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"Something unexpected where the machine drove like a machine rather than a person..." is nonsense. There were over 1500 reports of humans driving the wrong way

"Something unexpected where the machine drove like a machine rather than a person..." is nonsense. There were over 1500 reports of humans driving the wrong way on Arizona roads last year. Humans drive that way all the time.

drob518 9mo ago
But how many humans drove on train tracks? Yes, humans make scads of mistakes, but they don’t typically make this one.
- yibg 9mo ago
  I don't know if there are stats for this but it wouldn't surprise me if there were non zero incidents of it. Drivers that are high / drunk, mentally impaired etc. More broadly, lots of cars driven by humans collide with trains, which is the at least one of the core issues here. EDIT: anecdotally at least for this type of ground level light rail, I've seen people drive on similar streetcar tracks (that are not shared with cars) in Toronto more than one time.
  - paleotrope 9mo ago
    Happens all the time in Boston on the green and sometimes the silver lines.
- arcfour 9mo ago
  I absolutely believe that humans would drive on train tracks. There is no shortage of terrible, insane, ignorant, and purely self-interested drivers on the road. Just look at any dashcam video compilation! The difference, of course, is that when a human does it we just say "what an idiot!" But when a machine does it, some people say "well, obviously machines can't drive and can never drive as well as a human can," which is silly.
  - munk-a 9mo ago
    I think there's an epistemological issue in your statement. When a human does it we say "what an idiot" because the driver is performing at a level below the generally accepted proficiency for driving. I think our reasonable expectations for autonomous driving is around an average level of proficiency. I also don't think it's reasonable to delay implementing technology until it's better than the best of us - but this was an utter failure and is not within the bounds of acceptability. I do think it's fair to argue that this is probably an oversight that can be corrected now that it has been revealed, though.
    - arcfour 9mo ago
      But in many ways, self-driving cars are better than or equal to the average driver. If I make a mistake once but am otherwise an exemplary driver, am I a bad driver? Same goes with these. The question isn't are they perfect (which is unfair), it's whether they are in aggregate safer than humans, which is objectively true, but people making big examples of issues like this serve only to muddy the water and scare the public needlessly. So, in the interests of avoiding needless regulation that would make us less safe, I think it's important to point out that these comparisons are unfair & examples are typically extremely rare edge cases.
      - munk-a 9mo ago
        I agree that in many ways self-driving cars are better than average. And I selfishly want to accelerate the adoption due to the fact that I'll appreciate it the most when other drivers are using it to reduce the chances to getting hit by a drunk or highly distracted driver. However, I think that driving on tram tracks is unacceptably bad - it is something that a good driver would simply never do outside of really strange circumstances (like complete vision loss due to heavy storm weather). This example shouldn't be used as a single example to bar autonomous vehicles but it should also be properly recognized as unacceptable to be repeated.
  - drob518 9mo ago
    Of course humans have driven on tracks. The point was that humans driving on tracks is far more rare than driving the wrong way on a one-way street, so this sticks out.
- eightysixfour 9mo ago
  > But how many humans drove on train tracks? I have seen this twice in my life. One person who freaked out because they stopped in the tracks and then turned onto them, the second I still have no idea how they got there. I think there are two really big issues with the roll out of self-driving cars that are going to be hard for us to overcome: 1. Their mistakes are going to be highly publicized, but no one is publicizing the infinite number of dumbass things human drivers do every day to compare it to. 2. They're going to make mistakes that are extremely obvious in hindsight or from a third party perspective, that most humans will say no human would have ever done. It is likely that a human has and would have made similar and worse mistakes, and makes them at a higher rate, and we will have to accept these as a reality in a complex world.
