5 ms·

The trend of autonomous cars is one of the things that I believe is not practical. Even the most sophisticated machine learning algorithm requires repetition an

The trend of autonomous cars is one of the things that I believe is not practical. Even the most sophisticated machine learning algorithm requires repetition and constant input to be optimized. But there is infinitely many variables when it comes to driving on a street level. Driving is intuitive on a city street. The scope of autonomous vehicles should be limited to places where there is clarity of transit and very few variables. I would be comfortable if a fleet of autonomous vehicles driving 200 miles/hour on a a dedicated side on a highway but not in a city or even an empty suburban neighborhood. I think for those intuitive situations the vehicles could even be driven remotely by a real person in a data center.

Gordonjcp 4y ago
> The scope of autonomous vehicles should be limited to places where there is clarity of transit and very few variables. This is precisely why Tesla Autopilot has such a good "safety record" - it only works on roads where people don't have accidents anyway. It works extremely well on motorways where everyone is travelling the same direction at the same speed and everything behaves extremely predictably. The moment anything crazy happens it hands off control to the human driver. People compare this "x thousand miles without an accident" behaviour to the sum total of human driving, including twisty country roads and cities, but it's not a fair comparison.
ben174 4y ago
This seems to warrant repeating every time this is brought up: It just needs to be 1% better than human drivers. If the net result is 1% less tragedies - sign me up. If it's better than the alternative, I'm in.
- mtoner23 4y ago
  if you want 1% fewer driving tragedies, we should all just drive less
  - LadyCailin 4y ago
    That has downsides. Autonomous driving needs to be 1% net better. Less driving has up sides, but also downsides, and it’s not clear how to do a net comparison there. But yeah, if it is net positive, we should do that too.
- Spoom 4y ago
  That's the engineering argument. The societal expectation, however, is that it's 100% better than human drivers, as in, it must not cause harm, ever. The reality is that the vast majority of folks won't accept autonomous vehicles if they don't meet this high bar. Opinions my own.
- yupper32 4y ago
  Most people (including me) think they're better drivers than average. I think I'm probably in the top 10%, at least. Whether or not that's actually true doesn't matter for my argument. All that considered, I need autonomous vehicles to be MUCH better than average human drivers to consider riding in them. They need to be better than I think I am, so maybe top 5% or so of talent on the road. 1% better than the average human is still an awful driver IMO.
- axg11 4y ago
  This is an unrealistic take. There are many other differences that you need to consider. For example, what is the nature of that 1% difference in tragedies? Perhaps there's a 1% improvement in overall fatalities but also an increase in very gruesome accidents. Technologies that are rapidly adopted often need to be 10x better than existing solutions, otherwise adoption is a slower uphill battle.
- kergonath 4y ago
  Better regulations and fewer huge SUVs or trucks with massive blind spots would result in more than a 1% drop. Better public transport would, as well. Sure, it’s not shiny new technologies…
- simion314 4y ago
  >It just needs to be 1% better than human drivers. If the net result is 1% less tragedies - sign me up. Say you have a child and want to send him to school, would you chose 1 drive him yourself, knowing you have 10 years of experience with zero accidents and you are responsible and care for your child 2 use a lottery that will give you a random driver, could be a 16 years old teen with 1 day experience, could be a 80 years old elder or a drunk or tired dude or a super driver 3 use an AI , is better then the drunk dude , 1% better then the teen but worse then you and much worse then a professional driver I am curious why would chose 2 or 3 if 1 is an option. 3
  - colejohnson66 4y ago
    Not everyone has option 1 available to them. It’s why school buses exist.
    - simion314 4y ago
