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Good discussion. The arguments that because humans can do it with two eyes any approach using more than cameras is wrong frustrate me to no end. Technology and

by twtw 8y ago

Good discussion. The arguments that because humans can do it with two eyes any approach using more than cameras is wrong frustrate me to no end. Technology and engineering isn't about imagining the minimum theoretical requirements, it's about building stuff that works with what is available. People can navigate cross country without gps, but it's not wrong to put gps in cars. It seems like the teams working on autonomous vehicles need all the crutches they can get, and it seems like a good idea to lean on superhuman sensors to make up for subhuman "cognition." I do wish, though, that people would stop equating all radar with the adaptive cruise control style radar - imaging radars are a thing that exist, and can be competitive with lidar.

aphextron 8y ago
>It seems like the teams working on autonomous vehicles need all the crutches they can get, and it seems like a good idea to lean on superhuman sensors to make up for subhuman "cognition." In a perfect world, yes. But cost always comes into the equation. Companies like comma.ai and Nexar are getting their devices in to the hands of hundreds of thousands of people at this point. When you can get that level of training and autonomy from a simple camera based device it becomes a really compelling product, even though you're nowhere near full level 4 self driving.
- darkpuma 8y ago
  Comma.ai isn't even close to Level 3. Edit: And neither is Tesla. Anybody operating either of these systems without paying attention to the road and being prepared to control the wheel at all times should have their drivers license confiscated. See page 73 of the Model 3 owners manual: https://www.tesla.com/content/dam/tesla/Ownership/Own/Model%203%20Owners%20Manual.pdf https://www.tesla.com/content/dam/tesla/Ownership/Own/Model%... Warning: Autosteer is a hands-on feature. You must keep your hands on the steering wheel at all times. Warning: Autosteer is intended for use only on highways and limited- access roads with a fully attentive driver. When using Autosteer, hold the steering wheel and be mindful of road conditions and surrounding traffic.* Key terms: "hands-on", "fully attentive driver". It's a Level 2 system. Page 74 makes this even more clear: Warning: Autosteer is not designed to, and will not, steer Model 3 around objects partially or completely in the driving lane. Always watch the road in front of you and stay prepared to take appropriate action. It is the driver's responsibility to be in control of Model 3 at all times.
  - aphextron 8y ago
    Sure they are. The latest openpilot is easily on par with Tesla Autopilot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5m2yS23dl4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5m2yS23dl4
  - ec109685 8y ago
    It will stop for objects in front of you. Agree though that it's a nice assist, but as you get used to it, you can predict the situations where it will fail. Definitely would not trust it to drive in an unconstrained environment.
    - darkpuma 8y ago
      > It will stop for objects in front of you. Until it doesn't. Failure to stop for a stationary gore point: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/06/ntsb-autopilot-steered-tesla-car-toward-traffic-barrier-before-deadly-crash/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/06/ntsb-autopilot-steered-... https://abc7news.com/automotive/i-team-exclusive-tesla-crash-in-september-showed-similarities-to-fatal-mountain-view-accident/3302389/ https://abc7news.com/automotive/i-team-exclusive-tesla-crash... Failure to stop for a stationary fire truck: https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/ https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/ Again, the Model 3 user manual is illuminating: Warning: Traffic-Aware Cruise Control cannot detect all objects and, especially in situations when you are driving over 50 mph (80 km/h), may not brake/decelerate when a vehicle or object is only partially in the driving lane or when a vehicle you are following moves out of your driving path and a stationary or slow-moving vehicle or object is in front of you. Always pay attention to the road ahead and stay prepared to take immediate corrective action. Depending on Traffic-Aware Cruise Control to avoid a collision can result in serious injury or death. In addition, Traffic-Aware Cruise Control may react to vehicles or objects that either do not exist or are not in the lane of travel, causing Model 3 to slowdown unnecessarily or inappropriately. Warning: Several factors