6 ms·

thanks. let's refashion our cityscape and our clothing to accommodate self driving cars. don't care about pedestrians. </sarcasm>

valine 4y ago
Not hitting pedestrians is already solved. Waymo couldn’t do driverless taxis rides if it wasn’t. I also have tesla’s fsd beta on my car, and it does a marvelous job not hitting people. If anything it’s way too cautious around pedestrians.
- jqpabc123 4y ago
  So if you're traveling at interstate speed and someone steps out too close to the roadway is it going to swerve into the next lane or slam on the brakes to avoid them? I recently had a situation where a large truck off to the right in front of me had a blowout and a large chunk of tire flew over into my lane. There were other cars traveling fast on both sides and behind me. What to do? I chose to maintain my speed and lane and just hit the tire. It caused some damage to the front of my car but in my split second judgment, this was the least bad option. What would your AI do?
  - eternityforest 4y ago
    It would have rear sensors. It knows something is behind at a fixed distance, so it must be matching your speed. If that distance is less than a safe reaction time, stopping is bad. It knows stuff is happening to the sides and swerving is bad. Unlike a human, it can slow down to hit the object at minimum speed, then speed up again just in time to not get hit even if the driver behind does nothing, at an optimized profile that gives the person behind time to not overreact and cause a pileup. Self driving also has the advantage that people might stay away. Unlike regular tailgating you have machinephobia that might actually make people not tail you.
    - jqpabc123 4y ago
      One of the most common accidents with "self driving" thus far has been the auto getting rear ended. Yes, this is undoubtedly the human drivers fault for following too closely but ... is it being precipitated by unexpected AI braking? In any case, the AI has demonstrated very limited ability to avoid these sort of collisions.
      - eternityforest 4y ago
        I wonder why there aren't more devices to give you an insurance discount for following to close. Or just to make an unsilencable beep if you try. In any case, some of those cases were probably due to lack of rear sensors, or lack of any sensors at all besides cameras, and lack of any deterministic code able to override the AI.
  - valine 4y ago
    Tesla has two branches of their self driving software, the fsd branch which is under active development and the highway branch which has not had major changes in 2 years. The highway software is much worse around pedestrians and obstacles than FSD. It’s hard to say how fsd would handle a situation like that on the highway, but based on my experience with fsd off highway it would never choose to hit a car, so very likely it would run over the debris.
dale_glass 4y ago
The argument as I take it is that AI image analysis could be avoided. We "just" use sensors to figure that it's on the road, it's not a car, so it's a potential obstacle regardless of what it might actually be. But I've got no idea how practically usable such an approach would be.
eternityforest 4y ago
We don't need to refashion clothing, radar sees us just fine. But I'm sure people would want radar reflectors just like they want high visibility clothing at night now, for extra assurance in edge cases, to be sure they always got priority over sensor artifact false positives.

valine 4y ago

Not hitting pedestrians is already solved. Waymo couldn’t do driverless taxis rides if it wasn’t. I also have tesla’s fsd beta on my car, and it does a marvelous job not hitting people. If anything it’s way too cautious around pedestrians.

jqpabc123 4y ago
So if you're traveling at interstate speed and someone steps out too close to the roadway is it going to swerve into the next lane or slam on the brakes to avoid them? I recently had a situation where a large truck off to the right in front of me had a blowout and a large chunk of tire flew over into my lane. There were other cars traveling fast on both sides and behind me. What to do? I chose to maintain my speed and lane and just hit the tire. It caused some damage to the front of my car but in my split second judgment, this was the least bad option. What would your AI do?
- eternityforest 4y ago
  It would have rear sensors. It knows something is behind at a fixed distance, so it must be matching your speed. If that distance is less than a safe reaction time, stopping is bad. It knows stuff is happening to the sides and swerving is bad. Unlike a human, it can slow down to hit the object at minimum speed, then speed up again just in time to not get hit even if the driver behind does nothing, at an optimized profile that gives the person behind time to not overreact and cause a pileup. Self driving also has the advantage that people might stay away. Unlike regular tailgating you have machinephobia that might actually make people not tail you.
  - jqpabc123 4y ago
    One of the most common accidents with "self driving" thus far has been the auto getting rear ended. Yes, this is undoubtedly the human drivers fault for following too closely but ... is it being precipitated by unexpected AI braking? In any case, the AI has demonstrated very limited ability to avoid these sort of collisions.
    - eternityforest 4y ago
      I wonder why there aren't more devices to give you an insurance discount for following to close. Or just to make an unsilencable beep if you try. In any case, some of those cases were probably due to lack of rear sensors, or lack of any sensors at all besides cameras, and lack of any deterministic code able to override the AI.
- valine 4y ago
  Tesla has two branches of their self driving software, the fsd branch which is under active development and the highway branch which has not had major changes in 2 years. The highway software is much worse around pedestrians and obstacles than FSD. It’s hard to say how fsd would handle a situation like that on the highway, but based on my experience with fsd off highway it would never choose to hit a car, so very likely it would run over the debris.

dale_glass 4y ago

The argument as I take it is that AI image analysis could be avoided. We "just" use sensors to figure that it's on the road, it's not a car, so it's a potential obstacle regardless of what it might actually be. But I've got no idea how practically usable such an approach would be.

eternityforest 4y ago

We don't need to refashion clothing, radar sees us just fine. But I'm sure people would want radar reflectors just like they want high visibility clothing at night now, for extra assurance in edge cases, to be sure they always got priority over sensor artifact false positives.