7 ms·

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

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.

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.