12 ms·

Given that often human-driven, or human-parked, cars create similar temporary obstacles, the most important question here is: does this happen more-often, or fo

by gojomo 4y ago

Given that often human-driven, or human-parked, cars create similar temporary obstacles, the most important question here is: does this happen more-often, or for longer-periods, with autonomous cars? I don't see the article, or quoted sources, even trying to make that comparison - so this is really only a half-story, compared to what's relevant. Further, given the remote-guidance possibilities with autonomous cars, it's plausible to think they'll eventually be far, far better than human-driven cars at making-way for higher-priority traffic. Human drivers sometimes fail-to-notice sirens or other high-priority demands on road capacity. But, an automated system could broadcast the planned-routes of dispatched priority vehicles to every autonomous car in the city, allowing the autonomous cars to preemptively clear paths, before it even becomes an issue of local-reasoning about an exceptional-situation.

flutas 4y ago
> Given that often human-driven, or human-parked, cars create similar temporary obstacles, the most important question here is: does this happen more-often, or for longer-periods, with autonomous cars? Honestly the article is pure tech-scare bait. It blames a car that stopped (while it was driving) when a truck was driving at it head on, but tries to glance over the fact that a (human driven) garbage truck is the reason the fire truck had to go into oncoming traffic in the first place. > a San Francisco Fire Department truck responding to a fire tried to pass a doubled-parked garbage truck by using the opposing lane.
- aetherson 4y ago
  What's your suggestion here? That garbage trucks don't pick up on streets without two lanes in each direction? The reality of driving is that there are a lot of these messy situations, and driverless cars need to be able to handle them.
  - flutas 4y ago
    > What's your suggestion here? That garbage trucks don't pick up on streets without two lanes in each direction? Maybe they don't block the travel lane for extended periods, just like any regular person is expected to not do. The article is basically saying "it's ok for the human driven car to do, but not the self driving car."
    - anyfoo 4y ago
      Garbage trucks (the article mentions the operator was working) and other service vehicles, including school busses, are expected to block travel lanes for extended periods and time, and humans are usually able to understand the situation and react accordingly in emergency situations.
    - rurp 4y ago
      Suppose the travel lane had been blocked by any other obstacle, say some large object fell into the road. The Cruise car would have failed in the exact same way, there just wouldn't be an extra human in the loop to blame.
    - mint2 4y ago
      Not familiar with sf or cities? Cars, delivery trucks, garbages trucks often stop in traffic lane for loading/unloading because there is literally nowhere else to stop. It’s annoying but expected and understandable. If they do that prior to sirens showing up there is no issue. They can’t predict the future.
  - rglullis 4y ago
    This may seem an wild idea for those in North America, but how about just eliminating car dependency in the first place?
    - throwaway92394 4y ago
      To put it mildly - this is unrealistic in the US except for major cities. Even then, depending on the city and where in the city, its going to be very difficult to convince and implement methods of cutting cars. While I think it's a good idea I just don't see this happening in the majority of the US other then major cities. In my state I just don't see how it would be possible given people commute 30+ miles regularly.
      - rglullis 4y ago
        Start with better zoning laws so that people are not pushed to live 15 miles away from the their work and general/light commerce areas. After that, just copy the playbook from the Netherlands. Amsterdam was very much like most big American cities until the 70s, their streets were steadily being redesigned for human scale and less car dependency. It can be done and it can be done easily if Americans stop believing in their Exceptionalism.
        Gordonjcp 4y ago
        > After that, just copy the playbook from the Netherlands The Netherlands has a ridiculously dense population and is completely flat. It's only a good model for other places with a ridiculous population density and pancake-flat geography. You couldn't apply the Netherlands model to, for example, Scotland.
        rglullis 4y ago
        Flatlands or not, it does not mean that cars are the only reasonable mode of transportation. Even if you insist of trying to solve a social problem with technology, it would make more sense for those living in hilly areas to push for electric bikes than self-driving cars.
  - anonporridge 4y ago
