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I avoid new technology, exactly because I'm an engineer. I wonder if that is just me, but when new technology is introduced and hyped, I usually take a quick l

I avoid new technology, exactly because I'm an engineer. I wonder if that is just me, but when new technology is introduced and hyped, I usually take a quick look at implementations, research, and talks just to get an idea of what the state of the art really is like. As a result, I have become the late adopter among my group of friends because the first iteration of any new technology usually just isn't worth the issues. You know this effect when you open a new book and immediately spot a typo? I felt that way looking at state of the art AI vision papers. The first paper would crash, despite me using the same GPU as the authors. Turns out they got incredibly lucky not to trigger a driver bug causing random calculation errors. The second paper converted float to bool and then tried to use the gradient for training. That's just plain mathematically wrong, a step function doesn't have a non-zero gradient. The third paper only used a 3x3 pixel neighborhood for learning long-distance moves. Doesn't work, I cannot learn about New York by waking around in my bathroom. That gave me the gut feeling that most people doing the research were lacking the necessary mathematical background. AI is stochastical gradient descent optimization, after all. Thanks to TensorFlow, it is nowadays easy to try out other people's AI. So I took some photos of my road and put them through the state of the art computer visible AIs trained with KITTY, a self-driving car dataset of German roads. All of them couldn't even track the wall of the house correctly. So now I'm afraid to use anything self-driving ^_^