can affect the performance of Automatic Emergency Braking, causing either no braking or inappropriate or untimely braking, such as when a vehicle is partially in the path of travel or there is road debris. It is the driver’s responsibility to drive safely and remain in control of the vehicle at all times. Never depend on Automatic Emergency Braking to avoid or reduce the impact of a collision. The user manual tells a different tale than Elon Musk does (https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/5c0e83e40fefb34c4e3b4a78-750-563.jpg https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/5c0e83e40fefb34c4e3b4...) Elon Musk gravely misrepresents the capabilities of these systems to impress consumers, who are left with the mistaken impression that Tesla sells cars with Level 3 capabilities.
threeseed 8y ago
Humans also have 576 MP quality eyes with a computational engine behind them the likes of which humanity isn't even remotely close to replicating. The idea that you can throw a cheap camera in a car and think you can achieve the same always seemed strange to me.
- grogenaut 8y ago
  are you telling me the retina display is a LIE?
  - bm1362 8y ago
    They never said who’s retinas you were getting.
  - mkbosmans 8y ago
    So how much is that 1MP retina display covering of your field of view?
    - grogenaut 8y ago
      the way I see most people using it when driving, walking, in meetings, at a resturant? 80% of the high res part.
- visarga 8y ago
  > with a computational engine behind them the likes of which humanity isn't even remotely close to replicating Let's not forget about human experience. It gives context to any visual perception, and can't be replicated by cars. We simply have access to a larger, more complex environment, and the environment fosters our intelligence. It's easy to overemphasise the brain to the detriment of environment, but in reality the environment is the main cause for the development of intelligence in the brain. The corollary is also true - a lower complexity environment will lead to lesser intelligence, no matter how powerful the brain is. Intelligence springs where agent needs meet with external limitations, those limitations guide its development. By analogy, the environment is like the training set and the brain is like a deep neural net. A deep neural net with a poor training set is not going to be accurate. That's why DeepMind, OpenAI and others have focused so much on artificial environments (games) to train agents - they know that environments are the key to training advanced AI. A mere dataset is like a static environment where nothing new happens. Research is transitioning from datasets to simulated environments for the next step in AI. I'd even go as far as to track the evolution of AI by the evolution of environments and environment models.
joe_the_user 8y ago
Well, You also say lidar isn't a crutch because self-driving cars aren't ever really going to be able to go by image recognition and enough logic to know what to do - rather, they're going to go by the complete plotting of the traffic grid with lidar being there for object-avoidance. This is Google's model and they are furthest along - and set-up in Arizona where the unpredictable is kept to the minimum.
- baybal2 8y ago
  > rather, they're going to go by the complete plotting of the traffic grid with lidar being there for object-avoidance. This is Google's model and they are furthest along Indeed, and that's how autopilot driven buses, that were around for at least a decade, work. Except their movement trajectories are predetermined, and they are very slow, and stop at every obstacle imaginable.
darkpuma 8y ago
>I do wish, though, that people would stop equating all radar with the adaptive cruise control style radar - imaging radars are a thing that exist, and can be competitive with lidar. Notably however, the radars employed by current Tesla cars lack the angular resolution to distinguish between stationary objects next to the road, and stationary objects in the middle of the road.
Cookingboy 8y ago
>The arguments that because humans can do it with two eyes I see that argument a lot, "well humans only have two eyes so of course two cameras would be enough". Well monkeys have two eyes too but they wouldn't be driving on the autobahn anytime soon would they. That argument is really used by people who have no idea how any of this works, and it really is frustrating.
- grecy 8y ago
  Your example does nothing to persuade me that two cameras aren't enough. It just says you need a powerful intelligence behind those two cameras.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Waterluvian 8y ago