    They need to be able to handle messy situations at least as good as human drivers, which isn't necessarily a high bar. And importantly, unlike human drivers, autonomous cars will only get persistently better at handling these kinds of situations as they encounter more of them.
    - ganbatekudasai 4y ago
      Yes it is an impossibly high bar, and no they will not persistently get better unlike humans until they develop fully generalized AI. It's so an easy to just say human drivers aren't as good, but it's not grounded in any reality. Just take voice controlled assistants for example. We've made pretty big strides on them, haven't we? And yet an entirely unmotivated teenager who's doing badly at school working a 7-Eleven outperforms voice assistants by several orders of magnitudes, through the sheer wonder of context clues and general intelligence, no matter how dim you want to assert that teenager to be. I am proud of my voice assistant when it properly understood that I wanted to indeed set a timer for 50 minutes instead of 15 minutes, while any person would immediately understand what I mean even in a noisy environment just from why I'm setting the timer, and even fuzzily adjust their behavior based on what continues to happen. Anyone who claims automated cars can fully learn the arbitrarily complicated physical situations they have to navigate around is either disingenuous, or does not know how computers work.
    - kergonath 4y ago
      > They need to be able to handle messy situations at least as good as human drivers, which isn't necessarily a high bar. You might have an overly-optimistic opinion of what AI can do. Not to say that humans are not stupid quite often, but we are very far from having AIs that can be as good as a 4 years old child. AIs are good at what they know and what they can account for. So yes, they will get better at what they know, but they cannot, by design, get better at what they don’t. So there will always be situations where they will be unbelievably stupid because their designers did not think it would happen. There is no solution to that at the moment.
- anonporridge 4y ago
  God awful "journalism".
- mawise 4y ago
  I wouldn't point the blame to the garbage truck, but I agree with your description of it as scare-bait. I would gladly accept random 25-second delays from the fire department in exchange for eliminating the 30~40k American deaths[1] each year due to traffic fatalities. [1]: https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state-by-state https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...
- 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
  The garbage truck being double parked while it was collecting garbage is probably common. They probably are used to routing around them. I go around double parked cars in my city all the time. Sometimes drivers in both directions need to magically negotiate. The driverless car that doesn’t understand it has to safely get out of the way of a fire truck is the new part of this situation.
thr0wawayf00 4y ago
> does this happen more-often, or for longer-periods, with autonomous cars? How would one go about finding that data? Is there an authority that tracks how often and for how long emergency vehicles are impeded by human drivers? You might get something along the lines of average time to first response on the scene. > Human drivers sometimes fail-to-notice sirens or other high-priority demands on road capacity. But, an automated system could broadcast the planned-routes of dispatched priority vehicles to every autonomous car in the city, allowing the autonomous cars to preemptively clear paths, before it even becomes an issue of local-reasoning about an exceptional-situation. This doesn't comfort me. We already live in a society whose leadership doesn't believe in net neutrality, I have a hard time believing that an automated driving system that programmatically prioritizes vehicles on the road won't be co-opted in the same manner to benefit those with capital at the expense of those that don't.
- gojomo 4y ago
  > How would one go about finding that data? The autonomous car companies have a lot of the data, since they've run the same cars with drivers extensively. They can see the differences in rates-of-situations between cars-working-autonomously, and cars-with-drivers. Given the long periods of operating with autonomy-plus-backup-driver, they also have stats on how often an in-car driver overrides the car, and exactly why. Cities also can & should independently collect such data. Some big-city buses are already equipeend with a photo-ticketing mechanism for immediately recording, & citing, and cars illegally parked in their paths/pickup-area. Emergency vehicles should have the same. > This doesn't comfort me. Well, I can't make you comfortable if you've got free-floating paranoia about abuses by the powerful. There are many such abuses! But I can point out that the exact same rational comparative criteria should apply before making a tangible policy decision about the use of the shared roads. We shouldn't be ruled by imaginative worries extrapolated from other insecurities, but rather real measurements of how often a "send a request to clea roads for emergency vehicles" is broadcast, whether each use has a recorded & verified legitimate justification, whether such broadcasts save lives versus not-using-them, etc.
