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Somehow the idea of a computer error killing me seems way worse than at least having a chance to save myself, since I’m a very cautious driver (though unlikely

Somehow the idea of a computer error killing me seems way worse than at least having a chance to save myself, since I’m a very cautious driver (though unlikely safer than average by 5x) . Self driving cars need to get to airline level safety where crashes are a rare thing and most people don’t think twice about giving up control to the pilots/auto pilot. If that takes expensive Lidar thats what we should use. I can’t imagine ever feeling good about trusting my life to a computer vision algorithm.

sliken 6y ago
Problem is, 95% [1] of drivers think they are better than average. [1] citation needed.
- senko 6y ago
  Happy to oblige: https://www.smithlawco.com/blog/2017/december/do-most-drivers-really-think-they-are-above-aver/ https://www.smithlawco.com/blog/2017/december/do-most-driver... In summary: in a study done in 1980, 93% of Americans thought themselves better than an average driver.
  - tjoff 6y ago
    And they are all correct. Except for when they haven't slept, or aren't paying attention etc. That is not a good baseline to compare self-driving cars against. That would be horrific.
    - the8472 6y ago
      The average baseline involves a driver that is not paying attention or hasn't slept X% of the time. You cannot magically wave away all the bad days and pretend only the good humans are on the streets. The bad days happen, people die. The autonomous vehicle only has to do better than that. That's the whole point.
      - tjoff 6y ago
        Statistically no. But you need to convince people - that is the point. We are not rational. We do not respond well to a car running straight into a barrier or stand-still vehicle at 100 km/h without even attempting to brake (such as the failure modes that Tesla has demonstrated) even if it does well most of the time and has better statistics than an average human. And further, as noted in the thread, a good part of driving is assessing other vehicles and vehicles behaving oddly (even if it is objectively better in isolation) is really bad and will increase the risk of collisions. I think google have experienced this, that people do not respond well do the driving technique of their car since it doesn't behave as a human - not that it does anything wrong.
        the8472 6y ago
        Individuals may not act rationally but regulators and insurance companies with their birds-eye view will see the hard numbers and hopefully provide incentives aligned with the rational choice.
        tjoff 6y ago
        I hope not. I expect them to produce cars that are much better than the average human before setting them free on the road. That is the rational choice given the human psyche. We can barely even convince people that vaccines are good.
        the8472 6y ago
        Just as with vaccines waiting for better cars means letting more people die in the meantime. That is a grim hope.
        tjoff 6y ago
        If companies rush this (as Tesla and Uber already has!) too much the backlash will likely set back self-driving unnecessarily. I believe a more careful approach will get broader adoption and likely save more lives.
  - nelgaard 6y ago
    Which says: == Obviously, not everyone can be above average. Exactly half of all drivers have to be in the bottom half when it comes to driving skills and safety. == Maybe, but the bottom half is not necessary drivers worse than average. I do not know how you would calculate "average". But there are people on the road that could pull down the average a lot. So that more than 50 percent are better than average.
    - adwn 6y ago
      In colloquial speech, most people don't differentiate between "mean" and "median". My guess is that, in that kind of survey, the participants read or say "average" and implicitly mean "median" – and exactly 50 percent of drivers are better than the median, by definition.
      - Dylan16807 6y ago
        The problem with not differentiating clearly between mean and median, is that you look out at other drivers and calculate a mean, then you assume that the median is the same. With a sufficiently skewed distribution this will hugely inflate your numbers, even if you have a realistic perspective of your actual skill.
- Ajedi32 6y ago
  Which could be true, assuming the median skill level of drivers is sufficiently higher than the average.
  - gifnamething 6y ago
    Mean is an average, not the average. Mode is an average. Median is an average.
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      > Mode is an average. They sure do claim that to elementary school children. But using mode sounds absolutely insane to me. Does any field actually do that? Maybe you could carefully bucket/smooth your data and then use the peak, but that's a far cry from taking raw numbers and looking at the most common.
matt-attack 6y ago
I feel the opposite. The one sensor that is guaranteed to have sufficient information to drive in all conditions is vision. That's obviously because humans drive exclusively with vision (and a single vantage point to boot - modulo mirrors).
- jschwartzi 6y ago
  Kind of. The difference between human vision and computer vision is that human vision is stereoscopic. We perceive depth in addition to color and shape. And that gives us the ability to perceive the 3-dimensional shape of an object, which lets us anticipate how it might move. A lot of CV algorithms operate on single images from a single camera, which makes it impossible to judge depth. In that case you'd have to use the size of an object as a proxy for its distance and speed, so you'd tend to misjudge how far things are from you and where they're going. The nice thing about LIDAR is that you can gather that depth/shape information and with sufficient calibration map the shapes in the camera image to the depths in the LIDAR image. You can do the same thing with two cameras so I'm not sure why LIDAR would be preferred here.
