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Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

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Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#331

Post by cerved »

jstanley wrote: post #316
kajecounterhack wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know by what metrics you're making these comparisons. Audio recognition and self-driving vehicles are apples and oranges. Autonomous driving is difficult primarily because of a changing world and low tolerance for mistakes. The state space of situations you're trying to map is just large. It will take time. But it's not even close to impossible. Audio recognition is difficult for a different reason: language…

> Audio recognition is difficult for a different reason: language is difficult to disambiguate without context. That's not the only reason audio recognition is hard. If it were, audio recognition would be exactly as hard as interpreting written text.

I get your point but to nitpick, written and spoken language are not equivalent. We don't say things like "quote", "comma" and "question mark". We use things like intonation, gestures etc.

Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#332

Post by qyv »

euyyn wrote: post #174
rayiner wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im skeptical you can do real autonomous driving without context. In DC, we have roads that flow one direction part of the day and another direction the other part. We've got roads that will be shut down unpredictably when there is a diplomatic event. We've got constant construction, where a two lane road might be reduced to one lane with a human holding a sign or using hand signals to usher cars through on their turn…

But you, as a human, don't need to know what happened before, to be able and drive through those conditions. You just need the immediately-available information, which is what OP defined as "no need for context" vs speech recognition.

How does a self driving car differentiate between a police officer flagging you down and a carjacker? Humans can make this judgement because we have a context for each of those situations based on our understanding of how the world works outside of just operating a vehicle safely.

Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#333

Post by cerved »

ChrisLTD wrote: post #294
pg314 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure, your sensors and cameras might be able to read signage correctly in 99% of conditions, but when there's graffiti on the sign at night during heavy rain, all bets are off. In the vast majority of the cases, that sign will have been seen by another autonomous car on a sunny day before it had graffiti, and stored in the map database. You should be comparing a whole fleet of autonomous vehicles learning from each…

What if the sign actually changes?

Have the responsible authority submit the change to db

Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#334

Post by Swizec »

Animats wrote: post #267
strebler wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've hit the nail on the head - audio recognition is quite poor after (a lot of) concerted effort over decades. Driving a car safely is significantly more difficult (and dangerous). That being said, Toyota's (and Subaru's) approach is the smart way forward - add sensors and capabilities that augment the human, but leave the human always responsible and in control. In order for a crash to happen, the human AND the m…

That being said, Toyota's (and Subaru's) approach is the smart way forward - add sensors and capabilities that augment the human, but leave the human always responsible and in control. In order for a crash to happen, the human AND the machine BOTH have to miss it. That's the approach we know won't work. That was Tesla's first-round autopilot, the self-crashing car. The one that would happily run into obstacles protru…

> That's the approach we know won't work. That was Tesla's first-round autopilot, the self-crashing car.

I think OP was talking about "crash avoidance" systems. Not systems that claim to drive the car but not really.

You're always driving, the car is just silently observing. If the car sees you're about to crash, it steps in and takes over. The opposite of Tesla's approach where you play the role of observer taking over when things go wrong.

The first approach is safe. The second approach isn't safe until full autonomy due to cognitive load and task switching delays.

Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#335

Post by wstrange »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #307
rayiner wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im skeptical you can do real autonomous driving without context. In DC, we have roads that flow one direction part of the day and another direction the other part. We've got roads that will be shut down unpredictably when there is a diplomatic event. We've got constant construction, where a two lane road might be reduced to one lane with a human holding a sign or using hand signals to usher cars through on their turn…

For a few more very common examples of humans using context: A human will spot a person wearing headphones and recognize that person has a low situational awareness. The computer doesn't come close to even having the optical resolution to do that if the AI was perfect - remember human vision is 570+ megapixels, even a 4K video stream is literally two orders of magnitude lower. [Now think about the fact that if we bui…

The computer could just assume the worst case:

That all people are classified as drunk children wearing headphones with low situational awareness.

Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#336

Post by strebler »

Animats wrote: post #267
strebler wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've hit the nail on the head - audio recognition is quite poor after (a lot of) concerted effort over decades. Driving a car safely is significantly more difficult (and dangerous). That being said, Toyota's (and Subaru's) approach is the smart way forward - add sensors and capabilities that augment the human, but leave the human always responsible and in control. In order for a crash to happen, the human AND the m…

That being said, Toyota's (and Subaru's) approach is the smart way forward - add sensors and capabilities that augment the human, but leave the human always responsible and in control. In order for a crash to happen, the human AND the machine BOTH have to miss it. That's the approach we know won't work. That was Tesla's first-round autopilot, the self-crashing car. The one that would happily run into obstacles protru…

Tesla took the opposite approach of what I described (the Subaru approach).

