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> much less be able to replicate human cognition that goes into operating heavy machinery in a busy multi-agent social context This holds if you expect self-dr

> much less be able to replicate human cognition that goes into operating heavy machinery in a busy multi-agent social context This holds if you expect self-driving cars to be able to work like humans in picking up "body-language" cues around other drivers. But we can also approach the problem the other way around and set better fixed rules for how driving needs to be done and adjust the road and car infrastructure to make the problem simpler. Human drivers get away with breaking so many rules that the problem becomes much harder than it needs to be.

compiler-guy 7y ago
Someone should redo the old "Spam Solutions" form except for self-driving cars. Found it: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt The parent response would have these ideas checked: (X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ... (X) Asshats (X) Jurisdictional problems ... (X) Technically illiterate politicians ... (X) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
- pedrocr 7y ago
  >Someone should redo the old "Spam Solutions" form except for self-driving cars. Automating being dismissive of discussion does sound like a great idea... > Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once It requires setting stricter traffic rules and having them be followed. Something that's done everywhere in the world every year. It can be done as gradually and as locally-specific as needed. > Asshats We already have those on the road causing accidents. Traffic rules are there to punish this exact behavior. The fact that we don't enforce a few of them makes self-driving harder. I'm not "failing to account for asshats", I'm specifically targeting them. > Jurisdictional problems We already have different jurisdictions where different driving requirements exist. Having self-driving cars that are only allowed to drive in country X would be nothing new. > Technically illiterate politicians My suggestions was specifically to make the road rules stricter and enforced. This is not a technical issue, it's the boring old issue of what the road rules should be and who should follow them. > Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually Enforcing road rules works fine even if done gradually. It also makes self-driving gradually simpler.
  - chipotle_coyote 7y ago
    >> Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once > It requires setting stricter traffic rules and having them be followed. Something that's done everywhere in the world every year. But you mentioned two somethings: "Setting stricter traffic rules" and "having them be followed." The very first examples in the TFA were from Argo's testing i Pittsburgh: Recently, one of the company’s cars encountered a bicyclist riding the wrong way down a busy street between other vehicles. Another Argo test car came across a street sweeper that suddenly turned a giant circle in an intersection, touching all four corners and crossing lanes of traffic that had the green light. Setting stricter traffic rules is certainly done everywhere in the world every year. People failing to follow traffic rules is also done everywhere in the world every day, and that's the big problem. Fully autonomous driving requires the ability to make snap decisions that may have little to no precedence in your past experience. This may be a solvable problem for AI, but it's a really, really hard problem that self-driving aficionados seem to consistently underestimate.
    - x0x0 7y ago
      And strange things happen all the time in high traffic high congestion urban environments. ... ie where we want to use cars.
    - pedrocr 7y ago
      What I'm saying is that it helps, not that it's a silver bullet. But we seem to be stuck in a mindset that self-driving needs to be perfect within the current practice on the road. The more I drive the more it's obvious how human drivers are horrible and often in ways that are extremely easy to police automatically (e.g., tailgating can be checked for with the current toll infrastructure in some of the roads I use). If we want self-driving sooner we may very well have to attack it across the whole system and work on regulation, enforcement, road-design, etc, in parallel with working on the flashy technology bits. If instead we decide that self-driving has to work in the complete mess that are roads today then AGI is quite possibly a requirement.
