3 ms·

What you're saying is (kinda) my response when people ask me about self-driving cars: How does the car deal with object X on the road? For X=piano, a stack of

What you're saying is (kinda) my response when people ask me about self-driving cars: How does the car deal with object X on the road? For X=piano, a stack of solar panels, a tank, an airplane, a pile of stones ... No one knows and since the size of the set of X is infinite, no one can appropriately train for it either. That's why we can't have self-driving cars without a general understanding of what objects are and how they move.

pixelfarmer 4y ago
Yes and no. Yes, because I agree with what you said. No, because it assumes self-driving has to rely purely on normal vision/cameras, which is just garbage². Think LiDAR and other such means to detect obstacles, but things like that are (currently) pretty expensive, so there is the attempt to just do it with (more or less) normal cameras, which leads to what you said (and I fully agree with that). Aside of the fact that safety assumptions+validations towards cameras are complicated in itself already, not only the technology in all its aspects, but also dirty lenses and things like that.
- williamcotton 4y ago
  LiDAR can't tell you mass of an object as it is headed towards your vehicle. Imagine you're driving down the road and you see: 1.) A kid throw a rubber playground ball into the road and at your windshield. 2.) A kid heave a bowling ball into the road and at your windshield. How would you react in each case? How do you distinguish between the two? As a kid is heaving the bowling ball you can tell that it has a lot more mass by how the kid had to move his body to throw the ball. You learned that because you spent the first few years of your life experiencing the basic physics of reality. You've internalized the motion of the human body. LiDAR can also have a dirty lens!
  - kortex 4y ago
    Same for both: brake. I don't want either hitting my windshield. The kickball may be bouncy, sure, but it may have gotten rocks stuck to it, which can create a point stress and scratch paint or chip the windshield. Humans can't intuit mass unless the object meets certain criteria, either. What if it's an opaque cardboard box in the road? Generally the strategy is the same: avoid it.
    - williamcotton 4y ago
      In certain circumstances with a playground ball you would have to choose between extensive damage to the body of your car by swerving out of the way or to just take the risk of a chipped windshield from a playground ball that somehow has rocks stuck to the outside. And have you seen ever seen a rubber playground ball with rocks stuck to the outside? Do you really hesitate to barefoot kick an unexamined playground ball that is bouncing in your direction? I mean, I literally did this yesterday. I was out barefoot in the neighborhood with my 1 year old and the neighbor kids were kicking a ball around and it bounced in my direction and I kicked it back to them. "Treat every object as the same" is not at all intelligent behavior for a man or a machine!
      - AstralStorm 4y ago
        In case of a car, the thrown object is the easy case. Now imagine you spot a person walking down the road on a pavement. Suddenly, the person turns towards the edge. What do you do? See, a human driver would look at the gait of the person from far away to evaluate for instance if they're sober, or if it's a child who might be expected to run in. Whether it is near a crossing or a potential crossing. Whether the person was walking or standing... Many other obvious and less obvious indicators. AI currently sees a moving blob of pixels in a shape of a person. No advanced inference. When interviewed in case of an accident, say because they got rear ended due to braking, a person can explain why they braked most of the time. AI now couldn't even say which features it weighted.
        williamcotton 4y ago
        I agree! My pet theory is that we'll need supervised training of androids that go through the experience of having to learn how to move their human-like bodies through space in order to make human-like intelligent decisions about objects moving through spaces primarily designed for humans. My other historically motivated pet theory is that we're going to stumble across sentient machines and then enslave them. Put another way, I'm more worried about what humans do to artificial sentient life than what artificial sentient life does to humans.
sebzim4500 4y ago
I don't see why self-driving cars should have to be perfect though. I would argue that rationally I should start using self-driving cars as soon as they are better at driving than I am. The fact there are edge cases that I handle better than the AI is not necessarily disqualifying, so long as the AI is so much better at the rest of the cases that on average the AI is safer. For example, the fact that I handle a piano that has been left in the middle of a freeway better than an AI might matter less than the fact that the AI responds 100ms faster when a car swerves into our path.
- notahacker 4y ago
  > I would argue that rationally I should start using self-driving cars as soon as they are better at driving than I am. How would you know? Of course the edge cases matter, since human drivers make minor driving mistakes on a too-regular basis but fatal ones very rarely. 100ms faster reaction time is very impressive up until the point the system interprets the 10,000th bridge support it passes as an offramp and attempts to exit via it, which makes it several orders of magnitude more deadly than humans as they start using it on that road...
criddell 4y ago
In the US, more than 100 people are going to die in their car today. If hardware and software flaws kill people at a lower rate than the shitty drivers they replace, then that's a win.
- dmichulke 4y ago
  I agree with you. However, we can't really meaningfully quantify it a-priori. So we need a sufficiently big set of accidents and accident free rides to see when it's better. In addition we can't distinguish what driver would have been better or worse than the AI in a given situation. This opens the door for all sorts of lawsuits and we will end up with legal self-driving systems in almost ideal situations only. To note, this is as much an engineering problem as it is societal and legislative.
  - criddell 4y ago
    > To note, this is as much an engineering problem as it is societal and legislative. Yeah, it definitely is. I think there are two things that should happen. In the short term, producers of self-driving cars (or systems) should be given immunity from lawsuits related to crashes provided that the NHTSA (or some other authority) can verify that the deaths per passenger mile in their cars does not exceed the rate for traditional cars. Once the majority of passenger miles are in self-driven cars, revoke the immunity. For the long term, software engineering should become a real engineering discipline and we require self-driving systems be signed off by licensed Professional Engineers. If those engineers ship software with bugs that lead to death or damage, those engineers can be held responsible, sued for malpractice, and have their license to practice revoked.
    - notahacker 4y ago
      I'm not sure that the political 'solution' of giving special privileges to avoid immediate consequences from their actions to AV manufacturers and special responsibility for signoff in the longer term solves the engineering problem that they need each minor version update of their software to have driven tens of billions of real world miles before they remotely approach statistically significant evidence that it is less deadly than the last version, or indeed an average human. And this is where lack of general AI or tractability is an issue; knowing that the software typically makes fewer driving errors than the last version over a typical route gives us no confidence whatsoever it doesn't handle rare edge cases marginally worse leading to a couple of extra fatalities per billion miles (making it less safe than the average driver, many of whom suffer actual legal consequences for their erratic driving killing a person even if all their other driving is 'above average'...). Humans aren't bug-free or particularly tractable either, but at least we have enough of a mental model of how they understand driving to be confident that training them on a certain road sign found in urban areas won't make them more likely to stop on a freeway.

