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Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

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Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#311

Post by neumann »

techiferous wrote: post #306
linuxftw wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think interesting edge cases include: 'empty cardboard box or log?' 'Deer just crossed road, is there another one close behind?' 'Driving temporarily on the wrong side of the street due to construction or a downed tree limb' 'Police directing traffic' 'Driving on wrong side of road to avoid collision' 'One lane bridges' 'Busy parking garage with blind corners' 'City Bus driver forces themselves recklessly into your…

Other edge cases include: Amish buggies, rotaries in Boston, Syracuse's upside down traffic light (green is on top), etc. The possibilities are endless; how can you test them all? Humans are really good about adapting to novel situations on the fly, not so much computers.

I mean, you are right about humans as a species, but oh god, not as drivers. As a cyclist commuter, pass/get passed by a lot of cars and see a lot of irregular/irrational behavior. Everytime there is a change in the traffic rules along my route (detour, construction, closed lane, new signalling) you will get a pretty high rate of people who either ignore the change, panic and drive recklessly, or panic and come to a confused stop.

Maybe we need driverless cars that can show panic faces when they don't know what to do and be coached by a friendly citizen what to do? It would be super cute.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#312

Post by yay_cloud2 »

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…

I'm still taken aback by how quickly government (federal, state) allowed testing of driverless cars on public roads. Feels like a cold calculation made on behalf of citizens to say "some people probably need to die in order to bring this to market quickly, and that's ok with us in these areas."

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#313

Post by taneq »

linuxftw wrote: post #204
jimmy1 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Driverless cars are coming along just fine. I am curious why you believe this to be the case? Driverless cars have yet to even come close to being workable in adverse conditions, to my knowledge, please correct me if I am wrong. > This is mostly about sensors and geometry. And mostly about the limitations of sensors, and the limitation of available algorithms to overcome geometry. A algorithm a driverless car uses…

I think interesting edge cases include: 'empty cardboard box or log?' 'Deer just crossed road, is there another one close behind?' 'Driving temporarily on the wrong side of the street due to construction or a downed tree limb' 'Police directing traffic' 'Driving on wrong side of road to avoid collision' 'One lane bridges' 'Busy parking garage with blind corners' 'City Bus driver forces themselves recklessly into your…

I think we need to keep our expectations realistic. Most of those would challenge a significant portion of human drivers (and the scenarios suggested by sibling commenters are even more likely to cause a human to crash), and it's perfectly acceptable for a human driver to say "X crazy thing happened causing me to crash. What the fk?"

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#314

Post by taneq »

Fricken wrote: post #202
jimmy1 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Driverless cars are coming along just fine. I am curious why you believe this to be the case? Driverless cars have yet to even come close to being workable in adverse conditions, to my knowledge, please correct me if I am wrong. > This is mostly about sensors and geometry. And mostly about the limitations of sensors, and the limitation of available algorithms to overcome geometry. A algorithm a driverless car uses…

The infrastructure driverless vehicles rely on is their own internal maps, which have lanes and signage marked out. Being able to visually detect these things is important, but it is a measure for added redundancy. Great strides have been made in using machine learning to filter out obscurants such as snow. Perception for autonomous vehicles is effectively a solved problem. The biggest technical challenges are relate…

> Perception for autonomous vehicles is effectively a solved problem.

The problem is that you can't separate "perception" from "cognition". A human could drive a car reasonably well via a webcam feed, so does a webcam count as "solved perception"?

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#315

Post by innocenat »

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #101
tomjakubowski wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak for Montreal, but there are countless counterexamples of cities in wealthy countries (not as wealthy as the US) where metro users are drawn from more or less every income level. Turns out you can actually make riding a metro into a good experience with a bit of effort. New York, Chicago, Tokyo, Taipei, London, Berlin, Munich come immediately to mind. And as sibling commenters have pointed out, in some p…

Taipei... yes, absolutely. That was a great experience and easy to use. NYC... altright, better than 15 years ago but still not great at all. Not as good as Germany or DC. Tokyo... lol, no! While clean and efficient, it’s a joke that you have different rail stations owned by different companies, different cards that may work on each other but probably not. The ticket machines are almost all cash only. And instruction…

> The ticket machines are almost all cash only. And instructions in other languages might have well used Google translate.