liability 7y ago
Optimistically; maybe everybody is hiding their 'secret sauce'. But I expect you're probably right.
- fxtentacle 7y ago
  I was optimistic like that in university. Great times :) But then I went into consulting and saw that big companies have teams of lawyers that settle proactively out of court to keep inconvenient truths out of the public opinion. Like the first few exploding iPhones. (Just an example, never worked there) BTW, did you hear about the Uber crash where their AI couldn't track a pedestrian and then killed her?
  - mistahenry 7y ago
    That’s an unfair characterization if you’re talking about the crash in Arizona. Perhaps: “Did you hear about the Uber crash where the AI couldn’t track a pedestrian jaywalking at night across the middle of a nearly pitch black two lane highway and then killed her?” would have been more apt. https://youtu.be/ufNNuafuU7M https://youtu.be/ufNNuafuU7M That being said, I’m a huge skeptic of the current state of self driving cars. I would have assumed these systems use LIDAR as well as vision and could have at least slammed on the brakes.
    - Piskvorrr 7y ago
      A more precise narrative, as shown in the evidence submitted by Uber to NTSB (as opposed to the PR video), is "AI saw something for 6 seconds, but because it couldn't decide what it is, it drove through. Turned out to be a human."
    - thombat 7y ago
      It only looks pitch black in Uber's badly-exposed dashcam video. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22307013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22307013
      - mistahenry 7y ago
        oh wow, that is certainly different than the news video which I assumed was relatively unbiased
    - keanzu 7y ago
      Police concluded that given the same conditions, Herzberg would have been visible to 85% of motorists at a distance of 143 feet (44 m), 5.7 seconds before the car struck Herzberg. A vehicle traveling 43 mph (69 km/h) can generally stop within 89 feet (27 m) once the brakes are applied. The police explanation of Herzberg's path meant she had already crossed two lanes of traffic before she was struck by the autonomous vehicle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg I was also misled by the poorly exposed "official" video. Given the numbers above there was time for a human driver to see her and even come to a complete stop. Further since she was moving from one side of the road to the other and only entered directly into the vehicle's path in the last 1.3 seconds (image in "Software issues" section of wikipedia article) it is likely that all that would have been needed to avoid the collision would have been a minor slow down and she would have completed her crossing safely.
iancmceachern 7y ago
I design medical devices and have the exact same opinion. It's the same logic as avoiding the first model year of production when buying a used car.
- LeifCarrotson 7y ago
  I design industrial automation equipment and have much the same feelings about those devices. I've programmed robot cells, with redundant software and hardware safety systems. I've run through the checklists to make sure the operators are SIL-3 safe with a high-speed high-power robot running just inches away through a piece of 1/4" polycarbonate - there to keep the operators out, it won't keep the robot in. I know all the engineering that goes into those systems, and that's why I will never ride a Kuka-coaster (a chair bolted to a 6-axis robot). Also, I'm quick to reach for a simple pneumatic cylinder to solve a problem. Perfectly capable of using new electric-servo-ballscrew-hotness to do a similar move, but the value provided by tried-and-tested systems is hard to overstate.
vincentmarle 7y ago
> So now I'm afraid to use anything self-driving ^_^ I'm in the same boat but unfortunately you have to share the road with these things so it's hard to completely avoid them. I do find myself avoiding Tesla's on the freeway more and more.
- randycupertino 7y ago
  I started avoiding Teslas on the freeway after watching the video of this guy putting on his makeup and shooting a youtube video while on autopilot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT_rEa4X1nA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT_rEa4X1nA
  - davedx 7y ago
    Just curious: do you also avoid Subarus, Seats, BMWs, Audis and the other cars with adaptive cruise control? Or is it only Tesla drivers you consider this dangerous?
    - kgabis 7y ago
      It's called Tesla autopilot. Average user is more likely to do silly things in cars that are advertised to have an autopilot rather than adaptive cruise control.
riffraff 7y ago
This resonates with me, and of course the classic xkcd on electronic voting https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/
- fsh 7y ago
  The difference is that electronic voting is a bad idea in principle, regardless of the implementation. Fully self-driving cars might actually be possible, but probably not with current software and hardware.
  - Leherenn 7y ago
    Do you mind explaining why it is a bad idea in principle? It feels like if we have a decent implementation (a big ask, to be sure), it would be safer and more convenient than the actual way.
    - fsh 7y ago
      Voting systems have a number of key requirements. To prevent bribes or coercion, the vote has to be anonymous and the voter must not be able to prove his vote. On the other hand, it must be possible to verify that each cast vote has been counted correctly. Finally, the whole process should be transparent and understandable for every interested voter. These requirements can be easily fulfilled with a well designed paper ballot system. I don't see any chance of doing the same with anything computerized.
      - dragonwriter 7y ago
        > To prevent bribes or coercion, the vote has to be anonymous and the voter must not be able to prove his vote. But we don't apply this rule to the votes where bribery and coercion are most practical to start with, where there are a small number of voters that can be intensely targeted, and swinging a small number is sufficient to decide major outcomes.
allovernow 7y ago
I don't know where you got these papers but you clearly got an awful sampling and I don't think you're giving computer vision a fair evaluation. Granted, we're not quite ready for self driving, but there's no question that the neural network subfield of ML has absolutely exploded in the last 5-10 years and is bursting with productionizable, application ready architectures that are already solving real world problems.
- fxtentacle 7y ago
  You sound like an NVIDIA salesperson trying to sell me on a $3000 Titan ;) There is no doubt in my mind that an AI with billions of parameters will be excellent at memorizing stuff. I also have no doubt that research activity has exploded, which might be related to the generous hardware grants being handed out... But all that research has produced surprisingly little progress over algorithms from 2004 in the field of optical flow. The papers I looked at were the top-ranked optical flow algorithms on Sintel and KITTY. So those were the AIs that work best in practice and better than 99% of the other AI solutions.
  - skybrian 7y ago
    While it's not my area of expertise, I am a bit wary of contest results. It seems like an exercise in overfitting via multiple comparisons? Maybe some algorithms with a slightly lower rank are actually more robust? If it's as bad as you say, it seems like a critical evaluation would be pretty interesting and advance the field.
  - scirocco 7y ago
    I wonder how many solutions within the AI field could just be categorized as "Automation"
    - DeedsMoraine 7y ago
      All of them. That's how AI works. Not by making smarter machines, but by destroying intelligence by smashing it into machine-digestible bits.
ghgr 7y ago
I mostly agree with you that there are many false positives in the research papers. Still, you shouldn't outright dismiss the possibility of you not implementing their models correctly.
- fxtentacle 7y ago
  I was reviewing the authors' own source codes.
opportune 7y ago
It’s been a while for me, but I’m pretty sure there are techniques for approximating gradients for step functions, although the paper may not have mentioned them (perhaps for secret sauce)
- fxtentacle 7y ago
  In the case I evaluated, the authors later admitted to using supervised training for initializing their supposedly unsupervised learning methods. Also, I was reviewing their public source code release and there was no approximation. That part of their loss function had simply never worked, but they had not noticed prior to the release of their paper. And due to them training slightly different from what they described in the paper, the AI worked competitively well nonetheless.
thdrdt 7y ago
Yes. Current self-driving might be safer than the avarage driver, but what most people forget is how unsafe it is when it fails. It fails harder than most avarage drivers and even bad drivers. In my eyes self-driving should still be called driving-assistance.
- JauntyHatAngle 7y ago
  Can you cite any sources that AI fails harder? I'm not exactly sure what you are referring to.
  - fxtentacle 7y ago
    The dead Uber pedestrian where the AI dismissed the data as faulty and did not slow down at all. I think every human would slow down if they see things that they cannot explain. An AI will not. It's basically the same problem as when an image recognition AI is 99% sure that the photo of your cat shows guacamole. Current AIs do not have a concept of absolute confidence, they only produce an estimate relative to the other possibilities that were available during training. That's why fully novel situations produce completely random results.
    - keanzu 7y ago
      > dead Uber pedestrian Elaine Herzberg was in dark clothing crossing a dark street well away from any crosswalk or street lighting. Would a human driver have performed better? From the footage I saw she was nearly invisible, I would have hit her too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufNNuafuU7M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufNNuafuU7M This was not a hard fail for the AI.
      - sebcat 7y ago
        The exposure time and the dynamic range of the sensor affects the visibility of the person in that video - it is very likely that a non-distracted human would have performed better. The vehicle was equipped with both radar and lidar. The victim was detected as an unknown object six seconds prior to impact, and at 1.3 seconds prior to impact when the victim entered the road the system determined that emergency braking by the driver was required, however the (distracted) driver was not alerted of this.
capkutay 7y ago
Yeah I have a similar feeling...but I am willing to try it. Just aware that there are probably corner cases it can't handle and generally curious about what the behavior is. For instance, I was driving on autopilot on a section of 101 where they repainted the lanes. I let autopilot do its thing...but I closely observed and kept my hand on the wheel and foot on the brakes. Lo and behold...the car positioned itself right in the shoulder and was driving towards no-man's land. If someone wasn't paying attention in this situation, it would have been catastrophic.
