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Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

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Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

#221

Post by dsnuh »

UnderProtest wrote: post #175
dsnuh wrote: post #22

This is tangentially related, and something I have wondered, so I will ask it here. Does anyone know how self driving cars will react to attempts by law enforcement officers to pull over the vehicle?

The only reason this even looks like a problem is that humans don't follow the law. In most jurisdictions if there's an emergency vehicle running flashers and/or siren behind you on the same side of the road you're supposed to slow, pull over, stop, then proceed only when the vehicle passes you. If the emergency vehicle parks behind you then you have effectively been pulled over. Pulling over safely is practically th…

So if the autonomous vehicle hears the sirens, does it start to pull over, or wait until it can also detect flashers? What about a loud stereo playing a siren sound or a car with flashers installed on it? I'm just wondering, because although I know this sounds like a pretty simple problem, I don't think that it is.

Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

#222

Post by Animats »

saas_co_de wrote: post #210
Animats wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't work that way. Waymo's remote control does not even support direct manual remote control. It just lets the remote operator give some direction to the onboard systems.

I am giving an analogy. Street car on digital track is the first part of it. The remote control aspects are there as well. It is not "direct" remote control. It is like a drone. You give a direction and the onboard computers execute on it. Direct remote control is not possible because of latency. But it also seems that the commercial launches of these vehicles might be dependent on 5G networks being available (lower…

There's another startup, for self-driving trucks, which does have direct remote control. Their idea is that the trucks are self-driving for long-haul, and then the final non-Interstate part is remote controlled.[1]

[1] https://phantom.auto/

Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

#223

Post by zaroth »

rohit2412 wrote: post #215
the8472 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All we need is that they don't kill more people than average human drivers do per passenger-mile. Assuming ride-sharing we could even let them be a little more deadly than human drivers and still save lives.

No, that's a wrong benchmark. We shouldn't compare driverless cars with the average human driver. We should compare them with the average human driver assisted by the best technology (which is say waymo's driverless software running passively to prevent accidents).

You’re incorrectly assuming that a solution to the problem of self-driving a car is a superset of the problem of passive accident avoidance.

If the software is in active control pretty much everything that goes into that is different from software that is deciding if and when to emergency brake.

To put it another way, a self-driving system will become safer than human drivers, not because it knows how/when to emergency brake really well, but because it won’t have to emergency brake as frequently as a human does.

Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

#224

Post by lostsock »

dang wrote: post #220
phyzome wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you tell me more about downward-spiraling, and how this relates to the guidelines? The guy in the article seems to be implying that pedestrians don't have the right to be in the road. I think it's pretty OK to be dismissive of that.

"Seriously fuck that guy" is low-grade internet sludge. We don't need that here. If you post it, others will post more, and we will get all sludgey. That's point #1. Point #2 is more subtle and more important. You picked an uncharitable interpretation in order to get snippy at it. That's a self-referential activity, not the thoughtful engagement we're looking for. This is why the site guidelines say: " Please respond…

Constantly impressed by the time you spend explaining your moderation suggestions dang, thank you for all the work you put in to make this place what it is :)

Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

#225

Post by legolas2412 »

zaroth wrote: post #223
rohit2412 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's a wrong benchmark. We shouldn't compare driverless cars with the average human driver. We should compare them with the average human driver assisted by the best technology (which is say waymo's driverless software running passively to prevent accidents).

You’re incorrectly assuming that a solution to the problem of self-driving a car is a superset of the problem of passive accident avoidance. If the software is in active control pretty much everything that goes into that is different from software that is deciding if and when to emergency brake. To put it another way, a self-driving system will become safer than human drivers, not because it knows how/when to emergen…

Sure, I understand that a driverless system might prevent accidents by strictly maintaining safe distances. But the benchmark still can't be unaided human, rather a human aided by the best assistive technology that can be built (say by the same company).

Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

#226

Post by [deleted] »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #173
notheguyouthink wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And people will die anyways. It would be the biggest miracle on earth I think if those things ended up being perfect (at least, the ones that work.. not Uber, obviously) . So it's all a numbers game. What's acceptable, and what we can improve on.

