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As a blind pedestrian, I am sincerely afraid of the future. The first time that I feel like innovation is putting me in danger.
by lynx23 3y ago
As a blind pedestrian, I am sincerely afraid of the future. The first time that I feel like innovation is putting me in danger.
- peterfirefly 3y agoWhy? You'll get much cheaper taxi services + the cars around you will be much safer (and the laws will be changed so far fewer bad drivers will be allowed to drive).
- lynx23 3y agoI would happily pay extra money for a human driver. Especially because I rely on their cooperation when getting in / out. A human taxi driver will call out to me when he stops, knowing that it isn't easy to destinguish him from other cars. And when getting out, I often ask the driver for the favour of showing me the door, when I drive to a place I dont know well. These are all things a robotaxi can not do for me. Which means the service quality will go down. I dont care about prices going down if the service is also diminished.
- aeonik 3y agoTo ameliorate your fear, a practical and potentially effective solution may be wearing a retroreflector, or some sort of light-based signalling device that would make it much more clear that you should not be run over.
- lynx23 3y agoThis remedy was already valid for normal human drivers. I am more concerned about automatic drivers not honoring the "Vertrauensgrundsatz" (principle of trust) which is a traffic law from my area whic, to my knowledge, doesnt even have a counterpart in the US. Basically, drivers learn that there are two classes of pedestrians: "normal" pedestrians, and those which basically cant be trusted. IOW, drunk or blind people. If you run over one of those, the likelihood of it being your fault rises.
- aeonik 3y agoI don't understand your reply. Yes, my suggested solution applies to everyone. I suggested it to you because you have fear, many people do not. The solutions certainly lower individual risk. It also sounded ironic to me, I thought others might notice and appreciate the irony in my suggestion. I don't understand how "Vertrauensgrundsatz" applies here.
- lynx23 3y agoTo put it in more direct terms, I wnder if AI training does and/or can even distinguish between different classes of pedestrians. I am suspecting the current approach is to treat them all the same. Which would result in a driver that doesnt know and therefore violates the "Vertrauensgrundsatz", someone who wouldnt even get a drivers license where I dwell...
- anonylizard 3y agoAre you aware of the recent developments in AI at all? This isn't an unsolved challenge, video multimodals would likely crush this problem. However, the advanced, LLM based systems with tons of world knowledge (and therefore can easily tell if a pedestrian is abnormal) take tons of processing power and latency, so cannot be deployed in the current AI driving systems. So it'll take 5-10 years for this to be solved. Also hope you know that Germany isn't the center of the world. Its not even the center in terms of cars anymore. German regulators don't get to dictate the progress of self driving.
- lynx23 3y agoWhen it comes to regulations, I hope my country is actually "the center of the world". Actually, the attitude you display in your last paragraph is more confirmation of my suspiicion then I actually want. Tech innovation people like you easily take a few dea people as long as innovation is not hindered. I am afraid of you guys.
- 3y ago
- simondotau 3y agoI'm confident that once driverless cars are good enough, blind pedestrians will be far safer than they ever were with drivered cars. But we're not there yet. Right now driverless cars should be banned from our roads. Cruise and Waymo are inviting catastrophe by having their embryonic systems practising on public roads without a human in the driver's seat. None of these systems are anywhere near good enough to be let loose unmonitored. I know it's unpopular to praise Tesla here, but in my view they deserve some credit for sitting pretty at SAE L2 while everyone else seems obsessed with quickly impressing investors with a half-baked rush to L3 or L4.
- watwut 3y ago> once driverless cars are good enough Sure, but that once can be still pretty far away for general conditions.
- simondotau 3y agoAgreed, and it doesn't matter how far away it is. If it takes ten years, it takes ten years. There should be no cars without humans in the driver's seat until the statistics bear out a level of safety at least one order of magnitude greater than human drivers.
- bryanlarsen 3y agoCruise could already be an order of magnitude safer than a human driver. We have enough milage data on Cruise to guess that it's comparable to a human driver, but to be assured that it's at least an order of magnitude safer requires a lot more data. And you can't get that data with a safety driver in the car. A safety driver should always override in emergency situations, whether necessary or not.
- asadotzler 3y agoSo what if a few pedestrians have to die along the way, the business model must not be disrupted.
- VBprogrammer 3y agoIn a hypothetical situation where these cars are deployed widely and are actually as close to perfect as we'd hope then that would be a much safer environment for you and everyone else than one in which drivers can be drunk, under the influence of drugs, tired or in too much of a rush. The only argument is whether that's realistic.
- lynx23 3y agoI just don't believe the "close to perfect" story. And I know that those who died while they were not close to perfect yet really don't care that there is this hypotetical future.
- shadowgovt 3y agoIn this specific case, it might be worth noting that, had the pedestrian not been dragged... They almost certainly would have died still, having been double-collided by multi-ton vehicles. Human drivers are still, mile-for-mile, the most dangerous threat to all pedestrians, blind and sighted.
- bluGill 3y agoI know people who have died from human driven cars, where the driver was sober. Autonomous cars only need to beat that, which is a much lower bar than perfect. Of course the closer to perfect they get the better, but a lot of people die on the roads, if autonomous cars can improve on that then we need them now, not waiting for some perfect. (I don't know if they really improve - all data I've seen is confusing and may be an attempt to hide the truth in some way)
- sparsely 3y agoNot sure it'll make you feel better but the initial accident in this case was caused by a human driver.
- peterfirefly 3y agoI know that was the official conclusion but I can't understand why -- the pedestrian walk out into the street (disrespecting the do-not-walk sign) and then paused in front of the car that hit her.
- FateOfNations 3y agoand on top of that, the pedestrian was crossing against a red (do not walk) light. Lots of human factors issues in this incident from all sides (driver, pedestrian, Cruise executives, regulators, media, policy makers, etc.)… The technology issues don't seem particularly profound.
- pie420 3y agoyou realize this whole thing was caused by a human driver hit and run, right? You have humans to fear. The less human drivers there are the safer you are
- peterfirefly 3y agoReally? It seems to me it was entirely caused by the pedestrian doing not one but two stupid things: 1) crossing the street when it wasn't her turn and 2) pausing in front of the car that then hit her. The "run" part happened afterwards and should of course be punished harshly but the "hit" part seems to be her own fault.
- lynx23 3y agoI dont trust technology unconditionally. I find it quite a stretch to conclude that everything non-human is automatically safe.