- neotek 7y ago
  Does it not feel a little crazy to you that you're willing to put your life into the hands of a machine that you know is capable of, and has already tried, killing you? I can't think of any time in my life where I've almost driven my car into a no-man's land even after thousands of hours of driving, and yet every Tesla owner I know has half a dozen stories about the time Auto Pilot tried to steer them into a barrier or took a corner way too fast or suddenly braked for no reason. I totally get the appeal of a Tesla, holy shit that acceleration is amazing, but Auto Pilot just does not seem worth it at all.
  - Piskvorrr 7y ago
    As a driver of many decades, and having survived quite a few of my own stupid mistakes, I think this is also bias. As long as I had some direct input into the situation, I saw such near-misses as the inherent risks of driving: I should have had the wheels geometry checked, I should have replaced the lightbulb, I shouldn't have driven on old tires, I should have checked the mirror, I shouldn't have overtaken there - and I continue to use cars, despite dozens, perhaps hundreds of near-misses, or even minor accidents: "yeah, we almost died today - but didn't, that's just a fact of driving, not a suicide attempt". Whereas once you feel that all agency is stripped from you, it's all someone else's fault, especially if the mistakes feel alien (as in "no human would err in this specific manner").
pjmlp 7y ago
Same here, always get those puzzled looks from non-technological friends when I am so picky about new tech.
simonebrunozzi 7y ago
I would almost agree with you, but please indulge with me in the following thought. Let's say that you can go to work by feet or by bike. Let's also say that by feet your probability of getting killed are 1 in 1,000,000, and the commute takes 20 minutes. On a bike, commuting takes only 10 minutes, but the probability is up to 1 in 200,000. Five times more. You end up deciding to use the bike every day to go to work. In this example, you decided to trade comfort (faster commute) with a slightly higher probability to end up dead. Imagine now you need to decide whether to commute in your Tesla with or without autopilot. Let's assume (I might be wrong) that Tesla's autopilot increases your chances of getting killed. (for simplicity, let's ignore the consequences for other people on the road). Would you still trade comfort (not needing to drive) with a slightly higher probability to die?
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  These sorts of analyses get complicated fast. Walking is riskier in part because you're more exposed to the "killer self-driving cars", but also people with preconditions will walk. Like, if you're drunk you'll walk home, if you're unfit you're more likely to walk than cycle, etc., people walking probably get mugged more often, ...
  - DangerousPie 7y ago
    But OP is making the opposite assumption here - that cycling is riskier. Which, keeping all other factors constant, seems intuitively correct to me since you go at a higher speed and you are on the road with cars rather than on the sidewalk.
- Piskvorrr 7y ago
  As you note, you're coming from impossible premises ("assuming your actions never affect anyone else"). Do you expect to come to meaningful conclusions? In other words, as a buyer, I do care about the occupant safety rating, you are correct in that. As a road user, I also care that other people's cars consider me as irrelevant, my potential death an externality to be amortized in the purchase prize.
nnq 7y ago
Papers code is probably optimized for "first to publish". Also overfit in a non-traditional sense since ppl wanta to beat SOTA by as much as possible. Also the heuristic tips an tricks and autotuning you'd want in a production models would exceed paper lenth 10x. Also the author is motivated to NOT provide a bug free easy to put in production version of the code since that would lower the $ value of their expertise. A cocktail of all the wrong incentives! Probably the production versions of those models are suboptimal in different ways but work better in practice...
Alupis 7y ago
This whole self driving, fully autonomous thing has become some sort of strange faux-religion. It's followers see no other possible solution as acceptable. Instead of putting our heads together to make really good driver assistance technologies and being satisfied, the darn thing needs to also drive itself everywhere otherwise we're leaving something on the table! Untill we have zero deaths, we cannot stop demanding self driving - as if somehow AI is a magical solution that's always better than humans. Forget better frame, chassis, and body panel design to protect pedestrians! We won't need them if AI never hits anyone. Forget better braking systems that apply themselves automatically. We don't need that if AI can always avoid the need for sudden stops. Forget seat belt enhancements since that'll just inhibit nap time in my self driving car. No, forget it all. My car needs to drive me all by itself, everywhere I need to go, no matter how hard or impossible of a problem that is. Driver assist is boring... Level 5 is sexy, and that's what I want!
- _pmf_ 7y ago
  Comma.ai kind of follows the "improving lane detection until it drives you completely" line, at least according to what I get from this interview with Hotz: https://lexfridman.com/george-hotz/ https://lexfridman.com/george-hotz/ He's still a bit too optimistic for my taste.
  - farisjarrah 7y ago
    I bought in to Comma.ai at first and even started porting my car over. But I quickly realized that the whole comma.ai crowd is way way to cavalier with safety. One day I was driving down the freeway and saw a small fender bender occur in front of me. I looked up at my dash and it was all ripped up with wires hanging everywhere because I was working on the Comma.ai stuff. If it had been me in that fender bender you know that insurance would definitely blame me for that given that I was messing with the OBDII and radar sensors. As cool as Comma.ai is, I really believe that their approach to allowing so much community involvement with little to no oversight is highly irresponsible. That being said.... If they do succeed, and get some sort of government approval or oversight.... You bet I'm putting that stuff back in. Its cool A.F.
- 7y ago
Fnoord 7y ago
I've been thinking for reasons to avoid Kickstarter and Indiegogo (as I got scammed on Kickstarter, and am not happy with the overall quality of several succeeded projects), and you gave me inspiration. Thank you.
arethuza 7y ago
"I avoid new technology, exactly because I'm an engineer." I would never call myself an engineer, although I have worked in environments where there were lots of engineers (not in the software world) and one definition of "engineering" that I heard was: "Meeting the requirements while doing as little new as possible"
- rwmurrayVT 7y ago
  That's a very accurate definition in the mechanical world. Every junior engineer with an overly complicated, cutting edge, unproven idea gets shot down pretty quickly. In our shipyard safety is more important than anything else. After that is cost.
preommr 7y ago
I don't understand why if you've gone through this much trouble, you don't have a blog post or even a medium article to cover your findings. I'd be very curious to see the responses from those authors and other experts in the field about your findings. There's just something dubious about how it seems like you consistently find mistakes and problems in these papers. I'd be stunned if there was any expert that wasn't aware of the shortcomings of using a kernel that's as small as 3x3.
- sedgjh23 7y ago
  You’ve summed up what threw me off about their comment quite well. Another thing, just the time alone needed to evaluate technology the way they are talking about sounds quite staggering.
johnjungles 7y ago
This is an oversimplification of Tesla’s technology, and they don’t use Tensorflow, other people’s pre-trained models, and computer vision isn’t the only thing that is a part of driving, they use radar and ultrasonics as well. I try new technologies all the time to get a sense of where it is in coming to fruition. I think what you mean is, you’re more skeptical of claims. The same way you claim you can’t learn anything about NY in your bathroom, you don’t know anything about Tesla or Self-driving if you haven’t tried it. You should at least test drive it under controlled conditions where you feel comfortable before closing yourself off completely.
- maxaf 7y ago
  > You should at least test drive it under controlled conditions [...] Who cares what the car does under controlled conditions? I'm sure the manufacturer did exactly that in their testing. Even when they test on public roads, there's a hands-off safety driver behind the wheel, who is paid to be on the lookout and sufficiently alert to take over in case of an unexpected excursion. (Unless the self-driving car under test is from Uber, in which case the safety driver simply watches video on their phone. Too soon?) This is nowhere near how these cars are used in the real world. The real world is not a set of "controlled conditions", so any comfort one builds up in such a situation is merely a false sense of security. > [...] where you feel comfortable before closing yourself off completely. So, here's the thing: I'm comfortable driving myself. I don't get distracted, I use good judgment, I consistently prioritize the safety of my vehicle's occupants over everything else. I know exactly how flawed self-driving cars are, and how far behind the curve of my driving skill they will remain within my lifespan. That's the sum total of everything I need to know, and no amount of "controlled conditions" demos will change my mind. P.S.: If you're from the future and you're reading this because I got mowed down by a self-driving car: ha ha! Joke's on me.
  - johnjungles 7y ago
    My comment about controlled conditions was about making you feel comfortable and give yourself a safe to try it out to get an understanding of when it. It wasn’t to say to believe in self driving, I agree it’s a long way out. Understanding the technology is more important than dismissing it altogether is what I was simply trying to point out. I think you can at the least try it, understand it, then have an opinion about it.. (which I respect). There seems to be a lot of negative comments from people who have never sat in a Tesla or have gone through a test drive.
thorin 7y ago
Response makes sense, I've never thought about it before but I don't like gadgets at all (EE and programmer for 25 years). I like simple things, don't have home assistant, don't have tablet anymore, rarely use computer at home, like simple things in my musical instrument and tv setup, no games consoles (used to love games as a kid but not anymore). It's less to worry about and I feel I get more done.
traviscj 7y ago
