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Rhetoric spewing forthcoming... I talk about this stuff with my peers, and am constantly dismissed by the techno-optimists that believe in the promises of big t

by ezzzzz 7y ago

Rhetoric spewing forthcoming... I talk about this stuff with my peers, and am constantly dismissed by the techno-optimists that believe in the promises of big tech, but I think it is important not to jump the gun and put these self-driving cars into production (i.e. the real world) without a significant paper trail and analysis of real-time incidents being made available to the public. Full stop, all incidents and outcomes, not just the good. Going further, I wish for more initiative to re-design infrastructure putting the safety of pedestrians, cyclists etc at the forefront. It is simply not safe for alternative transportation to share the road with vehicles, autonomous or otherwise. Coincidentally, if infrastructure were designed to limit or prevent the interaction between cars and non-cars, the problem of detection for autonomous systems becomes much easier. Unfortunately, society would rather prop up the free market with capital than invest in public works which benefit more than corporations and shareholders.

ptero 7y ago
Good points, but we also need to quantify the risks posed by human drivers in similar situations. Getting "similar situations" is hard, but not impossible: aircraft industry builds faithful sims where people can respond to various stimuli (or lack thereof for hours after which trouble comes). As it is, we bash every crash and failure of such cars and may prohibit those from public roads while statistically they might be making our lives safer, not more dangerous. My 2c.
- ezzzzz 7y ago
  I see what you're getting at, but there is a certain amount of cognitive dissonance at play here. If a person driving a car strikes a pedestrian, there may be a grey area as to who was at fault. What was the speed of the driver? Was the driver impaired? Was the pedestrian impaired? Was the driver's view obstructed, was the pedestrians view obstructed? Etc, etc. But when a system that is designed to autonomously detect infinite, non-discrete, random variables fails prevent a collision/incident, you have a failure. There is no grey area, Y or N. The hope is, the system is smart enough to determine exactly 'why' there was a failure (i.e. the system recognizes the input, a pedestrian in this case, but was not able to prevent collision due to the constraints of physics, or without a nominal increase for concurrent accidents). Still a failure, albeit a failure with a greater snapshot of heuristics and causality.
  - viklove 7y ago
    You're getting stuck up in pedantry when only one thing matters: Do AI drivers kill fewer pedestrians than human drivers?
    - ulisesrmzroche 7y ago
      All evidence points to nope.
      - ezzzzz 7y ago
        Citation needed. This is my argument. Unless you are working for Uber/Tesla/Waymo where is the data? I'd even be satisfied with seeing incidents where the system successfully avoided collisions, at least as a baseline. How do regression lines trend in comparison to non-autonomous cars considering scale?
        mandevil 7y ago
        I'm pretty sure if they were better than humans by any real statistical margin they would be trumpeting that in press releases. The fact that they work so hard to maintain such secrecy- only revealing data that they are legally mandated to- suggests that they, the people must familiar with the system performance, think it is inadequate. In essence, because the people who control the data have an interest in revealing data that is superior to human performance, the lack of conclusive data on this leads to an inference that it isn't.
        romwell 7y ago
        >Citation needed. Sure! Traffic fatalities in the US, human drivers: 1.25 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U... Uber's self-driving car fatality rate: 1 death per 2 million miles[2] That is, Uber's state-of-the-art is an order of magnitude worse than human drivers. I know, you'll complain about small sample size. The thing is, assuming Uber's cars match humans, the chances of a collision happening only after 2 million miles are very small, like pulling an ace of spades out of a shuffled deck of cards. The point is, we do have the data, and the data does not support optimistic beliefs. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U... [2]https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/10/waymo-has-driven-10-million-miles-on-public-roads-thats-a-big-deal/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/10/waymo-has-driven-10-mil...
jhayward 7y ago
> without a significant paper trail and analysis of real-time incidents being made available to the public. Full stop, all incidents and outcomes, not just the good Without simultaneously reporting the identical data for human driven vehicles in a complete, accurate, and globally comprehensive way there is little that can be done with such data except use it to make political attacks on the technology. As comparison: every single battery electric vehicle that has a fire is widely reported and disclaimed, impugning the technology as unsafe. The 10s of thousands of flammable fueled vehicle fires are completely unreported in the media.
- ezzzzz 7y ago
  A brief look at https://www.nhtsa.gov/ https://www.nhtsa.gov/ reveals that more data is available than I thought, along with a roadmap to full automation (https://www.nhtsa.gov/technology-innovation/automated-vehicles-safety https://www.nhtsa.gov/technology-innovation/automated-vehicl...). I'm glad this is being looked at, and it seems that they are in favor of automation. That being said, the data is there for comparison/analysis. One major benefit of autonomous vehicles is that they are certainly better reporters than humans. They need not rely on the fallible memories of human drivers when data from sensors, cameras, internal system monitoring etc is out there living in the data-center. A complete snapshot of an event for replay removes any uncertainty from the equation. Simply put, these systems are designed to provide optimal data that should be captured for analysis. I am not a Luddite here, I think that it is possible for machines to be more effective drivers than humans. As a consumer/pedestrian however, I am skeptical of any claims without actionable (open) data being provided. *edit whoops don't know HN link formatting :)

