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ADAS + human driver seems enough to solve most of the shortcomings of both human and robot drivers. Full self-driving doesn't strike me as necessary to prevent

by dlisboa 25d ago

ADAS + human driver seems enough to solve most of the shortcomings of both human and robot drivers. Full self-driving doesn't strike me as necessary to prevent deaths.

jpcfl 25d ago
There is a moral hazard with ADAS + human drivers: > Once drivers move from the novelty phase to the post-novelty operational phase, behavioral adaptation may begin to occur and overreliance and over-trust in the automation features potentially develop, including a greater willingness to look away from the forward road (as shown in the VCC data set). [1] I'm not sure if this is more dangerous than strictly human-operated vehicles, but I would wager that it is more dangerous than strictly autonomous vehicles. 1. https://aaafoundation.org/research/understanding-the-impact-of-technology-do-advanced-driver-assistance-and-semi-automated-vehicle-systems-lead-to-improper-driving-behavior/ https://aaafoundation.org/research/understanding-the-impact-...
- notahacker 25d ago
  I'm not sure why a semi autonomous system of equivalent driving capability would be more dangerous than strictly autonomous vehicles because of "over-trust" unless one assumes that the driver that overtrust the autonomous vehicles and looks away is also inclined to try to override the semiautonomous system whilst doing so. Humans overtrusting a system capable of imperfect Level 5 driving will certainly not be alert to correct all its errors, but on the other hand they should be capable of correcting more than the baseline (especially if the autonomous system is good enough at general driving under most conditions for the human driver to be restricted to "get me off this road train track or flood the system shouldn't have stopped in" and "follow instructions" type edge cases rather than misidentifying objects at high speed type edge cases.) If there are additional problems caused by human drivers, it's surely that they are inclined to intentionally override the system with dangerous behaviours which is a separate problem entirely, or that their driving ability has atrophied so much from not driving they are unable to handle the boundaries of Level 4...
  - lazyasciiart 25d ago
    Overtrust looks like people sleeping or not even bothering to stay in the front seats of the car. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/california-highway-patrol-searching-man-seen-riding-back-seat-tesla-n1266944 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/california-highway-patr...
    - notahacker 25d ago
      Sure, but I'm failing to see how an autonomous driving system without a steering wheel or brake fitted is safer than one with a steering wheel and brake fitted but the human driver ignoring it and sitting in the back seat. The actual potential for increased/decreased risk comes when the human driver rightly or wrongly actually intervenes.
      - madamelic 25d ago
        You are correct but I think previous comment hung on specific word you used: "semi-autonomous". What that would mean is a system that still requires attention / supervision. What I believe you meant is an AV that still has human controls but is capable of unsupervised driving. If you aren't familiar with SAE AV levels, check them out. It is a common refrain that L3 AVs are a SUPER bad idea because they would be 99.9% perfect at driving but could still mess up so 'drivers' of them would become too trusting and minimally attentive which would cause accidents. The common thing is that L3 needs to be skipped entirely so a car should either be L2 and wouldn't be good enough to drive entirely on its own for long periods (lane assist, low speed traffic jam chauffeur, etc) or L4+ where the car can drive on its own but if conditions degrade where it can't continue it is capable of finding a safe spot to stop rather than aborting in the middle of driving suddenly. The controls vs no controls isn't really an argument. Like you said, it will basically be fine either way if the system is sufficiently advanced especially if autonomy can't be disengaged while moving.
      - jakzurr 25d ago
        I think the argument for autonomous is that human intervention is, generally, wrongly rather than rightly. At this point, I won't agree or disagree, but it's getting more interesting all the time.
- semi-extrinsic 25d ago
  There was research some years ago in Sweden that cars with 4WD get into accidents 20% - 30% more often than cars with 2WD. And cars with 4WD averaged 10% higher speed at the moment of the crash. The cause was found to be drivers with 2WD losing a little traction early in their drove and subsequently slowing down, while drivers with 4WD just kept driving like normal until they were suddenly off the road. Another statistic is that intoxicated or otherwise impaired drivers cause more than half of all fatalities. So making a solution with machine learning and cameras that could retrofit into any existing car and just deny starting the car for such drivers, and having insurance companies cut premiums for having such gadgets installed, would be much more effective than any form of self driving or similar. https://mb.cision.com/wpyfs/00/00/00/00/00/3E/5A/A2/wkr0011.pdf https://mb.cision.com/wpyfs/00/00/00/00/00/3E/5A/A2/wkr0011....