That's probably only hold true for (Western) tourists. And I don't think it is fair to compare on that. Tokyo (and Japan in general) rail system can be really intimidating but that's just because its sheer size, but once you know your way around it, it's gotta be among the best rail system in the world.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#316

Post by deepnotderp »

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…

Lidar gives you high precision depth, so you can tell whether or not the car is parked or in the lane.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#317

Post by seanmcdirmid »

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #242
cevn wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suica cards work practically everywhere. You can poke a button to use english, usually clearly labeled. You need cash everywhere in Japan so not sure why that surprised you. My experience with Tokyo metro was pretty good. I've never seen a metro as well-organized despite 15 private rail companies splitting the system. The only problem is the operating hours, the last train rush is insane some nights.

The English button does work great... But doesn't tell you a DAMN THING about which line to transfer to get to some location just how much it costs. And when you need to transfer green to blue, good luck, because you better know that this one blue arrow pointing left means you need to go upstairs, cross the street, go into an entirely different station and then go down two flights of stairs with basically no more dir…

Have you tried using google maps? In my experience, it works great for Tokyo transit options.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#318

Post by agildehaus »

yay_cloud2 wrote: post #312
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…

I'm still taken aback by how quickly government (federal, state) allowed testing of driverless cars on public roads. Feels like a cold calculation made on behalf of citizens to say "some people probably need to die in order to bring this to market quickly, and that's ok with us in these areas."

The existence of cars and airplanes (even horses) is a similar trade-off. Some people have to die for us to even have them.

Ultimately the faster we bring driverless cars to fruition, the fewer people will die, simply because it's inevitable that they will quickly exceed the safety of humans.

Then we will have turned automobile safety into an engineering problem. It was partially that before, we could package the victim better to improve their survivability, but now we can modify the driver ... every driver.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#319

Post by logifail »

markdown wrote: post #274
linuxftw wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Great strides have been made in using machine learning to filter out obscurants such as snow. Perception for autonomous vehicles is effectively a solved problem. Great strides is not 'perfected' and I don't think perception for autonomous vehicles is a solved problem whatsoever. What is a driverless car to do if it slides out of position on the road and is now facing the wrong direction? Does it have the ability to…

> Great strides is not 'perfected' The goal isn't perfection. The goal is to be as good as humans. Eg: An autonomous vehicle driving through snow backed by millions of miles of experience driving in snow is better than someone from the tropics driving through snow for the first time.

>> The goal is to be as good as humans.

Which particular humans?

>> An autonomous vehicle driving through snow [..] is better than someone from the tropics driving through snow for the first time

Better than the worst human we can imagine? Better than the average human? Better than the average human who drives on that road at that time of year?

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#320

Post by fouc »

linuxftw wrote: post #204
jimmy1 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Driverless cars are coming along just fine. I am curious why you believe this to be the case? Driverless cars have yet to even come close to being workable in adverse conditions, to my knowledge, please correct me if I am wrong. > This is mostly about sensors and geometry. And mostly about the limitations of sensors, and the limitation of available algorithms to overcome geometry. A algorithm a driverless car uses…

I think interesting edge cases include: 'empty cardboard box or log?' 'Deer just crossed road, is there another one close behind?' 'Driving temporarily on the wrong side of the street due to construction or a downed tree limb' 'Police directing traffic' 'Driving on wrong side of road to avoid collision' 'One lane bridges' 'Busy parking garage with blind corners' 'City Bus driver forces themselves recklessly into your…

How do humans handle edge cases anyways?

I think it comes down to being able to model the world around us, having a model for human behavior, animal behavior, etc. If we see a baby deer, we look for the mother deer.

It feels like we're also really good at creating multiple open-ended stimulations in the back of our mind about how things might play out, where they can easily be paused or fleshed out depending on which became more probable or if we want to learn something. It's kind of a running background process.

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