Isn't this the best part of capitalism? Someone makes a lightbulb that's super inefficient but gets everyone thinking about the brilliance of candleless light at night. We then spend generations evolving the concept hundreds of times, with a market that rewards these innovations through sales. Is there a better way to build a better autonomous car? We're at the initial stage of exciting people with an implementation that kind of works. We will now spend generations selling better and better cars with different, fewer, better, cheaper sensors and other parts.
- twtw 8y ago
  I'm not sure I agree with your analogy between current "autonomous" vehicles and an inefficient lightbulb. I'd say it's more like a lightbulb that flickers and burns out in 5 seconds. In which case it probably makes more sense to make the lightbulb not burn out first. I don't think Edison (and his employees) got a momentary flash of light from a lightbulb and then said, "alright, it's almost working, now let's see if we can do it without the fragile glass bulb."
  - bewo001 8y ago
    It usually takes some time from the point "we have done all the basic research" to something that is successful in the market. Today, autonomous driving seems still to be in the basic research stage. If there was a research car, filled with ridiculously expensive hardware, able to perform at human level, I'd be more optimistic about the introduction of a marketable self driving car ten years from now. Take the mouse + graphical GUI example. It was demonstrated in the late 1960s but became only economically viable in the mid 1980s.
  - darkpuma 8y ago
    Your intuition is correct. Practical electric lights, in the form of arc lamps, existed before Edison was even born and were successfully commercialized many years before the incandescent light bulb. Effective incandescent light bulbs were also around before Edison's. The main things Edison's team brought to the table were a better filament material, a better vacuum in the bulb, and supporting electrical infrastructure (generators, etc.)
spacenick88 8y ago
I think the real point is that LIDAR has its own shortcomings. Currently the range is too limited, it's sensitive to fog and rain (more than cameras) and it's very expensive. Note that Tesla's for example don't only use cameras, they do have radar and use that to "see" two cars ahead even now. Still they don't use LIDAR and Musk's thesis is that this particular tech isn't needed and overly expensive and cumbersome
- twtw 8y ago
  The radar in tesla vehicles is the type intended for use in adaptive cruise control. Extremely low angular resolution with a filter that ignores objects that are close to stationary. This is why Teslas keep running into stationary cars. The radar in them is not designed for this, and can't tell the difference between a fire truck in the lane and the barrier to the side of the lane.
xoa 8y ago
>The arguments that because humans can do it with two eyes any approach using more than cameras is wrong frustrate me to no end. Technology and engineering isn't about imagining the minimum theoretical requirements, it's about building stuff that works with what is available. People can navigate cross country without gps, but it's not wrong to put gps in cars. At least as important, and something that comes up shockingly little as well (I don't see any responses to you yet on it here even!), is that overall humans stink at driving. Like you said, arguments begin with "because humans can do it" and need to be stopped right there, because that needs a lot of qualification. "Humans can do it"... with well over 1.25 million deaths a year worldwide [1] and another 20-50 million injured/disabled. Also these stats are actually worse then they look at first glance, because it's not a uniform age distribution. A lot of young people die on the roads vs other causes of death, which represents an even bigger loss in terms of human years. Personalized arbitrary point to point mechanized transportation is so insanely valuable that it's well worth that kind of death/injury rate, or for that matter one vastly higher (as it was in previous decades before modern safety standards), but there is also no reason to use it as a benchmark for "acceptable" if the opportunity exists to do better. And in particular there is no reason to limit autonomous systems to human visual spectrum for information input. That doesn't cut it for a lot of adverse weather conditions, or even just for humans along the road or animals jumping across the road at night for that matter. A big part of the pitch shouldn't be to match humans, it should be to exceed them and by a sizable margin as well. ---- 1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2018/12/07/traffic-deaths-continue-climb-worldwide-per-capita-rate-has-stabilized-who-says/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2018/12/07/tra...
