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Humans have a tolerance for human-style accidents, but not robotic-style accidents. A dipshit that pulls in front of you to t-bone is a human-style accident tha

Humans have a tolerance for human-style accidents, but not robotic-style accidents. A dipshit that pulls in front of you to t-bone is a human-style accident that is acceptable. A tesla that sees a river and thinks it's a road is a robotic-style accident. It's going to take centuries for us to become acclimated to how machines mess things up.

romwell 8y ago
Is it unreasonable? One can learn to drive defensively, and be able to spot the said dipshit in advance, decreasing the likelihood of collision. Yes, not in all cases, but there's a bell curve. As humans, we can read other humans. Robots aren't inherently bad either. I love my Roomba precisely because if it fails, it fails predictably. I can and do make my apartment Roomba-friendly. But the self-driving deep learning-driven cars don't have this feature. They fail unpredictabily, as in your example. We don't have an understanding of what really drives the decision-making there. And we keep discovering failure modes as they manifest. One day, the car might think the river is a road. Another, it will not recognize a road block as such. But only if it's a Tuesday. Or something. We really don't know. So I don't think we'll get acclimated to that. Unpredictable failure is a reasonable thing to be afraid of.
- cblades 8y ago
  I'd argue it is unreasonable given that (afaik) no one is marketing a self-driving car that doesn't also require a driver be attentive at all times. You can learn to drive a self-driving car defensively, in the same way you learn to drive a normal car defensively. Pay attention to your surroundings, blind spots, and other cars. Maybe self-driving is a poor term to use.
  - simion314 8y ago
    >You can learn to drive a self-driving car defensively, Then it is not a self driving car, maybe let's named them human supervised self running cars
    - cblades 8y ago
      Exactly, that was my point. There are no self-driving cars on the market, or in development by major car manufacturers. They all explicitly require human attention.
  - fwip 8y ago
    It's especially bad because us humans supervising the cars are going to be worried about preventing human-style accidents. Maybe you're worried about it following too close or not noticing the red light - so you don't notice the warning signs in time when it veers into the concrete barrier.
  - fucking_tragedy 8y ago
    > (afaik) no one is marketing a self-driving car that doesn't also require a driver be attentive at all times. Tesla's marketing videos for Autopilot have a caption along the lines of "driver is only present for legal reasons".
    - cblades 8y ago
      Wow, that's downright irresponsible.
  - romwell 8y ago
    >You can learn to drive a self-driving car defensively My point was that you can't learn to drive a normal car defensively if there are self-driving cars on the road (in their current form). When a self-driving car decides to do something stupid, you won't see it coming because the decision tree is literally beyond human comprehension. See: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181204-why-we-should-worry-when-machines-hallucinate http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181204-why-we-should-worry... And Uber's and Tesla's accidents have shown us that you can't rely on the human in the car to catch it before it does something stupid. After all, teaching someone how to drive and watching them attentively is difficult work.
- chongli 8y ago
  Humans fail in unpredictable ways all the time. Look at the cases of people using vehicles as a weapon of terrorism. How are we supposed to predict that? Yeah, we can go back and investigate the person's life and say "see, they had a history of browsing extremist websites, making bigoted comments, suicidal thoughts, etc." The problem is that this description fits a very large group of people, compared to the subgroup which actually carry out the attacks. So while it is true that we may have difficulty (or it may even be impossible) auditing a self driving car after the fact, it should not be any more comforting to know that human failure can be explained after the fact, given that the human failure was not predicted beforehand.
  - fwip 8y ago
    The US has 5 million car crashes a year. Vehicular terrorism is not even visible on the chart.
slg 8y ago
You would think then a cooperative system between human and robot would be therefore be the best option. The human prevents the robot from driving into a river and the robot prevents the human from t-boning someone else. Except most people on HN seem to be completely against this type of cooperative system and would only support self driving tech when it gets to level 4 or even level 5 autonomy.
- wvenable 8y ago
  I'm not sure how such a system could possibly work; human attention doesn't work that way. If the robot drive 2 hours and 35 minutes just fine and one minute later decides to drive off the road, how is a human going to react to that? It's not really possible. If a human has to pay attention all the time, then they might as well just be driving. And one of the advantages of self driving cars will be freedom for the elderly and disabled who already have difficulty driving cars. This is the group, in my opinion, that will benefit the most from self driving cars.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - slg 8y ago
