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I have very mixed feelings about autonomous cars. One side of me is so excited about the prospect and finds it all amazing and futuristic. I love reading about

I have very mixed feelings about autonomous cars. One side of me is so excited about the prospect and finds it all amazing and futuristic. I love reading about how Tesla and Waymo approach it differently. The other side of me is absolutely not ready to trust my life to a machine - even though I know I do that all the time in other ways in modern life. I think it will be people's emotional evaluation that will matter more than anything else and it will be a bumpy road to acceptance. Driverless cara will probably be safer statistically but they’ll simultaneously make errors a human wouldn’t, so some people are going to die in what will seem like really dumb ways. This will be hard to accept even though that already happens with human drivers. Probably because their mistakes will be easier to identify with and explain.

2bitencryption 7y ago
every now and then I do something while driving that, IMO, requires "human cognition". Not just image recognition, obstacle avoidance, rule following, etc. Like, I'm cruising along at 45mph and a plastic bag is blown in front of my car. Yes, I see an obstacle and need to make a decision about what to do - but I do this as a human who knows what a plastic bag is, and how it is far safer to drive right over it than slam on the brakes. I know a plastic bag is not, say, a Pomeranian. Another example: I'm driving, and from beyond my plane of vision, a basketball bounces onto the road up ahead. I can't see past a building, but I know I'm near a park where kids frequently play, and I know it's possible a kid comes running into the road to grab the ball. I proactively slow down. I guess you could say a leavel-5 autonomous car would see the ball and slow down anyway, but there's still that lack of cognition that concerns me. We like to think of driving as a purely rule-based game that is simple enough to model and train against. And I believe in 99% of situations, it is. But in that 1%... the plastic bags and all that...
- mgalgs 7y ago
  > Not just image recognition, obstacle avoidance, rule following, etc. I would argue that the examples you gave are just image recognition, etc. What is your brain doing if not image recognition and obstacle avoidance? We're not there with today's technology but eventually our machines will perform better at those uniquely human tasks you mentioned. After all, we humans and our cognition is just the output of these giant meat computers inside our skulls pulling in sensory data and running pattern recognition algorithms. The $65,000 question is whether or not today's technology is sufficient (however barbaric) to be acceptable for the job.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    > I would argue that the examples you gave are just image recognition, etc. What is your brain doing if not image recognition and obstacle avoidance Planning, anticipation, reading body language, etc? Is that person looking like he’s going to jaywalk? That’s not image recognition. Yes, once he steps into the road the self driving car will respond quicker. But the human driver might already be slowing down and watching for hints of initiating movement. Image recognition is just one tiny piece of it.
    - mgalgs 7y ago
      > That’s not image recognition. How do you do it? Telepathically? You're still just receiving visual input and processing it.
      - rayiner 7y ago
        "Image recognition" is a small subset of "receiving visual input and processing it." We know how to do image recognition with machine learning. Planning and anticipation is a much harder problem.
      - beerandt 7y ago
        Human knowledge and intuition. Deductive reasoning. Knowing there is a location ahead without a crosswalk that kids constantly cross at. Or knowing that the car in front of you is going too fast, implying that they're unaware of the railroad tracks they're about to jump. You don't need telepathy to make useful predictions. And humans don't need to be accurate, they just need to be prepared to take a measured response.
        Dylan16807 7y ago
        > Knowing there is a location ahead without a crosswalk that kids constantly cross at. That's not based on reasoning. Most people driving by probably don't even know. And it might be in the car's database. > Or knowing that the car in front of you is going too fast, implying that they're unaware of the railroad tracks they're about to jump. If I'm behind them, and I'm going much slower because I know the layout of the road... I'm not sure how knowing this matters?
- jonplackett 7y ago
  I think that sums it up really well. In those kind of edge cases like the basket ball, if an AI driver didn’t slow down and then killed a kid, we’d all be up in arms about It saying how obvious it was that a kid would run out, and we’d have stopped, and we’d be right. But at the same time that AI driver will have stopped in time when 10 other kids jumped out without any warning because it has much, much better reflexes. But it’ll be the first instance that will get all the airtime.
