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I can see how this kind of thing would not be in the self-driving training sets. But a person standing in the way should cause the vehicle to stop, right? Pede

I can see how this kind of thing would not be in the self-driving training sets. But a person standing in the way should cause the vehicle to stop, right? Pedestrian of any kind, including a firefighter in full gear. It's hard to speculate what happened without knowing the details, but I'm imagining a scenario where someone stood there to block the car's progress, and once they realized it's a dumb robot that will proceed as soon as the path is "clear", they did the next logical thing (which was to smash the robot).

atrettel 4y ago
There are a lot of these kind of edge cases that are just not going to end up in training data sets, at least not in sufficient quantities in sufficient time. That makes it hard for 100 percent data-driven approaches to adapt to all circumstances, since so much data is needed. A human can reason and understand odd circumstances without prior "training data". That's an advantage in my view. Current AI systems like these just respond to the data given to them --- garbage in, garbage out, as the saying goes. In my view, we should be worried not just about what data is missing but also what data is either unintentionally or even intentionally incorrect. One day a hacker will find a way to insert malicious data (in contrast to malicious code) and try to exploit these systems. That's just inevitable at this point. I hope that these autonomous systems end up with a lot more fail safes, since episodes like this one are only going to become more common, in my view.
- crooked-v 4y ago
  You might like the scifi story "Car Wars", which does some exploring of the subject: https://doctorow.medium.com/car-wars-a01718a27e9e https://doctorow.medium.com/car-wars-a01718a27e9e
Psychlist 4y ago
> Pedestrian of any kind, including a firefighter in full gear. You assume that a firefighter will be recognised as a person. Even if they're wearing breathing gear or carrying a sack etc. And would definitely respond appropriately to hand gestures, driving away from the fire rather than queuing neatly behind a fire appliance or something. For all the people concerned that a driverless car might stop somewhere it shouldn't, I'm way more concerned that the car will drive on when it really should stop. Especially given some of the insanity we've seen in Auckland with the current floods, the idea that a driverless car might not recognise someone standing waist deep in floodwaters or whatever, then just drive on through, doesn't excite me. There's too many cases where actual human drivers fail to respond appropriately even though we have 100-odd years of selection pressure encouraging them to.

atrettel 4y ago

There are a lot of these kind of edge cases that are just not going to end up in training data sets, at least not in sufficient quantities in sufficient time. That makes it hard for 100 percent data-driven approaches to adapt to all circumstances, since so much data is needed. A human can reason and understand odd circumstances without prior "training data". That's an advantage in my view. Current AI systems like these just respond to the data given to them --- garbage in, garbage out, as the saying goes. In my view, we should be worried not just about what data is missing but also what data is either unintentionally or even intentionally incorrect. One day a hacker will find a way to insert malicious data (in contrast to malicious code) and try to exploit these systems. That's just inevitable at this point. I hope that these autonomous systems end up with a lot more fail safes, since episodes like this one are only going to become more common, in my view.

crooked-v 4y ago
You might like the scifi story "Car Wars", which does some exploring of the subject: https://doctorow.medium.com/car-wars-a01718a27e9e https://doctorow.medium.com/car-wars-a01718a27e9e

Psychlist 4y ago

> Pedestrian of any kind, including a firefighter in full gear. You assume that a firefighter will be recognised as a person. Even if they're wearing breathing gear or carrying a sack etc. And would definitely respond appropriately to hand gestures, driving away from the fire rather than queuing neatly behind a fire appliance or something. For all the people concerned that a driverless car might stop somewhere it shouldn't, I'm way more concerned that the car will drive on when it really should stop. Especially given some of the insanity we've seen in Auckland with the current floods, the idea that a driverless car might not recognise someone standing waist deep in floodwaters or whatever, then just drive on through, doesn't excite me. There's too many cases where actual human drivers fail to respond appropriately even though we have 100-odd years of selection pressure encouraging them to.