gmfawcett 4y ago
Wouldn't the apples-to-apples comparison be: how many human drivers have been in the path of a honking fire truck, yet refused to move? Including parked cars and other "obstacle" cases is imbalanced.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- gojomo 4y ago
  That's a fine micro-comparison to consider, alone! But also, what if this is a rare situation where the autonomous car completely fails compared to a human-in-seat? But, even this failure still resolves in under-a-minute. Or, worst-case, approximates the (quite-common) case of a breakdown or human-accident blocking traffic, in a manner that takes tens-of-minutes to resolve. In that case, who cares that we've found one narrow failure? Humans show impatience, poor-judgement, bad exception handling, recklessness, and so forth at ample rates across many road interactions. It's the net total of blockages by autonomous cars, in count & duration & severity, that matters, and specifically whether overall they do better or worse than human drivers. That net comparison is the most important consideration.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  Why would the only proper comparison be against a human driven car with a human in it rather than against all human driven car situations (including double parking)?
anyfoo 4y ago
The problem is that there are literally uncountably many situations that a human with "general intelligence" will understand and react to accordingly. Sometimes smoothly, sometimes less so. But a non-conscious automatic entity needs to have the required behavior programmed in explicitly. So yes, you might argue that for this particular situation, you "just" need to put in the proper programming and AI/ML training and then "maybe the car will notice more often than a human" as long as the situation is within very specific bounds. At least now that somebody made an article about it. But it does not change that the autonomous machine does not understand the complex world it is driving in in the slightest, and that, for example, swerving into an unmanned fruit stand without being able to brake is much better than swerving into an unmanned gas pump.
- robbrown451 4y ago
  "But it does not change that the autonomous machine does not understand the complex world it is driving in in the slightest, and that, for example, swerving into an unmanned fruit stand without being able to brake is much better than swerving into an unmanned gas pump." It seems it would have a way of prioritizing such things. That doesn't seem particularly complicated, to be honest... weighted decision making is certainly within its capacity. E.g. shopping cart has fewer "avoid hitting" points than stroller. It's not like every scenario has to be explicitly programmed in, nor does the program need to run some analysis on a detailed backstory to justify that a baby is more valuable than groceries. In effect, somebody -- probably not a programmer either -- just needs to enter some numbers into a spreadsheet. (yes there is complex programming that allows that to be manifested in the car's decisions, but the idea that programmers are themselves constantly making "moral calls" in the code, rather than the control data, is fiction) And if it does have such prioritization in its logic, I'd say yeah, it "understands" the world in that respect. Unless you have defined the word "understand" in some mystical way that precludes non-biological machines by definition.
  - anyfoo 4y ago
    > It seems it would have a way of prioritizing such things. You are putting the cart before the horse. The problem is not in prioritization, the problem is in having the correct ontology to even get to the "prioritization" stage. Does the car know what a fruit stand is? Does it know what a gas pump is? Does it know how the fruit stand relates to the gas pump in "expected outcome when being hit by a car"? If you say "we can program that in", read my post again.
InitialLastName 4y ago
> Human drivers sometimes fail-to-notice sirens or other high-priority demands on road capacity. In the lane directly in front of them, facing them, and honking?
- mirntyfirty 4y ago
  Proof by strawman imaginary counter-example
  - InitialLastName 4y ago
    The first 2 sentences of the article we're discussing: > On an early April morning, around 4 am, a San Francisco Fire Department truck responding to a fire tried to pass a doubled-parked garbage truck by using the opposing lane. But a traveling autonomous vehicle, operated by the General Motors subsidiary Cruise without anyone inside, was blocking its path. I don't think it's intolerable to use a straw-man argument when discussing scarecrows.
    - treesprite82 4y ago