  - rubicon33 7y ago
    Nearly 1.25 million people die in road crashes each year. Think about that. Self driving cars aren't just a solution to nuisance of driving. They're a solution to one of the leading causes of DEATH and INJURY in the country. Sure there are going to be edge cases where we as humans will be able to point at the car and say "damnit, we could have prevented that"! But I sure hope when we do that, the car points right back at us and asks "And for the other 1.20 million lives I've saved this year? You would have killed them"
    - rayiner 7y ago
      > Sure there are going to be edge cases where we as humans will be able to point at the car and say "damnit, we could have prevented that"! This is a meaningless assertion unless you account for how often "edge cases" arise. If unpredictable pedestrians, unplanned road construction, etc., is an "edge case" the car basically won't work in DC or New York.
      - smt88 7y ago
        It doesn't need to work in every place to be useful or worthwhile. Sleepy truck drivers are a major safety issue by themselves, and highways are easier for SDCs to drive on.
      - volkk 7y ago
        i would assume that for the first X years, aka a long time, the SDCs would operate mostly on highways/very rural areas.
- fwip 7y ago
  The driverless cars out there can't even stop for children that are clearly visible. https://www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/does-your-car-have-automated-emergency-braking-its-a-big-fail-for-pedestrians/ https://www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/does-your-car-have-... > Using a child-sized dummy, vehicles only avoid running over the child 11% of the time They're not safe.
  - jonplackett 7y ago
    This is just for automated braking, not autonomous cars. Not the same thing at all.
    - fwip 7y ago
      The state of the art systems designed only to brake before hitting obstacles can't even do that. It's a pretty simple problem, as far as self-driving tasks go. I don't think that bodes well at all for full autonomy - especially since at least one of those vendors (Tesla) is promising self-driving sooner than later.
    - beerandt 7y ago
      Honest question. Are they fundamentally different, design wise? Or is it merely a measure of confidence & reliability?
      - bryan_w 7y ago
        Self driving cars have more sensors
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  Even if the car occasionally stops for plastic bags, the self-driving is still a massive improvement in the experience I have. For children you might preemptively slow down, but a properly designed system can brake a whole lot faster. Should be fine.
  - beerandt 7y ago
    These are both faulty assumptions. 1) If I'm considering whether to brake for a plastic bag, I'm also going to check for anyone tailgating me, and take that into consideration. Including whether said tailgater is a geo prism or a Freightliner attached to a tanker of gasoline. Slamming on the brakes for a plastic bag is not the universal safer choice. 2) Already mentioned this, but reaction/breaking time is meaningless without timely recognition.
    - Dylan16807 7y ago
      > Slamming on the brakes for a plastic bag is not the universal safer choice. ...I didn't say it was. And you call me the one making assumptions. > reaction/breaking time is meaningless without timely recognition. If it can't quickly recognize large moving objects then it's not qualified to drive at all. I'm assuming it can do that because self-driving at all is part of the premise. (Well, specifically the recognition is necessary for basic driving functionality, and being faster is a matter of adding compute power and using cameras at least as fast as the ones in an iphone.)
      - beerandt 7y ago
        1) I'll rephrase: occasionally (and needlessly) stopping for a plastic bag (or any other false positive) should not be considered a massive improvement over current human abilities 2) >>>you might preemptively slow down, but a properly designed system can brake a whole lot faster. >If it can't quickly recognize large moving objects I'm not questioning whether it can recognize quickly. Just whether it can ever be better/ faster than humans, taking into account cognitive ability. It's whether human (prediction-or-recognition time + reaction time + breaking time) is more or less than (AI recognition time + plus reaction time + breaking time) If AI can react and brake 2 seconds faster than a human, but doesn't recognize the threat until 4 seconds after humans can, then AI drivers will kill more people than human drivers. Which won't be fine. >being faster is a matter of adding compute power and using cameras There are other comments about the limitations of relying only on image recognition. While compute power per might improve the AI recognition time, humans still have the advantage of being able to predict instead of react. This will continue to be a major limitation for AI.
