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> Software is not ready for that yet, I think. It will never happen. Robots will never have the intelligence to manage dangerous situations in the open world,

> Software is not ready for that yet, I think. It will never happen. Robots will never have the intelligence to manage dangerous situations in the open world, only in controlled environments. After a series of accidents passes the unforgivable threshold, certain levels of autonomous driving will be banned completely.

cowmoo728 4y ago
Maybe I'm too optimistic about self driving but it seems that a fail-safe default of "upon encountering an active emergency situation, stop at a reasonable distance away" is good enough and better than what a significant minority of human drivers do.
- ulizzle 4y ago
  Who are the significant minority? This is the same claim always given by the A.I boosters. Who sees firefighters fighting a fire and decides to just plow through and make matters worse? Because by "significant minority" what you are saying is that 2 or 3 out of 10 human drivers do this.
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    Exactly. The fact that some humans are drunks or psychopaths does not mean that AI mistakes are going to just be accepted. We send people to prison when they make those kinds of mistakes, what do we do when machine learning models kill while functioning entirely normally?
    - j16sdiz 4y ago
      Send a low level engineer to prison, of course.
      - ulizzle 4y ago
        That's actually not as wild as you think, because that's what happens when a building or bridge falls. The contractor that built the bridge, just like the company that designed it, the agency responsible for inspections and maintenance, etc, is also liable for damages, including prison if it's deemed so by the courts. Of course, software engineers get treated with kid's gloves, otherwise, everyone just freaks out and cries and cries, because their robotic utopia dreams are meaningless nonsense. Apparently, smart enough to code, but not smart enough to take responsibility for their actions.
    - hgsgm 4y ago
      > We send people to prison when they make those kinds of mistakes, what do we do when machine learning models kill while functioning entirely normally? Assess a massive fine. Money is lifeblood of a corpo.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  How do we know we can make the machines smart enough to detect the dangerous situations it is incapable of handling on its own? It's just a bit too perfect, no?
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    How do we know we can make humans do it?
- throwaway173738 4y ago
  If the dangerous situation is a flash flood or landslide stopping may be entirely the wrong response. The entire problem with these rigid failsafes and the whole idea of ai-driven cars is this idea that a programmer can predict every situation the car will encounter by extrapolating from the climate and road conditions in places like san francisco. One project I worked on was a safety critical system that almost got sunk by an overly-simplistic fault response. The device would reboot if it detected any sensor readings out of range. One day someone put a bag over it while it was delivering concentrated oxygen from the air and it rebooted because the ambient o2 sensor was reading well below what anyone could reasonably expect were the machine not enclosed. The patient had to be bagged while the machine came back on. You simply can’t predict every emergency situation and you most certainly shouldn’t assume a simplistic single-response model is enough to get the passenger to safety. Humans are really good at inferring correct behavior socially and it would be much better for an AV to watch what other drivers are doing to figure out how to handle unexpected situations. To the degree an AI-driven system is unable to do this it is completely unsuited for use on the road.
  - ElFitz 4y ago
    I think many of us aren’t used to working on anything actually critical to human lives. And I wouldn’t be surprised if quite a few of those who are have never actually fully understood what that means. I certainly don’t. But then, there’s a reason I stay away from life-critical systems.
- sempron64 4y ago
  What about a dangerous situation like a criminal trying to enter the vehicle where the right response is to avoid them and drive away?
Zircom 4y ago
I think never is a strong word. You genuine believe that we'll never create an equivalent or even comparable intelligence to our own artificially?
- colechristensen 4y ago
  I think there's no stage at which you trust such an entity with something like driving until it wants a robot to drive it's car so it can do other things than focus on driving. In the same way you don't trust a 5 year old with a loaded gun, you don't trust real synthetic intelligence with something like driving you safely. Not until it reaches the level where it wants equal rights, suffrage, and generally to be treated as alive. That's way off into science fiction land.
  - concordDance 4y ago
    I don't get why people think intelligence requires things like a desire for suffrage... There is no particular reason why advanced planning, modelling and pattern matching ability should need human-like goals. Heck, even counting votes would be quite impossible (how much divergence does a copy need before it gets its own vote? What it not all modules/nodes are copied?). Also, the anti-suffrage women seem to have been erased from history as far as popular discourse goes... guess the Women's National Anti-Suffrage League isn't taught in schools (support amongst women for extending the vote was very lukewarm, becoming a majority only after the law changed).
    - chongli 4y ago
      There is no particular reason why advanced planning, modelling and pattern matching ability should need human-like goals. Because driving requires the ability to understand what other drivers are doing. It requires a theory of mind, which means understanding human goals.
      - barelyauser 4y ago
        Moving from point A to point B is the goal of humans while they drive. You don't need "human like" understanding of human goals. You do need to account for the stupidity of people though.
alasdair_ 4y ago
It will definitely happen, and likely (>50%) within the next 10-15 years. We need true GAI to do this, of course, and the question is: will a "real" GAI be willing to drive a car? How much will we have to pay it?
- runarberg 4y ago
  GAI is a pipe dream. There is no technology that we can even conceive—let alone build in the next 10-15 years—of which passes as GAI. Our current AI is based on statistical inference, GAI will need to be able to do far more than infer from data and interpolate actions. No we will never have GAI. --- I know never is a long time, but I can comfortably predict this because there is not only technological problems with GAI, but also philosophical problems. The way we define intelligence is such that if we find or invent something that combats human intelligence we immediately redefine it to exclude that aspect.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    The question of if an AI can be regarded as a sentient being has already been debated ad nauseam in science fiction (e.g. Data in Star Trek). All that's needed is someone to achieve GAI at a supercomputer level. From then on, it's just a matter of scaling it down. Your iPhone has more compute power than a supercomputer 30 years ago, after all. And what's also a way to "cheat" is fusing computers and organic matter. Brain-in-a-vat style, or, for yet another Star Trek reference, Voyager's organic compute network (which IIRC even suffered a pathogen infection at one point). And that is definitely possible in the next 10-15 years. Give Musk's Neuralink enough apes to euthanize and it will get done.
    - chongli 4y ago
      Your iPhone has more compute power than a supercomputer 30 years ago, after all. In 30 years we will not have an iPhone-sized device with the power of today's supercomputers. Transistor scaling is in its final stages. We'll be lucky to get 2-3 more process nodes and that'll be it.
philliphaydon 4y ago
I donno the robots in terminator seemed to have some self awareness. Why can’t we apply the same to cars?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- morpheos137 4y ago
  Your comment, I am not sure if intentionally, encapsulates what is really going on with self driving cars. I.e. people assume fantasy or fiction can become reality with enough effort. This is not always true...
  - philliphaydon 4y ago
    > I.e. people assume fantasy or fiction can become reality with enough effort. This is not always true... More or less hit the nail on the head :)
shitlord 4y ago
People can't even manage dangerous situations all the time. They panic, they freeze, and they make mistakes. Driverless cars don't need to work perfectly all the time. They just need to injure fewer people than human drivers.