  - ryandrake 25d ago
    The gadgets would have to meet an impossibly low false-positive rate and they'd need to be mandatory and non-removable for this to be effective. Constantly impaired drivers won't voluntarily install the devices, and any non-impaired driver who is falsely prevented from using their car will get rid of the device and not care about the insurance discount. Also, they really need to be able to detect the other really bad cause of impairment: mobile phone usage.
    - LtWorf 24d ago
      A tampered car won't pass inspection.
- Gigachad 25d ago
  It's like those approval prompts in coding agents. At the start you are reading the commands intently but after being bombarded with them for days you just hit accept on them.
redwall_hp 25d ago
Automatic braking alone is a huge deal: if you're a bit late in braking, you get a warning. If you go past that, brakes auto apply. When configured correctly, I don't even notice it's there 99.9% of the time...and the times I do I'm glad it's there, because the beep pulls you out of a momentary distraction. The only problem is not every car on the road has it yet.
- epgui 25d ago
  Anecdotally, the only times I've ever noticed these chimes and the auto-braking (even automatic rolling-up of windows), it was false positives, and it was mildly terrifying: for a brief and unexpected moment I was no longer in control of my vehicle. [Recent Honda Civic and Audi A3 models]
  - stephencanon 25d ago
    I've only had a couple weeks in rentals with automatic emergency braking, and was very nearly been rear-ended twice due to false positives. Anecdotal, and I'm sure they'll improve with time, but I would never allow the system I experienced anywhere near a car I owned. It was profoundly unsafe.
    - Terr_ 25d ago
      Assuming you're already stuck with such a vehicle, is there any benefit to a dashcam that captures the alert-noises to prove the that you, the driver, never chose to brake unsafely? I realize this relies heavily on the questionable sanity and ethics of insurance companies. Even if they agree you aren't personally at fault, they'd probably just increase the premiums for everyone with that model, rather than sue the car manufacturer.
      - ozim 25d ago
        Never hear of someone who was rear ended being liable. Guy behind should keep a distance that allows him reacting in time and he is responsible for keeping that distance. The same for skiing you don’t have eyes on the back of your head, one behind you is responsible for not crashing into you. In car you have rear mirrors but if you have something in front of you and breaking you are not going to look in the mirrors.
MostlyStable 25d ago
The problem with mostly-but-not-entirely autonomous is that humans will tend to treat it like entirely autonomous.
- dylan604 25d ago
  It doesn't help when manufacturers call their mostly-but-not-entirely autonomous systems Full Self Driving
  - throw1234567891 25d ago
    A manufacturer.
AlotOfReading 25d ago
An ADAS would be L4 if it was designed to be truly autonomous. If it's not designed to be truly autonomous, you have to somehow address the attention problem. Even a good attention monitoring system isn't sufficient, because people have the ability to appear superficially attentive by all external metrics, while not engaging with the driving task mentally. The data to differentiate these levels is pretty limited for a variety of reasons, and the problem only worsens when you conflate AEB with ADAS as the IHS/IEEE do in this article rather than use an OEDR-based definition.
hoss1474489 25d ago
I recently implemented OpenPilot for my vehicle and used it on a 9 hour road trip. Due to the nuances of my vehicle, the built-in hands-on-wheel nag was still active and required (small) driver wheel inputs every 10 seconds to prevent the beeps. Just keeping both hands on the wheel was enough to pacify the nag. But this forced me to keep attention on the vehicle, more than OpenPilot's face direction detector. Anecdotally I am certain this kept me more engaged than if I could have gone hands off. The net effect was I had more capacity to be aware of what was going on around me on the road, AND I didn't feel nearly as fatigued at the end of the drive. Keeping the car between the lines consumes a little bit of cognitive energy constantly, which compounds over a long drive. Freeing up that load allowed me to pay more attention to what was happening on the rest of the road. And the mental burden was still half as much--I felt like I had driven maybe 4-5 hours instead of 9. I have some ideas for how I might disable the built-in nag, but I'm pretty sure doing so would make my car less safe. The current configuration might already achieve the safety maximum for ADAS based on front-facing cameras only. It increases situational awareness while reducing fatigue, and I think that anything further I try to do will adversely affect one or both of those effects.