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  How many parks in the USA have speed zones around them that aren’t restricted to 15-25mph? It is stupid easy to slow down for a kid chase ball scenario when you are already going slow anyways, the only reason it is such a problem at all is because human drivers prefer speeding so much.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    Tons of them? I don't think any of the parks around here in exurban maryland have any sort of special speed zone. My 100+ year old neighborhood doesn't even have its layout mapped correctly in Google Maps. (The road names in the app don't match the street signs and the wayfinding doesn't realize that the road in front of my house is segmented with barriers so you can't drive all the way down it.)
    - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
      Even in that case, the city default speed limit (when not posted) is usually something low like 25 (Seattle is 20!). Yes, many human drivers ignore that, but self driving cars don’t have that luxury. We really should do this like the Dutch: when something problematic is encountered, engineer and regulate the hell out of it. Not just for self driving cars, but it works for humans to some extent that the laws are actually enforced.
- nearbuy 7y ago
  The flip side is every now and then a situation arises that requires machine reaction times or attentiveness. Waymo cars have driven over 10 million miles so far without any fatal accidents. That's not nearly enough miles to compare against human drivers, but it'll be interesting to see who does better once they log some more miles.
- cf141q5325 7y ago
  Its not just plastic bags and fringe error cases. As a driver you know that you sometimes have to break the rules. Say an empty truck is parking on one side of the road, blocking the lane entirely, to overtake him you need to make an illegal maneuver overtaking him or stand there holding up traffic for everyone. Or one step further, you have to make room for an ambulance,. I dont think there is a realistic scenario were all rules to drive in normal traffic can be sufficiently covered.
- bobsil1 7y ago
  Correct, they need a common sense / world model.
- darawk 7y ago
  While that's true, the autonomous car can also react so much faster than you can. It may be able to largely trade-off your level of contextual awareness for pure reaction speed in most cases.
  - rightbyte 7y ago
    Are you sure? Image recognition or radar does not make self driving cars necessarely faster than a cognitive model and eye input just becouse computers are way faster at math and IO. You need a certain hysteresis/threshold to filter out false positives.
dsaavy 7y ago
What you describe feels similar in certain ways to insulin pumps. They’ve definitely helped people live longer and healthier lives but still have cause injuries that otherwise wouldn’t have happened with human administered injections. https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.4915491 https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.4915491
- jonplackett 7y ago
  Really interesting comparison, thanks.
beerandt 7y ago
Maybe semantics, but the biggest problem isn't necessarily trusting the machine to do what's expected. The problem is the machine being able to predict what pedestrians and other drivers are going to do. This isn't just a problem for driverless cars, it's become a real problem for people, too. The rules of the road are there for a reason, people! When you wave someone into traffic, or have your emergency flashers on while still moving in the rain, or wait too long at a busy 4-way stop, you're not being courteous or defensive or cautious, you're being unpredictable! (And most likely inefficient, as well.) Worse, (and this is going to be driverless cars' Achilles heel, IMHO) is people pulling into or across traffic (or otherwise failing to yield) based only on the expectation that the vehicle with the right-of-way will brake and do whatever is required to avoid a wreck. If they do it in front of a driverless car while trying to cross a busy highway, then people making this assumption are going to get killed.
- jonplackett 7y ago
  Or it might go the other way and driverless cars will be push-overs on the road and brake for everyone all the time. There’s a lot of decisions to be made about how they should react to that kind of stuff. Tesla’s last automation talk was interesting about that - they’re basically training the cars to act like a human driver would, looking for tiny signals that might warn of unexpected behaviour.
  - beerandt 7y ago