I love this take! I’ve been similarly untrusting of a lot of “high tech” approaches to various things, and I derive a lot of joy from products/services/etc that take a “back to basics” or at least minimally- or non-digital philosophy. In particular: I have an affinity for automatic watches and carbureted motorcycles. If nothing else, it’s a bit of a break from what feels like a constant struggle to keep all the gears turning at work. BUT... I’ll confess I’m also a sucker for innovations / the occasional new hotness. I recently upgraded a Kawasaki KLR650 (a competent but... “well tested”, shall we say? motorcycle) in favor of KTM’s top-of-the-line adventure bike. The technology difference between the two (despite only 3 model years between them) is incredible: the latter adds 5x the power, ride-by-wire, cruise control, lean-sensitive ABS/traction control, an up/down-capable quickshifter, probably a thousand other improvements. One day, about 1100 miles into owning the new bike, the dash pops up a low tire pressure warning from the tire pressure monitoring system. It showed the rear pressure was fairly low, and sure enough, I’d picked up a small screw between the treads. Certainly a TPMS is nothing compared to anything self-driving, but honestly it was a bit of a wake-up call — I WANT systems on my bike to increase my safety level. I’m not really sure what the lesson is here. Maybe “Look for the middle grounds (the ABS/TPMS-maturity systems) between ancient technology (anything on my beloved KLR) and bleeding edge (non-replicable papers on self-driving cars)”? Seems like this holds up ok, especially as a consumer of those techs... But maybe not for the innovators?
Cthulhu_ 7y ago
> I avoid new technology, exactly because I'm an engineer. > I wonder if that is just me Can't find it now but there was a poignant quote or anecdote I read the other day that expresses this exact sentiment - the more you know about technology, the less likely you are to use it. I think it was in the context of e.g. smart homes and voice assistants or online tracking - if you're aware of how much data they hoover up and what can be done with that, you'd be Very Afraid.
- fouc 7y ago
  It would be nice if that sort of awareness was more prevalent on HN.
  - Psyladine 7y ago
    The cult of cheer, eyes waxing over from a disappointed jet-age generation, and a little shiny syndrome.
- brokenmachine 7y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22088547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22088547 Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future! Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise. https://biggaybunny.tumblr.com/post/166787080920/tech-enthusiasts-everything-in-my-house-is-wired https://biggaybunny.tumblr.com/post/166787080920/tech-enthus... (via foxrob92)
vardump 7y ago
I think it should be emphasized this accident occurred in May 2018.
smoyer 7y ago
I've got a beautiful 2001 Mercedes-Benz ... it drives well, avoids all the trendy stuff but still has too many electronic components (most recently I had to replace the computer board that decides whether you should be able to shift). My daughter has a 1971 Super-Beetle she's stored in my garage ... when it breaks, it's something mechanical!
Communitivity 7y ago
I agree with all but one of your points, and they're all well made. However, by saying "AI is stochastical gradient descent optimization" you're equating AI with Machine Learning/Deep Learning. The list of AI technologies also includes things like Artificial Life, Genetic Algorithms, Biological Systems Modeling, and Semantic Reasoning. I suspect that when we get true AI, i.e. Strong AI or Artificial General Intelligence, we will achieve it through a combination of these techniques made to work together.
sgt101 7y ago
AI is not stochastical gradient descent optimization; neural nets are; but AI is bigger than that - planning, deduction, game theory and so on. You can find out buy buying and reading a text book.
tbrock 7y ago
Plus... what’s the point? Maybe we automate a couple jobs for long haul shipping or road trips but what a fruitless effort! Why don’t we work on drones that pick us up and take us places to really leap ahead, get out of traffic, and do something amazing? Cars driving themselves? How incremental.
dosethree 7y ago
"As a result, I have become the late adopter among my group of friends because the first iteration of any new technology usually just isn't worth the issues." This is only true for things where reliability matters more than the new features the new tech provides. In the case of cars, of course, I'd prefer reliability. But for other things like the original iPhone, sometimes new tech is just better than whats out their even if there will always been some flaws in the first versions
ctack 7y ago
"I have become the late adopter". Exactly my thoughts when reading about the blended wing aeroplane, yesterday.
acollins1331 7y ago
3x3 pixels in a CNN isn't just 3x3 pixels though. As the layers get pooled together even though the sliding window stays the same size (3x3) it's moving over images that are getting compressed 2x every time you pool. So in that last layer you're looking quite farther than "3 pixels".
locuscoeruleus 7y ago
> That gave me the gut feeling that most people doing the research were lacking the necessary mathematical background. I don't find this to be the case with most ML researchers. Is it possible you have misunderstood some of these papers? It is, after all, hard to jump straight into a new field. > The second paper converted float to bool and then tried to use the gradient for training. This sounds like binarized neural networks. If that's the case, they keep the activation before binarization to use for backpropegation. > The third paper only used a 3x3 pixel neighborhood for learning long-distance moves. A single layer of 3x3 convolutions would not be able to model long-distance moves. But I have not read a single paper where they have only used one layer. Is it possible they stacked multiple conv + pooling layers? The receptive field of each unit higher up in the stack grows pretty large in the end.
ChicagoBoy11 7y ago
It's not. I got my pilot's license and fly in a technically advanced aircraft, and all that it means is that there's quite a bit of automation there to help you out. The lessons imbued in it, the issues you learn exist, actually using it in very critical phases of flight, etc., builds an appreciation for both the wonders and dangers of automation. Going through that experience has 1000% made me more weary of autonomous vehicles.
dkonofalski 7y ago
This is why I don't understand the sad conclusion of the story in the article. The driver knew that AutoPilot had issues with that stretch of the freeway and was able to repeat the issues on several occasions but still thought it best to be on his phone, while driving 71 mph, at the mercy of AutoPilot? Especially considering that he was an engineer who had expressed concern over this, it seems silly to me that he wouldn't just take over manually during that stretch... He didn't and now he's gone because of it. It's not worth the risk/reward.
- mumblemumble 7y ago
  We don't need to understand it. We just need to know that, even armed with all that knowledge, he still made the decision he did, and that we should not expect others with less knowledge of how software works to be any less human.
  - dopamean 7y ago
    This has been my takeaway from the whole situation. It says something about the exactly how safe this stuff needs to be for it to be considered reliable.
    - heliodor 7y ago
      My impression is that it's already more reliable than humans. Not perfect, but it probably averages better than all the crashes humans are causing.
      - Reelin 7y ago
        > it's already more reliable than humans Only when comparing aggregate statistics. Not all humans are equally (un)safe drivers; insurance rates vary based on driving record for good reason.
  - Drew_ 7y ago
    If anything I would expect less knowledgeable people to be more skeptical and cautious than somebody who has a vested interest and passion for technology. I can't imagine anybody other than a tech enthusiast who would maintain trust in a self driving car technology that previously attempted to veer them into a barrier.
deleted 7y ago
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madacol 7y ago
Many opinions, but little data. It's hard to assess anything under this circumstances.
cat199 7y ago
> That gave me the gut feeling that most people doing the research were lacking the necessary mathematical background. AI is stochastical gradient descent optimization, after all. ML is only one part of 'AI'
ksec 7y ago
>I avoid new technology, exactly because I'm an engineer. There is a saying where all software (security) engineers dont have IOT or any "Smart" devices in their home.
pmart123 7y ago
It should probably be called "CoPilot" and issue significant alerts as to when it has a poor understanding of the situation so the driver is aware to at least be more alert.
wolfspider 7y ago
This is not new technology at all but perhaps this is technology which is being used in an unnecessarily complex manner. I sat in on a lecture given by University of Maryland circa 2000 here in Florida concerning their W4 video surveillance system which could tell the difference between different objects quite well. It did this on a 400Mhz dual-pentium machine and could even recognize different signs at driving speed. This was before TensorFlow or Python really took off or GPUs where powerful and did not require a supercomputer to operate or a cloud either it was just Math: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/34.868683 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/34.868683 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.8.9790&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.8.9...
oppositelock 7y ago
ML hype spawned a lot of self driving car hype, and a lot of promises which can't be delivered in any short time frame. It started with Comma.ai, but others picked up the full ML torch and went with it. Other companies are making steady, sure progress using the old school robotics approach of throwing sensors at the problem, Waymo, for example. Others are being reckless and trying to use vision alone (Tesla). It's a mess. However, safe self driving is coming, slowly but surely (I work at a company which produces tech for these guys). The hyped companies are in trouble, but car OEM's, partnered with companies you've never heard of, are making slow, steady progress, all the while being subject to government functional safety requirements, particularly in the US and EU. There is zero chance that a Tesla or GM car will be allowed to fully self drive, so no matter how advanced these systems are, they're sold as level 2 systems requiring driver oversight and qualify as cruise control in regulations. Today, we have full autonomy in some truck routes (only as proofs of concept), in ship yards, parking shuttles, mining equipment, quarry trucks, etc, places where the problem domain is more constrained. Generalized self driving is a ways off, but by the time you can make use of it, it will be safe, it just won't come from Tesla or Cruise or Uber.
aschatten 7y ago
The biggest tech thing I am afraid of that all other people are excited about is digital election. ML field is pretty clear about its limitation.
johnnyno83 7y ago
"I felt that way looking at state of the art AI vision papers" - which papars you looked at?