by ezzzzz 7y ago

ptero 7y ago

Good points, but we also need to quantify the risks posed by human drivers in similar situations. Getting "similar situations" is hard, but not impossible: aircraft industry builds faithful sims where people can respond to various stimuli (or lack thereof for hours after which trouble comes). As it is, we bash every crash and failure of such cars and may prohibit those from public roads while statistically they might be making our lives safer, not more dangerous. My 2c.

ezzzzz 7y ago
I see what you're getting at, but there is a certain amount of cognitive dissonance at play here. If a person driving a car strikes a pedestrian, there may be a grey area as to who was at fault. What was the speed of the driver? Was the driver impaired? Was the pedestrian impaired? Was the driver's view obstructed, was the pedestrians view obstructed? Etc, etc. But when a system that is designed to autonomously detect infinite, non-discrete, random variables fails prevent a collision/incident, you have a failure. There is no grey area, Y or N. The hope is, the system is smart enough to determine exactly 'why' there was a failure (i.e. the system recognizes the input, a pedestrian in this case, but was not able to prevent collision due to the constraints of physics, or without a nominal increase for concurrent accidents). Still a failure, albeit a failure with a greater snapshot of heuristics and causality.
- viklove 7y ago
  You're getting stuck up in pedantry when only one thing matters: Do AI drivers kill fewer pedestrians than human drivers?
  - ulisesrmzroche 7y ago
    All evidence points to nope.
    - ezzzzz 7y ago
      Citation needed. This is my argument. Unless you are working for Uber/Tesla/Waymo where is the data? I'd even be satisfied with seeing incidents where the system successfully avoided collisions, at least as a baseline. How do regression lines trend in comparison to non-autonomous cars considering scale?
      - mandevil 7y ago
        I'm pretty sure if they were better than humans by any real statistical margin they would be trumpeting that in press releases. The fact that they work so hard to maintain such secrecy- only revealing data that they are legally mandated to- suggests that they, the people must familiar with the system performance, think it is inadequate. In essence, because the people who control the data have an interest in revealing data that is superior to human performance, the lack of conclusive data on this leads to an inference that it isn't.
      - romwell 7y ago
        >Citation needed. Sure! Traffic fatalities in the US, human drivers: 1.25 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U... Uber's self-driving car fatality rate: 1 death per 2 million miles[2] That is, Uber's state-of-the-art is an order of magnitude worse than human drivers. I know, you'll complain about small sample size. The thing is, assuming Uber's cars match humans, the chances of a collision happening only after 2 million miles are very small, like pulling an ace of spades out of a shuffled deck of cards. The point is, we do have the data, and the data does not support optimistic beliefs. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U... [2]https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/10/waymo-has-driven-10-million-miles-on-public-roads-thats-a-big-deal/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/10/waymo-has-driven-10-mil...

jhayward 7y ago

> without a significant paper trail and analysis of real-time incidents being made available to the public. Full stop, all incidents and outcomes, not just the good Without simultaneously reporting the identical data for human driven vehicles in a complete, accurate, and globally comprehensive way there is little that can be done with such data except use it to make political attacks on the technology. As comparison: every single battery electric vehicle that has a fire is widely reported and disclaimed, impugning the technology as unsafe. The 10s of thousands of flammable fueled vehicle fires are completely unreported in the media.

ezzzzz 7y ago
A brief look at https://www.nhtsa.gov/ https://www.nhtsa.gov/ reveals that more data is available than I thought, along with a roadmap to full automation (https://www.nhtsa.gov/technology-innovation/automated-vehicles-safety https://www.nhtsa.gov/technology-innovation/automated-vehicl...). I'm glad this is being looked at, and it seems that they are in favor of automation. That being said, the data is there for comparison/analysis. One major benefit of autonomous vehicles is that they are certainly better reporters than humans. They need not rely on the fallible memories of human drivers when data from sensors, cameras, internal system monitoring etc is out there living in the data-center. A complete snapshot of an event for replay removes any uncertainty from the equation. Simply put, these systems are designed to provide optimal data that should be captured for analysis. I am not a Luddite here, I think that it is possible for machines to be more effective drivers than humans. As a consumer/pedestrian however, I am skeptical of any claims without actionable (open) data being provided. *edit whoops don't know HN link formatting :)