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> I don’t understand why anyone could think that it would be easy or fast. Because progress went so quickly from "cars are entirely human operated" to "cars ca

> I don’t understand why anyone could think that it would be easy or fast. Because progress went so quickly from "cars are entirely human operated" to "cars can nearly drive themselves", so it's assumed that progress will continue at that pace. We've made this mistake time and time again before self driving cars and evidently continue to make that mistake now

chii 3y ago
as a percentage of accidents, i would imagine autodriving cars are less than human driven cars. It's still flawed atm, but surely it will continue to improve. Not to mention that the average human is already terrible a driver, and replacing them with autodriving surely nets more benefits than the flaws of autodriving - if not at this moment, then very soon in the future.
- resolutebat 3y ago
  The problem is that whenever a human driven car reverses over a toddler or wraps around a telephone pole or veers across lanes into oncoming traffic or blows through a red light and T-bones someone, nobody cares because it happens all the time, but when a self-driving car does, murderbot outrage makes frontpage news all over the world. So even though we rationally should immediately go all in on automation as soon as self-driving cars are on average safer than human ones, realistically this is politically completely unpalatable until they reach a much, much higher, possibly unachievable, standard. It's not "fair" that this is the case, but unfortunately humans are really bad at accurately assessing the risks of low probability incidents (eg. dying from terrorism), especially if they get a lot of media airtime.
  - shash 3y ago
    The liability problem is important here - when someone reverses over a toddler, someone gets sued. Or they lose their license. Or $CONSEQUENCE. What's the consequence in an autonomous vehicle? Does only _that_ vehicle lose its license? Does every vehicle with that particular revision of the ML model? The whole fleet? The next problem is, you're assuming that the autonomous vehicle is going to be _better_ than the human; it may have more information, may be faster in its response time, but maybe in a chaotic environment, that doesn't translate into drastically improved safety. Unless of course, _everything_ on the road is self-driving (meaning, zero pedestrians, zero other vehicles, no animals,...) which is going to run into chicken-egg...
    - chii 3y ago
      > you're assuming that the autonomous vehicle is going to be _better_ than the human i think this is already proven true empiracally with the existing milage and rates of accidents. https://thedriven.io/2023/04/27/accident-rate-for-tesla-80-lower-than-us-average-with-fsd/ https://thedriven.io/2023/04/27/accident-rate-for-tesla-80-l... (or from here https://www.carscoops.com/2023/03/tesla-says-its-autonomous-systems-are-safer-than-a-human-but-is-it-really-so/ https://www.carscoops.com/2023/03/tesla-says-its-autonomous-..., which quotes various sources of data, unless tesla is lying about their FSD data they reported). Humans just don't believe in autodriving, and there's still the problem of liability assignment - both aren't a technology problem imho, but a human impediment to adoption.
      - wartijn_ 3y ago
        That’s not data about autonomous vehicles. Tesla’s fsd is a feature where the car drives itself during some parts of a trip. The driver is always supposed to keep paying attention and sometimes take over control. To show that autonomous cars are better drivers than humans you need data from autonomous cars in the same situation as human drivers. And that data doesn’t exist (yet), because truly autonomous cars don’t drive in all places and situations where humans do.
      - shash 3y ago