      Autonomous car didn't seem to fail to notice the fire truck, just that it arguably took the wrong course of action by yielding to the right instead of reversing into the intersection.
  - tadfisher 4y ago
    This example is what we're discussing, e.g. the article.
- gojomo 4y ago
  > In the lane directly in front of them, facing them, and honking? Yes! In SF and other big free-country cities at 4am, some human drivers are high! Sometimes human drivers are passed-out or suffering a health crisis. Sometimes they've left their vehicles blocking key rights-of-way as they go somewher else for many minutes. In San Francisco, I've seen human-driver-unattended cars block light-rail trains many times. (I live not far from the N-Judah line, which also has a history of pedestrian bystanders physically moving cars to clear the road: https://www.munidiaries.com/2014/02/10/muni-riders-lift-car-off-of-n-judah-tracks-again/ https://www.munidiaries.com/2014/02/10/muni-riders-lift-car-...) We need to judge autonomous car suboptimalities against real human drivers, with all their failures - not against idealized, unerring humans-at-their-best.
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> the most important question here is: does this happen more-often, or for longer-periods, with autonomous cars? The nost important question is - how do you recover. With every autonomous system, when it does fail, it is often catastrophic because there is no recovery path. When a human clerk makes a mistake, you can talk to them, when a human driver stops in the middlw of the street, you can tall to them - when a computer crashes, you are tipically fucked.
- gojomo 4y ago
  As far as I can tell, none of the reported incidents in SF involved a "computer crash". Further, none have been as 'catastrophic' as other very-common accidents with human drivers. So yes, the details of recovery are important – but only in comparison to the human baseline. If incidents happen less often than with humans, and/or recovery happens as fast or faster than with humans, that's the relevant criteria. Also deserving weight: might autonomous cars avoid dangerous panics in some situations where humans sometimes panic & overreact? I've often seen human drivers make things worse by making an ill-advised impatient navigate-around. I've seen people trying, earnestly, to avoid a block or prior accident who – distracted, anxious – do something else wrong, causing another collision. Weigh all the rates & severities. Don't set policy based on selective worst-cases, including many imaginary/theoretical contrived cases.
SoftTalker 4y ago
> an automated system could broadcast the planned-routes of dispatched priority vehicles to every autonomous car in the city, allowing the autonomous cars to preemptively clear paths, before it even becomes an issue of local-reasoning about an exceptional-situation These cars can barely drive themselves with hyper-accurate maps on a sunny day without any surprises, and we want them to receive and evaluate emergency dispatches from some central system that doesn't yet exist, and respond accordingly? I think we're a ways away from that.
- mwint 4y ago
  That central system is already far more real than you would think. I was amazed to download the PulsePoint app and immediately see all the fire/EMS events in real-time, with data on which units are responding/there/leaving. It’s not a huge stretch.
- gojomo 4y ago
  The cars relying on external routing guidance, from cloud services similar to 'Google Maps' driving directions. An alert from emergency services can simply... remove roads from consideration, the same as is already routinely done when other accidents/traffic cause dynamic routing updates. So, you don't even need to upgrade the autonomous vehicles, you just change the other, existing, flexible, proven system for recommending routes.
kazinator 4y ago
You're missing the angle that when a human blocks passage for an extended period of time with their vehicle, it's almost always because the human is away from the vehicle: the human has deliberately parked where they are not supposed to and then walked away. When the computer does this, it's always "sitting" in the vehicle, and is not acting on a selfish intent: it's just carrying buggy/incomplete requirements. A human sitting in the vehicle is generally capable of responding to "sir, can you move your car?", or a horn from the fire engine or whatever.
- gojomo 4y ago
  But if the human-away-from-vehicle blocks things for minutes, while the temporarily-confused-AI has a remote-operator fix the issue in 30 seconds, or others in the area find another solution even faster than in the unattended-car scenario... isn't the advantage, given the actual weighted occurrences, still for the autonomous car?
  - kazinator 4y ago
    If there is a man behind the curtain, it doesn't meet any reasonable definition of "autonomous".
klyrs 4y ago
There was a double-parked garbage truck in the opposing lane of traffic. What makes this news is that the other party to the blockade was an autonomous car.