  - bilbo0s 7y ago
    Back in the late 90's, early 00's, the segway was released to much the same breathless prognostications that we hear today about self driving cars. Doerr said it would be more important than the internet. Kamen claimed it would restructure global transportation. I don't need to go into everything that was said, you can google it. There was one thing said, however, that I think would be appropriate to touch on here. Kamen, just like you, claimed that traffic laws and the streets could be restructured to better accommodate the segway. That was the instant I knew the segway would not be taking off for a long, long time. If you need for people to restructure their laws and cities solely to accommodate your new technology, you should probably work a little bit harder on perfecting your technology. Because restructuring society's laws and transportation infrastructure simply to use your technology is probably not going to happen. The only time you get a radical restructuring of that nature is when the invention frees you from needing the infrastructure at all.
nradov 7y ago
That's a stereotypical engineering solution and fails to account for how humans actually act in the real world. Humans will always break some rules. As a taxpayer I don't think huge infrastructure changes or lots of increased traffic enforcement are a good use of limited public resources.
- mattnewton 7y ago
  I can think of far worse uses for that money than trying to make our roads safer. The current system costs us 40k in lives and millions of serious injuries per year - there is a lot of headroom for improvements. https://www.nsc.org/road-safety/safety-topics/fatality-estimates https://www.nsc.org/road-safety/safety-topics/fatality-estim...
- Retric 7y ago
  With unspoken assumptions about how much an increase is needed things become arbitrary. IMO, if allowing self driving cars on highways costs less than 100k per mile it’s a rather trivial expensive at 16 Billion in the US. Extending that to every road would be much harder to justify. Similarly, developing something like a set of more clear hand gestures for directing traffic would not be a major issue. Honestly, the need for expensive changes seems unlikely, though some changes such as paint choices for lane markings would probably increase safety or efficiency.
lazyasciiart 7y ago
We've done that for ages. They're called trains.
jakeogh 7y ago
The "humans are the bugs" fallacy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18447674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18447674 What's next? Walls on sidewalks? Computers are not smart or dumb. They are machines. Anthropomorphizing them ("self") is foolish.
- pedrocr 7y ago
  My point is humans are already behaving extremely poorly as drivers and that already causes accidents. There are ways to help that be less of an issue that also helps self-driving become possible. But instead we accept those ridiculous risks when driving ourselves and yet expect to hold self-driving to a much higher standard while also complaining if it's not aggressive enough in traffic. That may very well turn self-driving into AGI but that's a choice not a characteristic of the problem. You're attacking a strawman. I'm not saying the solution to self-driving is to change the environment completely to make the problem trivial (i.e., walls on sidewalks). I'm saying that some of the poorly defined and even worse enforced rules of driving could be worked on and that would help self-driving as well. How much would be enough to bring it out of being AGI I'm not sure, but it would definitely help.
  - jakeogh 7y ago
    We have plenty of rules already. Rules get broken. The more enforcement approach is a road to China.
    - pedrocr 7y ago
      I personally don't think enforcing rules around roundabouts so I don't have the near-death experience I had the other day "a road to China". I actually love driving myself and don't particularly care about self-driving technology. But as far as I can tell it's not even possible for me, a reasonably fit human, to drive in way that prevents those risks. If we are not willing to tackle that and at the same time expect airliner reliability from self-driving cars then we've defined the problem as impossible.
      - 7y ago