liability 7y ago

Optimistically; maybe everybody is hiding their 'secret sauce'. But I expect you're probably right.

fxtentacle 7y ago
I was optimistic like that in university. Great times :) But then I went into consulting and saw that big companies have teams of lawyers that settle proactively out of court to keep inconvenient truths out of the public opinion. Like the first few exploding iPhones. (Just an example, never worked there) BTW, did you hear about the Uber crash where their AI couldn't track a pedestrian and then killed her?
- mistahenry 7y ago
  That’s an unfair characterization if you’re talking about the crash in Arizona. Perhaps: “Did you hear about the Uber crash where the AI couldn’t track a pedestrian jaywalking at night across the middle of a nearly pitch black two lane highway and then killed her?” would have been more apt. https://youtu.be/ufNNuafuU7M https://youtu.be/ufNNuafuU7M That being said, I’m a huge skeptic of the current state of self driving cars. I would have assumed these systems use LIDAR as well as vision and could have at least slammed on the brakes.
  - Piskvorrr 7y ago
    A more precise narrative, as shown in the evidence submitted by Uber to NTSB (as opposed to the PR video), is "AI saw something for 6 seconds, but because it couldn't decide what it is, it drove through. Turned out to be a human."
  - thombat 7y ago
    It only looks pitch black in Uber's badly-exposed dashcam video. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22307013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22307013
    - mistahenry 7y ago
      oh wow, that is certainly different than the news video which I assumed was relatively unbiased
  - keanzu 7y ago
    Police concluded that given the same conditions, Herzberg would have been visible to 85% of motorists at a distance of 143 feet (44 m), 5.7 seconds before the car struck Herzberg. A vehicle traveling 43 mph (69 km/h) can generally stop within 89 feet (27 m) once the brakes are applied. The police explanation of Herzberg's path meant she had already crossed two lanes of traffic before she was struck by the autonomous vehicle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg I was also misled by the poorly exposed "official" video. Given the numbers above there was time for a human driver to see her and even come to a complete stop. Further since she was moving from one side of the road to the other and only entered directly into the vehicle's path in the last 1.3 seconds (image in "Software issues" section of wikipedia article) it is likely that all that would have been needed to avoid the collision would have been a minor slow down and she would have completed her crossing safely.

iancmceachern 7y ago

I design medical devices and have the exact same opinion. It's the same logic as avoiding the first model year of production when buying a used car.

LeifCarrotson 7y ago
I design industrial automation equipment and have much the same feelings about those devices. I've programmed robot cells, with redundant software and hardware safety systems. I've run through the checklists to make sure the operators are SIL-3 safe with a high-speed high-power robot running just inches away through a piece of 1/4" polycarbonate - there to keep the operators out, it won't keep the robot in. I know all the engineering that goes into those systems, and that's why I will never ride a Kuka-coaster (a chair bolted to a 6-axis robot). Also, I'm quick to reach for a simple pneumatic cylinder to solve a problem. Perfectly capable of using new electric-servo-ballscrew-hotness to do a similar move, but the value provided by tried-and-tested systems is hard to overstate.

vincentmarle 7y ago

> So now I'm afraid to use anything self-driving ^_^ I'm in the same boat but unfortunately you have to share the road with these things so it's hard to completely avoid them. I do find myself avoiding Tesla's on the freeway more and more.

randycupertino 7y ago
I started avoiding Teslas on the freeway after watching the video of this guy putting on his makeup and shooting a youtube video while on autopilot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT_rEa4X1nA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT_rEa4X1nA
- davedx 7y ago
  Just curious: do you also avoid Subarus, Seats, BMWs, Audis and the other cars with adaptive cruise control? Or is it only Tesla drivers you consider this dangerous?
  - kgabis 7y ago
    It's called Tesla autopilot. Average user is more likely to do silly things in cars that are advertised to have an autopilot rather than adaptive cruise control.

riffraff 7y ago

This resonates with me, and of course the classic xkcd on electronic voting https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/

fsh 7y ago
The difference is that electronic voting is a bad idea in principle, regardless of the implementation. Fully self-driving cars might actually be possible, but probably not with current software and hardware.
- Leherenn 7y ago
  Do you mind explaining why it is a bad idea in principle? It feels like if we have a decent implementation (a big ask, to be sure), it would be safer and more convenient than the actual way.
  - fsh 7y ago
    Voting systems have a number of key requirements. To prevent bribes or coercion, the vote has to be anonymous and the voter must not be able to prove his vote. On the other hand, it must be possible to verify that each cast vote has been counted correctly. Finally, the whole process should be transparent and understandable for every interested voter. These requirements can be easily fulfilled with a well designed paper ballot system. I don't see any chance of doing the same with anything computerized.
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      > To prevent bribes or coercion, the vote has to be anonymous and the voter must not be able to prove his vote. But we don't apply this rule to the votes where bribery and coercion are most practical to start with, where there are a small number of voters that can be intensely targeted, and swinging a small number is sufficient to decide major outcomes.

allovernow 7y ago

I don't know where you got these papers but you clearly got an awful sampling and I don't think you're giving computer vision a fair evaluation. Granted, we're not quite ready for self driving, but there's no question that the neural network subfield of ML has absolutely exploded in the last 5-10 years and is bursting with productionizable, application ready architectures that are already solving real world problems.

fxtentacle 7y ago
You sound like an NVIDIA salesperson trying to sell me on a $3000 Titan ;) There is no doubt in my mind that an AI with billions of parameters will be excellent at memorizing stuff. I also have no doubt that research activity has exploded, which might be related to the generous hardware grants being handed out... But all that research has produced surprisingly little progress over algorithms from 2004 in the field of optical flow. The papers I looked at were the top-ranked optical flow algorithms on Sintel and KITTY. So those were the AIs that work best in practice and better than 99% of the other AI solutions.
- skybrian 7y ago
  While it's not my area of expertise, I am a bit wary of contest results. It seems like an exercise in overfitting via multiple comparisons? Maybe some algorithms with a slightly lower rank are actually more robust? If it's as bad as you say, it seems like a critical evaluation would be pretty interesting and advance the field.
- scirocco 7y ago
  I wonder how many solutions within the AI field could just be categorized as "Automation"
  - DeedsMoraine 7y ago
    All of them. That's how AI works. Not by making smarter machines, but by destroying intelligence by smashing it into machine-digestible bits.