- pnutjam 8y ago
  There's no guarantee that computers will do better. We don't have the data. They currently do worse. Some people claim that they won't make the same mistake twice, but how many times have you seen the same bug crop up after it was fixed in previous updates? I would also posit that the existing statistics provide a "good enough" floor. If a million people currently die, the software will be good enough when it has the same level of fatalities. There is no incentive to make it better, at least not in our Capitalistic system. Investments would be better spent on differentiating widgets that dazzle the occupants, not protecting non-customers outside the vehicle.
itwas10pm 8y ago
It was 10pm in the evening. I drove home in my hyundai but the tank was empty. I probably couldn't make it if I went full speed at 130km/h so I drove carefully at 80km/h. Nothing eventful happened on the highway and I got off safely. 5 minutes later I am roughly 100m away from home. I have to take a right turn uphill which meant that my car slowed down to slightly less than 20km/h and then I have to turn left to get to the parking lot. As you can guess it was dark and I was primarily paying attention to the sidewalk because pedestrians are hard to see. As I turn left suddenly BAM. A bicycle with a small hard to see light has crashed into the rear door on the right side at a pace of possibly more than 30km/h as it was going downhill. The car door and the front of bicycle were completely trashed. Luckily the cyclist didn't sustain any serious injuries. I was obviously protected in a huge cage of steel (compared to american one's its still tiny) but I slowly started to hate driving, especially at night. All the bullshit speeding tickets, the annoying maintenance and now accidents are adding up to a miserable experience. If I had 360° night vision this wouldn't have happened. I can't trust my own two eyes. I wouldn't trust anyone's two eyes for that matter to drive a car safely. They weren't good enough last year and they won't be enough next year. Replicating humans will just replicate their weaknesses. I'll take all the crutches I can get.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
bluGill 8y ago
Humans are not good drivers with two eyes. I constantly have to take my eyes off the road to check mirrors. I hope while checking what is behind me that nothing happens in front. I hope while looking in front of me nothing I need to worry about from the sides/back of me matter. Of course most of the danger is in front of me so I spend most of the time looking there, but there are times when things not in front of me are dangerous to me. By giving a car more than two eyes it has the potential to become a better driver than me because it can watch more. By adding more than just visible light cameras it can see things that I would never see. I want my next car to be safer, the big limit is not seat belts, brakes, crumple zones, airbags, and such - the big limit is the limited human in control. There is potential to make some of the above obsolete if the control system is enough better.
- Spivak 8y ago
  > Humans are not good drivers with two eyes. This isn't really the point, it's that humans are able to successfully build an accurate-enough model of the world to navigate terrain with only camera like vision -- and a really bad one at that. There is, of course, no problem with giving cars more sensory abilities to make them safer but what they mean by a crutch is that the CS breakthrough that will make self-driving cars compete with humans will function about as well with two crappy cameras mounted on the drivers seat as it would with an array of high-precision sensors.
  - EamonnMR 8y ago
    Pretty good vision, all told. Though the constant scanning motions of the eyes as opposed to fixed cameras mean they may have at least as much in common with LIDAR.
  - sangnoir 8y ago
    (tongue firmly in cheek) Material science breakthrough could result in aircraft that flap wings that could compete with condors too, but what would be the point? Naturally evolved mechanism are not the gold standard; they developed under completely different constraints.
jsight 8y ago
I feel like I have been somewhere in the middle on this. I feel like to reach level 5 autonomy, the vehicles are going to have to have really good image processing from conventional cameras. In fact, they might need it to be so good that the lidars themselves become redundant. But there are a lot of possibilities between zero autonomy and level 5 autonomy that might almost require lidar too in the short term.