  - arcfour 9mo ago
    > Their mistakes are going to be highly publicized, but no one is publicizing the infinite number of dumbass things human drivers do every day to compare it to. Idea: "Waymo or Human," a site like Scrandle where we watch dashcam clips of insane driving or good driving in a challenging situation and guess if it's a human or self-driving car.
  - jsbisviewtiful 9mo ago
    Frustratingly Americans seem to inherently despise public transit (probably because owning a car has become so necessary due to poor city planning ON TOP OF the classist appeal) despite the advantages and local/state govs refuse to give public transit options proper funding and oversight - leading to even more distaste for public transit. Personally I won't be using one of these cars because I want to contribute to other humans' paychecks, but I would much rather be using public transit over adding more and more cars to more and more roads/lanes. All of the negative publicity around the autonomous cars is justified IMO because, even if these cars are "safer" than a human, they are still clearly not as safe as they need to be when considering liability, local laws, basic driving etiquette and the cost to other humans' incomes.
    - etempleton 9mo ago
      Americans don’t despise public transit. They despise poorly maintained / insufficient public transit. Outside of New York and San Francisco, public transit is really not sufficient to get you where you need to go. Many cities could do better to have more robust public transit, but the reality is America is vast and people commute long distances regularly. The cost of deploying such vast amounts of public transit would be prohibitively expensive.
- hannahstrawbrry 9mo ago
  Seen this exact thing happen a handful of times myself lol (I live in Phoenix)
- nickff 9mo ago
  There are many pictures of cars driving in bike lanes in my city (and yes, the bike lanes are very small and well-signed).
- thunfischbrot 9mo ago
  Spending 2 minutes on google news or youtube equipped with keywords such as "car", "train tracks" and "stuck" will show you otherwise.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- nwallin 9mo ago
  These are light rail/tram tracks, not railroad tracks. The road is the same type of road that you normally drive up, they just have train tracks embedded in the road surface, signs telling you not to drive there, and every now and then a tram drives along it. Functionally, they're no different than bus lanes or a wide shoulder. Humans drive on them all the time, because there's no traffic on them and they can get to where they're going faster. They shouldn't, it's illegal, and they can get ticketed for it, but they do it anyway. If you load up google street view in Phoenix/Tempe/Gilbert you can see a few people driving on them.
  - lokar 9mo ago
    People have been getting confused and driving cars towards/into the SF muni tunnel for ages.
  - drob518 9mo ago
    Okay, so this is tracks embedded in and parallel with road surface, not tracks with cross-ties, sitting on ballast. That’s a bit more understandable, then.
- gretch 9mo ago
  I’ve seen it personally in San Jose. Guy turned left but instead of continuing onto the crossing road, he turned onto the VTA rails in the middle of the road. Then proceeded to get stuck on the concrete partition once the intersection was over, and work crews had to come out to fix the mess.
kazinator 9mo ago
Do they continue to drive that way if they have a passenger yelling, "we are on train tracks?" to the point that said passenger has to bail out? (Sure, within the wide boundaries of mental health, it is not impossible.)
- potato3732842 9mo ago
  >Do they continue to drive that way if they have a passenger yelling, "we are on train tracks?" On a non-separated rail like in the video where you can just turn off at any time I can see a lot of people continuing to do it just to spite their spouse for screeching about the obvious. Or on the other side of the coin I can see a lot of people just say nothing because it's probably fine and they'd rather not have the argument.
- duskwuff 9mo ago