    >I'm not sure how such a system could possibly work; human attention doesn't work that way. If the robot drive 2 hours and 35 minutes just fine and one minute later decides to drive off the road, how is a human going to react to that? It's not really possible. Right now the self driving tech doesn't do anything to communicate with the driver besides just a general warning. However that doesn't have to be the case. Maybe some type of confidence indicator should be added. A simple green, yellow, red warning system could help a driver know when a self driving car might not be as certain in its surroundings. >If a human has to pay attention all the time, then they might as well just be driving. I just don't get this mindset. There are different levels of "paying attention" that require different levels of mental energy. The discussion also isn't made with nearly any other driver assist technology. No one suggests that automatic transmissions or cruise control are worthless because the driver still has to pay attention. >And one of the advantages of self driving cars will be freedom for the elderly and disabled who already have difficulty driving cars. This is the group, in my opinion, that will benefit the most from self driving cars. I agree with that, but it doesn't mean that other drivers won't benefit as well.
agildehaus 8y ago
You can get 99% of the way there with extremely detailed maps. Where the road is, where the lanes are, what the speed limit is, where to find stoplights and rail signals, where to be extra-cautious, how to navigate through a construction zone, all can be pre-programmed. A Waymo is basically just following a virtual track on an extremely detailed LIDAR map of the area, obsessively watching for pedestrians and following the rules of the road the best it can. It will never think a river is a road. Not to say that there aren't a million little things to be concerned about with this approach, or that there aren't major things to overcome (like heavy snow on the ground making your LIDAR map useless). But I think we'll get there, and in many places soon. There's nothing that says this tech has to exist everywhere out the gate.
- foobiekr 8y ago
  Tesla's approach thinks white trailers are open sky. The river comparison is not unreasonable at all. Almost all of the startups in the space are following the Tesla approach of just throwing machine learning at the problem which means almost all work in the space suffers from novel input producing unpredictable results. This is one of the things that has killed trained and evolved systems in the past and the fact that few of the companies in this space are even trying to manage it (either by building interpretable models or by using models and using ML to do parameter fitting) is a good indicator that the whole business is either a fraud or is built on the premise that with enough data or, for the un-cautious and unaware, enough simulation, the problem solves itself. I think what we are actually seeing is that Waymo (where, in ten years, they might have a solution) and Tesla (which is mostly worst-in-class but as a company is the master of hype) drove hype around self-driving. Then Uber and Lyft latched on (because they needed a story to paper over their terrible economics) and pushed it even higher. The Otto thing and Cruise's acquisition made VCs pay attention. So these companies are acquisition bait for the assumed-clueless big auto companies. They will not deliver self-driving cars. At best they will deliver next-generation enhancements to emergency braking, etc.
  - agildehaus 8y ago
    > Tesla's approach thinks white trailers are open sky. The river comparison is not unreasonable at all. A Tesla is not a self-driving car. Autopilot is an assistive technology.
cr0sh 8y ago
> Humans have a tolerance for human-style accidents, but not robotic-style accidents. I think it's more because there's someone to yell at - someone to blame. Think of it like a taxi driver with a passenger; people ride in these all the time, or uber, or lyft - and have no problems doing so. Even though they aren't in control, and they have no idea about the driver's driving capability. They assume the driver is an average to better driver, when that may not be the case at all. So what happens when an accident occurs? Well - if the passenger is still alive, and believes it to be their driver's fault, they can yell at their driver. If they believe it's the other driver's fault, they can yell at them...and so forth. But you put a robot in place of any driver - then who can you yell at when an accident occurs? Nobody. You can yell all you want, you can even blame the corporation that made the car/robot - but you are still yelling at a machine. It won't change anything. It won't feel bad. It probably won't even make you feel better, because it won't restore your agency in the situation. That's my guess anyhow - pulled straight from my nether regions, with nothing to back it up. I wonder if there have been any studies on this? Are there any data on what happens in other "self-driving" incidents; like perhaps completely automated trains with no humans other than passengers on-board? Do such things even exist? Or do companies already know this - and put a human "in charge" to take the blame and heat for when an accident happens (maybe they also provide an e-stop button for the human to press - whether it's actually connected to anything or not - but it's logged as to whether it was pressed, just to help "assign blame" later)...? While I have no proof or anything to back this assertion or theory up, it seems like it would match human nature. When things go wrong, humans want to blame somebody - some actual, sentient being. I'm sure there's a psychological term for this need and the action; I don't know what that term is, but I'm almost certain it's been studied. Essentially one of two things would have to be done to overcome this: Either the machine would have to become perfect at driving and avoiding accidents (even to the point of avoiding things of natural random consequence, such as rocks falling on the road, or something of that nature) - or it will have to become more sentient, and ideally emotive; that is a GAI with human traits. The former is likely impossible - randomness will always get ya; even trains have what should be "avoidable" accidents. The latter - well, if it's achievable; that is, if we can make such a GAI, etc - it will likely also suffer the same problems humans do, most notably that we are failable and we make mistakes. ...but at least then we can blame them on something, right?

