Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

791–800 of 1001 posts

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#791

Post by _xnmw »

My personal hunch is that fully autonomous self-driving tech is not theoretically possible under currently known computational models, because it implies many well-known NP-Hard problems. Self-driving companies are betting on the ability to find a heuristic/approximation that works "sufficiently well". But I strongly feel that the chasm that needs to be crossed to be "sufficiently good" is not one of magnitude (i.e. we just need more testing!), but of theoretical boundaries, due to the existence of at-least two sub-problems which are not computationally solvable: 1. prediction of what pedestrians/cyclists will do next, and 2. accounting for sensor input distortion under bad weather conditions.

Humans can solve these problems due to life experience, not just driving experience. In other words, I think we're gonna need fully-conscious AI to solve self-driving.

The only way self-driving tech will reach production is if the input space is restricted, which is a significant-but-not-groundbreaking iteration on what we've been doing for decades with airplane autopilots and self-driving monorails. Sure, we can have self-driving cars on specifically designed freeways, but nothing more.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#792

Post by fnbr »

xbeta wrote: post #783

Statistically speaking, I am curious to know the data on these areas: - number of miles driven per fatal accident on self-driving - number of miles driven per fatal accident on a human driver. It is important to know whether our machine is now doing worse/better than our counter-part and this means a lot for our self-driving initiatives.

The numbers that I have seen indicate that humans have a fatal accident roughly once per hundred million miles, while we have one fatal accident for a self-driving car, with somewhere around ten million miles driven across all self-driving cars.

I've heard Uber is around 3 million self-driving miles.

So Uber would be 30x worse than humans.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#793

Post by em3rgent0rdr »

icc97 wrote: post #713

One aspect that comes from this is that now car crashes can be treated more like aircraft crashes. Each self-driving car now has a black box in it with a ton of telemetary. So it's not just "don't drink and drive", knowing that they'll probably reoffend soon anyway. Every crash and especially fatality can be thoroughly investigated and should be prevented from ever happening again. Hopefully there's enough data in th…

> "Every crash and especially fatality can be thoroughly investigated"

Would be better if the code and data was open for public review.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#794

Post by emodendroket »

_xnmw wrote: post #791

My personal hunch is that fully autonomous self-driving tech is not theoretically possible under currently known computational models, because it implies many well-known NP-Hard problems. Self-driving companies are betting on the ability to find a heuristic/approximation that works "sufficiently well". But I strongly feel that the chasm that needs to be crossed to be "sufficiently good" is not one of magnitude (i.e.…

> Sure, we can have self-driving cars on specifically designed freeways, but nothing more.

But at this point what makes it better than a train?

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#795

Post by tdonaghe »

_xnmw wrote: post #791

My personal hunch is that fully autonomous self-driving tech is not theoretically possible under currently known computational models, because it implies many well-known NP-Hard problems. Self-driving companies are betting on the ability to find a heuristic/approximation that works "sufficiently well". But I strongly feel that the chasm that needs to be crossed to be "sufficiently good" is not one of magnitude (i.e.…

What if "good enough" is just reduces deaths/injuries by 99%? 90%?

People would still get hurt and die directly due to software that cannot be perfected, but the gains to society as a whole might be worth it.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#796

Post by jjoonathan »

_xnmw wrote: post #791

My personal hunch is that fully autonomous self-driving tech is not theoretically possible under currently known computational models, because it implies many well-known NP-Hard problems. Self-driving companies are betting on the ability to find a heuristic/approximation that works "sufficiently well". But I strongly feel that the chasm that needs to be crossed to be "sufficiently good" is not one of magnitude (i.e.…

Aren't self-driving cars already doing much better than humans on the safety front? That's the standard to beat, not perfection.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#797

Post by emodendroket »

fnbr wrote: post #792
xbeta wrote: post #783

Statistically speaking, I am curious to know the data on these areas: - number of miles driven per fatal accident on self-driving - number of miles driven per fatal accident on a human driver. It is important to know whether our machine is now doing worse/better than our counter-part and this means a lot for our self-driving initiatives.

The numbers that I have seen indicate that humans have a fatal accident roughly once per hundred million miles, while we have one fatal accident for a self-driving car, with somewhere around ten million miles driven across all self-driving cars. I've heard Uber is around 3 million self-driving miles. So Uber would be 30x worse than humans.

Interesting analysis, but the data seems a little sparse to draw this conclusion.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#798

Post by xbeta »

_xnmw wrote: post #791

My personal hunch is that fully autonomous self-driving tech is not theoretically possible under currently known computational models, because it implies many well-known NP-Hard problems. Self-driving companies are betting on the ability to find a heuristic/approximation that works "sufficiently well". But I strongly feel that the chasm that needs to be crossed to be "sufficiently good" is not one of magnitude (i.e.…

I think the self-driving initiative is not about beating the human counterpart at launch, but at least on par with the performance done by human. That itself has huge value in efficiency and saving time.

Slowly with many AI-driven vehicles on the road, we can "optimized" for a better performance on safety and other issues.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#799

Post by baron816 »

icc97 wrote: post #713

One aspect that comes from this is that now car crashes can be treated more like aircraft crashes. Each self-driving car now has a black box in it with a ton of telemetary. So it's not just "don't drink and drive", knowing that they'll probably reoffend soon anyway. Every crash and especially fatality can be thoroughly investigated and should be prevented from ever happening again. Hopefully there's enough data in th…

I hope we see the day when every car crash makes national news and there’s a big NTSB investigation into what happened.

Re: Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

#800

Post by linkregister »

DangerousPie wrote: post #322

I know this is a slightly insensitive question to ask right now, but assuming that what happened was that the car tried to turn right and the cyclist came from behind and crossed into its path[0]: Who would actually have been in the wrong? I cycle along paths like this from time to time myself, and I always assume that I should let a turning car pass in front of me. As soon as I see the turn signal I will either fall…

That move is against the law, at least in San Francisco. The vehicle should enter the bike lane to turn right.
Post reply on HN