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So, self-driving cars are supposed to be, at the same time... ...much safer than human-driven cars, because they never tire and they never break traffic rules

So, self-driving cars are supposed to be, at the same time... ...much safer than human-driven cars, because they never tire and they never break traffic rules and thus never cause accidents and ...supposed to bend and break traffic rules like humans quite often do in order to be efficient drivers How should that be possible? Ah yeah, by having self-driving cars which are so extremely intelligent that they don't just follow the legal rules, but some idealistic set of rules deviating from the written laws that no human has ever been able to write down concisely, let alone bring into algorithmic form, but that is at the same time 100% safe and very efficient at allowing a maximum number of vehicles to reach their individual destinations in the shortest time possible. Anyone not convinced that L5 self-driving cars are impossible without first developing a strong AGI way above human intelligence levels should have a really good solution for this obvious contradiction.

fallingknife 5y ago
Easy. There is no contradiction. If I can think faster, see better, and react faster than you, I can break exactly the same traffic laws as you and still be a much safer driver. Computers can do all of those things currently, and it is a matter of time before that is applied to driving.
- Slartie 5y ago
  > think faster Computers cannot "think" at any speed.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    Fine. "Plan" faster, if you want to be picky.
modeless 5y ago
It's not complicated. Traffic laws are not perfectly aligned with safety. Plenty of legal things are unsafe and plenty of things that are illegal are not always dangerous. This isn't surprising either. The process of making laws is political and politics are clearly not an ideal way to decide on a perfect and exhaustive and precisely detailed set of rules for anything. The laws do not constitute an algorithm for driving. They are necessarily simplified. And yes, a self driving car is going to need a set of driving rules that are much more detailed than anything humans have written down before.
- wavefunction 5y ago
  That seems like an appropriate generalized take on "laws" but in the specific case of ignoring a stop sign, I don't think it applies. Stop signs are a traffic control device that other drivers rely on to predict the intent of a vehicle approaching the stop sign.
  - modeless 5y ago
    Stop signs are anything but "ignored". The actual behavior only applies when the car recognizes a stop sign and also assesses good visibility to ensure that no other cars are around, and the car still slows regardless. It's not just blowing through stop signs at top speed whenever it feels like it.
- sutuplesu 5y ago
  Pragmatic rulemaking for large numbers of people also needs to take into account the fact that the rule will naturally be viewed as a loose guideline by some people, and even as a thing to be defied for its own sake by others. Setting the limit stricter than the actual desired behavior can push average behavior closer to the target.
  - modeless 5y ago
    Yes, that's a great reason why laws made for humans may not be perfect when applied strictly to machines.
  - donatj 5y ago
    > Setting the limit stricter than the actual desired behavior can push average behavior closer to the target I hate this so much. Selective enforcement only serves to enable overzealous enforcement against unpopular and disenfranchised groups. One does one small thing wrong and they can then tack a large handful of other charges that would never otherwise be enforced. It's disgusting. Make the rules things that should actually be rules. Enforce them as written. The end.
  - jackson1442 5y ago
deegles 5y ago
A human breaks the rolling stop rule on a case by case basis and is responsible for the consequences, while a rolling-stop-avoidance feature acts on your behalf and Tesla is responsible for it. An analogy might be that it's the difference between getting food poisoning from home cooking vs. from a restaurant. Even though you're consuming food in both instances, the liability is assigned differently.
- lamontcg 5y ago
  > A human breaks the rolling stop rule on a case by case basis and is responsible for the consequences Not really. You can fail to see a pedestrian and cripple them and you won't see a whole lot of consequences for your "accident" (negligence). Breaking rules on a case-by-case basis is also how the normalization of deviance occurs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ljzj9Msli5o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ljzj9Msli5o If you break rules when you think you don't need to follow them you'll find that you're not 99.9% perfect and you will inevitably cause a crash. If you follow the rules all the time you won't make that error. The reason why computers should ultimately replace human drivers is precisely because we're dangerously incompetent and overconfident and shouldn't be breaking any rules.
- FireBeyond 5y ago
  Oh, according to Tesla, not so. Their perspective is that you're absolutely and solely liable in either case. Their legal department works studiously to handwave away every marketing statement. "The driver is only in the seat for legal purposes. The car is driving itself." - "You are entirely responsible for driving the vehicle." "Use Summon to bring your car to you while dealing with a fussy child." - "Pay attention to vehicle at all times."
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
Traffic laws are draconian/inflexible because: 1) they have to be simple enough to fit in an AVERAGE DRIVER's head (it is a miracle to me that highways in cities are as functional and low-error as they are yes I know the death statistics on driving) 2) the law makers know the laws will be bent, so they set a baseline of VERY VERY SAFE and hope that most people only bend the law to VERY SAFE or at worst MOSTLY SAFE. It seems weird given how "bad" self-driving algs are right now, but with a detailed database of locations and context, I absolutely believe the "rolling stop" logic in the car would be safer and more effective than a human observing complete stops. I definitely do not agree with Tesla's vision-only no-location-context algorithm approach. Such a thing is a baseline, but if you know the location to where you are going, then route-specific data should be downloaded that has been optimized with multiple specific AI computation passes. That's how humans work: we are slow and dumb when we are driving in unfamiliar locations and routes, but for our commute routes we know where potholes are, cracks in the road, which lane to be in, dangerous sidestreets and intersections and congestion points, etc. So I disagree that L5 is impossible. Well, it depends on "way above human intelligence". I think what you are trying to say is you need a supersapient intellect with IQ 195. But AIs can be "dumb" but have access to a far larger memory space and database and respond to a far wider bandwidth of sensor information. The AI programs may not be solving Fermat's Last Theorem in the margin of a book, but they can be smarter in the sense that it's like having a million gnomes watching at once.
- Slartie 5y ago
  > Well, it depends on "way above human intelligence". I think what you are trying to say is you need a supersapient intellect with IQ 195. I'd say even "normal human intelligence" would suffice for at least getting L5 to work (maybe not with perfect safety and efficiency, but working at all). But you cannot remove the need for actual "intelligence" from the equation, and that's the problem: our AIs are not "intelligent" at all. They are idiot savants, and driving a car isn't exactly a problem where you need savant-like capabilities. It is a very general, broad-range problem, which is much more applicable for the broad mental capabilities of even the not-so-smart part of humanity. Case in point: there are human savants in areas like playing chess or Go or recognizing text in many different spoken languages, but there are no human savants in the area of driving cars on public roads.
tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
> because they never tire and they never break traffic rules and thus never cause accidents No, because they never tire and almost never break traffic rules in dangerous ways, and thus cause accidents much less frequently than humans. Realistically, this means that instead of following the speed limit they'd follow speed limit + X, instead of keeping the prescribed distance they'd keep whatever distance human drivers typically maintain (while still keeping enough distance to react and stop), and it also means rolling through 4-way stops when they have sufficient confidence that it is safe to do so.

