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I used to disagree, then one day I was showering and thought I heard something I couldn't possibly have heard (a train crossing bell). False positive, my audio

I used to disagree, then one day I was showering and thought I heard something I couldn't possibly have heard (a train crossing bell). False positive, my audio neural net heard some sound and with all the distortion got it wrong. My other facilities quickly ruled it out and concluded that it was unlikely that a train was in my apartment, but also that there is no train crossing there either. This problem (pattern matching, cross referencing experiences, deducing truth) mirrors the SDV problem pretty well. Can they tell that the plastic bag on the road is safe to drive over? Can they infer that if the truck in front of them is overflowing with poorly-secured tools and equipment/soon-to-be debris, to maybe keep more distance? If a human waves to indicate they should go around, or the road ahead is closed, or they need help, will the car understand? The way to solve self-driving cars in a few years is to start building roads and infrastructure for such automation. Maybe even have a human driving multiple cars, computer assisted, simultaneously from a remote office.

leoc 7y ago
> The way to solve self-driving cars in a few years is to start building roads and infrastructure for such automation. Maybe even have a human driving multiple cars, computer assisted, simultaneously from a remote office. Even if the system took one driver-hour per vehicle-hour, with every vehicle controlled by one human driver at all times and each human driver controlling only one vehicle at a time, there would be significant benefits in terms of cost and availability from having all the taxi drivers working from a single ops centre, instantly assignable to any vehicle anywhere on demand. Any driver-hour-per-vehicle-hour reductions would be gravy on top of that. (However the system would certainly need some level of autonomous driving to at least halt the vehicle safely in the event of a communications failure or the like.) (It's probably a coincidence that Musk happens to be building something which might be extremely valuable as a component of such a remote-driving system https://www.starlink.com/ https://www.starlink.com/ , but perhaps it is not. 35mm of latency in each direction https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/02/spacexs-satellite-broadband-nears-fcc-approval-and-first-test-launch/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/02/space... is probably not a showstopper in this application http://www.brake.org.uk/component/tags/tag/thinking-time http://www.brake.org.uk/component/tags/tag/thinking-time , especially if it can be compensated for by a professional and tightly-monitored driver pool, reduced speed limits and/or failsafe locally-controlled AI braking. The need to rely on autonomous driving and/or a supplementary ground-based network in tunnels and under bridges would likely be a bigger drawback.)
missosoup 7y ago
OT: I don't know if this effect has a name, but the reason you hallucinated a train crossing bell was because shower sounds a lot like white noise, and white noise contains all sounds. Your brain 'found' and selectively filtered a bell in it. It's somewhat similar to the Ganzfeld effect. If you ever experience a new auditory environment like a factory floor or hospital, you will keep hearing sounds from that environment for a few days if exposed to white noise.
- xyzzy_plugh 7y ago
  Fascinating! I figured it was something like this, but didn't bother digging into the science. Thanks!
- tluyben2 7y ago
  That sounds interesting; when i'm in the shower I hear a lot of things over time (all of them friendly, nothing aggressive strangely enough, so far anyway); music (quite complete songs as if there is music on in the house), dogs trying to get in at the door, people calling me, people on the phone; when I turn the shower off, it is silence (dogs are already inside as well). I have tinnitus and that might make it worse?
- uryga 7y ago
  > If you ever experience a new auditory environment like a factory floor or hospital, you will keep hearing sounds from that environment for a few days if exposed to white noise. i've also experienced this when a song got stuck in my head (didn't know the title, so i kept looking for it) and i occasionally heard bits of it in white noise / high pitched sounds. also fun fact - this is roughly how vocoders (the Kraftwerk / Daft punk voice effect) work! a carrier signal, e.g. white noise, is selectively filtered to match the frequencies in a modulator signal, e.g. a human voice.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  And we tend to drop these hallucinations on high level of cognition. Self driving cars also can have a weirdness censor. No particular intelligence is required to ignore "faulty" sensor inputs or to not act on weird sensor combinations.
AstralStorm 7y ago
Why are you trying to make a perfect car rather than just better enough than typical human? People wouldn't spot unsecured cargo more often than not until it falls on the ground. The big problem in legislation is that we just don't know how bad drivers humans are typically. Legislation is loose for us but somehow machines are supposed to be perfect.
- michaelt 7y ago
  For practical business reasons. A substantial majority of drivers - up to 80% - would rate themselves above average [1] so 80% of your target market thinks they're better than such a car. And if such a product takes off you know eventually it's going to kill someone who is legitimately a top 0.1% driver, who's been teaching advanced driving to secret service limo drivers for 30 years and never been in an accident. And if you ever end up in court, and jurors notice you've made many billions of dollars from this technology, arguments that the dead guy probably wasn't a very good driver anyway and statistically your system is above average might not win over jurors who are thinking "well I certainly wouldn't have crashed into that clearly marked concrete barrier in broad daylight" [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3730094 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3730094
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    So if you make a car better than what an average driver thinks of themselves, you win? That is achievable by either making a really good self driving car or by fixing those bad perceptions of car drivers. Not every country even has a jury based judicial system. And the good lawyer would ask the jurors to imagine how they would react in a given failure scenario while ignoring the fact that it is a self driving car, much like they're supposed to ignore the fact that a driver is of specific group (not even protected class) as not pertinent. The prosecution would have to show that the failure is caused specifically because it is a self driving car. Burden of proof. They objection is aimed at the justice not the jury. Negligence suit against a company is a separate matter than a car crash. And much harder for jurors. To calibrate juror expectations you might try to show footage from some related human crashes as part of initial presentation. It depends on the judge whether that would be allowed of course. Definitely should be allowed against an expert to establish their expertise in judging car accidents. First such case against a level 5 car would be very high profile. This of course means that driverless cars are allowed on the road, ultimately meaning there would be some sort of car certification.
ageitgey 7y ago
> The way to solve self-driving cars in a few years is to start building roads and infrastructure for such automation. Maybe even have a human driving multiple cars, computer assisted, simultaneously from a remote office. My proposed law of online self driving car discussions: Every self-driving car discussion ends in someone inventing "trains" :-) Self-driving trains are already widely used. London's DLR has been in operation since the 1980's.
- leoc 7y ago
  While there are similarities I don't think they go that far. In particular, driverless train operation is only made possible by the fact that network operators and governments are fanatical about fighting obstructions and unauthorised crossings on railway track—to say nothing of unauthorised users!—regardless of whether the trains are automated or not. (In fact railways seem (I am not an expert) to be very vulnerable to disruption if these efforts fail, viz. the notoriety of train delays in the UK due to leaves on the line.) That level of expense and centralised control is certainly not coming to local, urban or back roads, though something like it might be possible on motorway.
YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
>> This problem (pattern matching, cross referencing experiences, deducing truth) mirrors the SDV problem pretty well. May I be a pedant? "Pattern matching" is how regular expressions are normally used to match a string in a text. "Pattern recognition" is what, e.g., a machine vision algorithm does when it identifies a dog in an image from the features of the image. In a discussion about self-driving cars' AI capabilities, it is "pattern recognition" rather than "pattern mathing" that is relevant. "Pattern matching" was also used by the OP in this thread: >> Navigating a construction zone with a flag man directing you on the opposite shoulder requires a brain, not pattern matching.
makz 7y ago
> The way to solve self-driving cars in a few years is to start building roads and infrastructure for such automation. Maybe even have a human driving multiple cars, computer assisted, simultaneously from a remote office. We already have that. It's called trains.