ghgr 7y ago

I mostly agree with you that there are many false positives in the research papers. Still, you shouldn't outright dismiss the possibility of you not implementing their models correctly.

fxtentacle 7y ago
I was reviewing the authors' own source codes.

opportune 7y ago

It’s been a while for me, but I’m pretty sure there are techniques for approximating gradients for step functions, although the paper may not have mentioned them (perhaps for secret sauce)

fxtentacle 7y ago
In the case I evaluated, the authors later admitted to using supervised training for initializing their supposedly unsupervised learning methods. Also, I was reviewing their public source code release and there was no approximation. That part of their loss function had simply never worked, but they had not noticed prior to the release of their paper. And due to them training slightly different from what they described in the paper, the AI worked competitively well nonetheless.

thdrdt 7y ago

Yes. Current self-driving might be safer than the avarage driver, but what most people forget is how unsafe it is when it fails. It fails harder than most avarage drivers and even bad drivers. In my eyes self-driving should still be called driving-assistance.

JauntyHatAngle 7y ago
Can you cite any sources that AI fails harder? I'm not exactly sure what you are referring to.
- fxtentacle 7y ago
  The dead Uber pedestrian where the AI dismissed the data as faulty and did not slow down at all. I think every human would slow down if they see things that they cannot explain. An AI will not. It's basically the same problem as when an image recognition AI is 99% sure that the photo of your cat shows guacamole. Current AIs do not have a concept of absolute confidence, they only produce an estimate relative to the other possibilities that were available during training. That's why fully novel situations produce completely random results.
  - keanzu 7y ago
    > dead Uber pedestrian Elaine Herzberg was in dark clothing crossing a dark street well away from any crosswalk or street lighting. Would a human driver have performed better? From the footage I saw she was nearly invisible, I would have hit her too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufNNuafuU7M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufNNuafuU7M This was not a hard fail for the AI.
    - sebcat 7y ago
      The exposure time and the dynamic range of the sensor affects the visibility of the person in that video - it is very likely that a non-distracted human would have performed better. The vehicle was equipped with both radar and lidar. The victim was detected as an unknown object six seconds prior to impact, and at 1.3 seconds prior to impact when the victim entered the road the system determined that emergency braking by the driver was required, however the (distracted) driver was not alerted of this.

capkutay 7y ago

Yeah I have a similar feeling...but I am willing to try it. Just aware that there are probably corner cases it can't handle and generally curious about what the behavior is. For instance, I was driving on autopilot on a section of 101 where they repainted the lanes. I let autopilot do its thing...but I closely observed and kept my hand on the wheel and foot on the brakes. Lo and behold...the car positioned itself right in the shoulder and was driving towards no-man's land. If someone wasn't paying attention in this situation, it would have been catastrophic.

neotek 7y ago
Does it not feel a little crazy to you that you're willing to put your life into the hands of a machine that you know is capable of, and has already tried, killing you? I can't think of any time in my life where I've almost driven my car into a no-man's land even after thousands of hours of driving, and yet every Tesla owner I know has half a dozen stories about the time Auto Pilot tried to steer them into a barrier or took a corner way too fast or suddenly braked for no reason. I totally get the appeal of a Tesla, holy shit that acceleration is amazing, but Auto Pilot just does not seem worth it at all.
- Piskvorrr 7y ago
  As a driver of many decades, and having survived quite a few of my own stupid mistakes, I think this is also bias. As long as I had some direct input into the situation, I saw such near-misses as the inherent risks of driving: I should have had the wheels geometry checked, I should have replaced the lightbulb, I shouldn't have driven on old tires, I should have checked the mirror, I shouldn't have overtaken there - and I continue to use cars, despite dozens, perhaps hundreds of near-misses, or even minor accidents: "yeah, we almost died today - but didn't, that's just a fact of driving, not a suicide attempt". Whereas once you feel that all agency is stripped from you, it's all someone else's fault, especially if the mistakes feel alien (as in "no human would err in this specific manner").

pjmlp 7y ago

Same here, always get those puzzled looks from non-technological friends when I am so picky about new tech.

simonebrunozzi 7y ago

I would almost agree with you, but please indulge with me in the following thought. Let's say that you can go to work by feet or by bike. Let's also say that by feet your probability of getting killed are 1 in 1,000,000, and the commute takes 20 minutes. On a bike, commuting takes only 10 minutes, but the probability is up to 1 in 200,000. Five times more. You end up deciding to use the bike every day to go to work. In this example, you decided to trade comfort (faster commute) with a slightly higher probability to end up dead. Imagine now you need to decide whether to commute in your Tesla with or without autopilot. Let's assume (I might be wrong) that Tesla's autopilot increases your chances of getting killed. (for simplicity, let's ignore the consequences for other people on the road). Would you still trade comfort (not needing to drive) with a slightly higher probability to die?

pbhjpbhj 7y ago
These sorts of analyses get complicated fast. Walking is riskier in part because you're more exposed to the "killer self-driving cars", but also people with preconditions will walk. Like, if you're drunk you'll walk home, if you're unfit you're more likely to walk than cycle, etc., people walking probably get mugged more often, ...
- DangerousPie 7y ago
  But OP is making the opposite assumption here - that cycling is riskier. Which, keeping all other factors constant, seems intuitively correct to me since you go at a higher speed and you are on the road with cars rather than on the sidewalk.
Piskvorrr 7y ago
As you note, you're coming from impossible premises ("assuming your actions never affect anyone else"). Do you expect to come to meaningful conclusions? In other words, as a buyer, I do care about the occupant safety rating, you are correct in that. As a road user, I also care that other people's cars consider me as irrelevant, my potential death an externality to be amortized in the purchase prize.

nnq 7y ago

Papers code is probably optimized for "first to publish". Also overfit in a non-traditional sense since ppl wanta to beat SOTA by as much as possible. Also the heuristic tips an tricks and autotuning you'd want in a production models would exceed paper lenth 10x. Also the author is motivated to NOT provide a bug free easy to put in production version of the code since that would lower the $ value of their expertise. A cocktail of all the wrong incentives! Probably the production versions of those models are suboptimal in different ways but work better in practice...

Alupis 7y ago

This whole self driving, fully autonomous thing has become some sort of strange faux-religion. It's followers see no other possible solution as acceptable. Instead of putting our heads together to make really good driver assistance technologies and being satisfied, the darn thing needs to also drive itself everywhere otherwise we're leaving something on the table! Untill we have zero deaths, we cannot stop demanding self driving - as if somehow AI is a magical solution that's always better than humans. Forget better frame, chassis, and body panel design to protect pedestrians! We won't need them if AI never hits anyone. Forget better braking systems that apply themselves automatically. We don't need that if AI can always avoid the need for sudden stops. Forget seat belt enhancements since that'll just inhibit nap time in my self driving car. No, forget it all. My car needs to drive me all by itself, everywhere I need to go, no matter how hard or impossible of a problem that is. Driver assist is boring... Level 5 is sexy, and that's what I want!