by dlisboa 25d ago

ADAS + human driver seems enough to solve most of the shortcomings of both human and robot drivers. Full self-driving doesn't strike me as necessary to prevent deaths.

jpcfl 25d ago

There is a moral hazard with ADAS + human drivers: > Once drivers move from the novelty phase to the post-novelty operational phase, behavioral adaptation may begin to occur and overreliance and over-trust in the automation features potentially develop, including a greater willingness to look away from the forward road (as shown in the VCC data set). [1] I'm not sure if this is more dangerous than strictly human-operated vehicles, but I would wager that it is more dangerous than strictly autonomous vehicles. 1. https://aaafoundation.org/research/understanding-the-impact-of-technology-do-advanced-driver-assistance-and-semi-automated-vehicle-systems-lead-to-improper-driving-behavior/ https://aaafoundation.org/research/understanding-the-impact-...

notahacker 25d ago
I'm not sure why a semi autonomous system of equivalent driving capability would be more dangerous than strictly autonomous vehicles because of "over-trust" unless one assumes that the driver that overtrust the autonomous vehicles and looks away is also inclined to try to override the semiautonomous system whilst doing so. Humans overtrusting a system capable of imperfect Level 5 driving will certainly not be alert to correct all its errors, but on the other hand they should be capable of correcting more than the baseline (especially if the autonomous system is good enough at general driving under most conditions for the human driver to be restricted to "get me off this road train track or flood the system shouldn't have stopped in" and "follow instructions" type edge cases rather than misidentifying objects at high speed type edge cases.) If there are additional problems caused by human drivers, it's surely that they are inclined to intentionally override the system with dangerous behaviours which is a separate problem entirely, or that their driving ability has atrophied so much from not driving they are unable to handle the boundaries of Level 4...
- lazyasciiart 25d ago
  Overtrust looks like people sleeping or not even bothering to stay in the front seats of the car. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/california-highway-patrol-searching-man-seen-riding-back-seat-tesla-n1266944 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/california-highway-patr...
  - notahacker 25d ago
    Sure, but I'm failing to see how an autonomous driving system without a steering wheel or brake fitted is safer than one with a steering wheel and brake fitted but the human driver ignoring it and sitting in the back seat. The actual potential for increased/decreased risk comes when the human driver rightly or wrongly actually intervenes.
    - madamelic 25d ago
      You are correct but I think previous comment hung on specific word you used: "semi-autonomous". What that would mean is a system that still requires attention / supervision. What I believe you meant is an AV that still has human controls but is capable of unsupervised driving. If you aren't familiar with SAE AV levels, check them out. It is a common refrain that L3 AVs are a SUPER bad idea because they would be 99.9% perfect at driving but could still mess up so 'drivers' of them would become too trusting and minimally attentive which would cause accidents. The common thing is that L3 needs to be skipped entirely so a car should either be L2 and wouldn't be good enough to drive entirely on its own for long periods (lane assist, low speed traffic jam chauffeur, etc) or L4+ where the car can drive on its own but if conditions degrade where it can't continue it is capable of finding a safe spot to stop rather than aborting in the middle of driving suddenly. The controls vs no controls isn't really an argument. Like you said, it will basically be fine either way if the system is sufficiently advanced especially if autonomy can't be disengaged while moving.
    - jakzurr 25d ago
      I think the argument for autonomous is that human intervention is, generally, wrongly rather than rightly. At this point, I won't agree or disagree, but it's getting more interesting all the time.
semi-extrinsic 25d ago
There was research some years ago in Sweden that cars with 4WD get into accidents 20% - 30% more often than cars with 2WD. And cars with 4WD averaged 10% higher speed at the moment of the crash. The cause was found to be drivers with 2WD losing a little traction early in their drove and subsequently slowing down, while drivers with 4WD just kept driving like normal until they were suddenly off the road. Another statistic is that intoxicated or otherwise impaired drivers cause more than half of all fatalities. So making a solution with machine learning and cameras that could retrofit into any existing car and just deny starting the car for such drivers, and having insurance companies cut premiums for having such gadgets installed, would be much more effective than any form of self driving or similar. https://mb.cision.com/wpyfs/00/00/00/00/00/3E/5A/A2/wkr0011.pdf https://mb.cision.com/wpyfs/00/00/00/00/00/3E/5A/A2/wkr0011....
- ryandrake 25d ago
  The gadgets would have to meet an impossibly low false-positive rate and they'd need to be mandatory and non-removable for this to be effective. Constantly impaired drivers won't voluntarily install the devices, and any non-impaired driver who is falsely prevented from using their car will get rid of the device and not care about the insurance discount. Also, they really need to be able to detect the other really bad cause of impairment: mobile phone usage.
  - LtWorf 24d ago
    A tampered car won't pass inspection.
Gigachad 25d ago
It's like those approval prompts in coding agents. At the start you are reading the commands intently but after being bombarded with them for days you just hit accept on them.