leoc 7y ago

> The way to solve self-driving cars in a few years is to start building roads and infrastructure for such automation. Maybe even have a human driving multiple cars, computer assisted, simultaneously from a remote office. Even if the system took one driver-hour per vehicle-hour, with every vehicle controlled by one human driver at all times and each human driver controlling only one vehicle at a time, there would be significant benefits in terms of cost and availability from having all the taxi drivers working from a single ops centre, instantly assignable to any vehicle anywhere on demand. Any driver-hour-per-vehicle-hour reductions would be gravy on top of that. (However the system would certainly need some level of autonomous driving to at least halt the vehicle safely in the event of a communications failure or the like.) (It's probably a coincidence that Musk happens to be building something which might be extremely valuable as a component of such a remote-driving system https://www.starlink.com/ https://www.starlink.com/ , but perhaps it is not. 35mm of latency in each direction https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/02/spacexs-satellite-broadband-nears-fcc-approval-and-first-test-launch/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/02/space... is probably not a showstopper in this application http://www.brake.org.uk/component/tags/tag/thinking-time http://www.brake.org.uk/component/tags/tag/thinking-time , especially if it can be compensated for by a professional and tightly-monitored driver pool, reduced speed limits and/or failsafe locally-controlled AI braking. The need to rely on autonomous driving and/or a supplementary ground-based network in tunnels and under bridges would likely be a bigger drawback.)

missosoup 7y ago

OT: I don't know if this effect has a name, but the reason you hallucinated a train crossing bell was because shower sounds a lot like white noise, and white noise contains all sounds. Your brain 'found' and selectively filtered a bell in it. It's somewhat similar to the Ganzfeld effect. If you ever experience a new auditory environment like a factory floor or hospital, you will keep hearing sounds from that environment for a few days if exposed to white noise.