  - tjoff 6y ago
    We don't need two eyes to drive. And we don't need two eyes to gauge depth. Neither does a machine, but adding stereoscopic cameras is not hard. The stereoscopic effect is very poor on driving distances, doesn't help us that much. Primarily we use clues form the environment to gauge distances. We also have to focus our eyes to the correct distance - that also tells us how far an object is. Primarily we have had an insane amount of training to understand our world. An understanding that a self-driving car will never achieve unless singularity happens. It might not need that, but it will need other ways to compensate for it.
  - yarcob 6y ago
    You can get 3D data from a single moving camera. The technique is called structure from motion and has been demonstrated to work well more than a decade ago. The biggest problem with relying on visual data is that you get very noisy data. Poor lighting and reflective or glossy surfaces cause problems (I'm not sure what current state of the art is, it's been a few years since I looked at the research). As far as I understand the big advantage of LIDAR is that you get nice and clean depth data and it's not so computationally expensive.
mankyd 6y ago
While I don't disagree, I will note that most people don't think twice about giving up control to bus and taxi drivers.* I think we trust humans to make a reasonable decision in a trolley-problem scenario (rightly or wrongly). Or rather, we trust the human we're in a vehicle with to value their own life, and thus our own, more than those outside of the vehicle in most scenarios. I expect there is research to investigate this, though I wouldn't know where to begin looking. *I've definitely had a few bad drivers, of course.
- xiphias2 6y ago
  I always sit in the back of the taxi (just like what Waymo does), and that already significantly decreases my chances of dieing. And with bus it's again easily more than 5x safer than a car.
- nelgaard 6y ago
  Busses are generally much safer because they are bigger and heavier. Except in mountains. But I only encounter that on holidays and on holidays we take a lot more risks. And I do think twice about taxis.
  - wnkrshm 6y ago
    Bus vs. AV: AV rider dead, lots of injuries in the bus. That's conservation of energy and momentum. Assuming some utilitaristic equation for minimizing total injury, an AV bus probably won't swerve, and probably won't brake significantly except if colliding with a heavy or fast vehicle.
colechristensen 6y ago
A computer error is going to be scarier by far. When a human kills someone with a car it is almost always in a way we can empathize. When you’re around cars you have pretty good mental models for the humans that drive them and how the car will behave. When you’re around human piloted cars you can look at the driver and get a pretty good idea of intent. You can tell if the driver sees you, you can tell what their mental state is, if they’re paying attention, what they intend to do. You can sum up a person with a glance, this is the power of evolution, we’re really good at figuring things out about other living things. Crossing the street in front of a car is a leap of faith, not troubling at all when there’s a human there, but a robot? There’s no body posture, no gestures, no facial expressions, nothing to go on. There’s a computer in control of a powerful heavy machine that you’re just expected to trust. Robot cars don’t make human mistakes, they make alien mistakes like running down kids on the sidewalk in broad daylight, things which don’t make any sense at all that make people feel like they aren’t anywhere safe. It won’t take but a couple of cute kids killed in a surprising matter to shut down the whole autonomous experiment.
- dado3212 6y ago
  > Crossing the street in front of a car is a leap of faith, not troubling at all when there’s a human there, but a robot? There’s no body posture, no gestures, no facial expressions, nothing to go on. There’s a computer in control of a powerful heavy machine that you’re just expected to trust. This is something that's very solvable though. Robot cars should and almost definitely will have a way to communicate to pedestrians. I agree with the general point though around a greater possibility of very out of the norm mistakes.
  - wool_gather 6y ago
    There's an opportunity for them to communicate better with pedestrians than the average human driver. Drivers tend to assume that their intent to stop or not to stop is obvious and don't bother with a clear signal like flashing their lights or waving visibly. From the pedestrian's perspective, it can be hard to see the driver at all (small movements of the hand can be invisible in sun glare; direction of gaze likewise), and also hard to tell what they're doing. Just because they're slowing somewhat as they approach doesn't mean they see you or intend to stop.
thesuitonym 6y ago
As cautious as you are, you still get distracted, focus on the wrong thing sometimes, and have blind spots. Computers don't.
- lemonspat 6y ago
  Computers might not get distracted, but have many other problems. And I assure you a computer can still focus on the wrong thing and have blind spots. https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sensors/slight-street-sign-modifications-can-fool-machine-learning-algorithms https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sen...
- kaba0 6y ago
  And I would choose a fly over today’s state of the art computer vision systems because they are still better than the latter.
toper-centage 6y ago
Good point. But it doesn't matter how carefully you drive if the road is full of idiots and intoxicated drivers.
bombcar 6y ago
A similar calculus was what lead me to get a private pilot’s license instead of a motorbike - general aviation fatalities are something like 90% pilot error but 60% of motorbike fatalities are NOT the fault of the rider.

