811–820 of 1001 posts
What happens when a self driving car in the future from a service is driving empty back to some parking? And hits someone? Does it call ambulance or police?
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.…
The Washington Post has an updated story with the victim's name: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr-gridlock/wp/2018/03/1... > Police said the vehicle was northbound on Curry Road when a woman, identified as 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg, crossing from the west side of street, was struck. She died at a hospital, the department said. No mention of her being a bicyclist. My gut instinct is to accept that the victim w…
I'd think so too, but there is literally a crumpled bicycle in the photo of the scene. Also the Uber has a dent on the right side, which faces east. It's possible she was walking her bicycle across the street, but that still looks pretty bad for Uber. That street is a straight shot with clear visibility.
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> I won't be surprised if someone at some point wears a stripy outfit, and the car thinks they are a part of the road, and tries to explicitly chase them down until they are under the wheels. Or if the car suddenly decides that the road continues at a 90 degree angle off a bridge. Or that the splashes from a puddle in front is actually an oncoming car and it must swerve into the school kids crossing the perpendicular…
> Are you working on the next season of Black Mirror? In Black Mirror, all cars in the world will simultaneously swerve into nearby pedestrians, buildings, or other cars.
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Very little of what goes into a current-generation self-driving car is based on machine learning [1]. The reason is exactly your point -- algorithmic approaches to self-driving are much safer and more predictable than a machine learning algorithms. Instead, LIDAR should exactly identify potential obstacles to the self-driving car on the road. The extent to which machine learning is used is to classify whether each ob…
Actually, because there's a severe shortage of LIDAR sensors (much like video cards & crypto currencies, self driving efforts have outstripped supply by a long shot), machine learning is being used quite broadly in concert with cameras to provide the model of the road ahead of the vehicle.
You can get depth sensing (time of flight) 2D camera Orbecc Astra for $150 or 1D laser scanner RPLIDAR for $300. Of course they are probably not suited for automotive, but for me even extra $2000 for self-driving car sensors isn't that much.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very little of what goes into a current-generation self-driving car is based on machine learning [1]. The reason is exactly your point -- algorithmic approaches to self-driving are much safer and more predictable than a machine learning algorithms. Instead, LIDAR should exactly identify potential obstacles to the self-driving car on the road. The extent to which machine learning is used is to classify whether each ob…
But that's the issue: identifying a pedestrian vs a snowman or a mailbox or a cardboard cutout is important when deciding whether to swerve left or right. It's an asymptotic problem: you'll never get 100% identification, and based on that, even the rigid algorithms will make mistakes. LIDAR is also not perfect when the road is covered in 5 inches of snow and you can't tell where the lanes are. Or at predicting a driv…
Neither are humans, and a self-driving car can react much faster than any human ever could.
This is what's going to happen. If you've ever seen a machine learning algorithm in action, this isn't surprising at all. Basically, they'll behave as expected some well known percentage of the time. But when they don't, the result will not be just a slight deviation from the normal algorithm, but a very unexpected one. So we will have overall a much smaller number of deaths caused by self driving cars, but ones that…
Do we even know yet what's happened?
It seems rather in bad taste to take someones death, not know the circumstances then wax lyrical about how it matches what you'd expect.
Former Lyft eng here. From my vantage point, as an industry, we're nowhere near where we should be on the safety side. The tech companies are developing driving tech privately instead of openly. Why can a private for profit company "test" their systems on the public roads? The public is at serious risk of getting run over by hacked and buggy guidance / decision system. Even when a human operator has his hands hoverin…
> Why can a private for profit company "test" their systems on the public roads? Because at some point, it's literally not possible to test something that's ultimately intended for use on public roads anywhere but public roads. Or, to put it in terms that would be more familiar to developers, "you can test all you want in QA, but prod is the ultimate test of whether your code really works". As mentioned downthread, t…
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.…
This is not a really strong argument against self-driving cars. The fact that a problem is NP-hard doesn't make it untractable. Every day we use apps that deal with NP problems (e.g., routing problems, packing problems, etc.). Also, note that there're P problems whose instances can be harder than (smaller) NP ones.
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Self driving cars are still subject to the laws of physics... unless you're going to dictate that self-driving cars never go above 15mph, I wouldn't advocate jumping in front of even a "perfect" self-driving car. Braking distance (without including any decision time) for a 15mph car is 11 ft, for a 30mph is 45 ft. Self driving cars won't change these limits. (well, they may be a little better than humans at maximizin…
The speed limit for this particular stretch was 45 mph. (sounds high to me, considering there is a bike lane)