet.

beat 8y ago

Interesting factoid... half of US traffic fatalities occur between the hours of 9pm and 3am on friday and saturday nights. Average drivers in average situations are, indeed, pretty safe. But drunk drivers? Angry drivers? Texting drivers? If autonomous cars can drive at the skill level of average drivers - and not get drunk or angry or distracted by forwarding cat videos - then they will significantly outperform humans. Additional evidence in the form of reason... autonomous drivers have better sensors than humans. Human drivers have limited vision, that only points in one direction at a time. Mirrors offer some slight augmentation, but. Ever backed out of a parking space in a crowded parking lot and gotten into an accident because a car you couldn't see before was suddenly right behind you? Common situation. Autonomous drivers won't have that problem. They can see out the back and to the sides, 360 degrees at all times. (I'll note that some of the first deployed autonomous tech was cars that can parallel-park themselves.) Additionally, autonomous systems have better reflexes. Remember the two second rule? That's to deal with the delay from your eyes to your brain to your hands and feet. Machines can physically respond to changes in situation faster than humans. Now, let's level up. Imagine a system where autonomous vehicles are transmitting short-range telemetry to nearby vehicles, letting them know their status, including velocity. They can relay back emergency status info - so the car that slams its brakes to avoid a pedestrian doesn't cause someone six cars back to rear-end the car in front of them. Merge-related accidents (related to parking-lot problems) can be reduced to nothingness with telemetry. Think about how Waze is doing this already with driving data for their mapping software. It'd work better with less human involvement. I can go on and on, but really, I'm gonna throw a bullshit card here. Fear of autonomous vehicles is magical thinking trumping reason. Humans do magical thinking all the time. We think safe things are scary, and we think scary things are safe, for symbolism rather than fact. That's why people in this discussion used the phrase "murderbot", but not "murderer".

frgtpsswrdlame 8y ago
>Interesting factoid... half of US traffic fatalities occur between the hours of 9pm and 3am on friday and saturday nights. Average drivers in average situations are, indeed, pretty safe. But drunk drivers? Angry drivers? Texting drivers? There is exactly zero proof that self-driving vehicles are better than drunk drivers. There is exactly zero proof that self-driving vehicles are better than angry drivers. There is exactly zero proof that self-driving vehicles are better than texting drivers. There is zero proof they will soon overtake any of those categories. >Additional evidence in the form of reason... autonomous drivers have better sensors than humans. Teslas have to ignore stationary objects because they can't accurately estimate the height of those objects. My 'sensors' know when a tire shred is on the ground and about 2 inches high and when a bicyclist is on the ground and about 5 feet high. >Additionally, autonomous systems have better reflexes. Remember the two second rule? That's to deal with the delay from your eyes to your brain to your hands and feet. Machines can physically respond to changes in situation faster than humans. Watch the video here: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44439523 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44439523 I have driven while texting, I still sometimes drive angry and I have (unfortunately) driven drunk in the past. I have never made the very simple mistake made in that video. Where is the quick mechanical reflex you are leading me to believe exists in self-driving vehicles? >Now, let's level up. Imagine a... No. Your imagination is running wild imagining something that doesn't and won't in the near future exist. Your imaginary car not only is covered in sensors, but can p2p communicate with the cars around it, has no lag in processing complex input, can behave itself among human drivers, etc. None of this actually exists, none of it is actually out there and we really don't have good reason to expect it any time soon. >I can go on and on, I believe you could, but it's just your fantasizing, it's not a realistic portrait of what is actually happening. >I'm gonna throw a bullshit card here. Going to? What about the several you've already sent my way lol. >Humans do magical thinking all the time. We think safe things are scary, and we think scary things are safe, for symbolism rather than fact. Exactly! That's why people in this discussion called humans "So. Fucking. Awful." at driving and then wrote three paragraphs imagining a utopian, non-existent self-driving system which magically solves all problems and is really quite safe. Before diagnosing magical thinking in others you might attempt detecting it in yourself.