  Bingo. Humans can make mistakes, but they can also recognize that something's gone wrong and change tactics to recover from it. Current self-driving systems can't do that effectively; they'll just keep going, even when they probably shouldn't.
- kyleee 9mo ago
  That would open up some very fun avenues for mischief if you could start yelling at the Waymo and pleading for it to change course
comrade1234 9mo ago
lol. I knew someone was going to come in with this reasoning for dismissing it. hn has become a parody of itself.
- lopifjun 9mo ago
  If the "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it" and "notice me senpai" memes had a baby raised by an automaton nanny it would be the majority HN user.
kgwxd 9mo ago
Driving yourself onto tracks is natural selection. AI driving a person onto tracks is artificial selection.
lopifjun 9mo ago
This is such a terribly ineffectual comparison, but okay... and I'd jump out of their car if I was a passenger and they were ignoring my pleading with them to stop.
shputil 9mo ago
1500 out of a lot. It's probably more accurate to say that those 1500 didn't drive like humans either.
- Bjartr 9mo ago
  By definition, they did. Humans do weird, irrational things sometimes. It's part of being human.
  - shputil 9mo ago
    yeah, sure, if you want to take everything that any human does as "being human" "by definition." Then I guess it's human to eat spiders and bathe in your own shit. I think it would be more useful to at least consider the normal level of behavior.
    - Bjartr 9mo ago
      > I think it would be more useful to at least consider the normal level of behavior. If we are talking "normal" human behavior, we should compare to "normal" robot behavior. If we are talking "outlier" robot behavior, we should compare to "outlier" human behavior.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
munk-a 9mo ago
Do we think it's acceptable to target a level of driving proficiency for automation that could be featured in dashcam footage that gets uploaded to youtube because it's so extremely inept or are we aiming for a higher target that might be a middling amount of driving proficiency?
- deepspace 9mo ago
  That is a very disingenuous take on the comment. We should of course target a higher level of proficiency than that, but the point is that many humans make stupid driving decisions every day. We can hold machines to a higher standard, but perfection is an unrealistic standard.
  - munk-a 9mo ago
    I don't think I was being disingenuous but I did try to specifically call out aiming for a middling (and not perfect) proficiency. Driving onto tram tracks on a clear day is unacceptably poor performance. This is something that a good driver is unlikely to ever do in their lifetime and - if it happened - likely involved some extreme circumstances.
- potato3732842 9mo ago
  Most autonomous failures aren't failures in a way that make good video though. It's like your grandma or 16yo daughter that gets stuck at a yield for no good reason. Nobody is gonna watch that so nobody uploads it. A robotaxi that has a "low enough to be acceptable" frequency of the above failure mode is likely to have enough occasional "full send" failure modes to make for Youtube fodder when deployed at scale even if they're comparatively rare compared to humans or the other failure type, or some other standard.
prewett 9mo ago
I don't generally have to entrust myself to humans doing crazy things, though. An actual person driving a taxi is familiar enough with the roads that they are unlikely to do something like that. Probably also Uber/Lyft drivers. And there is usually an option to rent a car and drive yourself, in which case any craziness the driver suffers from is at least my own fault.
puttycat 9mo ago
> Humans drive that way all the time. Why do we hold calculators to such high bars? Humans make calculation mistakes all the time. Why do we hold banking software to such high bars? People forget where they put their change all the time. Etc etc.
- CamperBob2 9mo ago
  Tens of thousands of humans kill each other every year on the roads in the US alone. So these analogies are completely bankrupt.
  - card_zero 9mo ago
    You mean to say (emotively) that humans drive that way all the time?
    - CamperBob2 9mo ago
      No, I'm saying (factually) that demanding perfection from self-driving cars costs lives.