romwell 8y ago

Is it unreasonable? One can learn to drive defensively, and be able to spot the said dipshit in advance, decreasing the likelihood of collision. Yes, not in all cases, but there's a bell curve. As humans, we can read other humans. Robots aren't inherently bad either. I love my Roomba precisely because if it fails, it fails predictably. I can and do make my apartment Roomba-friendly. But the self-driving deep learning-driven cars don't have this feature. They fail unpredictabily, as in your example. We don't have an understanding of what really drives the decision-making there. And we keep discovering failure modes as they manifest. One day, the car might think the river is a road. Another, it will not recognize a road block as such. But only if it's a Tuesday. Or something. We really don't know. So I don't think we'll get acclimated to that. Unpredictable failure is a reasonable thing to be afraid of.

cblades 8y ago
I'd argue it is unreasonable given that (afaik) no one is marketing a self-driving car that doesn't also require a driver be attentive at all times. You can learn to drive a self-driving car defensively, in the same way you learn to drive a normal car defensively. Pay attention to your surroundings, blind spots, and other cars. Maybe self-driving is a poor term to use.
- simion314 8y ago
  >You can learn to drive a self-driving car defensively, Then it is not a self driving car, maybe let's named them human supervised self running cars
  - cblades 8y ago
    Exactly, that was my point. There are no self-driving cars on the market, or in development by major car manufacturers. They all explicitly require human attention.
- fwip 8y ago
  It's especially bad because us humans supervising the cars are going to be worried about preventing human-style accidents. Maybe you're worried about it following too close or not noticing the red light - so you don't notice the warning signs in time when it veers into the concrete barrier.
- fucking_tragedy 8y ago
  > (afaik) no one is marketing a self-driving car that doesn't also require a driver be attentive at all times. Tesla's marketing videos for Autopilot have a caption along the lines of "driver is only present for legal reasons".
  - cblades 8y ago
    Wow, that's downright irresponsible.
- romwell 8y ago
  >You can learn to drive a self-driving car defensively My point was that you can't learn to drive a normal car defensively if there are self-driving cars on the road (in their current form). When a self-driving car decides to do something stupid, you won't see it coming because the decision tree is literally beyond human comprehension. See: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181204-why-we-should-worry-when-machines-hallucinate http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181204-why-we-should-worry... And Uber's and Tesla's accidents have shown us that you can't rely on the human in the car to catch it before it does something stupid. After all, teaching someone how to drive and watching them attentively is difficult work.
chongli 8y ago
Humans fail in unpredictable ways all the time. Look at the cases of people using vehicles as a weapon of terrorism. How are we supposed to predict that? Yeah, we can go back and investigate the person's life and say "see, they had a history of browsing extremist websites, making bigoted comments, suicidal thoughts, etc." The problem is that this description fits a very large group of people, compared to the subgroup which actually carry out the attacks. So while it is true that we may have difficulty (or it may even be impossible) auditing a self driving car after the fact, it should not be any more comforting to know that human failure can be explained after the fact, given that the human failure was not predicted beforehand.
- fwip 8y ago
  The US has 5 million car crashes a year. Vehicular terrorism is not even visible on the chart.

slg 8y ago

You would think then a cooperative system between human and robot would be therefore be the best option. The human prevents the robot from driving into a river and the robot prevents the human from t-boning someone else. Except most people on HN seem to be completely against this type of cooperative system and would only support self driving tech when it gets to level 4 or even level 5 autonomy.

wvenable 8y ago
I'm not sure how such a system could possibly work; human attention doesn't work that way. If the robot drive 2 hours and 35 minutes just fine and one minute later decides to drive off the road, how is a human going to react to that? It's not really possible. If a human has to pay attention all the time, then they might as well just be driving. And one of the advantages of self driving cars will be freedom for the elderly and disabled who already have difficulty driving cars. This is the group, in my opinion, that will benefit the most from self driving cars.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- slg 8y ago
  >I'm not sure how such a system could possibly work; human attention doesn't work that way. If the robot drive 2 hours and 35 minutes just fine and one minute later decides to drive off the road, how is a human going to react to that? It's not really possible. Right now the self driving tech doesn't do anything to communicate with the driver besides just a general warning. However that doesn't have to be the case. Maybe some type of confidence indicator should be added. A simple green, yellow, red warning system could help a driver know when a self driving car might not be as certain in its surroundings. >If a human has to pay attention all the time, then they might as well just be driving. I just don't get this mindset. There are different levels of "paying attention" that require different levels of mental energy. The discussion also isn't made with nearly any other driver assist technology. No one suggests that automatic transmissions or cruise control are worthless because the driver still has to pay attention. >And one of the advantages of self driving cars will be freedom for the elderly and disabled who already have difficulty driving cars. This is the group, in my opinion, that will benefit the most from self driving cars. I agree with that, but it doesn't mean that other drivers won't benefit as well.