by gojomo 4y ago

flutas 4y ago

> Given that often human-driven, or human-parked, cars create similar temporary obstacles, the most important question here is: does this happen more-often, or for longer-periods, with autonomous cars? Honestly the article is pure tech-scare bait. It blames a car that stopped (while it was driving) when a truck was driving at it head on, but tries to glance over the fact that a (human driven) garbage truck is the reason the fire truck had to go into oncoming traffic in the first place. > a San Francisco Fire Department truck responding to a fire tried to pass a doubled-parked garbage truck by using the opposing lane.

aetherson 4y ago
What's your suggestion here? That garbage trucks don't pick up on streets without two lanes in each direction? The reality of driving is that there are a lot of these messy situations, and driverless cars need to be able to handle them.
- flutas 4y ago
  > What's your suggestion here? That garbage trucks don't pick up on streets without two lanes in each direction? Maybe they don't block the travel lane for extended periods, just like any regular person is expected to not do. The article is basically saying "it's ok for the human driven car to do, but not the self driving car."
  - anyfoo 4y ago
    Garbage trucks (the article mentions the operator was working) and other service vehicles, including school busses, are expected to block travel lanes for extended periods and time, and humans are usually able to understand the situation and react accordingly in emergency situations.
  - rurp 4y ago
    Suppose the travel lane had been blocked by any other obstacle, say some large object fell into the road. The Cruise car would have failed in the exact same way, there just wouldn't be an extra human in the loop to blame.
  - mint2 4y ago
    Not familiar with sf or cities? Cars, delivery trucks, garbages trucks often stop in traffic lane for loading/unloading because there is literally nowhere else to stop. It’s annoying but expected and understandable. If they do that prior to sirens showing up there is no issue. They can’t predict the future.
- rglullis 4y ago
  This may seem an wild idea for those in North America, but how about just eliminating car dependency in the first place?
  - throwaway92394 4y ago
    To put it mildly - this is unrealistic in the US except for major cities. Even then, depending on the city and where in the city, its going to be very difficult to convince and implement methods of cutting cars. While I think it's a good idea I just don't see this happening in the majority of the US other then major cities. In my state I just don't see how it would be possible given people commute 30+ miles regularly.
    - rglullis 4y ago
      Start with better zoning laws so that people are not pushed to live 15 miles away from the their work and general/light commerce areas. After that, just copy the playbook from the Netherlands. Amsterdam was very much like most big American cities until the 70s, their streets were steadily being redesigned for human scale and less car dependency. It can be done and it can be done easily if Americans stop believing in their Exceptionalism.
      - Gordonjcp 4y ago
        > After that, just copy the playbook from the Netherlands The Netherlands has a ridiculously dense population and is completely flat. It's only a good model for other places with a ridiculous population density and pancake-flat geography. You couldn't apply the Netherlands model to, for example, Scotland.
        rglullis 4y ago
        Flatlands or not, it does not mean that cars are the only reasonable mode of transportation. Even if you insist of trying to solve a social problem with technology, it would make more sense for those living in hilly areas to push for electric bikes than self-driving cars.
- anonporridge 4y ago
  They need to be able to handle messy situations at least as good as human drivers, which isn't necessarily a high bar. And importantly, unlike human drivers, autonomous cars will only get persistently better at handling these kinds of situations as they encounter more of them.
  - ganbatekudasai 4y ago
    Yes it is an impossibly high bar, and no they will not persistently get better unlike humans until they develop fully generalized AI. It's so an easy to just say human drivers aren't as good, but it's not grounded in any reality. Just take voice controlled assistants for example. We've made pretty big strides on them, haven't we? And yet an entirely unmotivated teenager who's doing badly at school working a 7-Eleven outperforms voice assistants by several orders of magnitudes, through the sheer wonder of context clues and general intelligence, no matter how dim you want to assert that teenager to be. I am proud of my voice assistant when it properly understood that I wanted to indeed set a timer for 50 minutes instead of 15 minutes, while any person would immediately understand what I mean even in a noisy environment just from why I'm setting the timer, and even fuzzily adjust their behavior based on what continues to happen. Anyone who claims automated cars can fully learn the arbitrarily complicated physical situations they have to navigate around is either disingenuous, or does not know how computers work.
  - kergonath 4y ago
    > They need to be able to handle messy situations at least as good as human drivers, which isn't necessarily a high bar. You might have an overly-optimistic opinion of what AI can do. Not to say that humans are not stupid quite often, but we are very far from having AIs that can be as good as a 4 years old child. AIs are good at what they know and what they can account for. So yes, they will get better at what they know, but they cannot, by design, get better at what they don’t. So there will always be situations where they will be unbelievably stupid because their designers did not think it would happen. There is no solution to that at the moment.
anonporridge 4y ago
God awful "journalism".
mawise 4y ago
I wouldn't point the blame to the garbage truck, but I agree with your description of it as scare-bait. I would gladly accept random 25-second delays from the fire department in exchange for eliminating the 30~40k American deaths[1] each year due to traffic fatalities. [1]: https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state-by-state https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...
2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
The garbage truck being double parked while it was collecting garbage is probably common. They probably are used to routing around them. I go around double parked cars in my city all the time. Sometimes drivers in both directions need to magically negotiate. The driverless car that doesn’t understand it has to safely get out of the way of a fire truck is the new part of this situation.