compiler-guy 7y ago

Someone should redo the old "Spam Solutions" form except for self-driving cars. Found it: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt The parent response would have these ideas checked: (X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ... (X) Asshats (X) Jurisdictional problems ... (X) Technically illiterate politicians ... (X) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually

pedrocr 7y ago
>Someone should redo the old "Spam Solutions" form except for self-driving cars. Automating being dismissive of discussion does sound like a great idea... > Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once It requires setting stricter traffic rules and having them be followed. Something that's done everywhere in the world every year. It can be done as gradually and as locally-specific as needed. > Asshats We already have those on the road causing accidents. Traffic rules are there to punish this exact behavior. The fact that we don't enforce a few of them makes self-driving harder. I'm not "failing to account for asshats", I'm specifically targeting them. > Jurisdictional problems We already have different jurisdictions where different driving requirements exist. Having self-driving cars that are only allowed to drive in country X would be nothing new. > Technically illiterate politicians My suggestions was specifically to make the road rules stricter and enforced. This is not a technical issue, it's the boring old issue of what the road rules should be and who should follow them. > Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually Enforcing road rules works fine even if done gradually. It also makes self-driving gradually simpler.
- chipotle_coyote 7y ago
  >> Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once > It requires setting stricter traffic rules and having them be followed. Something that's done everywhere in the world every year. But you mentioned two somethings: "Setting stricter traffic rules" and "having them be followed." The very first examples in the TFA were from Argo's testing i Pittsburgh: Recently, one of the company’s cars encountered a bicyclist riding the wrong way down a busy street between other vehicles. Another Argo test car came across a street sweeper that suddenly turned a giant circle in an intersection, touching all four corners and crossing lanes of traffic that had the green light. Setting stricter traffic rules is certainly done everywhere in the world every year. People failing to follow traffic rules is also done everywhere in the world every day, and that's the big problem. Fully autonomous driving requires the ability to make snap decisions that may have little to no precedence in your past experience. This may be a solvable problem for AI, but it's a really, really hard problem that self-driving aficionados seem to consistently underestimate.
  - x0x0 7y ago
    And strange things happen all the time in high traffic high congestion urban environments. ... ie where we want to use cars.
  - pedrocr 7y ago
    What I'm saying is that it helps, not that it's a silver bullet. But we seem to be stuck in a mindset that self-driving needs to be perfect within the current practice on the road. The more I drive the more it's obvious how human drivers are horrible and often in ways that are extremely easy to police automatically (e.g., tailgating can be checked for with the current toll infrastructure in some of the roads I use). If we want self-driving sooner we may very well have to attack it across the whole system and work on regulation, enforcement, road-design, etc, in parallel with working on the flashy technology bits. If instead we decide that self-driving has to work in the complete mess that are roads today then AGI is quite possibly a requirement.
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  Back in the late 90's, early 00's, the segway was released to much the same breathless prognostications that we hear today about self driving cars. Doerr said it would be more important than the internet. Kamen claimed it would restructure global transportation. I don't need to go into everything that was said, you can google it. There was one thing said, however, that I think would be appropriate to touch on here. Kamen, just like you, claimed that traffic laws and the streets could be restructured to better accommodate the segway. That was the instant I knew the segway would not be taking off for a long, long time. If you need for people to restructure their laws and cities solely to accommodate your new technology, you should probably work a little bit harder on perfecting your technology. Because restructuring society's laws and transportation infrastructure simply to use your technology is probably not going to happen. The only time you get a radical restructuring of that nature is when the invention frees you from needing the infrastructure at all.

nradov 7y ago

That's a stereotypical engineering solution and fails to account for how humans actually act in the real world. Humans will always break some rules. As a taxpayer I don't think huge infrastructure changes or lots of increased traffic enforcement are a good use of limited public resources.

mattnewton 7y ago
I can think of far worse uses for that money than trying to make our roads safer. The current system costs us 40k in lives and millions of serious injuries per year - there is a lot of headroom for improvements. https://www.nsc.org/road-safety/safety-topics/fatality-estimates https://www.nsc.org/road-safety/safety-topics/fatality-estim...
Retric 7y ago
With unspoken assumptions about how much an increase is needed things become arbitrary. IMO, if allowing self driving cars on highways costs less than 100k per mile it’s a rather trivial expensive at 16 Billion in the US. Extending that to every road would be much harder to justify. Similarly, developing something like a set of more clear hand gestures for directing traffic would not be a major issue. Honestly, the need for expensive changes seems unlikely, though some changes such as paint choices for lane markings would probably increase safety or efficiency.

lazyasciiart 7y ago

We've done that for ages. They're called trains.

jakeogh 7y ago

The "humans are the bugs" fallacy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18447674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18447674 What's next? Walls on sidewalks? Computers are not smart or dumb. They are machines. Anthropomorphizing them ("self") is foolish.

pedrocr 7y ago
My point is humans are already behaving extremely poorly as drivers and that already causes accidents. There are ways to help that be less of an issue that also helps self-driving become possible. But instead we accept those ridiculous risks when driving ourselves and yet expect to hold self-driving to a much higher standard while also complaining if it's not aggressive enough in traffic. That may very well turn self-driving into AGI but that's a choice not a characteristic of the problem. You're attacking a strawman. I'm not saying the solution to self-driving is to change the environment completely to make the problem trivial (i.e., walls on sidewalks). I'm saying that some of the poorly defined and even worse enforced rules of driving could be worked on and that would help self-driving as well. How much would be enough to bring it out of being AGI I'm not sure, but it would definitely help.
- jakeogh 7y ago
  We have plenty of rules already. Rules get broken. The more enforcement approach is a road to China.
  - pedrocr 7y ago
    I personally don't think enforcing rules around roundabouts so I don't have the near-death experience I had the other day "a road to China". I actually love driving myself and don't particularly care about self-driving technology. But as far as I can tell it's not even possible for me, a reasonably fit human, to drive in way that prevents those risks. If we are not willing to tackle that and at the same time expect airliner reliability from self-driving cars then we've defined the problem as impossible.
    - 7y ago