fallingknife 5y ago

Easy. There is no contradiction. If I can think faster, see better, and react faster than you, I can break exactly the same traffic laws as you and still be a much safer driver. Computers can do all of those things currently, and it is a matter of time before that is applied to driving.

Slartie 5y ago
> think faster Computers cannot "think" at any speed.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  Fine. "Plan" faster, if you want to be picky.

modeless 5y ago

It's not complicated. Traffic laws are not perfectly aligned with safety. Plenty of legal things are unsafe and plenty of things that are illegal are not always dangerous. This isn't surprising either. The process of making laws is political and politics are clearly not an ideal way to decide on a perfect and exhaustive and precisely detailed set of rules for anything. The laws do not constitute an algorithm for driving. They are necessarily simplified. And yes, a self driving car is going to need a set of driving rules that are much more detailed than anything humans have written down before.

wavefunction 5y ago
That seems like an appropriate generalized take on "laws" but in the specific case of ignoring a stop sign, I don't think it applies. Stop signs are a traffic control device that other drivers rely on to predict the intent of a vehicle approaching the stop sign.
- modeless 5y ago
  Stop signs are anything but "ignored". The actual behavior only applies when the car recognizes a stop sign and also assesses good visibility to ensure that no other cars are around, and the car still slows regardless. It's not just blowing through stop signs at top speed whenever it feels like it.
sutuplesu 5y ago
Pragmatic rulemaking for large numbers of people also needs to take into account the fact that the rule will naturally be viewed as a loose guideline by some people, and even as a thing to be defied for its own sake by others. Setting the limit stricter than the actual desired behavior can push average behavior closer to the target.
- modeless 5y ago
  Yes, that's a great reason why laws made for humans may not be perfect when applied strictly to machines.
- donatj 5y ago
  > Setting the limit stricter than the actual desired behavior can push average behavior closer to the target I hate this so much. Selective enforcement only serves to enable overzealous enforcement against unpopular and disenfranchised groups. One does one small thing wrong and they can then tack a large handful of other charges that would never otherwise be enforced. It's disgusting. Make the rules things that should actually be rules. Enforce them as written. The end.
- jackson1442 5y ago