sliken 6y ago

Problem is, 95% [1] of drivers think they are better than average. [1] citation needed.

senko 6y ago
Happy to oblige: https://www.smithlawco.com/blog/2017/december/do-most-drivers-really-think-they-are-above-aver/ https://www.smithlawco.com/blog/2017/december/do-most-driver... In summary: in a study done in 1980, 93% of Americans thought themselves better than an average driver.
- tjoff 6y ago
  And they are all correct. Except for when they haven't slept, or aren't paying attention etc. That is not a good baseline to compare self-driving cars against. That would be horrific.
  - the8472 6y ago
    The average baseline involves a driver that is not paying attention or hasn't slept X% of the time. You cannot magically wave away all the bad days and pretend only the good humans are on the streets. The bad days happen, people die. The autonomous vehicle only has to do better than that. That's the whole point.
    - tjoff 6y ago
      Statistically no. But you need to convince people - that is the point. We are not rational. We do not respond well to a car running straight into a barrier or stand-still vehicle at 100 km/h without even attempting to brake (such as the failure modes that Tesla has demonstrated) even if it does well most of the time and has better statistics than an average human. And further, as noted in the thread, a good part of driving is assessing other vehicles and vehicles behaving oddly (even if it is objectively better in isolation) is really bad and will increase the risk of collisions. I think google have experienced this, that people do not respond well do the driving technique of their car since it doesn't behave as a human - not that it does anything wrong.
      - the8472 6y ago
        Individuals may not act rationally but regulators and insurance companies with their birds-eye view will see the hard numbers and hopefully provide incentives aligned with the rational choice.
        tjoff 6y ago
        I hope not. I expect them to produce cars that are much better than the average human before setting them free on the road. That is the rational choice given the human psyche. We can barely even convince people that vaccines are good.
        the8472 6y ago
        Just as with vaccines waiting for better cars means letting more people die in the meantime. That is a grim hope.
        tjoff 6y ago
        If companies rush this (as Tesla and Uber already has!) too much the backlash will likely set back self-driving unnecessarily. I believe a more careful approach will get broader adoption and likely save more lives.
- nelgaard 6y ago
  Which says: == Obviously, not everyone can be above average. Exactly half of all drivers have to be in the bottom half when it comes to driving skills and safety. == Maybe, but the bottom half is not necessary drivers worse than average. I do not know how you would calculate "average". But there are people on the road that could pull down the average a lot. So that more than 50 percent are better than average.
  - adwn 6y ago
    In colloquial speech, most people don't differentiate between "mean" and "median". My guess is that, in that kind of survey, the participants read or say "average" and implicitly mean "median" – and exactly 50 percent of drivers are better than the median, by definition.
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      The problem with not differentiating clearly between mean and median, is that you look out at other drivers and calculate a mean, then you assume that the median is the same. With a sufficiently skewed distribution this will hugely inflate your numbers, even if you have a realistic perspective of your actual skill.
Ajedi32 6y ago
Which could be true, assuming the median skill level of drivers is sufficiently higher than the average.
- gifnamething 6y ago
  Mean is an average, not the average. Mode is an average. Median is an average.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    > Mode is an average. They sure do claim that to elementary school children. But using mode sounds absolutely insane to me. Does any field actually do that? Maybe you could carefully bucket/smooth your data and then use the peak, but that's a far cry from taking raw numbers and looking at the most common.

matt-attack 6y ago

I feel the opposite. The one sensor that is guaranteed to have sufficient information to drive in all conditions is vision. That's obviously because humans drive exclusively with vision (and a single vantage point to boot - modulo mirrors).