    Good point. And it could have both problems. There's no reason I can think of to assume mutual exclusion. >act like a human driver Anything AI making this or a similar claim is automatically suspect to me. >looking for tiny signals that might warn of unexpected behaviour I suppose this is progress, except that it sort of implies that the AI wasn't already doing that. Which to me says the programmers are still having to anticipate too many possible scenarios.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    Tesla still reliably runs into stationary objects and fails to brake for (dummy) children, so take all that with a grain of salt.
BurningFrog 7y ago
Like someone said, driverless cars will save thousands, and kill hundreds. It's obviously the best choice to adapt a technology like that, but I'm not sure our society has the fortitude to do it.
- beerandt 7y ago
  >save thousands, and kill hundreds Seriously. Why does everyone assume this? Because Tesla's marketing department says so?
  - BurningFrog 7y ago
    Because the overwhelming majority of traffic deaths are due to human errors (A) a computer could easily avoid. It would of course introduce a class of errors (B) that humans would not have made, but those can be iteratively improved until they're substantially lower than the category they're replacing. My point is that once B is substantially lower than A, the tech should be deployed. But I fear people will demand B = 0.
    - beerandt 7y ago
      I agree. >once B is substantially lower than A It's the presumption that this ^ is a given; that's what I have a problem with. I think people assume B will continue to decrease in a linear fashion, (or maybe log/exp, but at least not hitting it's asymptote / limit until it's less than A). But we're already seeing diminishing returns, and since A and B are both difficult to measure, I think presuming that the good will automatically outweigh the bad (at least in the foreseeable future) is nothing more than blind hope at this point. There's also no reason to believe that it won't become more dangerous at some point. Look at air travel. Automation made great improvements in safety without many downsides. Until maybe about 10 years ago, when automation related accidents started creeping up (yet usually blamed on pilot error). And then you get to the 737-max problem. (I'm not claiming air travel is more dangerous, it's not. But mechanical reliability and materials testing / repair are doing far more for safety than automation is. Modern jet engines are an underappreciated marvel of science.) Personally, I would accept a greater risk for the convenience of being driven by AI, and I don't think I'm alone. I just think it's a bit of blind hope (and even some arrogance) to assume AI will be safer anytime soon.
paulcole 7y ago
When true autonomous cars are truly ready, you’re not going to have a choice. It’s going to quickly become prohibitively expensive to insure a human driver.
YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
>> Driverless cara will probably be safer statistically but they’ll simultaneously make errors a human wouldn’t, so some people are going to die in what will seem like really dumb ways. Statistically it would take tens or hundreds of years before we can know whether self-driving cars are safer than human-driven cars: Key Findings ∙ Autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and sometimes hundreds of billions of miles to demonstrate their reliability in terms of fatalities and injuries. ∙ Under even aggressive testing assumptions, existing fleets would take tens and sometimes hundreds of years to drive these miles — an impossible proposition if the aim is to demonstrate their performance prior to releasing them on the roads for consumer use. ∙ Therefore, at least for fatalities and injuries, test-driving alone cannot provide sufficient evidence for demonstrating autonomous vehicle safety. From: Driving to Safety How Many Miles of Driving Would It Take to Demonstrate Autonomous Vehicle Reliability? https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1478.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1478.html
WhompingWindows 7y ago
People already die in VAST numbers on the roads. This is all a question of which deaths are reported/discussed. If some technology leads to death, it will undoubtedly get way more media coverage than if human error leads to death. ~50 people died when a compounding pharmacy had mold in its spinal injections. ~300 died in SK when a ferry sank. Over a hundred people died due to Boeing's software issues. Hell, look at Uber killing that single pedestrian in Arizona -- how many traffic fatalities occur during Uber rides overall? This is all since 2010 with "advanced" technologies. With scale of tech, comes fringe/rare events, which will be reported on. The important question is: will less people die with Waymo cars than without them? All logic and reason point towards "less people will die," but evidence is needed. The one thing we can be sure of: when people DO die with SDCs, it will be HEAVILY reported on, even though thousands die daily on the roads due to preventable, human error, which is rarely reported on.