agildehaus 8y ago

You can get 99% of the way there with extremely detailed maps. Where the road is, where the lanes are, what the speed limit is, where to find stoplights and rail signals, where to be extra-cautious, how to navigate through a construction zone, all can be pre-programmed. A Waymo is basically just following a virtual track on an extremely detailed LIDAR map of the area, obsessively watching for pedestrians and following the rules of the road the best it can. It will never think a river is a road. Not to say that there aren't a million little things to be concerned about with this approach, or that there aren't major things to overcome (like heavy snow on the ground making your LIDAR map useless). But I think we'll get there, and in many places soon. There's nothing that says this tech has to exist everywhere out the gate.

foobiekr 8y ago
Tesla's approach thinks white trailers are open sky. The river comparison is not unreasonable at all. Almost all of the startups in the space are following the Tesla approach of just throwing machine learning at the problem which means almost all work in the space suffers from novel input producing unpredictable results. This is one of the things that has killed trained and evolved systems in the past and the fact that few of the companies in this space are even trying to manage it (either by building interpretable models or by using models and using ML to do parameter fitting) is a good indicator that the whole business is either a fraud or is built on the premise that with enough data or, for the un-cautious and unaware, enough simulation, the problem solves itself. I think what we are actually seeing is that Waymo (where, in ten years, they might have a solution) and Tesla (which is mostly worst-in-class but as a company is the master of hype) drove hype around self-driving. Then Uber and Lyft latched on (because they needed a story to paper over their terrible economics) and pushed it even higher. The Otto thing and Cruise's acquisition made VCs pay attention. So these companies are acquisition bait for the assumed-clueless big auto companies. They will not deliver self-driving cars. At best they will deliver next-generation enhancements to emergency braking, etc.
- agildehaus 8y ago
  > Tesla's approach thinks white trailers are open sky. The river comparison is not unreasonable at all. A Tesla is not a self-driving car. Autopilot is an assistive technology.

cr0sh 8y ago

> Humans have a tolerance for human-style accidents, but not robotic-style accidents. I think it's more because there's someone to yell at - someone to blame. Think of it like a taxi driver with a passenger; people ride in these all the time, or uber, or lyft - and have no problems doing so. Even though they aren't in control, and they have no idea about the driver's driving capability. They assume the driver is an average to better driver, when that may not be the case at all. So what happens when an accident occurs? Well - if the passenger is still alive, and believes it to be their driver's fault, they can yell at their driver. If they believe it's the other driver's fault, they can yell at them...and so forth. But you put a robot in place of any driver - then who can you yell at when an accident occurs? Nobody. You can yell all you want, you can even blame the corporation that made the car/robot - but you are still yelling at a machine. It won't change anything. It won't feel bad. It probably won't even make you feel better, because it won't restore your agency in the situation. That's my guess anyhow - pulled straight from my nether regions, with nothing to back it up. I wonder if there have been any studies on this? Are there any data on what happens in other "self-driving" incidents; like perhaps completely automated trains with no humans other than passengers on-board? Do such things even exist? Or do companies already know this - and put a human "in charge" to take the blame and heat for when an accident happens (maybe they also provide an e-stop button for the human to press - whether it's actually connected to anything or not - but it's logged as to whether it was pressed, just to help "assign blame" later)...? While I have no proof or anything to back this assertion or theory up, it seems like it would match human nature. When things go wrong, humans want to blame somebody - some actual, sentient being. I'm sure there's a psychological term for this need and the action; I don't know what that term is, but I'm almost certain it's been studied. Essentially one of two things would have to be done to overcome this: Either the machine would have to become perfect at driving and avoiding accidents (even to the point of avoiding things of natural random consequence, such as rocks falling on the road, or something of that nature) - or it will have to become more sentient, and ideally emotive; that is a GAI with human traits. The former is likely impossible - randomness will always get ya; even trains have what should be "avoidable" accidents. The latter - well, if it's achievable; that is, if we can make such a GAI, etc - it will likely also suffer the same problems humans do, most notably that we are failable and we make mistakes. ...but at least then we can blame them on something, right?