thr0wawayf00 4y ago

> does this happen more-often, or for longer-periods, with autonomous cars? How would one go about finding that data? Is there an authority that tracks how often and for how long emergency vehicles are impeded by human drivers? You might get something along the lines of average time to first response on the scene. > Human drivers sometimes fail-to-notice sirens or other high-priority demands on road capacity. But, an automated system could broadcast the planned-routes of dispatched priority vehicles to every autonomous car in the city, allowing the autonomous cars to preemptively clear paths, before it even becomes an issue of local-reasoning about an exceptional-situation. This doesn't comfort me. We already live in a society whose leadership doesn't believe in net neutrality, I have a hard time believing that an automated driving system that programmatically prioritizes vehicles on the road won't be co-opted in the same manner to benefit those with capital at the expense of those that don't.

gojomo 4y ago
> How would one go about finding that data? The autonomous car companies have a lot of the data, since they've run the same cars with drivers extensively. They can see the differences in rates-of-situations between cars-working-autonomously, and cars-with-drivers. Given the long periods of operating with autonomy-plus-backup-driver, they also have stats on how often an in-car driver overrides the car, and exactly why. Cities also can & should independently collect such data. Some big-city buses are already equipeend with a photo-ticketing mechanism for immediately recording, & citing, and cars illegally parked in their paths/pickup-area. Emergency vehicles should have the same. > This doesn't comfort me. Well, I can't make you comfortable if you've got free-floating paranoia about abuses by the powerful. There are many such abuses! But I can point out that the exact same rational comparative criteria should apply before making a tangible policy decision about the use of the shared roads. We shouldn't be ruled by imaginative worries extrapolated from other insecurities, but rather real measurements of how often a "send a request to clea roads for emergency vehicles" is broadcast, whether each use has a recorded & verified legitimate justification, whether such broadcasts save lives versus not-using-them, etc.