2bitencryption 7y ago

every now and then I do something while driving that, IMO, requires "human cognition". Not just image recognition, obstacle avoidance, rule following, etc. Like, I'm cruising along at 45mph and a plastic bag is blown in front of my car. Yes, I see an obstacle and need to make a decision about what to do - but I do this as a human who knows what a plastic bag is, and how it is far safer to drive right over it than slam on the brakes. I know a plastic bag is not, say, a Pomeranian. Another example: I'm driving, and from beyond my plane of vision, a basketball bounces onto the road up ahead. I can't see past a building, but I know I'm near a park where kids frequently play, and I know it's possible a kid comes running into the road to grab the ball. I proactively slow down. I guess you could say a leavel-5 autonomous car would see the ball and slow down anyway, but there's still that lack of cognition that concerns me. We like to think of driving as a purely rule-based game that is simple enough to model and train against. And I believe in 99% of situations, it is. But in that 1%... the plastic bags and all that...

mgalgs 7y ago
> Not just image recognition, obstacle avoidance, rule following, etc. I would argue that the examples you gave are just image recognition, etc. What is your brain doing if not image recognition and obstacle avoidance? We're not there with today's technology but eventually our machines will perform better at those uniquely human tasks you mentioned. After all, we humans and our cognition is just the output of these giant meat computers inside our skulls pulling in sensory data and running pattern recognition algorithms. The $65,000 question is whether or not today's technology is sufficient (however barbaric) to be acceptable for the job.
- rayiner 7y ago
  > I would argue that the examples you gave are just image recognition, etc. What is your brain doing if not image recognition and obstacle avoidance Planning, anticipation, reading body language, etc? Is that person looking like he’s going to jaywalk? That’s not image recognition. Yes, once he steps into the road the self driving car will respond quicker. But the human driver might already be slowing down and watching for hints of initiating movement. Image recognition is just one tiny piece of it.
  - mgalgs 7y ago
    > That’s not image recognition. How do you do it? Telepathically? You're still just receiving visual input and processing it.
    - rayiner 7y ago
      "Image recognition" is a small subset of "receiving visual input and processing it." We know how to do image recognition with machine learning. Planning and anticipation is a much harder problem.
    - beerandt 7y ago
      Human knowledge and intuition. Deductive reasoning. Knowing there is a location ahead without a crosswalk that kids constantly cross at. Or knowing that the car in front of you is going too fast, implying that they're unaware of the railroad tracks they're about to jump. You don't need telepathy to make useful predictions. And humans don't need to be accurate, they just need to be prepared to take a measured response.
      - Dylan16807 7y ago
        > Knowing there is a location ahead without a crosswalk that kids constantly cross at. That's not based on reasoning. Most people driving by probably don't even know. And it might be in the car's database. > Or knowing that the car in front of you is going too fast, implying that they're unaware of the railroad tracks they're about to jump. If I'm behind them, and I'm going much slower because I know the layout of the road... I'm not sure how knowing this matters?
jonplackett 7y ago
I think that sums it up really well. In those kind of edge cases like the basket ball, if an AI driver didn’t slow down and then killed a kid, we’d all be up in arms about It saying how obvious it was that a kid would run out, and we’d have stopped, and we’d be right. But at the same time that AI driver will have stopped in time when 10 other kids jumped out without any warning because it has much, much better reflexes. But it’ll be the first instance that will get all the airtime.
- rubicon33 7y ago
  Nearly 1.25 million people die in road crashes each year. Think about that. Self driving cars aren't just a solution to nuisance of driving. They're a solution to one of the leading causes of DEATH and INJURY in the country. Sure there are going to be edge cases where we as humans will be able to point at the car and say "damnit, we could have prevented that"! But I sure hope when we do that, the car points right back at us and asks "And for the other 1.20 million lives I've saved this year? You would have killed them"
  - rayiner 7y ago
    > Sure there are going to be edge cases where we as humans will be able to point at the car and say "damnit, we could have prevented that"! This is a meaningless assertion unless you account for how often "edge cases" arise. If unpredictable pedestrians, unplanned road construction, etc., is an "edge case" the car basically won't work in DC or New York.
    - smt88 7y ago
      It doesn't need to work in every place to be useful or worthwhile. Sleepy truck drivers are a major safety issue by themselves, and highways are easier for SDCs to drive on.
    - volkk 7y ago
      i would assume that for the first X years, aka a long time, the SDCs would operate mostly on highways/very rural areas.
fwip 7y ago
The driverless cars out there can't even stop for children that are clearly visible. https://www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/does-your-car-have-automated-emergency-braking-its-a-big-fail-for-pedestrians/ https://www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/does-your-car-have-... > Using a child-sized dummy, vehicles only avoid running over the child 11% of the time They're not safe.