jschwartzi 6y ago
Kind of. The difference between human vision and computer vision is that human vision is stereoscopic. We perceive depth in addition to color and shape. And that gives us the ability to perceive the 3-dimensional shape of an object, which lets us anticipate how it might move. A lot of CV algorithms operate on single images from a single camera, which makes it impossible to judge depth. In that case you'd have to use the size of an object as a proxy for its distance and speed, so you'd tend to misjudge how far things are from you and where they're going. The nice thing about LIDAR is that you can gather that depth/shape information and with sufficient calibration map the shapes in the camera image to the depths in the LIDAR image. You can do the same thing with two cameras so I'm not sure why LIDAR would be preferred here.
- tjoff 6y ago
  We don't need two eyes to drive. And we don't need two eyes to gauge depth. Neither does a machine, but adding stereoscopic cameras is not hard. The stereoscopic effect is very poor on driving distances, doesn't help us that much. Primarily we use clues form the environment to gauge distances. We also have to focus our eyes to the correct distance - that also tells us how far an object is. Primarily we have had an insane amount of training to understand our world. An understanding that a self-driving car will never achieve unless singularity happens. It might not need that, but it will need other ways to compensate for it.
- yarcob 6y ago
  You can get 3D data from a single moving camera. The technique is called structure from motion and has been demonstrated to work well more than a decade ago. The biggest problem with relying on visual data is that you get very noisy data. Poor lighting and reflective or glossy surfaces cause problems (I'm not sure what current state of the art is, it's been a few years since I looked at the research). As far as I understand the big advantage of LIDAR is that you get nice and clean depth data and it's not so computationally expensive.

mankyd 6y ago

While I don't disagree, I will note that most people don't think twice about giving up control to bus and taxi drivers.* I think we trust humans to make a reasonable decision in a trolley-problem scenario (rightly or wrongly). Or rather, we trust the human we're in a vehicle with to value their own life, and thus our own, more than those outside of the vehicle in most scenarios. I expect there is research to investigate this, though I wouldn't know where to begin looking. *I've definitely had a few bad drivers, of course.

xiphias2 6y ago
I always sit in the back of the taxi (just like what Waymo does), and that already significantly decreases my chances of dieing. And with bus it's again easily more than 5x safer than a car.
nelgaard 6y ago
Busses are generally much safer because they are bigger and heavier. Except in mountains. But I only encounter that on holidays and on holidays we take a lot more risks. And I do think twice about taxis.
- wnkrshm 6y ago
  Bus vs. AV: AV rider dead, lots of injuries in the bus. That's conservation of energy and momentum. Assuming some utilitaristic equation for minimizing total injury, an AV bus probably won't swerve, and probably won't brake significantly except if colliding with a heavy or fast vehicle.

colechristensen 6y ago

A computer error is going to be scarier by far. When a human kills someone with a car it is almost always in a way we can empathize. When you’re around cars you have pretty good mental models for the humans that drive them and how the car will behave. When you’re around human piloted cars you can look at the driver and get a pretty good idea of intent. You can tell if the driver sees you, you can tell what their mental state is, if they’re paying attention, what they intend to do. You can sum up a person with a glance, this is the power of evolution, we’re really good at figuring things out about other living things. Crossing the street in front of a car is a leap of faith, not troubling at all when there’s a human there, but a robot? There’s no body posture, no gestures, no facial expressions, nothing to go on. There’s a computer in control of a powerful heavy machine that you’re just expected to trust. Robot cars don’t make human mistakes, they make alien mistakes like running down kids on the sidewalk in broad daylight, things which don’t make any sense at all that make people feel like they aren’t anywhere safe. It won’t take but a couple of cute kids killed in a surprising matter to shut down the whole autonomous experiment.

dado3212 6y ago
> Crossing the street in front of a car is a leap of faith, not troubling at all when there’s a human there, but a robot? There’s no body posture, no gestures, no facial expressions, nothing to go on. There’s a computer in control of a powerful heavy machine that you’re just expected to trust. This is something that's very solvable though. Robot cars should and almost definitely will have a way to communicate to pedestrians. I agree with the general point though around a greater possibility of very out of the norm mistakes.
- wool_gather 6y ago
  There's an opportunity for them to communicate better with pedestrians than the average human driver. Drivers tend to assume that their intent to stop or not to stop is obvious and don't bother with a clear signal like flashing their lights or waving visibly. From the pedestrian's perspective, it can be hard to see the driver at all (small movements of the hand can be invisible in sun glare; direction of gaze likewise), and also hard to tell what they're doing. Just because they're slowing somewhat as they approach doesn't mean they see you or intend to stop.

thesuitonym 6y ago

As cautious as you are, you still get distracted, focus on the wrong thing sometimes, and have blind spots. Computers don't.

lemonspat 6y ago
Computers might not get distracted, but have many other problems. And I assure you a computer can still focus on the wrong thing and have blind spots. https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sensors/slight-street-sign-modifications-can-fool-machine-learning-algorithms https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sen...
kaba0 6y ago
And I would choose a fly over today’s state of the art computer vision systems because they are still better than the latter.

toper-centage 6y ago

Good point. But it doesn't matter how carefully you drive if the road is full of idiots and intoxicated drivers.

bombcar 6y ago

A similar calculus was what lead me to get a private pilot’s license instead of a motorbike - general aviation fatalities are something like 90% pilot error but 60% of motorbike fatalities are NOT the fault of the rider.