by twtw 8y ago

aphextron 8y ago

>It seems like the teams working on autonomous vehicles need all the crutches they can get, and it seems like a good idea to lean on superhuman sensors to make up for subhuman "cognition." In a perfect world, yes. But cost always comes into the equation. Companies like comma.ai and Nexar are getting their devices in to the hands of hundreds of thousands of people at this point. When you can get that level of training and autonomy from a simple camera based device it becomes a really compelling product, even though you're nowhere near full level 4 self driving.

darkpuma 8y ago
Comma.ai isn't even close to Level 3. Edit: And neither is Tesla. Anybody operating either of these systems without paying attention to the road and being prepared to control the wheel at all times should have their drivers license confiscated. See page 73 of the Model 3 owners manual: https://www.tesla.com/content/dam/tesla/Ownership/Own/Model%203%20Owners%20Manual.pdf https://www.tesla.com/content/dam/tesla/Ownership/Own/Model%... Warning: Autosteer is a hands-on feature. You must keep your hands on the steering wheel at all times. Warning: Autosteer is intended for use only on highways and limited- access roads with a fully attentive driver. When using Autosteer, hold the steering wheel and be mindful of road conditions and surrounding traffic.* Key terms: "hands-on", "fully attentive driver". It's a Level 2 system. Page 74 makes this even more clear: Warning: Autosteer is not designed to, and will not, steer Model 3 around objects partially or completely in the driving lane. Always watch the road in front of you and stay prepared to take appropriate action. It is the driver's responsibility to be in control of Model 3 at all times.
- aphextron 8y ago
  Sure they are. The latest openpilot is easily on par with Tesla Autopilot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5m2yS23dl4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5m2yS23dl4
- ec109685 8y ago
  It will stop for objects in front of you. Agree though that it's a nice assist, but as you get used to it, you can predict the situations where it will fail. Definitely would not trust it to drive in an unconstrained environment.
  - darkpuma 8y ago
    > It will stop for objects in front of you. Until it doesn't. Failure to stop for a stationary gore point: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/06/ntsb-autopilot-steered-tesla-car-toward-traffic-barrier-before-deadly-crash/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/06/ntsb-autopilot-steered-... https://abc7news.com/automotive/i-team-exclusive-tesla-crash-in-september-showed-similarities-to-fatal-mountain-view-accident/3302389/ https://abc7news.com/automotive/i-team-exclusive-tesla-crash... Failure to stop for a stationary fire truck: https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/ https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/ Again, the Model 3 user manual is illuminating: Warning: Traffic-Aware Cruise Control cannot detect all objects and, especially in situations when you are driving over 50 mph (80 km/h), may not brake/decelerate when a vehicle or object is only partially in the driving lane or when a vehicle you are following moves out of your driving path and a stationary or slow-moving vehicle or object is in front of you. Always pay attention to the road ahead and stay prepared to take immediate corrective action. Depending on Traffic-Aware Cruise Control to avoid a collision can result in serious injury or death. In addition, Traffic-Aware Cruise Control may react to vehicles or objects that either do not exist or are not in the lane of travel, causing Model 3 to slowdown unnecessarily or inappropriately. Warning: Several factors can affect the performance of Automatic Emergency Braking, causing either no braking or inappropriate or untimely braking, such as when a vehicle is partially in the path of travel or there is road debris. It is the driver’s responsibility to drive safely and remain in control of the vehicle at all times. Never depend on Automatic Emergency Braking to avoid or reduce the impact of a collision. The user manual tells a different tale than Elon Musk does (https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/5c0e83e40fefb34c4e3b4a78-750-563.jpg https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/5c0e83e40fefb34c4e3b4...) Elon Musk gravely misrepresents the capabilities of these systems to impress consumers, who are left with the mistaken impression that Tesla sells cars with Level 3 capabilities.

threeseed 8y ago

Humans also have 576 MP quality eyes with a computational engine behind them the likes of which humanity isn't even remotely close to replicating. The idea that you can throw a cheap camera in a car and think you can achieve the same always seemed strange to me.

grogenaut 8y ago
are you telling me the retina display is a LIE?
- bm1362 8y ago
  They never said who’s retinas you were getting.
- mkbosmans 8y ago
  So how much is that 1MP retina display covering of your field of view?
  - grogenaut 8y ago
    the way I see most people using it when driving, walking, in meetings, at a resturant? 80% of the high res part.
visarga 8y ago
> with a computational engine behind them the likes of which humanity isn't even remotely close to replicating Let's not forget about human experience. It gives context to any visual perception, and can't be replicated by cars. We simply have access to a larger, more complex environment, and the environment fosters our intelligence. It's easy to overemphasise the brain to the detriment of environment, but in reality the environment is the main cause for the development of intelligence in the brain. The corollary is also true - a lower complexity environment will lead to lesser intelligence, no matter how powerful the brain is. Intelligence springs where agent needs meet with external limitations, those limitations guide its development. By analogy, the environment is like the training set and the brain is like a deep neural net. A deep neural net with a poor training set is not going to be accurate. That's why DeepMind, OpenAI and others have focused so much on artificial environments (games) to train agents - they know that environments are the key to training advanced AI. A mere dataset is like a static environment where nothing new happens. Research is transitioning from datasets to simulated environments for the next step in AI. I'd even go as far as to track the evolution of AI by the evolution of environments and environment models.

joe_the_user 8y ago

Well, You also say lidar isn't a crutch because self-driving cars aren't ever really going to be able to go by image recognition and enough logic to know what to do - rather, they're going to go by the complete plotting of the traffic grid with lidar being there for object-avoidance. This is Google's model and they are furthest along - and set-up in Arizona where the unpredictable is kept to the minimum.

baybal2 8y ago
> rather, they're going to go by the complete plotting of the traffic grid with lidar being there for object-avoidance. This is Google's model and they are furthest along Indeed, and that's how autopilot driven buses, that were around for at least a decade, work. Except their movement trajectories are predetermined, and they are very slow, and stop at every obstacle imaginable.

darkpuma 8y ago

>I do wish, though, that people would stop equating all radar with the adaptive cruise control style radar - imaging radars are a thing that exist, and can be competitive with lidar. Notably however, the radars employed by current Tesla cars lack the angular resolution to distinguish between stationary objects next to the road, and stationary objects in the middle of the road.