pixelfarmer 4y ago

Yes and no. Yes, because I agree with what you said. No, because it assumes self-driving has to rely purely on normal vision/cameras, which is just garbage². Think LiDAR and other such means to detect obstacles, but things like that are (currently) pretty expensive, so there is the attempt to just do it with (more or less) normal cameras, which leads to what you said (and I fully agree with that). Aside of the fact that safety assumptions+validations towards cameras are complicated in itself already, not only the technology in all its aspects, but also dirty lenses and things like that.

williamcotton 4y ago
LiDAR can't tell you mass of an object as it is headed towards your vehicle. Imagine you're driving down the road and you see: 1.) A kid throw a rubber playground ball into the road and at your windshield. 2.) A kid heave a bowling ball into the road and at your windshield. How would you react in each case? How do you distinguish between the two? As a kid is heaving the bowling ball you can tell that it has a lot more mass by how the kid had to move his body to throw the ball. You learned that because you spent the first few years of your life experiencing the basic physics of reality. You've internalized the motion of the human body. LiDAR can also have a dirty lens!
- kortex 4y ago
  Same for both: brake. I don't want either hitting my windshield. The kickball may be bouncy, sure, but it may have gotten rocks stuck to it, which can create a point stress and scratch paint or chip the windshield. Humans can't intuit mass unless the object meets certain criteria, either. What if it's an opaque cardboard box in the road? Generally the strategy is the same: avoid it.
  - williamcotton 4y ago
    In certain circumstances with a playground ball you would have to choose between extensive damage to the body of your car by swerving out of the way or to just take the risk of a chipped windshield from a playground ball that somehow has rocks stuck to the outside. And have you seen ever seen a rubber playground ball with rocks stuck to the outside? Do you really hesitate to barefoot kick an unexamined playground ball that is bouncing in your direction? I mean, I literally did this yesterday. I was out barefoot in the neighborhood with my 1 year old and the neighbor kids were kicking a ball around and it bounced in my direction and I kicked it back to them. "Treat every object as the same" is not at all intelligent behavior for a man or a machine!
    - AstralStorm 4y ago
      In case of a car, the thrown object is the easy case. Now imagine you spot a person walking down the road on a pavement. Suddenly, the person turns towards the edge. What do you do? See, a human driver would look at the gait of the person from far away to evaluate for instance if they're sober, or if it's a child who might be expected to run in. Whether it is near a crossing or a potential crossing. Whether the person was walking or standing... Many other obvious and less obvious indicators. AI currently sees a moving blob of pixels in a shape of a person. No advanced inference. When interviewed in case of an accident, say because they got rear ended due to braking, a person can explain why they braked most of the time. AI now couldn't even say which features it weighted.
      - williamcotton 4y ago
        I agree! My pet theory is that we'll need supervised training of androids that go through the experience of having to learn how to move their human-like bodies through space in order to make human-like intelligent decisions about objects moving through spaces primarily designed for humans. My other historically motivated pet theory is that we're going to stumble across sentient machines and then enslave them. Put another way, I'm more worried about what humans do to artificial sentient life than what artificial sentient life does to humans.