cowmoo728 4y ago

Maybe I'm too optimistic about self driving but it seems that a fail-safe default of "upon encountering an active emergency situation, stop at a reasonable distance away" is good enough and better than what a significant minority of human drivers do.

ulizzle 4y ago
Who are the significant minority? This is the same claim always given by the A.I boosters. Who sees firefighters fighting a fire and decides to just plow through and make matters worse? Because by "significant minority" what you are saying is that 2 or 3 out of 10 human drivers do this.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  Exactly. The fact that some humans are drunks or psychopaths does not mean that AI mistakes are going to just be accepted. We send people to prison when they make those kinds of mistakes, what do we do when machine learning models kill while functioning entirely normally?
  - j16sdiz 4y ago
    Send a low level engineer to prison, of course.
    - ulizzle 4y ago
      That's actually not as wild as you think, because that's what happens when a building or bridge falls. The contractor that built the bridge, just like the company that designed it, the agency responsible for inspections and maintenance, etc, is also liable for damages, including prison if it's deemed so by the courts. Of course, software engineers get treated with kid's gloves, otherwise, everyone just freaks out and cries and cries, because their robotic utopia dreams are meaningless nonsense. Apparently, smart enough to code, but not smart enough to take responsibility for their actions.
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    > We send people to prison when they make those kinds of mistakes, what do we do when machine learning models kill while functioning entirely normally? Assess a massive fine. Money is lifeblood of a corpo.
steveBK123 4y ago
How do we know we can make the machines smart enough to detect the dangerous situations it is incapable of handling on its own? It's just a bit too perfect, no?
- hgsgm 4y ago
  How do we know we can make humans do it?
throwaway173738 4y ago
If the dangerous situation is a flash flood or landslide stopping may be entirely the wrong response. The entire problem with these rigid failsafes and the whole idea of ai-driven cars is this idea that a programmer can predict every situation the car will encounter by extrapolating from the climate and road conditions in places like san francisco. One project I worked on was a safety critical system that almost got sunk by an overly-simplistic fault response. The device would reboot if it detected any sensor readings out of range. One day someone put a bag over it while it was delivering concentrated oxygen from the air and it rebooted because the ambient o2 sensor was reading well below what anyone could reasonably expect were the machine not enclosed. The patient had to be bagged while the machine came back on. You simply can’t predict every emergency situation and you most certainly shouldn’t assume a simplistic single-response model is enough to get the passenger to safety. Humans are really good at inferring correct behavior socially and it would be much better for an AV to watch what other drivers are doing to figure out how to handle unexpected situations. To the degree an AI-driven system is unable to do this it is completely unsuited for use on the road.
- ElFitz 4y ago
  I think many of us aren’t used to working on anything actually critical to human lives. And I wouldn’t be surprised if quite a few of those who are have never actually fully understood what that means. I certainly don’t. But then, there’s a reason I stay away from life-critical systems.
sempron64 4y ago
What about a dangerous situation like a criminal trying to enter the vehicle where the right response is to avoid them and drive away?