        The second of your links says "According to the folks over at Jalopnik though, the bar for “safer than a human” is probably a lot higher than one might guess. In fact, after crunching numbers from the NHTSA, it seems as though drivers avoid crashes 99.999819 percent of the time. If Tesla’s data is to be believed, it’s already surpassed that." Are you even making a statistically significant comparison at this point? And there are these also: https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/25/23737972/tesla-whistleblower-leak-fsd-complaints-self-driving https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/25/23737972/tesla-whistleblo... Quite apart from the fact that this isn't actual self-driving that's being measured (as sibling points out).
  - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
    > but when a self-driving car does, murderbot outrage makes frontpage news all over the world. It's not "fair" that this is the case, It is exactly fair - if a drunk guy in Australia is driving one car. If he hits a child, that has no relevance to my life in EU. He will be arrested and dealt with. But Tesla autopilot drives millions if cars. It if hits a child in Australia, it does not get arrested. Its also gonna drive over my children in EU.
    - chii 3y ago
      > Its also gonna drive over my children in EU. a false equivalency. The same type of bozo that reverses into a child also exists in europe.
      - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
        Himans have separate brains. The Aitopilot runs same code. If autopilot has error in the code that makes it drive off cliffs, that affects made pople.
        digbybk 3y ago
        This is the advantage of self driving. If there is an error it gets fixed for all cars in the fleet. Humans have bugs - we get bored, we get distracted, we get angry, we thrill seek, etc - and we’ll never fix our bugs. Nor should we. Any technology that requires humans to be perfect all the time to be safe is an inhuman technology. I think people will look back at fully human drive cars, and the death rate we tolerate from it, with disbelief.
- watwut 3y ago
  I do not imagine that. Sometime in the future they will be safer, but as of now they are in the "unknown safety level" category. Pretty much all those optimistic estimates were done by highly untrustworthy companies and in highly artificial conditions.
visarga 3y ago
> so it's assumed that progress will continue at that pace. We've made this mistake time and time again before self driving cars and evidently continue to make that mistake now We are making the same mistake now with chatGPT. We think if it progressed so much in the last 3 years, future progress will go at the same speed. But the last 1% is exponentially harder than the previous 99%.
- bodge5000 3y ago
  Yeh thats what I was getting at, though in reality the expectations are even more unrealistic. A lot of the (less technical) people I've spoken to haven't been saying that so much progress has been made in a matter of years, but a matter of months. Because of course if you weren't following the early development of these models, it appears that chatGPT came out of nowhere
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- pharmakom 3y ago
  I agree. if we have a model that can do (end to end) the role of a lawyer, scientist or software engineer, then I think we have reached AGI.
- cornel_io 3y ago
  No. There is no incentive for car AI to improve because everyone knows it won't be allowed for basically forever. Chat AI is here and will progress, so there's massive incentive for it to improve. Chat AI will improve at at least 10x the rate as car AI.
- Razengan 3y ago
  > But the last 1% is exponentially harder than the previous 99%. Also, sometimes (often?) you can quickly make a lot of progress using the WRONG methods that are completely useless in the remaining 50% or more of the work. Then that field hits a dead end and is mothballed until a decade or so later when sometimes dares to restart it from a fresh perspective.
delusional 3y ago
It's obvious that it's hard now, but at the time it was much harder to coherently argue that THIS was the mode shift of the progress chart. An S-curve just looks exponential from the bottom. It's not until you hit the flattening part of it you see where the limit is.

