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<em>Animals and children running out last-second into the road?</em> I feel like AI would outperform the heck out of us in that situation, because solving it c
by Cass 12y ago
<em>Animals and children running out last-second into the road?</em>
I feel like AI would outperform the heck out of us in that situation, because solving it correctly involves a) high situational awareness, which we suck at because we get distracted, and b) making split-second calculations, which we suck at because we panic and our reflexes aren't that fast. I mean, this is a simple situation, when it comes down to it:
Something runs out into the road.
- Can you swerve and avoid hitting it without hitting anything else or driving off the road? If yes, do. If no:
- Can you hit the brakes without endangering anyone behind you? (Humans tend to have trouble with this decision, because half the time we forget to watch the rear view mirror and now there's no time to check. An AI would ALWAYS know what was behind it.)
If yes, do. If not:
Are you more worried about endangering the thing before you or the thing behind you? If it's an animal, hit the animal. If the thing in front of you is a squishy human and the thing behind you is a car protected by all the engineering that protects cars in crashes these days, hit the brakes.
That's all there is to it, 99 % of the time. Sure, this is a situation where AI might make the wrong decision in 1 % of cases, but it's also a situation where humans are wrong much more than that.
<em>How do you deal with a lack of markers on the road?</em>
This one is actually probably most easily solved by just putting markers on all roads. Sure, that would require driving down all roads in a specially-engineered expensive vehicle with a dedicated crew, so you think it sounds like unaffordable insanity until you realize google has already done it once, for the googlemaps mapping project. Just do it again, this time in a car made for spray-painting markers instead of mapping stuff.
Apart from that, the overwhelming majority of problems on the road can be solved by yielding even when you're technically in the right and just slowing the heck down, if necessary to walking speed and below. There will still be problems that only a human being can solve, but there's going to be a human being in the car, so worst case, pull over and ask them. If your human is drunk or underage, pull over, wait for the next passing car, watch how their human solves it, and do what they did. In the rare case where there's no other car likely to pass any time soon and the human in the car is incapacitated - possibly some sort of remote solution would work, where a human in some kind of remote driving center can take control of your car for a minute if necessary?
There'll still be high-speed situations where the AI will fuck and kill someone, but I do think people would come to accept self-driving AI even if it occasionally fucks up and kills people, because it'll be world-changingly convenient. And so far we've accepted a LOT of occasionally-deadly shit if it's sufficiently convenient. (Trains. planes. Nuclear reactors. Every single one of those things had waves of protests and people going "It will never work, and when it fails, people will die! Not worth it!"
And occasionally they failed, and people died, but we still keep using them.
- archagon 12y ago> I feel like AI would outperform the heck out of us in that situation, because solving it correctly involves a) high situational awareness, which we suck at because we get distracted, and b) making split-second calculations, which we suck at because we panic and our reflexes aren't that fast. My understanding is that current self-driving technology works great at short range, but is pretty incapable of dealing with obstacles at a distance. If there are things far away that are potentially dangerous — kids, a car behaving erratically, a landslide — I can slow down in case something happens. A self-driving car might have more trouble until the obstacle gets in range, by which point it might be too late. > Are you more worried about endangering the thing before you or the thing behind you? If it's an animal, hit the animal. What if it's somebody's pet? Sometimes putting a dent in someone's car is worth saving a beloved animal's life. What if you're about to hit someone and there's a bicyclist behind you? There will be times when the car will have to make decisions regarding which life to save, including the driver's. > This one is actually probably most easily solved by just putting markers on all roads. This isn't possible on all roads. Markers can be covered by snow, mud, etc. Yes, you can have RFID markers or whatever, but that would be incredibly expensive. Who's going to pay the bill? The taxpayers? Why? Also, I was just reminded of parking: how the heck will self-driving cars deal with the current parking rules? It takes all my intelligence just to figure those out sometimes! > There'll still be high-speed situations where the AI will fuck and kill someone, but I do think people would come to accept self-driving AI even if it occasionally fucks up and kills people, because it'll be world-changingly convenient. But self-driving cars won't be world-changingly convenient. I don't drive. I don't have to: trains, buses, and occasionally planes take care of my transportation needs for me. I can already snooze on my way to work, get home when I'm drunk, etc. Who will these cars change the world for? Silicon Valley types who want to commute and go on vacation without bumping into anyone else? Because the poor certainly won't be able to afford them, country folks won't be able to use them, and Europeans will probably have no need for them. (Heck, they're still mostly on manual transmissions. And have you looked at the gas prices over there?!) When we went from horses to trains (and eventually cars and planes), it made it possible for humans to travel across the entire world in a matter of hours. Self-driving cars won't be that kind of leap. I think it would be much healthier for our cities to focus on developing public transit infrastructure. The best places I've ever lived have been threaded by a city-wide metro system, with commuter trains connecting to further regions. Pedestrians benefit. Suburbanites benefit. The city feels more compact and walkable. You can even get rid of some of the roads!