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Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

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Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#251

Post by gameswithgo »

wpietri wrote: post #248
Animats wrote: post #71

Driverless cars are coming along just fine. Waymo is making steady progress. The sensors are getting better. The problem comes from all those "fake it til you make it" startups, Uber and Tesla being the worst. Both have killed people. This is mostly about sensors and geometry. Machine learning has a role, but only in target identification. That's how Waymo does it. The fake it til you make it crowd had the fantasy th…

Coming along fine, sure, but isn't the point about reality versus hype? The guy who started iRobot, Rodney Brooks, doesn't believe we'll see a true driverless car operating throughout a city on normal roads until 2035 at the earliest: http://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/ As software developers, we all know how big the difference between "a demo the boss is excited about" and "reliably working in production f…

>until 2035 at the earliest

Could be correct. I think likely it is correct. BUT, everyone thought we still wouldn't be winning games of Go by now. So could be wrong.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#252

Post by icebraining »

baybal2 wrote: post #225
icebraining wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

arguable usefulness/value Are regular cars useful? A self-driving car is just as useful for someone who can't drive: minors, many seniors, many people with disabilities - or people who just don't have a driving licenses, like me.

For them, a 30km/h crawler with overattentive collision avoidance system may well be useful. This is not much different to how public transport drivers have to drive. I expect them facing same issues like trams and trolleybuses - terribly bad experience in traffic. You only see risky people aggressively trying to overtake and scratching their paint, while leaving the driver no opportunity to move an inch.

A self-driving car is a mobile monitoring station; every such behavior will be closely tracked, recorded and possibly shared with the authorities. I think those drivers will learn to stay away from them.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#253

Post by santiagogo »

Buldak wrote: post #9
cicero wrote: post #2

"Our love affair with self-driving cars is a form of 'techno-chauvinism,' Prof. Broussard says. 'It's the idea that technology is always the highest and best solution, and is superior to the people-based solution.'"

We like the idea of technological solutions that don't require us to change our lifestyle or make hard choices. Driverless cars are appealing because they would allow us to largely maintain the status quo (as opposed to, say, reorienting toward public transportation). It's like an obese person who says, "I don't want to eat healthy and exercise. Why can't scientists just invent low-calorie versions of the food I like…

We like the idea of technology improving our quality of life because as a civilization it's worked for us spectacularly so far. Driverless cars are appealing because they build on top of a transportation solution that already works, reducing the problems and externalities of it, without requiring us to completely overhaul the way we build cities and live which could take decades. When half of the world lives in remote or insecure areas, driving vs public transport is not a lazy lifestlye choice like eating poorly. Autonomous cars will also bring about a lot of new use cases which could improve public transport design, reach and usage, like driving you to a metro station which has no parking in the morning and picking you up in the afternoon.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#254

Post by dragontamer »

thanatropism wrote: post #220
dragontamer wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's absolutely no equivalence between a CNN created today with deep learning, compared to the Neural Network in a human brain. The problem with the human brain is one of inattention. CNNs / Artificial Neural Networks can remain at attention 100% of the time due to their artificial / machine nature. But CNNs, despite being at 100% attention the entire time, still have issues determining if that splotch on the scre…

The "neural network" terminology is really cringeworthy all things considered. ("Deep learning" is much better.)

I dunno. I think "auto-optimization" best describes the process.

Even calling it "learning" is kinda overselling itself. There really are only two camps of "Learning": auto-optimization (against a trained dataset), and auto-categorization (aka self-training).

Its auto-optimization: the algorithm self-corrects itself to try and look more like the training-set's "ground truth". Or auto-categorization, as the algorithm looks for patterns and tries to draw its own categories.

"Learning" implies model finding. Which... strangely enough... I'd argue that 3-SAT solvers are more "learning" based, at least with colloquial use of the word. Those things really do craft new theories and test them through the process of elimination / resolution / etc. etc. "Neural Networks" explicitly DON'T do this however.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#255

Post by jimmaswell »

Animats wrote: post #71

Driverless cars are coming along just fine. Waymo is making steady progress. The sensors are getting better. The problem comes from all those "fake it til you make it" startups, Uber and Tesla being the worst. Both have killed people. This is mostly about sensors and geometry. Machine learning has a role, but only in target identification. That's how Waymo does it. The fake it til you make it crowd had the fantasy th…

> Both have killed people.

Are you referring to the midnight jaywalker in Uber's case? I still feel like most of the blame goes to the pedestrian.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#256

Post by dragonwriter »

enord wrote: post #249
stale2002 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You argument is basically that it is more important to figure out who to blame for deaths, than it is to get rid of those deaths in the first place. That strikes me as weird. Also, the people who will be paying out damages will be exactly the same as the people who are paying out for them today. The insurance companies. The simple solution to these "ethical" issues is for everyone to have insurance, and for the insur…

Nobody will accept liability for actions outside of their control, and car manufacturers can not possibly afford to insure all cars they sell in perpetuity. Insurance only works if the insuree bears the risk (and it has to be an actual risk with nonzero probability times cost, i'll leave why as an exercise to the reader) and in the case of car accidents, that risk is liability, which people have and computers don't.…

> Nobody will accept liability for actions outside of their control, and car manufacturers can not possibly afford to insure all cars they sell in perpetuity.