- jonplackett 7y ago
  This is just for automated braking, not autonomous cars. Not the same thing at all.
  - fwip 7y ago
    The state of the art systems designed only to brake before hitting obstacles can't even do that. It's a pretty simple problem, as far as self-driving tasks go. I don't think that bodes well at all for full autonomy - especially since at least one of those vendors (Tesla) is promising self-driving sooner than later.
  - beerandt 7y ago
    Honest question. Are they fundamentally different, design wise? Or is it merely a measure of confidence & reliability?
    - bryan_w 7y ago
      Self driving cars have more sensors
Dylan16807 7y ago
Even if the car occasionally stops for plastic bags, the self-driving is still a massive improvement in the experience I have. For children you might preemptively slow down, but a properly designed system can brake a whole lot faster. Should be fine.
- beerandt 7y ago
  These are both faulty assumptions. 1) If I'm considering whether to brake for a plastic bag, I'm also going to check for anyone tailgating me, and take that into consideration. Including whether said tailgater is a geo prism or a Freightliner attached to a tanker of gasoline. Slamming on the brakes for a plastic bag is not the universal safer choice. 2) Already mentioned this, but reaction/breaking time is meaningless without timely recognition.
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    > Slamming on the brakes for a plastic bag is not the universal safer choice. ...I didn't say it was. And you call me the one making assumptions. > reaction/breaking time is meaningless without timely recognition. If it can't quickly recognize large moving objects then it's not qualified to drive at all. I'm assuming it can do that because self-driving at all is part of the premise. (Well, specifically the recognition is necessary for basic driving functionality, and being faster is a matter of adding compute power and using cameras at least as fast as the ones in an iphone.)
    - beerandt 7y ago
      1) I'll rephrase: occasionally (and needlessly) stopping for a plastic bag (or any other false positive) should not be considered a massive improvement over current human abilities 2) >>>you might preemptively slow down, but a properly designed system can brake a whole lot faster. >If it can't quickly recognize large moving objects I'm not questioning whether it can recognize quickly. Just whether it can ever be better/ faster than humans, taking into account cognitive ability. It's whether human (prediction-or-recognition time + reaction time + breaking time) is more or less than (AI recognition time + plus reaction time + breaking time) If AI can react and brake 2 seconds faster than a human, but doesn't recognize the threat until 4 seconds after humans can, then AI drivers will kill more people than human drivers. Which won't be fine. >being faster is a matter of adding compute power and using cameras There are other comments about the limitations of relying only on image recognition. While compute power per might improve the AI recognition time, humans still have the advantage of being able to predict instead of react. This will continue to be a major limitation for AI.
seanmcdirmid 7y ago
How many parks in the USA have speed zones around them that aren’t restricted to 15-25mph? It is stupid easy to slow down for a kid chase ball scenario when you are already going slow anyways, the only reason it is such a problem at all is because human drivers prefer speeding so much.
- rayiner 7y ago
  Tons of them? I don't think any of the parks around here in exurban maryland have any sort of special speed zone. My 100+ year old neighborhood doesn't even have its layout mapped correctly in Google Maps. (The road names in the app don't match the street signs and the wayfinding doesn't realize that the road in front of my house is segmented with barriers so you can't drive all the way down it.)
  - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    Even in that case, the city default speed limit (when not posted) is usually something low like 25 (Seattle is 20!). Yes, many human drivers ignore that, but self driving cars don’t have that luxury. We really should do this like the Dutch: when something problematic is encountered, engineer and regulate the hell out of it. Not just for self driving cars, but it works for humans to some extent that the laws are actually enforced.
nearbuy 7y ago
The flip side is every now and then a situation arises that requires machine reaction times or attentiveness. Waymo cars have driven over 10 million miles so far without any fatal accidents. That's not nearly enough miles to compare against human drivers, but it'll be interesting to see who does better once they log some more miles.
cf141q5325 7y ago
Its not just plastic bags and fringe error cases. As a driver you know that you sometimes have to break the rules. Say an empty truck is parking on one side of the road, blocking the lane entirely, to overtake him you need to make an illegal maneuver overtaking him or stand there holding up traffic for everyone. Or one step further, you have to make room for an ambulance,. I dont think there is a realistic scenario were all rules to drive in normal traffic can be sufficiently covered.
bobsil1 7y ago
Correct, they need a common sense / world model.
darawk 7y ago
While that's true, the autonomous car can also react so much faster than you can. It may be able to largely trade-off your level of contextual awareness for pure reaction speed in most cases.
- rightbyte 7y ago
  Are you sure? Image recognition or radar does not make self driving cars necessarely faster than a cognitive model and eye input just becouse computers are way faster at math and IO. You need a certain hysteresis/threshold to filter out false positives.

