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Why self-driving cars are not going to happen

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Re: Why self-driving cars are not going to happen

#12
post #4

Human drivers can feel safe around other cars because of mutually assured destruction. You are both afraid of dying if you make a significant mistake. Self-driving cars will never have this fear holding them back from making mistakes. You could argue there is actually an incentive to let them crash once in awhile, because the valuable real world data will be phoned home and used to improve the product for the small p…

I am a human driver. I do not feel safe around other cars.

I am also human driver and I feel safer around "dumb" cars. I don't ever intend to ride a self driving car, and will do my best to avoid being near one.

Aside from being vulnerable to malicious actors, self-driving cars make "cold-hearted" mistakes that don't make sense; mistakes that humans would never make. Sure, the total number of mistakes they make will be lower than the equivalent number of accidents caused by humans. However, having human life lost to the type of mistakes self-driven cars make is, in my opinion, an unacceptable price to pay.

If I must loose my life to a car-related indecent, I want the it to be caused by a human, and not some quirk or edge-case in an algorithm or neural net.

Re: Why self-driving cars are not going to happen

#13
Disappointed that this article even made it to hacker news.

Problem#2: "Liability Issues" doesn't make sense. Geico, Allstate and other insurance companies can easily provide coverage. In fact the insurance gets easier with self-driving cars. Premium might go up or down based on the technology used. But coverage is very much doable.

Driving is so monotonous,that it is a perfect "killer app" for computer vision and cognitive computing.

Re: Why self-driving cars are not going to happen

#14
As you're saying it can't be done, just don't get in the way of the guys actually getting it done.

The mattress is a nice example of a novel problem, but a remote edge-case. Being safe from all badly secured loads is not a prerequesite for self-driving cars -- they merely need to be more safe on balance than the mass of human drivers before they start taking over. I suspect that even if self-driving-cars all did the worst possible thing and tailgated all badly secured loads, the overall safety improvement would still be a net positive.

This prediction will suffer the same fate of other naysaying predictions by experts (never fly, never get to the moon, never know what a star is made of, etc., etc,., etc.....).

Re: Why self-driving cars are not going to happen

#15
The two reasons offered are the complexity of algorithms and the liability.

I don't think these reasons are valid. For the complexity, I would be really surprised if self-driving car programmers wouldn't consider dangers from objects falling from other cars. In fact, this is relatively easy to consider.

The other one is the liability. One explanation for ML software was that if "regular" software is about data and algorithm, the ML software is about data, model and algorithm. The idea is that algorithm in ML case is somewhat generic, and a lot of customization comes from learned model. In case of liability I think it's quite possible that a judge would make a decision basing on analysis of the model - if the model is "reasonable", then the decision based on that model could be too.

Re: Why self-driving cars are not going to happen

#16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a human driver. I do not feel safe around other cars.

I am also human driver and I feel safer around "dumb" cars. I don't ever intend to ride a self driving car, and will do my best to avoid being near one. Aside from being vulnerable to malicious actors, self-driving cars make "cold-hearted" mistakes that don't make sense; mistakes that humans would never make. Sure, the total number of mistakes they make will be lower than the equivalent number of accidents caused by…

As someone almost killed this evening while driving home from the Thanksgiving holiday weekend by a driver texting and not paying attention behind me at highway speeds (with my wife and newborn daughter in the car), I welcome the cold, calculating embrace of self driving cars with open arms.

Edit: The driver ended up impacting a semi trailer that had been in front of us, with me leaving the lane for the safety of the grassy interstate median.

Re: Why self-driving cars are not going to happen

#17
post #14

As you're saying it can't be done, just don't get in the way of the guys actually getting it done. The mattress is a nice example of a novel problem, but a remote edge-case. Being safe from all badly secured loads is not a prerequesite for self-driving cars -- they merely need to be more safe on balance than the mass of human drivers before they start taking over. I suspect that even if self-driving-cars all did the…

> a remote edge-case

Have you ever driven on the 405? Give me a break. We're far away (if at all) from true self-driving cars.

Re: Why self-driving cars are not going to happen

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am also human driver and I feel safer around "dumb" cars. I don't ever intend to ride a self driving car, and will do my best to avoid being near one. Aside from being vulnerable to malicious actors, self-driving cars make "cold-hearted" mistakes that don't make sense; mistakes that humans would never make. Sure, the total number of mistakes they make will be lower than the equivalent number of accidents caused by…

As someone almost killed this evening while driving home from the Thanksgiving holiday weekend by a driver texting and not paying attention behind me at highway speeds (with my wife and newborn daughter in the car), I welcome the cold, calculating embrace of self driving cars with open arms. Edit: The driver ended up impacting a semi trailer that had been in front of us, with me leaving the lane for the safety of the…

Firstly, I'm glad you and your family were not harmed.

I do not in any way mean for this to be offensive or disrespectful, but would you still welcome self-driving cars had this incident been caused by a malfunctioning self-driving car as apposed to a reckless driver?

My point is that self-driving cars lack the common sense that humans have. A human would immediately halt if they hear a child scream near their car, a car would continue moving along as if nothing is happening if it isn't designed or trained to detect screams.

Until machines gain sensory and cognitive capabilities that exceed ours, and a working comprehension of human values, I maintain my stance regarding this issue.

Re: Why self-driving cars are not going to happen

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a human driver. I do not feel safe around other cars.

I am also human driver and I feel safer around "dumb" cars. I don't ever intend to ride a self driving car, and will do my best to avoid being near one. Aside from being vulnerable to malicious actors, self-driving cars make "cold-hearted" mistakes that don't make sense; mistakes that humans would never make. Sure, the total number of mistakes they make will be lower than the equivalent number of accidents caused by…

Do you take flights or go near where a plane might crash? Because they're autopiloted. They are safer than manually-driven cars too.

Re: Why self-driving cars are not going to happen

#20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone almost killed this evening while driving home from the Thanksgiving holiday weekend by a driver texting and not paying attention behind me at highway speeds (with my wife and newborn daughter in the car), I welcome the cold, calculating embrace of self driving cars with open arms. Edit: The driver ended up impacting a semi trailer that had been in front of us, with me leaving the lane for the safety of the…

Firstly, I'm glad you and your family were not harmed. I do not in any way mean for this to be offensive or disrespectful, but would you still welcome self-driving cars had this incident been caused by a malfunctioning self-driving car as apposed to a reckless driver? My point is that self-driving cars lack the common sense that humans have. A human would immediately halt if they hear a child scream near their car, a…

> A human would immediately halt if they hear a child scream near their car, a car would continue moving along as if nothing is happening if it isn't designed or trained to detect screams.

I don't know to what extent they use sound as an input (makes sense that they'd do, given horns). But for what I've seen, self-driving cars are much better than humans at detecting pedestrians in their vicinity, including cases in which a child can't actually be seen by a human driver and he happens not to be screaming.

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