6 ms·

If a human can do it, I see no reason why an autonomous system can't, eventually, do it. It might take a very long time, but "never" seems short-sighted.

• bryanlarsen 7y ago
  Humans can't do it. When your stopping distance (including reaction time) exceeds your visibility there's no way to drive safely, but humans do it anyways.
  • leetcrew 7y ago
    > When your stopping distance (including reaction time) exceeds your visibility there's no way to drive safely, but humans do it anyways. this is bad, but not quite as bad as it sounds. most of the time, you only need to stop as fast as the car in front of you. it's pretty uncommon to encounter a stationary object in the middle of the travel lane. in fact, outside of driving on surface streets in the city, I can't remember the last time I had to avoid a stationary object in my lane. I'm much more worried by how closely people follow the car in front of them, regardless of visibility. many leave barely enough room to react at all.
    • bryanlarsen 7y ago
      Accident rates in the US on the highway are on the order of one per million miles. And in a million miles of driving you will encounter quite a few stationary or otherwise unexpected objects in the middle of the travel lane.
      • Retric 7y ago
        Object sure, but generally it’s not really an issue. Simply avoiding or driving over broken tire bits etc is generally a non issue. A object would need to be substantial enough to cause an accident and then roll into or fall onto a highway. That’s far from a 1 per million miles of driving situation. Remember, something falling off a truck would also take a while to slow down.
      • beat 7y ago
        Good example - deer. But human drivers hit deer all the time, and it's often unavoidable. An autonomous driver is probably more likely to miss a deer than a human, due to substantially better reflex time.
        • smileysteve 7y ago
          And one would think infrared vision that could be useful (except possibly when it's a magic number between 98.6 amf 104 degrees somewhere) To me, every brown mailbox with a white reflector could be a deer coming to the road, to infrared, with a larger lens, it should be able to tell a lot better.
    • paganel 7y ago
      Step outside of the US and Western Europe and things can become quite interesting pretty damn fast, for example I had to avoid cows nonchalantly walking down the road like in this YT video [1] at least once every year for the last 3 or 4 years (mostly when I visit my brother in the countryside). Horse-driven carts are also still a thing in these parts of Europe, and they’re basically stationary objects (fun thing when you end up behind one just before a blind curb, preferably with a lorry driving up just behind you). Just like other people have mentioned in here, driving is a AI-complete problem. [1] https://youtu.be/9vzV7tY8r54 https://youtu.be/9vzV7tY8r54
      • rurp 7y ago
        I've had a similar experience driving around rural Mexico. The laws are far more lax and you run into all kinds of unexpected obstacles, but as a whole it actually works out pretty well because people understand and adapt to the situations. One example is that there are a number of small towns with two way streets that are parked on but only the width of two cars. That creates bottlenecks where cars can only travel in one direction at a time. This might seem like a disaster and it certainly wouldn't work on a busy city street, but in these locations everyone adjusts and when two cars approach a choke point from opposite directions drivers are really good about being cautious and pulling to the side to allow the other party to pass. There are probably thousands of these local quirks around the world. Handling all of these situations effectively in a fully self-driving car will take an advanced AGI.
    • mrkstu 7y ago
      They typically leave enough room to stop for their estimate of how long it would take the car in front of them to stop + the distance to that car. That initial estimate does NOT assume the car in front of them will stop instantaneously obviously. While this usually will be fine, there are definitely issues when something stationary does pop up. While caravan-ing to Yellowstone with 3 vehicles, all traveling in the center lane of the freeway, we encountered a small car with a passed out passenger in the middle lane. My bro-in-law swerved with some room to spare, immediately behind him I swerved with basically zero room to spare, and my father behind me (luckily for them in a Suburban, but bad for the man in the VW) had no chance- I was immediately looking in my back mirror knowing what I was going to see. There is a decent likelihood that a machine could have swerved in time, but nearly zero that a typical human could/would have in our typical following patterns. Humans route around inefficient practices. Just as human driving speeds are typically unaffected by posted traffic speeds, they will optimize for their typical experience over written codes for how they drive.
  • beat 7y ago
    Which is why I keep saying autonomous driving doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be better than humans. And that's a much lower bar, because we are lousy drivers.