      >Not everyone has option 1 available to them. It’s why school buses exist. - Not everyone has access to school bus options - not everyone can drive - not everyone owns a self driving car .... I would prefer if we stay on topic and answer at in Hypothetical question. Or if you have a bias, let use a different domain Your child is ill and you call for a doctor, but in this universe doctors are a lot of time drunk or are allowed to practice with zero experience, whyat do you chose 1 you call your family doctor that you trust and is not a drunk 2 you call the AI doctor that is terrible compared to a normal doctor but is better then the drunk doctors 3 you realize that it would be so much cheaper then creating an army of AI robot doctors to just fix the problem with drunk doctors, and maybe the fact you are an AI enthusiast won't prevent you think that comparing an AI with a drunk doctor is stupid, that we should have better stats then is better then the worse.
      - colejohnson66 4y ago
        Chill out. I never said I was an AI enthusiast. Maybe don’t assume things because someone made a small critique about your comment? I was simply responding to your question of why people choose 2 or 3 when 1 is an option. Because it’s not always an option. You even admit that at the top of your comment. Which leads me to ask: what are you trying to prove here?
bsder 4y ago
> Driving is intuitive on a city street. Driving on a city street is habitual--not intuitive. Humans memorize their driving area and then act within that. Put a new stop sign onto a road and watch the circus.
piperswe 4y ago
"Places where there is clarity of transit and very few variables" sounds like railroads. High-speed rail is, in my opinion, a much more equitable and efficient use of infrastructure than letting private vehicles only owned by those who can afford to buy them fill up a private lane.
krisoft 4y ago
> Even the most sophisticated machine learning algorithm requires repetition and constant input to be optimized. Self driving cars are not machine learning algorithms. They have machine learning parts in their programing but nobody reputable would hook up a neural network to the pedals and the steering and just let it rip. You simply have a bad mental model of how these machines are built and it shows. There are three big questions every self driving car has to answer: Where I am? What is around me? What to do next? To reliably answer the “where” question you don’t just trust one sensor. You use multiple sensors. Yes, that includes a gps, but also cameras and a lidar and a radar too. It is not machine learning. If you are interested how this is done you need to look up topics like iterative closest point matching, multi-view geometry, kalman-filtering, bag-of-visual-words representation, and bayesian reasoning. To reliably answer what is around the car you likewise use all of your sensors. Yes, this has bits of machine learning in it, but it is not only machine learning. You can and do a lot of model-free perception. For example if your laser is bouncing back from somewhere then there is something there. There is a lot of published literature on sensor fusion and tracking and prediction. These algorithms are not magic, and they are not machine learning. They are just what you also would come up with if you would think about the problem hard for 8 hours a day for tens of years. Then there is the planning. These are not machine learning based algorithms. They usually generate a bunch of different plans, then cull the unsafe ones (for example the ones which would collide with a tracked object) and then you rate the plans according to some heuristic and choose the best, then repeat. It is not magic. There is a serious craft and engineering to it. You can read a good introduction to different approaches in Lavalle’s Planning Algorithms book if you are so interested.
dylan604 4y ago
>could even be driven remotely by a real person in a data center. doesn't this totally defeat the purpose of driverless cars? a remotely operated car is not the same thing as driverless. the company operating the car would still have to pay for a human to do work. also, as cool as remotely operated sounds, there are so many ways that is worse than a human in the car. for starters, peripheral vision is lost in remote.
mr_toad 4y ago
> I think for those intuitive situations the vehicles could even be driven remotely by a real person in a data center. They already are.

