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I attended a Presidential Commission on Robotics meeting at Carnegie Mellon University during the Obama administration. UBER, Google, and a whole lot of govern
by rpaddock 5y ago
I attended a Presidential Commission on Robotics meeting at Carnegie Mellon University during the Obama administration.
UBER, Google, and a whole lot of government acronyms such as IARPA were present.
What they spent most of the day obsessing about was:
“We know, statistically, our technology WILL kill a child. How do we handle the public and political fall out of that?”
In my view they were more concerned about that than looking for technical solutions.
I brought up a personal experience:
I once almost had a accident on Interstate 80, in a construction zone.
Somehow a car that was over packed pulled from between some construction equipment, in front of me.
This driver could not see out any window but right in front of him, and he was pulling *across* the interstate traffic, not going with the flow. He could not see out the passenger window, that was facing me, it had a sleeping bag in it.
He shot out from between the construction equipment about twenty feet in front of me, while I was doing 45 MPH, remember it was a construction zone.
The correct solutions to the problem was to floor the gas, so that I could get in front of him while there was still space, and get off on the right hand berm of the road.
Any solution the applied the brakes would have caused a collision.
The experts in the room replied that Aircraft Autopilot software may have been able to avoid a collision in this example. No one was sure and few seemed to care.
- snowwrestler 5y agoYou were there and I wasn’t. But from your description it just sounds like liability was the main topic of that conference. That’s not a group of people who are going to be able to workshop technical solutions for one particular driving scenario. In general I agree with your point that human drivers can create complex risks requiring sophisticated mitigations. But I also agree that ML systems are going to kill people at some point (arguably they already have) and policy will need to be created for that.
- rpaddock 5y agoIt was a mixed group from technical to non-tech, with the tech side best represented by Industry. The Government people were non-tech and I don't know about the military brass that was there. As far as I know there were no lawyers present. "liability was the main topic of that conference." More like underlying current of each session. It was not the intent of the conference.
- snowwrestler 5y agoThanks for clarifying
- sagarm 5y agoTesla has killed a half dozen of their customers, and it's been surprisingly not much of an issue.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoBut this is because their "full self driving" is anything but. They just blame it on the driver who should have been in control. With real full self driving where the driver is not supposed to have control, the legal situation will have to be decided indeed. I wonder if this is holding back progress there.