    • runarberg 7y ago
      I vote for neither. We don’t need to drive, and we certainly don’t need computers to do it for us. There are other—much more easily automated—systems that are several orders of magnitudes more efficient then driving and—if implemnted sufficiently—almost always faster. Autonomous driving doesn’t need to be perfect because we don’t need it. With sufficient alternative systems the only reason for driving will be for hobby (and we don’t want that automated anyway) and heavy load work (like agriculture, mining, or logging) which is already heavily automated.
      • beat 7y ago
        We need transportation. A world of sitting on our butts in front of a computer isn't a solution to much of anything. Maybe we don't need to actually operate the vehicle, but we need the vehicle. I'm not walking halfway across the country just to visit my mother.
        • runarberg 7y ago
          Whoa. Misunderstanding here. I’m not talking about eliminating transportation. That is just stupid. Alternative transportation from driving include: busses, trains, bikes, walking, trolleys, bicycles, ski-lifts, airplaines, taxis, boats, rollerskates, escalators, etc. The sum of these alternatives will almost always outweigh driving in terms of benefits with a notable exception of convenience. So if you are willing to sacrifice convenience when you want to visit your mother, you will almost certainly get there faster and more economically (with the right systems in place) then driving.
          • beat 7y ago
            Until you need to carry something with you - like luggage, or a baby.
• mhermher 7y ago
  Will a computer ever write War and Peace or compose the 9th Symphony too? How about solve an unsolved math proof? No reason it can't be automated, right?
  • leesec 7y ago
    All these things are literally on the AI horizon.
    • gooseus 7y ago
      Indeed, it's that lake we can see and certainly reach if only we can make it just a little farther into the AI desert.
    • Qwertystop 7y ago
      No matter how fast you run for the horizon, it stays well out of reach.
    • ionised 7y ago
      I'd say these things are also 'way in the future'.
    • compiler-guy 7y ago
      People were saying this in the seventies before the long AI winter. It's always just around the corner, and has been since the dawn of AI. Maybe we will get there some day (I never say never), but cautious realism has never been the AI field's strong suit.
    • magic_beans 7y ago
      And how long exactly is that horizon?
    • snowwrestler 7y ago
      There's an emotional component to art, and I don't see nearly as much work on artificial emotions as I do on task-oriented artificial intelligence. A lot of people are working to create a car smart enough to drive humans anywhere. How many people are working to create a car smart enough to refuse to drive because it's feeling inspired to write music instead?
• freediver 7y ago
  It will, when it has all capabilities of a human which may be never.
• michaelt 7y ago
  Imagine you're driving down a street when a kid playing on the sidewalk runs behind a truck and disappears from your view. If the kid appears in the road from behind the truck, the computer can handle slamming on the brakes very easily - probably faster than a human can - without understanding the kid any better than a group of LIDAR points or a rectangle of pixels labelled 'obstacle' by a neural network. But if you want to brake before the kid appears from behind the truck? For that, a fully attentive human driver will be making a bunch of estimates about what the kid is doing, whether they seemed to have noticed the car, how old they were, and so on. In other words, applying a theory of mind. Needless to say, if the latter is a must-have feature, that's a pretty hairy problem. Of course, it's possible the decrease in deaths from being fast on the brakes in simple situations will outweigh the increase in deaths from lacking a theory of mind in complex situations. If that's the case, the self-driving car programmer's job would be a good deal simpler!
  • joefourier 7y ago
    There's no need for a theory of mind - the self driving car can identify the kid as a pedestrian, recognize that it started moving in a possible collision course, then disappeared, thus prompting either slowing down to a non-fatal speed until the truck has been passed. Children playing in the street are a common occurrence in residential areas, I see no reason why you would not develop a set of rules and heuristics to handle them. Identifying a pedestrian as child, and knowing whether it is running or playing, is well within the capabilities of modern computer vision.
    • AnimalMuppet 7y ago
      It's worse than that. That small thing heading toward the road... was that a leaf blown by the wind, or was it a ball? If it's a ball, you'd better be already braking, because a kid is likely coming right behind it, and paying attention to the ball rather than the road. If it's a leaf, though... you don't want to hit the brakes for every blowing leaf.
      • mamon 7y ago