_pmf_ 7y ago
Comma.ai kind of follows the "improving lane detection until it drives you completely" line, at least according to what I get from this interview with Hotz: https://lexfridman.com/george-hotz/ https://lexfridman.com/george-hotz/ He's still a bit too optimistic for my taste.
- farisjarrah 7y ago
  I bought in to Comma.ai at first and even started porting my car over. But I quickly realized that the whole comma.ai crowd is way way to cavalier with safety. One day I was driving down the freeway and saw a small fender bender occur in front of me. I looked up at my dash and it was all ripped up with wires hanging everywhere because I was working on the Comma.ai stuff. If it had been me in that fender bender you know that insurance would definitely blame me for that given that I was messing with the OBDII and radar sensors. As cool as Comma.ai is, I really believe that their approach to allowing so much community involvement with little to no oversight is highly irresponsible. That being said.... If they do succeed, and get some sort of government approval or oversight.... You bet I'm putting that stuff back in. Its cool A.F.
7y ago

Fnoord 7y ago

I've been thinking for reasons to avoid Kickstarter and Indiegogo (as I got scammed on Kickstarter, and am not happy with the overall quality of several succeeded projects), and you gave me inspiration. Thank you.

arethuza 7y ago

"I avoid new technology, exactly because I'm an engineer." I would never call myself an engineer, although I have worked in environments where there were lots of engineers (not in the software world) and one definition of "engineering" that I heard was: "Meeting the requirements while doing as little new as possible"

rwmurrayVT 7y ago
That's a very accurate definition in the mechanical world. Every junior engineer with an overly complicated, cutting edge, unproven idea gets shot down pretty quickly. In our shipyard safety is more important than anything else. After that is cost.

preommr 7y ago

I don't understand why if you've gone through this much trouble, you don't have a blog post or even a medium article to cover your findings. I'd be very curious to see the responses from those authors and other experts in the field about your findings. There's just something dubious about how it seems like you consistently find mistakes and problems in these papers. I'd be stunned if there was any expert that wasn't aware of the shortcomings of using a kernel that's as small as 3x3.

sedgjh23 7y ago
You’ve summed up what threw me off about their comment quite well. Another thing, just the time alone needed to evaluate technology the way they are talking about sounds quite staggering.

johnjungles 7y ago

This is an oversimplification of Tesla’s technology, and they don’t use Tensorflow, other people’s pre-trained models, and computer vision isn’t the only thing that is a part of driving, they use radar and ultrasonics as well. I try new technologies all the time to get a sense of where it is in coming to fruition. I think what you mean is, you’re more skeptical of claims. The same way you claim you can’t learn anything about NY in your bathroom, you don’t know anything about Tesla or Self-driving if you haven’t tried it. You should at least test drive it under controlled conditions where you feel comfortable before closing yourself off completely.

maxaf 7y ago
> You should at least test drive it under controlled conditions [...] Who cares what the car does under controlled conditions? I'm sure the manufacturer did exactly that in their testing. Even when they test on public roads, there's a hands-off safety driver behind the wheel, who is paid to be on the lookout and sufficiently alert to take over in case of an unexpected excursion. (Unless the self-driving car under test is from Uber, in which case the safety driver simply watches video on their phone. Too soon?) This is nowhere near how these cars are used in the real world. The real world is not a set of "controlled conditions", so any comfort one builds up in such a situation is merely a false sense of security. > [...] where you feel comfortable before closing yourself off completely. So, here's the thing: I'm comfortable driving myself. I don't get distracted, I use good judgment, I consistently prioritize the safety of my vehicle's occupants over everything else. I know exactly how flawed self-driving cars are, and how far behind the curve of my driving skill they will remain within my lifespan. That's the sum total of everything I need to know, and no amount of "controlled conditions" demos will change my mind. P.S.: If you're from the future and you're reading this because I got mowed down by a self-driving car: ha ha! Joke's on me.
- johnjungles 7y ago
  My comment about controlled conditions was about making you feel comfortable and give yourself a safe to try it out to get an understanding of when it. It wasn’t to say to believe in self driving, I agree it’s a long way out. Understanding the technology is more important than dismissing it altogether is what I was simply trying to point out. I think you can at the least try it, understand it, then have an opinion about it.. (which I respect). There seems to be a lot of negative comments from people who have never sat in a Tesla or have gone through a test drive.

thorin 7y ago

Response makes sense, I've never thought about it before but I don't like gadgets at all (EE and programmer for 25 years). I like simple things, don't have home assistant, don't have tablet anymore, rarely use computer at home, like simple things in my musical instrument and tv setup, no games consoles (used to love games as a kid but not anymore). It's less to worry about and I feel I get more done.

traviscj 7y ago

I love this take! I’ve been similarly untrusting of a lot of “high tech” approaches to various things, and I derive a lot of joy from products/services/etc that take a “back to basics” or at least minimally- or non-digital philosophy. In particular: I have an affinity for automatic watches and carbureted motorcycles. If nothing else, it’s a bit of a break from what feels like a constant struggle to keep all the gears turning at work. BUT... I’ll confess I’m also a sucker for innovations / the occasional new hotness. I recently upgraded a Kawasaki KLR650 (a competent but... “well tested”, shall we say? motorcycle) in favor of KTM’s top-of-the-line adventure bike. The technology difference between the two (despite only 3 model years between them) is incredible: the latter adds 5x the power, ride-by-wire, cruise control, lean-sensitive ABS/traction control, an up/down-capable quickshifter, probably a thousand other improvements. One day, about 1100 miles into owning the new bike, the dash pops up a low tire pressure warning from the tire pressure monitoring system. It showed the rear pressure was fairly low, and sure enough, I’d picked up a small screw between the treads. Certainly a TPMS is nothing compared to anything self-driving, but honestly it was a bit of a wake-up call — I WANT systems on my bike to increase my safety level. I’m not really sure what the lesson is here. Maybe “Look for the middle grounds (the ABS/TPMS-maturity systems) between ancient technology (anything on my beloved KLR) and bleeding edge (non-replicable papers on self-driving cars)”? Seems like this holds up ok, especially as a consumer of those techs... But maybe not for the innovators?

Cthulhu_ 7y ago

> I avoid new technology, exactly because I'm an engineer. > I wonder if that is just me Can't find it now but there was a poignant quote or anecdote I read the other day that expresses this exact sentiment - the more you know about technology, the less likely you are to use it. I think it was in the context of e.g. smart homes and voice assistants or online tracking - if you're aware of how much data they hoover up and what can be done with that, you'd be Very Afraid.

fouc 7y ago
It would be nice if that sort of awareness was more prevalent on HN.
- Psyladine 7y ago
  The cult of cheer, eyes waxing over from a disappointed jet-age generation, and a little shiny syndrome.
brokenmachine 7y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22088547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22088547 Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future! Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise. https://biggaybunny.tumblr.com/post/166787080920/tech-enthusiasts-everything-in-my-house-is-wired https://biggaybunny.tumblr.com/post/166787080920/tech-enthus... (via foxrob92)

vardump 7y ago

I think it should be emphasized this accident occurred in May 2018.

smoyer 7y ago

I've got a beautiful 2001 Mercedes-Benz ... it drives well, avoids all the trendy stuff but still has too many electronic components (most recently I had to replace the computer board that decides whether you should be able to shift). My daughter has a 1971 Super-Beetle she's stored in my garage ... when it breaks, it's something mechanical!