xyzzy_plugh 7y ago
Fascinating! I figured it was something like this, but didn't bother digging into the science. Thanks!
tluyben2 7y ago
That sounds interesting; when i'm in the shower I hear a lot of things over time (all of them friendly, nothing aggressive strangely enough, so far anyway); music (quite complete songs as if there is music on in the house), dogs trying to get in at the door, people calling me, people on the phone; when I turn the shower off, it is silence (dogs are already inside as well). I have tinnitus and that might make it worse?
uryga 7y ago
> If you ever experience a new auditory environment like a factory floor or hospital, you will keep hearing sounds from that environment for a few days if exposed to white noise. i've also experienced this when a song got stuck in my head (didn't know the title, so i kept looking for it) and i occasionally heard bits of it in white noise / high pitched sounds. also fun fact - this is roughly how vocoders (the Kraftwerk / Daft punk voice effect) work! a carrier signal, e.g. white noise, is selectively filtered to match the frequencies in a modulator signal, e.g. a human voice.
AstralStorm 7y ago
And we tend to drop these hallucinations on high level of cognition. Self driving cars also can have a weirdness censor. No particular intelligence is required to ignore "faulty" sensor inputs or to not act on weird sensor combinations.

AstralStorm 7y ago

Why are you trying to make a perfect car rather than just better enough than typical human? People wouldn't spot unsecured cargo more often than not until it falls on the ground. The big problem in legislation is that we just don't know how bad drivers humans are typically. Legislation is loose for us but somehow machines are supposed to be perfect.

michaelt 7y ago
For practical business reasons. A substantial majority of drivers - up to 80% - would rate themselves above average [1] so 80% of your target market thinks they're better than such a car. And if such a product takes off you know eventually it's going to kill someone who is legitimately a top 0.1% driver, who's been teaching advanced driving to secret service limo drivers for 30 years and never been in an accident. And if you ever end up in court, and jurors notice you've made many billions of dollars from this technology, arguments that the dead guy probably wasn't a very good driver anyway and statistically your system is above average might not win over jurors who are thinking "well I certainly wouldn't have crashed into that clearly marked concrete barrier in broad daylight" [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3730094 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3730094
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  So if you make a car better than what an average driver thinks of themselves, you win? That is achievable by either making a really good self driving car or by fixing those bad perceptions of car drivers. Not every country even has a jury based judicial system. And the good lawyer would ask the jurors to imagine how they would react in a given failure scenario while ignoring the fact that it is a self driving car, much like they're supposed to ignore the fact that a driver is of specific group (not even protected class) as not pertinent. The prosecution would have to show that the failure is caused specifically because it is a self driving car. Burden of proof. They objection is aimed at the justice not the jury. Negligence suit against a company is a separate matter than a car crash. And much harder for jurors. To calibrate juror expectations you might try to show footage from some related human crashes as part of initial presentation. It depends on the judge whether that would be allowed of course. Definitely should be allowed against an expert to establish their expertise in judging car accidents. First such case against a level 5 car would be very high profile. This of course means that driverless cars are allowed on the road, ultimately meaning there would be some sort of car certification.

ageitgey 7y ago

> The way to solve self-driving cars in a few years is to start building roads and infrastructure for such automation. Maybe even have a human driving multiple cars, computer assisted, simultaneously from a remote office. My proposed law of online self driving car discussions: Every self-driving car discussion ends in someone inventing "trains" :-) Self-driving trains are already widely used. London's DLR has been in operation since the 1980's.

leoc 7y ago
While there are similarities I don't think they go that far. In particular, driverless train operation is only made possible by the fact that network operators and governments are fanatical about fighting obstructions and unauthorised crossings on railway track—to say nothing of unauthorised users!—regardless of whether the trains are automated or not. (In fact railways seem (I am not an expert) to be very vulnerable to disruption if these efforts fail, viz. the notoriety of train delays in the UK due to leaves on the line.) That level of expense and centralised control is certainly not coming to local, urban or back roads, though something like it might be possible on motorway.

YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago

>> This problem (pattern matching, cross referencing experiences, deducing truth) mirrors the SDV problem pretty well. May I be a pedant? "Pattern matching" is how regular expressions are normally used to match a string in a text. "Pattern recognition" is what, e.g., a machine vision algorithm does when it identifies a dog in an image from the features of the image. In a discussion about self-driving cars' AI capabilities, it is "pattern recognition" rather than "pattern mathing" that is relevant. "Pattern matching" was also used by the OP in this thread: >> Navigating a construction zone with a flag man directing you on the opposite shoulder requires a brain, not pattern matching.

makz 7y ago