drob518 9mo ago

But how many humans drove on train tracks? Yes, humans make scads of mistakes, but they don’t typically make this one.

yibg 9mo ago
I don't know if there are stats for this but it wouldn't surprise me if there were non zero incidents of it. Drivers that are high / drunk, mentally impaired etc. More broadly, lots of cars driven by humans collide with trains, which is the at least one of the core issues here. EDIT: anecdotally at least for this type of ground level light rail, I've seen people drive on similar streetcar tracks (that are not shared with cars) in Toronto more than one time.
- paleotrope 9mo ago
  Happens all the time in Boston on the green and sometimes the silver lines.
arcfour 9mo ago
I absolutely believe that humans would drive on train tracks. There is no shortage of terrible, insane, ignorant, and purely self-interested drivers on the road. Just look at any dashcam video compilation! The difference, of course, is that when a human does it we just say "what an idiot!" But when a machine does it, some people say "well, obviously machines can't drive and can never drive as well as a human can," which is silly.
- munk-a 9mo ago
  I think there's an epistemological issue in your statement. When a human does it we say "what an idiot" because the driver is performing at a level below the generally accepted proficiency for driving. I think our reasonable expectations for autonomous driving is around an average level of proficiency. I also don't think it's reasonable to delay implementing technology until it's better than the best of us - but this was an utter failure and is not within the bounds of acceptability. I do think it's fair to argue that this is probably an oversight that can be corrected now that it has been revealed, though.
  - arcfour 9mo ago
    But in many ways, self-driving cars are better than or equal to the average driver. If I make a mistake once but am otherwise an exemplary driver, am I a bad driver? Same goes with these. The question isn't are they perfect (which is unfair), it's whether they are in aggregate safer than humans, which is objectively true, but people making big examples of issues like this serve only to muddy the water and scare the public needlessly. So, in the interests of avoiding needless regulation that would make us less safe, I think it's important to point out that these comparisons are unfair & examples are typically extremely rare edge cases.
    - munk-a 9mo ago
      I agree that in many ways self-driving cars are better than average. And I selfishly want to accelerate the adoption due to the fact that I'll appreciate it the most when other drivers are using it to reduce the chances to getting hit by a drunk or highly distracted driver. However, I think that driving on tram tracks is unacceptably bad - it is something that a good driver would simply never do outside of really strange circumstances (like complete vision loss due to heavy storm weather). This example shouldn't be used as a single example to bar autonomous vehicles but it should also be properly recognized as unacceptable to be repeated.
- drob518 9mo ago
  Of course humans have driven on tracks. The point was that humans driving on tracks is far more rare than driving the wrong way on a one-way street, so this sticks out.
eightysixfour 9mo ago
> But how many humans drove on train tracks? I have seen this twice in my life. One person who freaked out because they stopped in the tracks and then turned onto them, the second I still have no idea how they got there. I think there are two really big issues with the roll out of self-driving cars that are going to be hard for us to overcome: 1. Their mistakes are going to be highly publicized, but no one is publicizing the infinite number of dumbass things human drivers do every day to compare it to. 2. They're going to make mistakes that are extremely obvious in hindsight or from a third party perspective, that most humans will say no human would have ever done. It is likely that a human has and would have made similar and worse mistakes, and makes them at a higher rate, and we will have to accept these as a reality in a complex world.
- arcfour 9mo ago
  > Their mistakes are going to be highly publicized, but no one is publicizing the infinite number of dumbass things human drivers do every day to compare it to. Idea: "Waymo or Human," a site like Scrandle where we watch dashcam clips of insane driving or good driving in a challenging situation and guess if it's a human or self-driving car.
- jsbisviewtiful 9mo ago
  Frustratingly Americans seem to inherently despise public transit (probably because owning a car has become so necessary due to poor city planning ON TOP OF the classist appeal) despite the advantages and local/state govs refuse to give public transit options proper funding and oversight - leading to even more distaste for public transit. Personally I won't be using one of these cars because I want to contribute to other humans' paychecks, but I would much rather be using public transit over adding more and more cars to more and more roads/lanes. All of the negative publicity around the autonomous cars is justified IMO because, even if these cars are "safer" than a human, they are still clearly not as safe as they need to be when considering liability, local laws, basic driving etiquette and the cost to other humans' incomes.
  - etempleton 9mo ago
    Americans don’t despise public transit. They despise poorly maintained / insufficient public transit. Outside of New York and San Francisco, public transit is really not sufficient to get you where you need to go. Many cities could do better to have more robust public transit, but the reality is America is vast and people commute long distances regularly. The cost of deploying such vast amounts of public transit would be prohibitively expensive.
hannahstrawbrry 9mo ago
Seen this exact thing happen a handful of times myself lol (I live in Phoenix)
nickff 9mo ago
There are many pictures of cars driving in bike lanes in my city (and yes, the bike lanes are very small and well-signed).
thunfischbrot 9mo ago
Spending 2 minutes on google news or youtube equipped with keywords such as "car", "train tracks" and "stuck" will show you otherwise.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
nwallin 9mo ago
These are light rail/tram tracks, not railroad tracks. The road is the same type of road that you normally drive up, they just have train tracks embedded in the road surface, signs telling you not to drive there, and every now and then a tram drives along it. Functionally, they're no different than bus lanes or a wide shoulder. Humans drive on them all the time, because there's no traffic on them and they can get to where they're going faster. They shouldn't, it's illegal, and they can get ticketed for it, but they do it anyway. If you load up google street view in Phoenix/Tempe/Gilbert you can see a few people driving on them.
- lokar 9mo ago
  People have been getting confused and driving cars towards/into the SF muni tunnel for ages.
- drob518 9mo ago
  Okay, so this is tracks embedded in and parallel with road surface, not tracks with cross-ties, sitting on ballast. That’s a bit more understandable, then.
gretch 9mo ago
I’ve seen it personally in San Jose. Guy turned left but instead of continuing onto the crossing road, he turned onto the VTA rails in the middle of the road. Then proceeded to get stuck on the concrete partition once the intersection was over, and work crews had to come out to fix the mess.