Communitivity 7y ago

I agree with all but one of your points, and they're all well made. However, by saying "AI is stochastical gradient descent optimization" you're equating AI with Machine Learning/Deep Learning. The list of AI technologies also includes things like Artificial Life, Genetic Algorithms, Biological Systems Modeling, and Semantic Reasoning. I suspect that when we get true AI, i.e. Strong AI or Artificial General Intelligence, we will achieve it through a combination of these techniques made to work together.

sgt101 7y ago

AI is not stochastical gradient descent optimization; neural nets are; but AI is bigger than that - planning, deduction, game theory and so on. You can find out buy buying and reading a text book.

tbrock 7y ago

Plus... what’s the point? Maybe we automate a couple jobs for long haul shipping or road trips but what a fruitless effort! Why don’t we work on drones that pick us up and take us places to really leap ahead, get out of traffic, and do something amazing? Cars driving themselves? How incremental.

dosethree 7y ago

"As a result, I have become the late adopter among my group of friends because the first iteration of any new technology usually just isn't worth the issues." This is only true for things where reliability matters more than the new features the new tech provides. In the case of cars, of course, I'd prefer reliability. But for other things like the original iPhone, sometimes new tech is just better than whats out their even if there will always been some flaws in the first versions

ctack 7y ago

"I have become the late adopter". Exactly my thoughts when reading about the blended wing aeroplane, yesterday.

acollins1331 7y ago

3x3 pixels in a CNN isn't just 3x3 pixels though. As the layers get pooled together even though the sliding window stays the same size (3x3) it's moving over images that are getting compressed 2x every time you pool. So in that last layer you're looking quite farther than "3 pixels".

locuscoeruleus 7y ago

> That gave me the gut feeling that most people doing the research were lacking the necessary mathematical background. I don't find this to be the case with most ML researchers. Is it possible you have misunderstood some of these papers? It is, after all, hard to jump straight into a new field. > The second paper converted float to bool and then tried to use the gradient for training. This sounds like binarized neural networks. If that's the case, they keep the activation before binarization to use for backpropegation. > The third paper only used a 3x3 pixel neighborhood for learning long-distance moves. A single layer of 3x3 convolutions would not be able to model long-distance moves. But I have not read a single paper where they have only used one layer. Is it possible they stacked multiple conv + pooling layers? The receptive field of each unit higher up in the stack grows pretty large in the end.

ChicagoBoy11 7y ago

It's not. I got my pilot's license and fly in a technically advanced aircraft, and all that it means is that there's quite a bit of automation there to help you out. The lessons imbued in it, the issues you learn exist, actually using it in very critical phases of flight, etc., builds an appreciation for both the wonders and dangers of automation. Going through that experience has 1000% made me more weary of autonomous vehicles.

dkonofalski 7y ago

This is why I don't understand the sad conclusion of the story in the article. The driver knew that AutoPilot had issues with that stretch of the freeway and was able to repeat the issues on several occasions but still thought it best to be on his phone, while driving 71 mph, at the mercy of AutoPilot? Especially considering that he was an engineer who had expressed concern over this, it seems silly to me that he wouldn't just take over manually during that stretch... He didn't and now he's gone because of it. It's not worth the risk/reward.

mumblemumble 7y ago
We don't need to understand it. We just need to know that, even armed with all that knowledge, he still made the decision he did, and that we should not expect others with less knowledge of how software works to be any less human.
- dopamean 7y ago
  This has been my takeaway from the whole situation. It says something about the exactly how safe this stuff needs to be for it to be considered reliable.
  - heliodor 7y ago
    My impression is that it's already more reliable than humans. Not perfect, but it probably averages better than all the crashes humans are causing.
    - Reelin 7y ago
      > it's already more reliable than humans Only when comparing aggregate statistics. Not all humans are equally (un)safe drivers; insurance rates vary based on driving record for good reason.
- Drew_ 7y ago
  If anything I would expect less knowledgeable people to be more skeptical and cautious than somebody who has a vested interest and passion for technology. I can't imagine anybody other than a tech enthusiast who would maintain trust in a self driving car technology that previously attempted to veer them into a barrier.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

madacol 7y ago

Many opinions, but little data. It's hard to assess anything under this circumstances.

cat199 7y ago

> That gave me the gut feeling that most people doing the research were lacking the necessary mathematical background. AI is stochastical gradient descent optimization, after all. ML is only one part of 'AI'

ksec 7y ago

>I avoid new technology, exactly because I'm an engineer. There is a saying where all software (security) engineers dont have IOT or any "Smart" devices in their home.

pmart123 7y ago

It should probably be called "CoPilot" and issue significant alerts as to when it has a poor understanding of the situation so the driver is aware to at least be more alert.

wolfspider 7y ago

This is not new technology at all but perhaps this is technology which is being used in an unnecessarily complex manner. I sat in on a lecture given by University of Maryland circa 2000 here in Florida concerning their W4 video surveillance system which could tell the difference between different objects quite well. It did this on a 400Mhz dual-pentium machine and could even recognize different signs at driving speed. This was before TensorFlow or Python really took off or GPUs where powerful and did not require a supercomputer to operate or a cloud either it was just Math: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/34.868683 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/34.868683 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.8.9790&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.8.9...

oppositelock 7y ago

ML hype spawned a lot of self driving car hype, and a lot of promises which can't be delivered in any short time frame. It started with Comma.ai, but others picked up the full ML torch and went with it. Other companies are making steady, sure progress using the old school robotics approach of throwing sensors at the problem, Waymo, for example. Others are being reckless and trying to use vision alone (Tesla). It's a mess. However, safe self driving is coming, slowly but surely (I work at a company which produces tech for these guys). The hyped companies are in trouble, but car OEM's, partnered with companies you've never heard of, are making slow, steady progress, all the while being subject to government functional safety requirements, particularly in the US and EU. There is zero chance that a Tesla or GM car will be allowed to fully self drive, so no matter how advanced these systems are, they're sold as level 2 systems requiring driver oversight and qualify as cruise control in regulations. Today, we have full autonomy in some truck routes (only as proofs of concept), in ship yards, parking shuttles, mining equipment, quarry trucks, etc, places where the problem domain is more constrained. Generalized self driving is a ways off, but by the time you can make use of it, it will be safe, it just won't come from Tesla or Cruise or Uber.

aschatten 7y ago

The biggest tech thing I am afraid of that all other people are excited about is digital election. ML field is pretty clear about its limitation.

johnnyno83 7y ago

"I felt that way looking at state of the art AI vision papers" - which papars you looked at?