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I don’t think I’m moving the goalposts - we were discussing whether autonomous driving (which I take to mean L4-L5 driving without the need for a human in the l

by jowday 5y ago

I don’t think I’m moving the goalposts - we were discussing whether autonomous driving (which I take to mean L4-L5 driving without the need for a human in the loop) is possible without geofences or HD maps. “Edge cases in some random small town” are exactly the sort of thing you need to worry about without a geofence. Not to mention these sorts of edge cases are way more common in large cities than small towns - one of the examples I gave was down a central avenue in San Francisco. >They can always get updates on what some random sign in some random location means as long as their safe and don’t block traffic that’s all that’s needed. What if it truly fails to parse the sign accurately and does something illegal or dangerous? What does sending an update out look like? Does a human take a look at a crop of the sign and review it? Why not just map it in that case?

Retric 5y ago
> edge cases are way more common It’s not a question of parsing a known sign, even extremely complex rules can be encoded. Further that process can take place from a photo of the sign uploaded by the car to then be encoded by the rules. The general case is stopping and having a remote driver slowly tell the car what to do. An unknown sign in a place without cellphone reception is about the only case where it really need to just figure it out on it’s own rather than simply avoid causing an accident. > What if it truly fails to parse a sign accurately and does something illegal or dangerous? Not much, people regularly disobey traffic signs especially ones with complex instructions. Don’t hit stuff or jump in front of another car is generally enough.
- jowday 5y ago
  > Further that process can take place from a photo of the sign uploaded by the car to then be encoded by the rules. The general case is stopping and having a remote driver slowly tell the car what to do. So you’re now agreeing that you need some level of remote support to handle edge cases like this? >An unknown sign in a place without cellphone reception is about the only case where it really need to just figure it out on it’s own rather than simply avoid causing an accident. Yes, and again, this is the sort of thing you actually need to worry about when trying to come up with generalized self driving solution. > Not much, people regularly disobey traffic signs especially ones with complex instructions. Don’t hit stuff or jump in front of another car is generally enough. What if it misinterprets a one way sign at night when there’s no other signal that it’s turning on to a one way lane and it suddenly finds itself traveling opposite the direction of traffic for a long period before encountering another car? You have to consider all of these edge cases when talking about a generalized solution. Maybe you still disagree with me in sprit, but do you see how when we really look at edge cases how you have to fall back to some level of remote operation or mapping?
  - Retric 5y ago
    > So you’re now agreeing that you need some level of remote support to handle edge cases like this? As a bootstrap step yes, after that no just regular updates for new traffic rules and such. You can’t make a purely offline self driving system that doesn’t get updated for 30 years because laws change. But presumably a non geofenced self driving car is going to be tested by driving on every road either directly or via someone’s mapping project. > What if it misinterprets a one way sign at night when there’s no other signal that it’s turning on to a one way lane and it suddenly finds itself traveling opposite the direction of traffic for a long period before encountering another car? You have to consider all of these edge cases when talking about a generalized solution. You mean in some location without maps? There are a finite number of roads in the world and they don’t change that quickly. If you’re worried that the AI is going to say end up on an ice road that melts, sure that’s the kind of thing that happens once. But the threshold isn’t perfection it’s ~30,000 dead people per year in the US. Beat that and you win.

by jowday 5y ago

Retric 5y ago

> edge cases are way more common It’s not a question of parsing a known sign, even extremely complex rules can be encoded. Further that process can take place from a photo of the sign uploaded by the car to then be encoded by the rules. The general case is stopping and having a remote driver slowly tell the car what to do. An unknown sign in a place without cellphone reception is about the only case where it really need to just figure it out on it’s own rather than simply avoid causing an accident. > What if it truly fails to parse a sign accurately and does something illegal or dangerous? Not much, people regularly disobey traffic signs especially ones with complex instructions. Don’t hit stuff or jump in front of another car is generally enough.

jowday 5y ago
> Further that process can take place from a photo of the sign uploaded by the car to then be encoded by the rules. The general case is stopping and having a remote driver slowly tell the car what to do. So you’re now agreeing that you need some level of remote support to handle edge cases like this? >An unknown sign in a place without cellphone reception is about the only case where it really need to just figure it out on it’s own rather than simply avoid causing an accident. Yes, and again, this is the sort of thing you actually need to worry about when trying to come up with generalized self driving solution. > Not much, people regularly disobey traffic signs especially ones with complex instructions. Don’t hit stuff or jump in front of another car is generally enough. What if it misinterprets a one way sign at night when there’s no other signal that it’s turning on to a one way lane and it suddenly finds itself traveling opposite the direction of traffic for a long period before encountering another car? You have to consider all of these edge cases when talking about a generalized solution. Maybe you still disagree with me in sprit, but do you see how when we really look at edge cases how you have to fall back to some level of remote operation or mapping?
- Retric 5y ago
  > So you’re now agreeing that you need some level of remote support to handle edge cases like this? As a bootstrap step yes, after that no just regular updates for new traffic rules and such. You can’t make a purely offline self driving system that doesn’t get updated for 30 years because laws change. But presumably a non geofenced self driving car is going to be tested by driving on every road either directly or via someone’s mapping project. > What if it misinterprets a one way sign at night when there’s no other signal that it’s turning on to a one way lane and it suddenly finds itself traveling opposite the direction of traffic for a long period before encountering another car? You have to consider all of these edge cases when talking about a generalized solution. You mean in some location without maps? There are a finite number of roads in the world and they don’t change that quickly. If you’re worried that the AI is going to say end up on an ice road that melts, sure that’s the kind of thing that happens once. But the threshold isn’t perfection it’s ~30,000 dead people per year in the US. Beat that and you win.