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> Put another way - would giving humans superhuman vision significantly reduce the accident rate? Yes? Incredibly? If people had 360° instant 3D awareness of

> Put another way - would giving humans superhuman vision significantly reduce the accident rate? Yes? Incredibly? If people had 360° instant 3D awareness of all objects, that would avoid so many accidents. No more blind spots, no more missing objects because you were looking in one spot instead of another. No more missing dark objects at night. It would be a gigantic improvement in the rate of accidents.

shepherdjerred 2y ago
Idk, many people are just bad at driving due to impatience. They don’t leave enough space/time to react even if they did have enough awareness
- crazygringo 2y ago
  Sure but that's not all people. If you assume a constant rate of attention, but then massively increase what people are aware of during that attention, that's a massive increase in safety. Safety is affected by lots of factors. Increasing any of them increases safety -- you don't need to increase all of them to get improvements.
  - shepherdjerred 2y ago
    ... I don't know. Many people are in accidents that are entirely not their fault, e.g. being rear-ended. You can't do anything about those who drive unsafely, distracted, under the influence, etc. Assuming you have a "good" driver, there are still plenty of times they might be into accidents for reasons that aren't because of awareness. For example, road conditions, behavior of other drivers, and just normal, honest mistakes. At least for me, my own sense aren't really the limiting factor in my safety. My eyes are good enough. Modern cars have the equivalent of bowling lane bumpers with auto-centering, pre-collision warning, and blind spot warning/indicators.
    - crazygringo 2y ago
      I don't understand what you're trying to say. Your eyes aren't good enough, compared to if you had 360° LIDAR awareness, which is the comparison here. You're listing all these other causes of accidents, which no one disputes. There's still a whole range of accidents caused by limitations in our spatial awareness because we can only ever be looking in one direction at a time. You're talking about "normal, honest mistakes". That's what I'm talking about. There would be less of those if we had magic 360° LIDAR in our bodies. A lot less. Especially at night, but during the day too. This isn't about blaming anybody. It's just the simple scientific fact that human senses are limited, and self-driving cars shouldn't limit themselves to human senses. Human senses aren't good enough for preventing all preventable accidents, no matter how "honest" drivers are.
      - shepherdjerred 2y ago
        The question was: > Put another way - would giving humans superhuman vision significantly reduce the accident rate? I'm saying that human vision is not the cause of most accidents. Most accidents are caused by distraction, incorrect decisions/errors of judgement, road conditions, etc.
        crazygringo 2y ago
        And I'm saying a ton of those "incorrect decisions/errors of judgement" would no longer exist if we had superhuman LIDAR abilities. You're using existing human vision as your baseline, which is not the right comparison here. The question is a baseline of superhuman abilities. So there's a ton of accidents we wouldn't get into if we had those superhuman abilities. Basically everything involving a collision with an object we weren't aware of in time because it wasn't in our limited field of view and wasn't well-lit, that could have been avoided if we had been. Which is a decent proportion of accidents. But the bigger, original point is that LIDAR is better than cameras, and better for avoiding accidents.
        pfannkuchen 2y ago
pfannkuchen 2y ago
You seem to be missing my point. Looking in one spot instead of another is included in what I’m calling “attention”. Of course paying attention to everything all the time would be and is a huge improvement. That is orthogonal to the type of vision tech being used. All approaches used in self driving systems today look everywhere all the time.
- crazygringo 2y ago
  You were responding to a comment criticizing Musk for removing "radar/lidar". So I'm assuming that the "superhuman vision" you described meant specifically if people had LIDAR, since that was the subject at hand. LIDAR is superior to cameras because it much more accurately detects objects. It's an advantage all the time, and an especially huge advantage at night. So LIDAR isn't orthogonal to anything. It's the entire point. If people had LIDAR, the accident rate would be significantly reduced. You're arguing that LIDAR won't help cars, because by analogy it wouldn't help people if it was a native biological sense. But that's wrong.

shepherdjerred 2y ago

Idk, many people are just bad at driving due to impatience. They don’t leave enough space/time to react even if they did have enough awareness

crazygringo 2y ago
Sure but that's not all people. If you assume a constant rate of attention, but then massively increase what people are aware of during that attention, that's a massive increase in safety. Safety is affected by lots of factors. Increasing any of them increases safety -- you don't need to increase all of them to get improvements.
- shepherdjerred 2y ago
  ... I don't know. Many people are in accidents that are entirely not their fault, e.g. being rear-ended. You can't do anything about those who drive unsafely, distracted, under the influence, etc. Assuming you have a "good" driver, there are still plenty of times they might be into accidents for reasons that aren't because of awareness. For example, road conditions, behavior of other drivers, and just normal, honest mistakes. At least for me, my own sense aren't really the limiting factor in my safety. My eyes are good enough. Modern cars have the equivalent of bowling lane bumpers with auto-centering, pre-collision warning, and blind spot warning/indicators.
  - crazygringo 2y ago
    I don't understand what you're trying to say. Your eyes aren't good enough, compared to if you had 360° LIDAR awareness, which is the comparison here. You're listing all these other causes of accidents, which no one disputes. There's still a whole range of accidents caused by limitations in our spatial awareness because we can only ever be looking in one direction at a time. You're talking about "normal, honest mistakes". That's what I'm talking about. There would be less of those if we had magic 360° LIDAR in our bodies. A lot less. Especially at night, but during the day too. This isn't about blaming anybody. It's just the simple scientific fact that human senses are limited, and self-driving cars shouldn't limit themselves to human senses. Human senses aren't good enough for preventing all preventable accidents, no matter how "honest" drivers are.
    - shepherdjerred 2y ago
      The question was: > Put another way - would giving humans superhuman vision significantly reduce the accident rate? I'm saying that human vision is not the cause of most accidents. Most accidents are caused by distraction, incorrect decisions/errors of judgement, road conditions, etc.
      - crazygringo 2y ago
        And I'm saying a ton of those "incorrect decisions/errors of judgement" would no longer exist if we had superhuman LIDAR abilities. You're using existing human vision as your baseline, which is not the right comparison here. The question is a baseline of superhuman abilities. So there's a ton of accidents we wouldn't get into if we had those superhuman abilities. Basically everything involving a collision with an object we weren't aware of in time because it wasn't in our limited field of view and wasn't well-lit, that could have been avoided if we had been. Which is a decent proportion of accidents. But the bigger, original point is that LIDAR is better than cameras, and better for avoiding accidents.
        pfannkuchen 2y ago

pfannkuchen 2y ago

You seem to be missing my point. Looking in one spot instead of another is included in what I’m calling “attention”. Of course paying attention to everything all the time would be and is a huge improvement. That is orthogonal to the type of vision tech being used. All approaches used in self driving systems today look everywhere all the time.

crazygringo 2y ago
You were responding to a comment criticizing Musk for removing "radar/lidar". So I'm assuming that the "superhuman vision" you described meant specifically if people had LIDAR, since that was the subject at hand. LIDAR is superior to cameras because it much more accurately detects objects. It's an advantage all the time, and an especially huge advantage at night. So LIDAR isn't orthogonal to anything. It's the entire point. If people had LIDAR, the accident rate would be significantly reduced. You're arguing that LIDAR won't help cars, because by analogy it wouldn't help people if it was a native biological sense. But that's wrong.