deegles 5y ago

A human breaks the rolling stop rule on a case by case basis and is responsible for the consequences, while a rolling-stop-avoidance feature acts on your behalf and Tesla is responsible for it. An analogy might be that it's the difference between getting food poisoning from home cooking vs. from a restaurant. Even though you're consuming food in both instances, the liability is assigned differently.

lamontcg 5y ago
> A human breaks the rolling stop rule on a case by case basis and is responsible for the consequences Not really. You can fail to see a pedestrian and cripple them and you won't see a whole lot of consequences for your "accident" (negligence). Breaking rules on a case-by-case basis is also how the normalization of deviance occurs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ljzj9Msli5o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ljzj9Msli5o If you break rules when you think you don't need to follow them you'll find that you're not 99.9% perfect and you will inevitably cause a crash. If you follow the rules all the time you won't make that error. The reason why computers should ultimately replace human drivers is precisely because we're dangerously incompetent and overconfident and shouldn't be breaking any rules.
FireBeyond 5y ago
Oh, according to Tesla, not so. Their perspective is that you're absolutely and solely liable in either case. Their legal department works studiously to handwave away every marketing statement. "The driver is only in the seat for legal purposes. The car is driving itself." - "You are entirely responsible for driving the vehicle." "Use Summon to bring your car to you while dealing with a fussy child." - "Pay attention to vehicle at all times."

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

Traffic laws are draconian/inflexible because: 1) they have to be simple enough to fit in an AVERAGE DRIVER's head (it is a miracle to me that highways in cities are as functional and low-error as they are yes I know the death statistics on driving) 2) the law makers know the laws will be bent, so they set a baseline of VERY VERY SAFE and hope that most people only bend the law to VERY SAFE or at worst MOSTLY SAFE. It seems weird given how "bad" self-driving algs are right now, but with a detailed database of locations and context, I absolutely believe the "rolling stop" logic in the car would be safer and more effective than a human observing complete stops. I definitely do not agree with Tesla's vision-only no-location-context algorithm approach. Such a thing is a baseline, but if you know the location to where you are going, then route-specific data should be downloaded that has been optimized with multiple specific AI computation passes. That's how humans work: we are slow and dumb when we are driving in unfamiliar locations and routes, but for our commute routes we know where potholes are, cracks in the road, which lane to be in, dangerous sidestreets and intersections and congestion points, etc. So I disagree that L5 is impossible. Well, it depends on "way above human intelligence". I think what you are trying to say is you need a supersapient intellect with IQ 195. But AIs can be "dumb" but have access to a far larger memory space and database and respond to a far wider bandwidth of sensor information. The AI programs may not be solving Fermat's Last Theorem in the margin of a book, but they can be smarter in the sense that it's like having a million gnomes watching at once.

Slartie 5y ago
> Well, it depends on "way above human intelligence". I think what you are trying to say is you need a supersapient intellect with IQ 195. I'd say even "normal human intelligence" would suffice for at least getting L5 to work (maybe not with perfect safety and efficiency, but working at all). But you cannot remove the need for actual "intelligence" from the equation, and that's the problem: our AIs are not "intelligent" at all. They are idiot savants, and driving a car isn't exactly a problem where you need savant-like capabilities. It is a very general, broad-range problem, which is much more applicable for the broad mental capabilities of even the not-so-smart part of humanity. Case in point: there are human savants in areas like playing chess or Go or recognizing text in many different spoken languages, but there are no human savants in the area of driving cars on public roads.

tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago

> because they never tire and they never break traffic rules and thus never cause accidents No, because they never tire and almost never break traffic rules in dangerous ways, and thus cause accidents much less frequently than humans. Realistically, this means that instead of following the speed limit they'd follow speed limit + X, instead of keeping the prescribed distance they'd keep whatever distance human drivers typically maintain (while still keeping enough distance to react and stop), and it also means rolling through 4-way stops when they have sufficient confidence that it is safe to do so.