There are a lot of road design features that come from the fact that humans do make certain mistakes consistently. For example, the US's love affair with four-way stops comes from drivers' inability to safely navigate uncontrolled intersections, even when there's no particular reason they couldn't. Stoplights usually have a delay between the red light for one direction and the green light for the next direction becau…
Seems like the curse of the 80/20 rule. Cars that can drive themselves, monitor their surroundings using cameras, react to unpredictable moving obstacles etc are pretty impressive. That's the 80%. The other 20% is about things like bad weather (especially snow, which can completely cover road markings and signs) and "no win" situations. It's not hard to see a close-enough-to-perfect system taking the other 80% of the time.
That is how Prof. Missy Cummings presented it in MIT's Human Factors class ~6 years ago. I've never seen a fighter cockpit, but she was a pilot herself, so I'll take her word for it :)
I've heard her tell this story. My impression (as I recall) was that it was to show the catapult operator that you weren't touching anything. But even though this is just about being flung mechanically off the deck, the basic idea applies. When the automated system is doing its thing, it can be harmful to interfere.
The other day, I came within two feet of a crash because the other driver completely disregarded a red light. It's pretty clear that if a human can't even pay attention to a light directly pointed at them, we have a very long time to go before humans can safely drive cars without a computer to intervene when needed.
One thing worth mentioning (even though I agree with the gist of your point) is that machines make the same mistakes consistently. This is pretty rare for a human. Imagine 10% of the cars on the road are autonomous and they all make this same mistake.
I think it's the opposite. Humans constantly make the same mistake like being drunk, tired, using a phone. With autonomous cars every single collision will be investigated - where the software is at fault a new improved version will be pushed to all cars, elimination the problem. This systematic improvement will mirror the improvement of airplane systems, but with a much faster time frame
> 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)
Spotify is default. She also knows how to do noun recognition. If she can tell the difference between “play” and “stop”, she can differentiate shuffle and Spotify.
I’m also ok sayin “Alexa, shuffle Taylor Swift” if that’s easier for their grammar.
I don' think that's true in terms of transportation systems. In terms of cars: Streets where built for people or animals walking on them and cars quickly started killing large numbers of people. The response was not to make cars safer by say physically limiting them to 10 MPH, but to remove people from streets. A fairly high fraction of early aviators where killed, that did little to slow adoption of aircraft. Astron…
> The response was not to make cars safer by say physically limiting them to 10 MPH Umm, reasonably sure that implementing a legal speed limit was an initial response, in the UK at least. It took a number of years (and likely a lot of propaganda, though I haven't looked that closely into it and history is, of course, written by the victors) to allow motorcars to use roads at anything close to a reasonable speed. Chec…
I am referring to a governor which would prevent cars from being capable of 10MPH even on empty roads. Actual in town speed limits would presumably be lower. Now, with our infrastructure that seems like a huge issue, but cites used to be built for walking and even small towns simply had vastly higher density.
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…
There are many automotive "auto-brake" systems, usually controlled by a radar. Those are useful. They're usually programmed to act only when a collision is inevitable. They prevent some slow-speed collisions, and reduce the damage in some faster ones.
What they don't do is take over steering. A last-second takeover of steering would make things worse some of the time.
Modern airliners _are_ mostly autonomous, and can even land themselves if necessary. Pilots are there as a safety margin. I've been on an automated city train as well, I believe in China.
Modern airlines are not mostly autonomous. I'll define it this way: remove the pilots from a flight at various stages along its route and see what happens. Multiple outcomes are possible but one is certain, it's not landing at the intended destination. If it were mostly autonomous, it'd land at destination at least some of the time. The chances of this happening today are 0.
That's because human checkpoints are intentionally wired into the workflow of a modern airliner. If those checkpoints were automated, the plane could indeed fly and land on its own. And I suspect the safety margins are not far from what is needed to automate the rest of the flight.
The space shuttle's only system that absolutely required human intervention was the landing gears, and that was to ensure that humans were always necessarily in the loop. That doesn't mean that the shuttle wasn't _MOSTLY_ automated.
> 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…
There are many automotive "auto-brake" systems, usually controlled by a radar. Those are useful. They're usually programmed to act only when a collision is inevitable. They prevent some slow-speed collisions, and reduce the damage in some faster ones. What they don't do is take over steering. A last-second takeover of steering would make things worse some of the time.
Don’t Volvo and Mercedes do obstacle avoidance? Or is that still in research? I think I remember seeing videos.
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…
Whether or not it "works" it has the overwhelming benefit of being an incremental approach. Incremental (evolutionary) change tends to work while revolutionary is more tricky. e.g. video phones were demonstrated in the 1960s but are still not really widely used. Also no need for Star Trek - level AI, which is a significant advantage.