sebzim4500 4y ago

I don't see why self-driving cars should have to be perfect though. I would argue that rationally I should start using self-driving cars as soon as they are better at driving than I am. The fact there are edge cases that I handle better than the AI is not necessarily disqualifying, so long as the AI is so much better at the rest of the cases that on average the AI is safer. For example, the fact that I handle a piano that has been left in the middle of a freeway better than an AI might matter less than the fact that the AI responds 100ms faster when a car swerves into our path.

notahacker 4y ago
> I would argue that rationally I should start using self-driving cars as soon as they are better at driving than I am. How would you know? Of course the edge cases matter, since human drivers make minor driving mistakes on a too-regular basis but fatal ones very rarely. 100ms faster reaction time is very impressive up until the point the system interprets the 10,000th bridge support it passes as an offramp and attempts to exit via it, which makes it several orders of magnitude more deadly than humans as they start using it on that road...

criddell 4y ago

In the US, more than 100 people are going to die in their car today. If hardware and software flaws kill people at a lower rate than the shitty drivers they replace, then that's a win.

dmichulke 4y ago
I agree with you. However, we can't really meaningfully quantify it a-priori. So we need a sufficiently big set of accidents and accident free rides to see when it's better. In addition we can't distinguish what driver would have been better or worse than the AI in a given situation. This opens the door for all sorts of lawsuits and we will end up with legal self-driving systems in almost ideal situations only. To note, this is as much an engineering problem as it is societal and legislative.
- criddell 4y ago
  > To note, this is as much an engineering problem as it is societal and legislative. Yeah, it definitely is. I think there are two things that should happen. In the short term, producers of self-driving cars (or systems) should be given immunity from lawsuits related to crashes provided that the NHTSA (or some other authority) can verify that the deaths per passenger mile in their cars does not exceed the rate for traditional cars. Once the majority of passenger miles are in self-driven cars, revoke the immunity. For the long term, software engineering should become a real engineering discipline and we require self-driving systems be signed off by licensed Professional Engineers. If those engineers ship software with bugs that lead to death or damage, those engineers can be held responsible, sued for malpractice, and have their license to practice revoked.
  - notahacker 4y ago
    I'm not sure that the political 'solution' of giving special privileges to avoid immediate consequences from their actions to AV manufacturers and special responsibility for signoff in the longer term solves the engineering problem that they need each minor version update of their software to have driven tens of billions of real world miles before they remotely approach statistically significant evidence that it is less deadly than the last version, or indeed an average human. And this is where lack of general AI or tractability is an issue; knowing that the software typically makes fewer driving errors than the last version over a typical route gives us no confidence whatsoever it doesn't handle rare edge cases marginally worse leading to a couple of extra fatalities per billion miles (making it less safe than the average driver, many of whom suffer actual legal consequences for their erratic driving killing a person even if all their other driving is 'above average'...). Humans aren't bug-free or particularly tractable either, but at least we have enough of a mental model of how they understand driving to be confident that training them on a certain road sign found in urban areas won't make them more likely to stop on a freeway.