Gordonjcp 4y ago

> The scope of autonomous vehicles should be limited to places where there is clarity of transit and very few variables. This is precisely why Tesla Autopilot has such a good "safety record" - it only works on roads where people don't have accidents anyway. It works extremely well on motorways where everyone is travelling the same direction at the same speed and everything behaves extremely predictably. The moment anything crazy happens it hands off control to the human driver. People compare this "x thousand miles without an accident" behaviour to the sum total of human driving, including twisty country roads and cities, but it's not a fair comparison.

ben174 4y ago

This seems to warrant repeating every time this is brought up: It just needs to be 1% better than human drivers. If the net result is 1% less tragedies - sign me up. If it's better than the alternative, I'm in.

mtoner23 4y ago
if you want 1% fewer driving tragedies, we should all just drive less
- LadyCailin 4y ago
  That has downsides. Autonomous driving needs to be 1% net better. Less driving has up sides, but also downsides, and it’s not clear how to do a net comparison there. But yeah, if it is net positive, we should do that too.
Spoom 4y ago
That's the engineering argument. The societal expectation, however, is that it's 100% better than human drivers, as in, it must not cause harm, ever. The reality is that the vast majority of folks won't accept autonomous vehicles if they don't meet this high bar. Opinions my own.
yupper32 4y ago
Most people (including me) think they're better drivers than average. I think I'm probably in the top 10%, at least. Whether or not that's actually true doesn't matter for my argument. All that considered, I need autonomous vehicles to be MUCH better than average human drivers to consider riding in them. They need to be better than I think I am, so maybe top 5% or so of talent on the road. 1% better than the average human is still an awful driver IMO.
axg11 4y ago
This is an unrealistic take. There are many other differences that you need to consider. For example, what is the nature of that 1% difference in tragedies? Perhaps there's a 1% improvement in overall fatalities but also an increase in very gruesome accidents. Technologies that are rapidly adopted often need to be 10x better than existing solutions, otherwise adoption is a slower uphill battle.
kergonath 4y ago
Better regulations and fewer huge SUVs or trucks with massive blind spots would result in more than a 1% drop. Better public transport would, as well. Sure, it’s not shiny new technologies…
simion314 4y ago
>It just needs to be 1% better than human drivers. If the net result is 1% less tragedies - sign me up. Say you have a child and want to send him to school, would you chose 1 drive him yourself, knowing you have 10 years of experience with zero accidents and you are responsible and care for your child 2 use a lottery that will give you a random driver, could be a 16 years old teen with 1 day experience, could be a 80 years old elder or a drunk or tired dude or a super driver 3 use an AI , is better then the drunk dude , 1% better then the teen but worse then you and much worse then a professional driver I am curious why would chose 2 or 3 if 1 is an option. 3
- colejohnson66 4y ago
  Not everyone has option 1 available to them. It’s why school buses exist.
  - simion314 4y ago
    >Not everyone has option 1 available to them. It’s why school buses exist. - Not everyone has access to school bus options - not everyone can drive - not everyone owns a self driving car .... I would prefer if we stay on topic and answer at in Hypothetical question. Or if you have a bias, let use a different domain Your child is ill and you call for a doctor, but in this universe doctors are a lot of time drunk or are allowed to practice with zero experience, whyat do you chose 1 you call your family doctor that you trust and is not a drunk 2 you call the AI doctor that is terrible compared to a normal doctor but is better then the drunk doctors 3 you realize that it would be so much cheaper then creating an army of AI robot doctors to just fix the problem with drunk doctors, and maybe the fact you are an AI enthusiast won't prevent you think that comparing an AI with a drunk doctor is stupid, that we should have better stats then is better then the worse.
    - colejohnson66 4y ago
      Chill out. I never said I was an AI enthusiast. Maybe don’t assume things because someone made a small critique about your comment? I was simply responding to your question of why people choose 2 or 3 when 1 is an option. Because it’s not always an option. You even admit that at the top of your comment. Which leads me to ask: what are you trying to prove here?

bsder 4y ago

> Driving is intuitive on a city street. Driving on a city street is habitual--not intuitive. Humans memorize their driving area and then act within that. Put a new stop sign onto a road and watch the circus.

piperswe 4y ago

"Places where there is clarity of transit and very few variables" sounds like railroads. High-speed rail is, in my opinion, a much more equitable and efficient use of infrastructure than letting private vehicles only owned by those who can afford to buy them fill up a private lane.

krisoft 4y ago

> Even the most sophisticated machine learning algorithm requires repetition and constant input to be optimized. Self driving cars are not machine learning algorithms. They have machine learning parts in their programing but nobody reputable would hook up a neural network to the pedals and the steering and just let it rip. You simply have a bad mental model of how these machines are built and it shows. There are three big questions every self driving car has to answer: Where I am? What is around me? What to do next? To reliably answer the “where” question you don’t just trust one sensor. You use multiple sensors. Yes, that includes a gps, but also cameras and a lidar and a radar too. It is not machine learning. If you are interested how this is done you need to look up topics like iterative closest point matching, multi-view geometry, kalman-filtering, bag-of-visual-words representation, and bayesian reasoning. To reliably answer what is around the car you likewise use all of your sensors. Yes, this has bits of machine learning in it, but it is not only machine learning. You can and do a lot of model-free perception. For example if your laser is bouncing back from somewhere then there is something there. There is a lot of published literature on sensor fusion and tracking and prediction. These algorithms are not magic, and they are not machine learning. They are just what you also would come up with if you would think about the problem hard for 8 hours a day for tens of years. Then there is the planning. These are not machine learning based algorithms. They usually generate a bunch of different plans, then cull the unsafe ones (for example the ones which would collide with a tracked object) and then you rate the plans according to some heuristic and choose the best, then repeat. It is not magic. There is a serious craft and engineering to it. You can read a good introduction to different approaches in Lavalle’s Planning Algorithms book if you are so interested.

dylan604 4y ago

>could even be driven remotely by a real person in a data center. doesn't this totally defeat the purpose of driverless cars? a remotely operated car is not the same thing as driverless. the company operating the car would still have to pay for a human to do work. also, as cool as remotely operated sounds, there are so many ways that is worse than a human in the car. for starters, peripheral vision is lost in remote.

mr_toad 4y ago

> I think for those intuitive situations the vehicles could even be driven remotely by a real person in a data center. They already are.