Car manufacturers already, in the US, bear strict liability for damages resulting from manufacturing defects in perpetuity, and bear the cost of that liability either by self-insurance or some form of liability insurance contract.

> Can TSLA or Uber be charged and convicted of vehicular manslaughter?

Irrelevant to the insurance issue, since criminal penalties are uninsurable; more relevant is can they be held civilly liable for wrongful death resulting from a defect in a vehicle they make, to which the answer is clearly “yes”.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#257

Post by wpietri »

xyhopguy wrote: post #221
01100011 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, my optical sensors(i.e. eyes) provide me with enough information to discriminate a cat from a bag, so I suppose with enough processing we should be able to do the same with a control system. Cars have an added advantage that their vision systems could work in lower light and non-optical wavelengths. I don't see any fundamental issues with getting self-driving cars working. It may not happen in 5 years, but it w…

The tough part about this line of reasoning is you can't tease apart the discriminatory power of human knowledge from human vision. How good does our expert system need to be? How good do our sensors need to be? I'm not so sure this is an easy to question to resolve

Exactly. Children have decent hand-eye coordination as toddlers. By 3 or 4, they can drive toy cars; by 5 they're riding bikes. But it takes them another decade or more to have the knowledge and judgment needed to drive a car in traffic. And even then they're not great; teens have a crash rate something like 3x other drivers.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#258

Post by mikedh »

pkulak wrote: post #170
Animats wrote: post #71

Driverless cars are coming along just fine. Waymo is making steady progress. The sensors are getting better. The problem comes from all those "fake it til you make it" startups, Uber and Tesla being the worst. Both have killed people. This is mostly about sensors and geometry. Machine learning has a role, but only in target identification. That's how Waymo does it. The fake it til you make it crowd had the fantasy th…

No one thinks that you just hook up ML to a camera and you're done. Literally everyone working on this only uses ML for identification. When that Model X crashed into a highway divider, it was because the lines on the road were very faint and there was a fork in the line that actually wasn't the _real_ lane line. The car followed that by mistake, but only because of the misidentification of the lane line. How are mor…

If the Model X in your example had LIDAR, it would have been able to build up a decently accurate collision model of the world, which it could have then used to say "there is an object in the path I'm on, maybe I shouldn't plow into it." As opposed to relying on implicit and apparently unreliable cues like lane markers. That particular fatal crash seems like a sensors and geometry problem.

"Nothing about our current world has been designed for lidar and radar. It was designed for binocular vision."

Really? Was the world designed for binocular vision, or is it just three dimensional?

Having more sensors, especially when they have different failure modes seems like the only possible way to create a reliable system. LIDAR isn't super dense, but generally has accurate returns. Binocular vision sucks on untextured objects, like the side of a white truck in the fatal Model S collision. Why wouldn't you want the crutch of both types of measurement?

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#259

Post by ntsplnkv2 »

aij wrote: post #96
save_ferris wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But in most of America we need to get back to the point where cars are no longer a necessity While I completely agree with you, the cultural barriers to this are petty much a non-starter in much of the country. I love not owning a car and being able to rely on mass transit where I live (Austin, TX), but Texas is so culturally opposed to anything like this. A lot of people think that mass transit is for the poor, an…

I live in the countryside but work in the city. This is in the US, so there is no bus I could take for my daily commute, though I've lived in countries where a similar arrangement would have a bus route within walking/biking distance. The thing is, if there were a bus, it would have to stop to pick up / drop off passengers along the way, which would make it so much slower than driving that it really would be for the…

The problem with buses isn't picking people up or stopping. It's just that without dedicated lanes or busways, they're not better than cars. Same traffic, + stops is a recipe for failure for people who can afford it. My bus takes a busway and skips huge traffic jams. I save 25 mins riding the bus and I don't pay to park.

> If they could tell that no one will be boarding or deboarding at a given stop, they could skip it entirely and take a shorter path instead.

Everytime selfdriving tech comes up people say things similar to this, this problem is 100% solvable now. Why are we waiting for self driving cars to solve this problem?

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#260

Post by paavoova »

yannyu wrote: post #85
iabacu wrote: post #74

The argument that autonomous tech will save lives is the most dangerous. This will take decades to be true. The same companies who are pushing for that narrative, are also the first ones to blame the drivers when their tech goes wrong. There’s so much data fudging to push for those narratives — they want the credit for lives saved, and at the same time don’t want the blame or liability for accidents caused.

Or maybe we hold driverless cars up to an unfair standard. Today, 3000 people die in the US every single day because of car accidents. Many, many more are injured or disabled. Why would we expect driverless cars to reduce that to 0? Shouldn't it be good enough if they reduce it to 50%? 25%?

Unfair? Why should a technology touted as the future be half-measured to something as "50%", as just "good enough"? When you have the human element at play, fault is easy to judge, as is blame easy to lay. When, say, a drunk driver is involved, it's clear what the problem is, and the state can fund enforcement against drunk driving and take other measures to reduce accidents. But with driverless cars, who does the victim and/or the victims family blame? What can the state and law enforcement do when there's nothing to prosecute besides some corporate entity (and possible laws that protect it) and a faulty algorithm or similar? The human element is no longer at play, and instead there's a car manufacture, protected by decades of lobbying, deciding what is safe enough to unleash on the populace. It's pure negligence to release driverless vehicles onto the roads simply because some statistics show it's "50% safer, thus safe enough".
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