kazinator 9mo ago

Do they continue to drive that way if they have a passenger yelling, "we are on train tracks?" to the point that said passenger has to bail out? (Sure, within the wide boundaries of mental health, it is not impossible.)

potato3732842 9mo ago
>Do they continue to drive that way if they have a passenger yelling, "we are on train tracks?" On a non-separated rail like in the video where you can just turn off at any time I can see a lot of people continuing to do it just to spite their spouse for screeching about the obvious. Or on the other side of the coin I can see a lot of people just say nothing because it's probably fine and they'd rather not have the argument.
duskwuff 9mo ago
Bingo. Humans can make mistakes, but they can also recognize that something's gone wrong and change tactics to recover from it. Current self-driving systems can't do that effectively; they'll just keep going, even when they probably shouldn't.
kyleee 9mo ago
That would open up some very fun avenues for mischief if you could start yelling at the Waymo and pleading for it to change course

comrade1234 9mo ago

lol. I knew someone was going to come in with this reasoning for dismissing it. hn has become a parody of itself.

lopifjun 9mo ago
If the "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it" and "notice me senpai" memes had a baby raised by an automaton nanny it would be the majority HN user.

kgwxd 9mo ago

Driving yourself onto tracks is natural selection. AI driving a person onto tracks is artificial selection.

lopifjun 9mo ago

This is such a terribly ineffectual comparison, but okay... and I'd jump out of their car if I was a passenger and they were ignoring my pleading with them to stop.

shputil 9mo ago

1500 out of a lot. It's probably more accurate to say that those 1500 didn't drive like humans either.

Bjartr 9mo ago
By definition, they did. Humans do weird, irrational things sometimes. It's part of being human.
- shputil 9mo ago
  yeah, sure, if you want to take everything that any human does as "being human" "by definition." Then I guess it's human to eat spiders and bathe in your own shit. I think it would be more useful to at least consider the normal level of behavior.
  - Bjartr 9mo ago
    > I think it would be more useful to at least consider the normal level of behavior. If we are talking "normal" human behavior, we should compare to "normal" robot behavior. If we are talking "outlier" robot behavior, we should compare to "outlier" human behavior.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

munk-a 9mo ago

Do we think it's acceptable to target a level of driving proficiency for automation that could be featured in dashcam footage that gets uploaded to youtube because it's so extremely inept or are we aiming for a higher target that might be a middling amount of driving proficiency?

deepspace 9mo ago
That is a very disingenuous take on the comment. We should of course target a higher level of proficiency than that, but the point is that many humans make stupid driving decisions every day. We can hold machines to a higher standard, but perfection is an unrealistic standard.
- munk-a 9mo ago
  I don't think I was being disingenuous but I did try to specifically call out aiming for a middling (and not perfect) proficiency. Driving onto tram tracks on a clear day is unacceptably poor performance. This is something that a good driver is unlikely to ever do in their lifetime and - if it happened - likely involved some extreme circumstances.
potato3732842 9mo ago
Most autonomous failures aren't failures in a way that make good video though. It's like your grandma or 16yo daughter that gets stuck at a yield for no good reason. Nobody is gonna watch that so nobody uploads it. A robotaxi that has a "low enough to be acceptable" frequency of the above failure mode is likely to have enough occasional "full send" failure modes to make for Youtube fodder when deployed at scale even if they're comparatively rare compared to humans or the other failure type, or some other standard.

prewett 9mo ago

I don't generally have to entrust myself to humans doing crazy things, though. An actual person driving a taxi is familiar enough with the roads that they are unlikely to do something like that. Probably also Uber/Lyft drivers. And there is usually an option to rent a car and drive yourself, in which case any craziness the driver suffers from is at least my own fault.

puttycat 9mo ago

> Humans drive that way all the time. Why do we hold calculators to such high bars? Humans make calculation mistakes all the time. Why do we hold banking software to such high bars? People forget where they put their change all the time. Etc etc.

CamperBob2 9mo ago
Tens of thousands of humans kill each other every year on the roads in the US alone. So these analogies are completely bankrupt.
- card_zero 9mo ago
  You mean to say (emotively) that humans drive that way all the time?
  - CamperBob2 9mo ago
    No, I'm saying (factually) that demanding perfection from self-driving cars costs lives.