Zircom 4y ago

I think never is a strong word. You genuine believe that we'll never create an equivalent or even comparable intelligence to our own artificially?

colechristensen 4y ago
I think there's no stage at which you trust such an entity with something like driving until it wants a robot to drive it's car so it can do other things than focus on driving. In the same way you don't trust a 5 year old with a loaded gun, you don't trust real synthetic intelligence with something like driving you safely. Not until it reaches the level where it wants equal rights, suffrage, and generally to be treated as alive. That's way off into science fiction land.
- concordDance 4y ago
  I don't get why people think intelligence requires things like a desire for suffrage... There is no particular reason why advanced planning, modelling and pattern matching ability should need human-like goals. Heck, even counting votes would be quite impossible (how much divergence does a copy need before it gets its own vote? What it not all modules/nodes are copied?). Also, the anti-suffrage women seem to have been erased from history as far as popular discourse goes... guess the Women's National Anti-Suffrage League isn't taught in schools (support amongst women for extending the vote was very lukewarm, becoming a majority only after the law changed).
  - chongli 4y ago
    There is no particular reason why advanced planning, modelling and pattern matching ability should need human-like goals. Because driving requires the ability to understand what other drivers are doing. It requires a theory of mind, which means understanding human goals.
    - barelyauser 4y ago
      Moving from point A to point B is the goal of humans while they drive. You don't need "human like" understanding of human goals. You do need to account for the stupidity of people though.

alasdair_ 4y ago

It will definitely happen, and likely (>50%) within the next 10-15 years. We need true GAI to do this, of course, and the question is: will a "real" GAI be willing to drive a car? How much will we have to pay it?

runarberg 4y ago
GAI is a pipe dream. There is no technology that we can even conceive—let alone build in the next 10-15 years—of which passes as GAI. Our current AI is based on statistical inference, GAI will need to be able to do far more than infer from data and interpolate actions. No we will never have GAI. --- I know never is a long time, but I can comfortably predict this because there is not only technological problems with GAI, but also philosophical problems. The way we define intelligence is such that if we find or invent something that combats human intelligence we immediately redefine it to exclude that aspect.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  The question of if an AI can be regarded as a sentient being has already been debated ad nauseam in science fiction (e.g. Data in Star Trek). All that's needed is someone to achieve GAI at a supercomputer level. From then on, it's just a matter of scaling it down. Your iPhone has more compute power than a supercomputer 30 years ago, after all. And what's also a way to "cheat" is fusing computers and organic matter. Brain-in-a-vat style, or, for yet another Star Trek reference, Voyager's organic compute network (which IIRC even suffered a pathogen infection at one point). And that is definitely possible in the next 10-15 years. Give Musk's Neuralink enough apes to euthanize and it will get done.
  - chongli 4y ago
    Your iPhone has more compute power than a supercomputer 30 years ago, after all. In 30 years we will not have an iPhone-sized device with the power of today's supercomputers. Transistor scaling is in its final stages. We'll be lucky to get 2-3 more process nodes and that'll be it.

philliphaydon 4y ago

I donno the robots in terminator seemed to have some self awareness. Why can’t we apply the same to cars?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
morpheos137 4y ago
Your comment, I am not sure if intentionally, encapsulates what is really going on with self driving cars. I.e. people assume fantasy or fiction can become reality with enough effort. This is not always true...
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  > I.e. people assume fantasy or fiction can become reality with enough effort. This is not always true... More or less hit the nail on the head :)

shitlord 4y ago

People can't even manage dangerous situations all the time. They panic, they freeze, and they make mistakes. Driverless cars don't need to work perfectly all the time. They just need to injure fewer people than human drivers.