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Despite your warning, I think it's important to say that we don't understand exactly how the brain works. Yet, we still allow people to drive. To know whether w

Despite your warning, I think it's important to say that we don't understand exactly how the brain works. Yet, we still allow people to drive. To know whether we should trust someone to drive, we created a test (driver's license test). I don't see why this would be any different for deciding whether computers should be allowed to drive - we can just make sure self-driving cars pass a road test. We could even do better than driver's license tests and have a human driver at the wheel during the test just in case.

Barrin92 8y ago
we don't just let people drive because they can pass a road test. There's probably 12 year old's that can pass a road test with enough training. We let people drive because we know that they are fully capable agents able to make decisions even in case of failure. In other words, they are responsible, reliable, fully cognisant individuals, far beyond the technical ability of operating a machine. A self-driving car is like a parrot trained to speak. Not only is it not an agent aware of its larger surrounding and potential implications of getting into unknown situations. It also has no real understanding of what driving is at all, it's even stupider than a pet. And because its software is usually deployed to thousands if not millions of devices at the same time, there is little to no variance to protect from extreme failure.
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  > We let people drive because we know that they are fully capable agents able to make decisions even in case of failure. In other words, they are responsible, reliable, fully cognisant individuals, far beyond the technical ability of operating a machine. I wish I could share your optimism in humanity, but what you just claimed sounds far from being true universally. Take your typical driver and throw in a failure situation they have never trained before (because, who has time to train them for every possible, or evens few likely failures), and it is not likely to end well.
  - Barrin92 8y ago
    >Take your typical driver and throw in a failure situation they have never trained before (because, who has time to train them for every possible, or evens few likely failures Humans have a base line of common sense reasoning and the ability to create coherent models of the world. A human driver isn't (rare exceptions aside) going to drive up an impossible street or try to dodge a street sign mistaken for a kangoroo in West Germany. There's nice examples of how an ML algorithm can be tricked into all sorts of pathological behaviour by choosing adversarial images, there's no baseline of reason to fall back on. Imagine a model that has one of these fatal edge cases baked in and a thousand cars suddenly mistake a flash of light for a u-turn. Sure, one or two human drivers out of a ten thousand might drive that irrationally on occasion, but compared to a machine we can usually cope with this. And I don't even want to imagine what happens if this turns malicious. Imagine a bad actor on a bridge above a highway with some artifact that messes automated cars recognition up and the developers forgot to put some hard fail-safe in for that piece of road.
- nl 8y ago
  Your point about agency is well made. It's worth noting the downsides to this agency too, though: Agency is what makes the stereotypical male 20yo driver speed and drive dangerously to show off to his friends, which leads to a very large number of accidents. It's unclear what accidents this agency avoids though. I can imagine a few situations where it helps (avoiding a terrorist attack by speeding away from the scene?). But in most cases the default operation for a self-driving car will be to stop as quickly and safely as possible in unusual circumstances, and it's unclear how often this is the wrong decision.

Barrin92 8y ago

we don't just let people drive because they can pass a road test. There's probably 12 year old's that can pass a road test with enough training. We let people drive because we know that they are fully capable agents able to make decisions even in case of failure. In other words, they are responsible, reliable, fully cognisant individuals, far beyond the technical ability of operating a machine. A self-driving car is like a parrot trained to speak. Not only is it not an agent aware of its larger surrounding and potential implications of getting into unknown situations. It also has no real understanding of what driving is at all, it's even stupider than a pet. And because its software is usually deployed to thousands if not millions of devices at the same time, there is little to no variance to protect from extreme failure.

seanmcdirmid 8y ago
> We let people drive because we know that they are fully capable agents able to make decisions even in case of failure. In other words, they are responsible, reliable, fully cognisant individuals, far beyond the technical ability of operating a machine. I wish I could share your optimism in humanity, but what you just claimed sounds far from being true universally. Take your typical driver and throw in a failure situation they have never trained before (because, who has time to train them for every possible, or evens few likely failures), and it is not likely to end well.
- Barrin92 8y ago
  >Take your typical driver and throw in a failure situation they have never trained before (because, who has time to train them for every possible, or evens few likely failures Humans have a base line of common sense reasoning and the ability to create coherent models of the world. A human driver isn't (rare exceptions aside) going to drive up an impossible street or try to dodge a street sign mistaken for a kangoroo in West Germany. There's nice examples of how an ML algorithm can be tricked into all sorts of pathological behaviour by choosing adversarial images, there's no baseline of reason to fall back on. Imagine a model that has one of these fatal edge cases baked in and a thousand cars suddenly mistake a flash of light for a u-turn. Sure, one or two human drivers out of a ten thousand might drive that irrationally on occasion, but compared to a machine we can usually cope with this. And I don't even want to imagine what happens if this turns malicious. Imagine a bad actor on a bridge above a highway with some artifact that messes automated cars recognition up and the developers forgot to put some hard fail-safe in for that piece of road.
nl 8y ago
Your point about agency is well made. It's worth noting the downsides to this agency too, though: Agency is what makes the stereotypical male 20yo driver speed and drive dangerously to show off to his friends, which leads to a very large number of accidents. It's unclear what accidents this agency avoids though. I can imagine a few situations where it helps (avoiding a terrorist attack by speeding away from the scene?). But in most cases the default operation for a self-driving car will be to stop as quickly and safely as possible in unusual circumstances, and it's unclear how often this is the wrong decision.