Tesla took the approach that the machine is in control and the human has to detect and take over when the machine makes a mistake. That is known to be a very problematic strategy, it's easy for the human to get distracted.

What Subaru has done is to leave the human in control, the machine only steps in when it sees a problem.

It's totally different safety outcomes. In fact, not even the same problem - one is "self driving", the other is "crash prevention".

Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#337

Post by Swizec »

kajecounterhack wrote: post #209
strebler wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've hit the nail on the head - audio recognition is quite poor after (a lot of) concerted effort over decades. Driving a car safely is significantly more difficult (and dangerous). That being said, Toyota's (and Subaru's) approach is the smart way forward - add sensors and capabilities that augment the human, but leave the human always responsible and in control. In order for a crash to happen, the human AND the m…

I don't know by what metrics you're making these comparisons. Audio recognition and self-driving vehicles are apples and oranges. Autonomous driving is difficult primarily because of a changing world and low tolerance for mistakes. The state space of situations you're trying to map is just large. It will take time. But it's not even close to impossible. Audio recognition is difficult for a different reason: language…

> language is difficult to disambiguate without context.

So why don't Siri/Alexa/etc developers give them context? I would LOVE to be able to say "Alexa, play playlist on shuffle mode" or even simple "Alexa, turn on shuffle and go to next song"

But no, the word "and" is completely off limits. Saying "shuffle playlist" instead of "play playlist" also doesn't work. I have to literally use 3 commands to do what I want:

"Alexa, play Taylor Swift" ... "Alexa, shuffle" ... "Alexa, next song"

With context, I could say "Alexa, play Taylor Swift on shuffle"

Apparently Siri is gaining the ability to deal with follow up questions in iOS11. Excited to try it out.

Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#338

Post by vel0city »

rayiner wrote: post #238
PeterisP wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a self driving car, it's sufficient if its understanding of weird situations is limited to detecting "yep, I'm in a weird situation, I'm going to stop now and wait for a remote human to take control". The situations you describe are rare - I've once had a diplomatic event that required weird rerouting and twice had cases where traffic was regulated by hand signals due to some crash on the road, but that means jus…

These situations aren't rare at all. Just in the last few months, I've had: change in left-turn traffic pattern leaving my office onto a major road; humans guiding traffic on 2-3 separate occasions (very common around July 4th); cones dramatically changing lane patterns in construction zones; two occasions of cops blocking off a road with their cars to let a motorcade pass. And this is just me driving ( i.e. my car i…

I imagine traffic in D.C. is incredibly atypical compared to most US cities. Issues common to drivers in D.C. are probably very rare to most drivers in the US, including those in other major metropolitan areas.

Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#339

Post by balls187 »

Swizec wrote: post #337
kajecounterhack wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know by what metrics you're making these comparisons. Audio recognition and self-driving vehicles are apples and oranges. Autonomous driving is difficult primarily because of a changing world and low tolerance for mistakes. The state space of situations you're trying to map is just large. It will take time. But it's not even close to impossible. Audio recognition is difficult for a different reason: language…

> language is difficult to disambiguate without context. So why don't Siri/Alexa/etc developers give them context? I would LOVE to be able to say "Alexa, play playlist on shuffle mode" or even simple "Alexa, turn on shuffle and go to next song" But no, the word "and" is completely off limits. Saying "shuffle playlist" instead of "play playlist" also doesn't work. I have to literally use 3 commands to do what I want:…

How would you differentiate:

"Alexa, play Taylor Swift on shuffle"

vs

"Alexa, play Taylor Swift on Spotify" (real command)

Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#340

Post by ars »

throwawayjava wrote: post #155
damontal wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what if there are 2 obstacles that the car can't brake fast enough to avoid so it has to decide which to hit. one is a person pushing a baby in a baby carriage, the other is a person pushing someone a wheelchair

The exact same thing that happens now: someone dies, usually selected arbitrarily based upon the driver's selfish desire to minimize harm to themselves. Because that situation doesn't allow enough time to make anything except instinctual choices. The driver is found at fault for that death if they were not driving legally. Otherwise, and very often times regardless, the whole thing is written off as a tragic accident…

Millions???

You are off by two orders of magnitude. It was 35,000 two years ago.

Still a lot of people, but not millions.

Put in context, it's around one death per 100 million miles driven.

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