I had a famous cancer researcher at a world famous cancer treatment hospital tell me (paraphrasing) “we won’t ever see the kinds of breakthroughs we saw in the past because we were reckless back then, foolish even. It was the Wild West.” I’m not saying I want the highways to be a Wild West for self driving cars, but it’s worth admitting it would probably accelerate the pace of innovation.

[deleted]

Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

#227

Post by nostrademons »

sandworm101 wrote: post #136
ebikelaw wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All journalists covering the self-driving car beat are basically required to ignore Waymo so they can continue writing “When will cars drive themselves? Experts say nobody knows” articles. If you ignore Waymo it’s a race; if you include Waymo it’s not. This article makes the further error of assuming “AI” is required for self-driving cars, rather than just a shitload of code.

>> “When will cars drive themselves? Experts say nobody knows” articles. Nobody knows because it has yet to happen. We have all seen demos and studies but that doesn't convince anyone not involved in the tech. Cars will be capable of driving themselves when I see one, sans humans, ask to merge in front of me on the highway. It will happen when I see one navigate the lineup to the ferry I take every week. It will happ…

Living around the Mountain View area, this is one of those moments where I'm like "Oh, the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed."

I've been driving next to these cars for the past 7 years. A number of my friends & former coworkers have ridden in them; a couple of them work on them. They've stopped for me at pedestrian crosswalks. I've gotten stuck behind them, driving 25mph on El Camino. I've waved them on to make a left in front of me (I'm still not entirely sure how they do that, but I think that if they detect that the driver at the intersection is stopped and has not gone within any reasonable time period, they creep out and eventually go if no movement is detected). I saw one last week attempt to switch lanes, find that the car behind it had sped up and it was no longer safe to make the lane change, turn off its blinker, pull ahead in its own lane, and then make the lane change safely several cars up.

They are on the road, and they work pretty well. I trust them a lot more than cars that say "Student Driver Onboard", or even the average Californian driver.

Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

#228

Post by pwaai »

Well thankfully the Google CEO is not some super salesman like Elon Musk who is trying to emulate Steve Jobs and failing hard with Tesla.

I would bet the farm on Waymo, they realized it takes a long time to build a level 4 autonomous vehicle, so no doubt they were being poached by Uber which all failed.

Likely the problem is one of numbers. The sheer amount of data, and the traffic data Google has access to, all of this adds to a superior safety experience.

Meanwhile a level 2 masquerading as level 3 autopilot should be up for some serious scrutiny, especially if it's true that there appears to be some issue with the autopilot on the Tesla.

Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

#229

Post by pwaai »

Animats wrote: post #124

Another bad article. As I keep pointing out, the way you start to do automatic driving is by first profiling the terrain to see where you can go. If it's not flat road, you don't go there. Doesn't matter why it's not flat. Then try to classify other road objects and predict their behavior. This only matters for moving objects. Waymo gets this, as we know from Urmson's talk at SXSW a few years back. Most of the DARPA…

> There's this mindset that you just throw deep learning at camera images and automatic driving comes out. Musk claimed that.

Shouldn't there be serious repercussions? But seems like he can fuck up majorly and people will still line up to blow him...he does have a BILF thing going for him.

Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

#230

Post by mchahn »

rohit2412 wrote: post #214
InclinedPlane wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody has self-driving cars, not even Waymo. Every "self-driving car" has "disengagements" (a euphemism for "it stopped working") periodically every few thousand miles. That's simply unacceptable and needs to be sorted out. If a human driver was performing a panic stop for no reason or hitting a pedestrian or another car every 3 months or so we would take away their license. Waymo is doing better than almost everyon…

I repeat this again and again, and am always surprised that nobody else likes to raise the unfair comparisons. I am willing to assume that waymo/Tesla etc have found the holy Grail, and made a driverless car safer than the average current human driver on the road. I'm not convinced that we should still allow these driverless cars on the road with no human backups. Not because of expectations or liability, but because…

Interesting. Maybe instead of humans intervening in the AI, the AI should intervene in the human's driving.
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