gmfawcett 4y ago

Wouldn't the apples-to-apples comparison be: how many human drivers have been in the path of a honking fire truck, yet refused to move? Including parked cars and other "obstacle" cases is imbalanced.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gojomo 4y ago
That's a fine micro-comparison to consider, alone! But also, what if this is a rare situation where the autonomous car completely fails compared to a human-in-seat? But, even this failure still resolves in under-a-minute. Or, worst-case, approximates the (quite-common) case of a breakdown or human-accident blocking traffic, in a manner that takes tens-of-minutes to resolve. In that case, who cares that we've found one narrow failure? Humans show impatience, poor-judgement, bad exception handling, recklessness, and so forth at ample rates across many road interactions. It's the net total of blockages by autonomous cars, in count & duration & severity, that matters, and specifically whether overall they do better or worse than human drivers. That net comparison is the most important consideration.
sokoloff 4y ago
Why would the only proper comparison be against a human driven car with a human in it rather than against all human driven car situations (including double parking)?

anyfoo 4y ago

The problem is that there are literally uncountably many situations that a human with "general intelligence" will understand and react to accordingly. Sometimes smoothly, sometimes less so. But a non-conscious automatic entity needs to have the required behavior programmed in explicitly. So yes, you might argue that for this particular situation, you "just" need to put in the proper programming and AI/ML training and then "maybe the car will notice more often than a human" as long as the situation is within very specific bounds. At least now that somebody made an article about it. But it does not change that the autonomous machine does not understand the complex world it is driving in in the slightest, and that, for example, swerving into an unmanned fruit stand without being able to brake is much better than swerving into an unmanned gas pump.

robbrown451 4y ago
"But it does not change that the autonomous machine does not understand the complex world it is driving in in the slightest, and that, for example, swerving into an unmanned fruit stand without being able to brake is much better than swerving into an unmanned gas pump." It seems it would have a way of prioritizing such things. That doesn't seem particularly complicated, to be honest... weighted decision making is certainly within its capacity. E.g. shopping cart has fewer "avoid hitting" points than stroller. It's not like every scenario has to be explicitly programmed in, nor does the program need to run some analysis on a detailed backstory to justify that a baby is more valuable than groceries. In effect, somebody -- probably not a programmer either -- just needs to enter some numbers into a spreadsheet. (yes there is complex programming that allows that to be manifested in the car's decisions, but the idea that programmers are themselves constantly making "moral calls" in the code, rather than the control data, is fiction) And if it does have such prioritization in its logic, I'd say yeah, it "understands" the world in that respect. Unless you have defined the word "understand" in some mystical way that precludes non-biological machines by definition.
- anyfoo 4y ago
  > It seems it would have a way of prioritizing such things. You are putting the cart before the horse. The problem is not in prioritization, the problem is in having the correct ontology to even get to the "prioritization" stage. Does the car know what a fruit stand is? Does it know what a gas pump is? Does it know how the fruit stand relates to the gas pump in "expected outcome when being hit by a car"? If you say "we can program that in", read my post again.

InitialLastName 4y ago

> Human drivers sometimes fail-to-notice sirens or other high-priority demands on road capacity. In the lane directly in front of them, facing them, and honking?

mirntyfirty 4y ago
Proof by strawman imaginary counter-example
- InitialLastName 4y ago
  The first 2 sentences of the article we're discussing: > On an early April morning, around 4 am, a San Francisco Fire Department truck responding to a fire tried to pass a doubled-parked garbage truck by using the opposing lane. But a traveling autonomous vehicle, operated by the General Motors subsidiary Cruise without anyone inside, was blocking its path. I don't think it's intolerable to use a straw-man argument when discussing scarecrows.
  - treesprite82 4y ago
    Autonomous car didn't seem to fail to notice the fire truck, just that it arguably took the wrong course of action by yielding to the right instead of reversing into the intersection.
- tadfisher 4y ago
  This example is what we're discussing, e.g. the article.
gojomo 4y ago
> In the lane directly in front of them, facing them, and honking? Yes! In SF and other big free-country cities at 4am, some human drivers are high! Sometimes human drivers are passed-out or suffering a health crisis. Sometimes they've left their vehicles blocking key rights-of-way as they go somewher else for many minutes. In San Francisco, I've seen human-driver-unattended cars block light-rail trains many times. (I live not far from the N-Judah line, which also has a history of pedestrian bystanders physically moving cars to clear the road: https://www.munidiaries.com/2014/02/10/muni-riders-lift-car-off-of-n-judah-tracks-again/ https://www.munidiaries.com/2014/02/10/muni-riders-lift-car-...) We need to judge autonomous car suboptimalities against real human drivers, with all their failures - not against idealized, unerring humans-at-their-best.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago

> the most important question here is: does this happen more-often, or for longer-periods, with autonomous cars? The nost important question is - how do you recover. With every autonomous system, when it does fail, it is often catastrophic because there is no recovery path. When a human clerk makes a mistake, you can talk to them, when a human driver stops in the middlw of the street, you can tall to them - when a computer crashes, you are tipically fucked.

gojomo 4y ago
As far as I can tell, none of the reported incidents in SF involved a "computer crash". Further, none have been as 'catastrophic' as other very-common accidents with human drivers. So yes, the details of recovery are important – but only in comparison to the human baseline. If incidents happen less often than with humans, and/or recovery happens as fast or faster than with humans, that's the relevant criteria. Also deserving weight: might autonomous cars avoid dangerous panics in some situations where humans sometimes panic & overreact? I've often seen human drivers make things worse by making an ill-advised impatient navigate-around. I've seen people trying, earnestly, to avoid a block or prior accident who – distracted, anxious – do something else wrong, causing another collision. Weigh all the rates & severities. Don't set policy based on selective worst-cases, including many imaginary/theoretical contrived cases.

SoftTalker 4y ago

> an automated system could broadcast the planned-routes of dispatched priority vehicles to every autonomous car in the city, allowing the autonomous cars to preemptively clear paths, before it even becomes an issue of local-reasoning about an exceptional-situation These cars can barely drive themselves with hyper-accurate maps on a sunny day without any surprises, and we want them to receive and evaluate emergency dispatches from some central system that doesn't yet exist, and respond accordingly? I think we're a ways away from that.

mwint 4y ago
That central system is already far more real than you would think. I was amazed to download the PulsePoint app and immediately see all the fire/EMS events in real-time, with data on which units are responding/there/leaving. It’s not a huge stretch.
gojomo 4y ago
The cars relying on external routing guidance, from cloud services similar to 'Google Maps' driving directions. An alert from emergency services can simply... remove roads from consideration, the same as is already routinely done when other accidents/traffic cause dynamic routing updates. So, you don't even need to upgrade the autonomous vehicles, you just change the other, existing, flexible, proven system for recommending routes.

kazinator 4y ago

You're missing the angle that when a human blocks passage for an extended period of time with their vehicle, it's almost always because the human is away from the vehicle: the human has deliberately parked where they are not supposed to and then walked away. When the computer does this, it's always "sitting" in the vehicle, and is not acting on a selfish intent: it's just carrying buggy/incomplete requirements. A human sitting in the vehicle is generally capable of responding to "sir, can you move your car?", or a horn from the fire engine or whatever.

gojomo 4y ago
But if the human-away-from-vehicle blocks things for minutes, while the temporarily-confused-AI has a remote-operator fix the issue in 30 seconds, or others in the area find another solution even faster than in the unattended-car scenario... isn't the advantage, given the actual weighted occurrences, still for the autonomous car?
- kazinator 4y ago
  If there is a man behind the curtain, it doesn't meet any reasonable definition of "autonomous".

klyrs 4y ago

There was a double-parked garbage truck in the opposing lane of traffic. What makes this news is that the other party to the blockade was an autonomous car.