dsaavy 7y ago

What you describe feels similar in certain ways to insulin pumps. They’ve definitely helped people live longer and healthier lives but still have cause injuries that otherwise wouldn’t have happened with human administered injections. https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.4915491 https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.4915491

jonplackett 7y ago
Really interesting comparison, thanks.

beerandt 7y ago

Maybe semantics, but the biggest problem isn't necessarily trusting the machine to do what's expected. The problem is the machine being able to predict what pedestrians and other drivers are going to do. This isn't just a problem for driverless cars, it's become a real problem for people, too. The rules of the road are there for a reason, people! When you wave someone into traffic, or have your emergency flashers on while still moving in the rain, or wait too long at a busy 4-way stop, you're not being courteous or defensive or cautious, you're being unpredictable! (And most likely inefficient, as well.) Worse, (and this is going to be driverless cars' Achilles heel, IMHO) is people pulling into or across traffic (or otherwise failing to yield) based only on the expectation that the vehicle with the right-of-way will brake and do whatever is required to avoid a wreck. If they do it in front of a driverless car while trying to cross a busy highway, then people making this assumption are going to get killed.

jonplackett 7y ago
Or it might go the other way and driverless cars will be push-overs on the road and brake for everyone all the time. There’s a lot of decisions to be made about how they should react to that kind of stuff. Tesla’s last automation talk was interesting about that - they’re basically training the cars to act like a human driver would, looking for tiny signals that might warn of unexpected behaviour.
- beerandt 7y ago
  Good point. And it could have both problems. There's no reason I can think of to assume mutual exclusion. >act like a human driver Anything AI making this or a similar claim is automatically suspect to me. >looking for tiny signals that might warn of unexpected behaviour I suppose this is progress, except that it sort of implies that the AI wasn't already doing that. Which to me says the programmers are still having to anticipate too many possible scenarios.
- rayiner 7y ago
  Tesla still reliably runs into stationary objects and fails to brake for (dummy) children, so take all that with a grain of salt.

BurningFrog 7y ago

Like someone said, driverless cars will save thousands, and kill hundreds. It's obviously the best choice to adapt a technology like that, but I'm not sure our society has the fortitude to do it.

beerandt 7y ago
>save thousands, and kill hundreds Seriously. Why does everyone assume this? Because Tesla's marketing department says so?
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  Because the overwhelming majority of traffic deaths are due to human errors (A) a computer could easily avoid. It would of course introduce a class of errors (B) that humans would not have made, but those can be iteratively improved until they're substantially lower than the category they're replacing. My point is that once B is substantially lower than A, the tech should be deployed. But I fear people will demand B = 0.
  - beerandt 7y ago
    I agree. >once B is substantially lower than A It's the presumption that this ^ is a given; that's what I have a problem with. I think people assume B will continue to decrease in a linear fashion, (or maybe log/exp, but at least not hitting it's asymptote / limit until it's less than A). But we're already seeing diminishing returns, and since A and B are both difficult to measure, I think presuming that the good will automatically outweigh the bad (at least in the foreseeable future) is nothing more than blind hope at this point. There's also no reason to believe that it won't become more dangerous at some point. Look at air travel. Automation made great improvements in safety without many downsides. Until maybe about 10 years ago, when automation related accidents started creeping up (yet usually blamed on pilot error). And then you get to the 737-max problem. (I'm not claiming air travel is more dangerous, it's not. But mechanical reliability and materials testing / repair are doing far more for safety than automation is. Modern jet engines are an underappreciated marvel of science.) Personally, I would accept a greater risk for the convenience of being driven by AI, and I don't think I'm alone. I just think it's a bit of blind hope (and even some arrogance) to assume AI will be safer anytime soon.

paulcole 7y ago

When true autonomous cars are truly ready, you’re not going to have a choice. It’s going to quickly become prohibitively expensive to insure a human driver.

YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago

>> Driverless cara will probably be safer statistically but they’ll simultaneously make errors a human wouldn’t, so some people are going to die in what will seem like really dumb ways. Statistically it would take tens or hundreds of years before we can know whether self-driving cars are safer than human-driven cars: Key Findings ∙ Autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and sometimes hundreds of billions of miles to demonstrate their reliability in terms of fatalities and injuries. ∙ Under even aggressive testing assumptions, existing fleets would take tens and sometimes hundreds of years to drive these miles — an impossible proposition if the aim is to demonstrate their performance prior to releasing them on the roads for consumer use. ∙ Therefore, at least for fatalities and injuries, test-driving alone cannot provide sufficient evidence for demonstrating autonomous vehicle safety. From: Driving to Safety How Many Miles of Driving Would It Take to Demonstrate Autonomous Vehicle Reliability? https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1478.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1478.html

WhompingWindows 7y ago

People already die in VAST numbers on the roads. This is all a question of which deaths are reported/discussed. If some technology leads to death, it will undoubtedly get way more media coverage than if human error leads to death. ~50 people died when a compounding pharmacy had mold in its spinal injections. ~300 died in SK when a ferry sank. Over a hundred people died due to Boeing's software issues. Hell, look at Uber killing that single pedestrian in Arizona -- how many traffic fatalities occur during Uber rides overall? This is all since 2010 with "advanced" technologies. With scale of tech, comes fringe/rare events, which will be reported on. The important question is: will less people die with Waymo cars than without them? All logic and reason point towards "less people will die," but evidence is needed. The one thing we can be sure of: when people DO die with SDCs, it will be HEAVILY reported on, even though thousands die daily on the roads due to preventable, human error, which is rarely reported on.