Cookingboy 8y ago

>The arguments that because humans can do it with two eyes I see that argument a lot, "well humans only have two eyes so of course two cameras would be enough". Well monkeys have two eyes too but they wouldn't be driving on the autobahn anytime soon would they. That argument is really used by people who have no idea how any of this works, and it really is frustrating.

grecy 8y ago
Your example does nothing to persuade me that two cameras aren't enough. It just says you need a powerful intelligence behind those two cameras.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Waterluvian 8y ago

Isn't this the best part of capitalism? Someone makes a lightbulb that's super inefficient but gets everyone thinking about the brilliance of candleless light at night. We then spend generations evolving the concept hundreds of times, with a market that rewards these innovations through sales. Is there a better way to build a better autonomous car? We're at the initial stage of exciting people with an implementation that kind of works. We will now spend generations selling better and better cars with different, fewer, better, cheaper sensors and other parts.

twtw 8y ago
I'm not sure I agree with your analogy between current "autonomous" vehicles and an inefficient lightbulb. I'd say it's more like a lightbulb that flickers and burns out in 5 seconds. In which case it probably makes more sense to make the lightbulb not burn out first. I don't think Edison (and his employees) got a momentary flash of light from a lightbulb and then said, "alright, it's almost working, now let's see if we can do it without the fragile glass bulb."
- bewo001 8y ago
  It usually takes some time from the point "we have done all the basic research" to something that is successful in the market. Today, autonomous driving seems still to be in the basic research stage. If there was a research car, filled with ridiculously expensive hardware, able to perform at human level, I'd be more optimistic about the introduction of a marketable self driving car ten years from now. Take the mouse + graphical GUI example. It was demonstrated in the late 1960s but became only economically viable in the mid 1980s.
- darkpuma 8y ago
  Your intuition is correct. Practical electric lights, in the form of arc lamps, existed before Edison was even born and were successfully commercialized many years before the incandescent light bulb. Effective incandescent light bulbs were also around before Edison's. The main things Edison's team brought to the table were a better filament material, a better vacuum in the bulb, and supporting electrical infrastructure (generators, etc.)

spacenick88 8y ago

I think the real point is that LIDAR has its own shortcomings. Currently the range is too limited, it's sensitive to fog and rain (more than cameras) and it's very expensive. Note that Tesla's for example don't only use cameras, they do have radar and use that to "see" two cars ahead even now. Still they don't use LIDAR and Musk's thesis is that this particular tech isn't needed and overly expensive and cumbersome

twtw 8y ago
The radar in tesla vehicles is the type intended for use in adaptive cruise control. Extremely low angular resolution with a filter that ignores objects that are close to stationary. This is why Teslas keep running into stationary cars. The radar in them is not designed for this, and can't tell the difference between a fire truck in the lane and the barrier to the side of the lane.

xoa 8y ago

>The arguments that because humans can do it with two eyes any approach using more than cameras is wrong frustrate me to no end. Technology and engineering isn't about imagining the minimum theoretical requirements, it's about building stuff that works with what is available. People can navigate cross country without gps, but it's not wrong to put gps in cars. At least as important, and something that comes up shockingly little as well (I don't see any responses to you yet on it here even!), is that overall humans stink at driving. Like you said, arguments begin with "because humans can do it" and need to be stopped right there, because that needs a lot of qualification. "Humans can do it"... with well over 1.25 million deaths a year worldwide [1] and another 20-50 million injured/disabled. Also these stats are actually worse then they look at first glance, because it's not a uniform age distribution. A lot of young people die on the roads vs other causes of death, which represents an even bigger loss in terms of human years. Personalized arbitrary point to point mechanized transportation is so insanely valuable that it's well worth that kind of death/injury rate, or for that matter one vastly higher (as it was in previous decades before modern safety standards), but there is also no reason to use it as a benchmark for "acceptable" if the opportunity exists to do better. And in particular there is no reason to limit autonomous systems to human visual spectrum for information input. That doesn't cut it for a lot of adverse weather conditions, or even just for humans along the road or animals jumping across the road at night for that matter. A big part of the pitch shouldn't be to match humans, it should be to exceed them and by a sizable margin as well. ---- 1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2018/12/07/traffic-deaths-continue-climb-worldwide-per-capita-rate-has-stabilized-who-says/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2018/12/07/tra...