chii 3y ago

as a percentage of accidents, i would imagine autodriving cars are less than human driven cars. It's still flawed atm, but surely it will continue to improve. Not to mention that the average human is already terrible a driver, and replacing them with autodriving surely nets more benefits than the flaws of autodriving - if not at this moment, then very soon in the future.

resolutebat 3y ago
The problem is that whenever a human driven car reverses over a toddler or wraps around a telephone pole or veers across lanes into oncoming traffic or blows through a red light and T-bones someone, nobody cares because it happens all the time, but when a self-driving car does, murderbot outrage makes frontpage news all over the world. So even though we rationally should immediately go all in on automation as soon as self-driving cars are on average safer than human ones, realistically this is politically completely unpalatable until they reach a much, much higher, possibly unachievable, standard. It's not "fair" that this is the case, but unfortunately humans are really bad at accurately assessing the risks of low probability incidents (eg. dying from terrorism), especially if they get a lot of media airtime.
- shash 3y ago
  The liability problem is important here - when someone reverses over a toddler, someone gets sued. Or they lose their license. Or $CONSEQUENCE. What's the consequence in an autonomous vehicle? Does only _that_ vehicle lose its license? Does every vehicle with that particular revision of the ML model? The whole fleet? The next problem is, you're assuming that the autonomous vehicle is going to be _better_ than the human; it may have more information, may be faster in its response time, but maybe in a chaotic environment, that doesn't translate into drastically improved safety. Unless of course, _everything_ on the road is self-driving (meaning, zero pedestrians, zero other vehicles, no animals,...) which is going to run into chicken-egg...
  - chii 3y ago
    > you're assuming that the autonomous vehicle is going to be _better_ than the human i think this is already proven true empiracally with the existing milage and rates of accidents. https://thedriven.io/2023/04/27/accident-rate-for-tesla-80-lower-than-us-average-with-fsd/ https://thedriven.io/2023/04/27/accident-rate-for-tesla-80-l... (or from here https://www.carscoops.com/2023/03/tesla-says-its-autonomous-systems-are-safer-than-a-human-but-is-it-really-so/ https://www.carscoops.com/2023/03/tesla-says-its-autonomous-..., which quotes various sources of data, unless tesla is lying about their FSD data they reported). Humans just don't believe in autodriving, and there's still the problem of liability assignment - both aren't a technology problem imho, but a human impediment to adoption.
    - wartijn_ 3y ago
      That’s not data about autonomous vehicles. Tesla’s fsd is a feature where the car drives itself during some parts of a trip. The driver is always supposed to keep paying attention and sometimes take over control. To show that autonomous cars are better drivers than humans you need data from autonomous cars in the same situation as human drivers. And that data doesn’t exist (yet), because truly autonomous cars don’t drive in all places and situations where humans do.
    - shash 3y ago
      The second of your links says "According to the folks over at Jalopnik though, the bar for “safer than a human” is probably a lot higher than one might guess. In fact, after crunching numbers from the NHTSA, it seems as though drivers avoid crashes 99.999819 percent of the time. If Tesla’s data is to be believed, it’s already surpassed that." Are you even making a statistically significant comparison at this point? And there are these also: https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/25/23737972/tesla-whistleblower-leak-fsd-complaints-self-driving https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/25/23737972/tesla-whistleblo... Quite apart from the fact that this isn't actual self-driving that's being measured (as sibling points out).
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  > but when a self-driving car does, murderbot outrage makes frontpage news all over the world. It's not "fair" that this is the case, It is exactly fair - if a drunk guy in Australia is driving one car. If he hits a child, that has no relevance to my life in EU. He will be arrested and dealt with. But Tesla autopilot drives millions if cars. It if hits a child in Australia, it does not get arrested. Its also gonna drive over my children in EU.
  - chii 3y ago
    > Its also gonna drive over my children in EU. a false equivalency. The same type of bozo that reverses into a child also exists in europe.
    - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
      Himans have separate brains. The Aitopilot runs same code. If autopilot has error in the code that makes it drive off cliffs, that affects made pople.
      - digbybk 3y ago
        This is the advantage of self driving. If there is an error it gets fixed for all cars in the fleet. Humans have bugs - we get bored, we get distracted, we get angry, we thrill seek, etc - and we’ll never fix our bugs. Nor should we. Any technology that requires humans to be perfect all the time to be safe is an inhuman technology. I think people will look back at fully human drive cars, and the death rate we tolerate from it, with disbelief.
watwut 3y ago
I do not imagine that. Sometime in the future they will be safer, but as of now they are in the "unknown safety level" category. Pretty much all those optimistic estimates were done by highly untrustworthy companies and in highly artificial conditions.

visarga 3y ago

> so it's assumed that progress will continue at that pace. We've made this mistake time and time again before self driving cars and evidently continue to make that mistake now We are making the same mistake now with chatGPT. We think if it progressed so much in the last 3 years, future progress will go at the same speed. But the last 1% is exponentially harder than the previous 99%.

bodge5000 3y ago
Yeh thats what I was getting at, though in reality the expectations are even more unrealistic. A lot of the (less technical) people I've spoken to haven't been saying that so much progress has been made in a matter of years, but a matter of months. Because of course if you weren't following the early development of these models, it appears that chatGPT came out of nowhere
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
pharmakom 3y ago
I agree. if we have a model that can do (end to end) the role of a lawyer, scientist or software engineer, then I think we have reached AGI.
cornel_io 3y ago
No. There is no incentive for car AI to improve because everyone knows it won't be allowed for basically forever. Chat AI is here and will progress, so there's massive incentive for it to improve. Chat AI will improve at at least 10x the rate as car AI.
Razengan 3y ago
> But the last 1% is exponentially harder than the previous 99%. Also, sometimes (often?) you can quickly make a lot of progress using the WRONG methods that are completely useless in the remaining 50% or more of the work. Then that field hits a dead end and is mothballed until a decade or so later when sometimes dares to restart it from a fresh perspective.

delusional 3y ago

It's obvious that it's hard now, but at the time it was much harder to coherently argue that THIS was the mode shift of the progress chart. An S-curve just looks exponential from the bottom. It's not until you hit the flattening part of it you see where the limit is.