redwall_hp 25d ago

Automatic braking alone is a huge deal: if you're a bit late in braking, you get a warning. If you go past that, brakes auto apply. When configured correctly, I don't even notice it's there 99.9% of the time...and the times I do I'm glad it's there, because the beep pulls you out of a momentary distraction. The only problem is not every car on the road has it yet.

epgui 25d ago
Anecdotally, the only times I've ever noticed these chimes and the auto-braking (even automatic rolling-up of windows), it was false positives, and it was mildly terrifying: for a brief and unexpected moment I was no longer in control of my vehicle. [Recent Honda Civic and Audi A3 models]
- stephencanon 25d ago
  I've only had a couple weeks in rentals with automatic emergency braking, and was very nearly been rear-ended twice due to false positives. Anecdotal, and I'm sure they'll improve with time, but I would never allow the system I experienced anywhere near a car I owned. It was profoundly unsafe.
  - Terr_ 25d ago
    Assuming you're already stuck with such a vehicle, is there any benefit to a dashcam that captures the alert-noises to prove the that you, the driver, never chose to brake unsafely? I realize this relies heavily on the questionable sanity and ethics of insurance companies. Even if they agree you aren't personally at fault, they'd probably just increase the premiums for everyone with that model, rather than sue the car manufacturer.
    - ozim 25d ago
      Never hear of someone who was rear ended being liable. Guy behind should keep a distance that allows him reacting in time and he is responsible for keeping that distance. The same for skiing you don’t have eyes on the back of your head, one behind you is responsible for not crashing into you. In car you have rear mirrors but if you have something in front of you and breaking you are not going to look in the mirrors.

MostlyStable 25d ago

The problem with mostly-but-not-entirely autonomous is that humans will tend to treat it like entirely autonomous.

dylan604 25d ago
It doesn't help when manufacturers call their mostly-but-not-entirely autonomous systems Full Self Driving
- throw1234567891 25d ago
  A manufacturer.

AlotOfReading 25d ago

An ADAS would be L4 if it was designed to be truly autonomous. If it's not designed to be truly autonomous, you have to somehow address the attention problem. Even a good attention monitoring system isn't sufficient, because people have the ability to appear superficially attentive by all external metrics, while not engaging with the driving task mentally. The data to differentiate these levels is pretty limited for a variety of reasons, and the problem only worsens when you conflate AEB with ADAS as the IHS/IEEE do in this article rather than use an OEDR-based definition.

hoss1474489 25d ago

I recently implemented OpenPilot for my vehicle and used it on a 9 hour road trip. Due to the nuances of my vehicle, the built-in hands-on-wheel nag was still active and required (small) driver wheel inputs every 10 seconds to prevent the beeps. Just keeping both hands on the wheel was enough to pacify the nag. But this forced me to keep attention on the vehicle, more than OpenPilot's face direction detector. Anecdotally I am certain this kept me more engaged than if I could have gone hands off. The net effect was I had more capacity to be aware of what was going on around me on the road, AND I didn't feel nearly as fatigued at the end of the drive. Keeping the car between the lines consumes a little bit of cognitive energy constantly, which compounds over a long drive. Freeing up that load allowed me to pay more attention to what was happening on the rest of the road. And the mental burden was still half as much--I felt like I had driven maybe 4-5 hours instead of 9. I have some ideas for how I might disable the built-in nag, but I'm pretty sure doing so would make my car less safe. The current configuration might already achieve the safety maximum for ADAS based on front-facing cameras only. It increases situational awareness while reducing fatigue, and I think that anything further I try to do will adversely affect one or both of those effects.