pnutjam 8y ago
There's no guarantee that computers will do better. We don't have the data. They currently do worse. Some people claim that they won't make the same mistake twice, but how many times have you seen the same bug crop up after it was fixed in previous updates? I would also posit that the existing statistics provide a "good enough" floor. If a million people currently die, the software will be good enough when it has the same level of fatalities. There is no incentive to make it better, at least not in our Capitalistic system. Investments would be better spent on differentiating widgets that dazzle the occupants, not protecting non-customers outside the vehicle.

itwas10pm 8y ago

It was 10pm in the evening. I drove home in my hyundai but the tank was empty. I probably couldn't make it if I went full speed at 130km/h so I drove carefully at 80km/h. Nothing eventful happened on the highway and I got off safely. 5 minutes later I am roughly 100m away from home. I have to take a right turn uphill which meant that my car slowed down to slightly less than 20km/h and then I have to turn left to get to the parking lot. As you can guess it was dark and I was primarily paying attention to the sidewalk because pedestrians are hard to see. As I turn left suddenly BAM. A bicycle with a small hard to see light has crashed into the rear door on the right side at a pace of possibly more than 30km/h as it was going downhill. The car door and the front of bicycle were completely trashed. Luckily the cyclist didn't sustain any serious injuries. I was obviously protected in a huge cage of steel (compared to american one's its still tiny) but I slowly started to hate driving, especially at night. All the bullshit speeding tickets, the annoying maintenance and now accidents are adding up to a miserable experience. If I had 360° night vision this wouldn't have happened. I can't trust my own two eyes. I wouldn't trust anyone's two eyes for that matter to drive a car safely. They weren't good enough last year and they won't be enough next year. Replicating humans will just replicate their weaknesses. I'll take all the crutches I can get.

deleted 8y ago
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bluGill 8y ago

Humans are not good drivers with two eyes. I constantly have to take my eyes off the road to check mirrors. I hope while checking what is behind me that nothing happens in front. I hope while looking in front of me nothing I need to worry about from the sides/back of me matter. Of course most of the danger is in front of me so I spend most of the time looking there, but there are times when things not in front of me are dangerous to me. By giving a car more than two eyes it has the potential to become a better driver than me because it can watch more. By adding more than just visible light cameras it can see things that I would never see. I want my next car to be safer, the big limit is not seat belts, brakes, crumple zones, airbags, and such - the big limit is the limited human in control. There is potential to make some of the above obsolete if the control system is enough better.

Spivak 8y ago
> Humans are not good drivers with two eyes. This isn't really the point, it's that humans are able to successfully build an accurate-enough model of the world to navigate terrain with only camera like vision -- and a really bad one at that. There is, of course, no problem with giving cars more sensory abilities to make them safer but what they mean by a crutch is that the CS breakthrough that will make self-driving cars compete with humans will function about as well with two crappy cameras mounted on the drivers seat as it would with an array of high-precision sensors.
- EamonnMR 8y ago
  Pretty good vision, all told. Though the constant scanning motions of the eyes as opposed to fixed cameras mean they may have at least as much in common with LIDAR.
- sangnoir 8y ago
  (tongue firmly in cheek) Material science breakthrough could result in aircraft that flap wings that could compete with condors too, but what would be the point? Naturally evolved mechanism are not the gold standard; they developed under completely different constraints.

jsight 8y ago

I feel like I have been somewhere in the middle on this. I feel like to reach level 5 autonomy, the vehicles are going to have to have really good image processing from conventional cameras. In fact, they might need it to be so good that the lidars themselves become redundant. But there are a lot of possibilities between zero autonomy and level 5 autonomy that might almost require lidar too in the short term.