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Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

wsj.com

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Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#321

Post by logifail »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #186
dwighttk wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

only if you are exclusively giving the Teslas to that smaller, worse, category of driver

The point is that we allow teen drivers on the road with the expectation and understanding that they will improve over several years. Why would we not expect to have to make the same concession for AI?

If a human drives sufficiently poorly they will eventually lose their right to drive on public roads for a time.

Could this/should this also apply for autonomous vehicles? If so, how?

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#322

Post by flor1s »

tigershark wrote: post #247
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…

You forgot ‘A woman in an electric wheelchair chasing a duck with a broom’ and ‘people playing frogger on roads’. And Waymo self driving car didn’t seem to have a problem with that.

Waymo can of course cherry pick the scenarios which they present about. Meanwhile a human driver still has to intervene every few thousands miles.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#323

Post by foobiekr »

TomMarius wrote: post #196
Jdam wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever heard about that thing called fog?

Cars could communicate together though

I do not understand how anyone thinks this will work in any scenario that includes a malicious actor.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#324

Post by xnx »

neumann wrote: post #311
techiferous wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Agree. It's a fun game to think up edge cases that would challenge a self-driving car. On average these cars will far outperform human drivers. I see human drivers blow through stop signs every day completely unaware that they did so.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#325

Post by krainboltgreene »

fouc wrote: post #320
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…

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…

> How do humans handle edge cases anyways?

A minimum 14 years of "human learning".

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#326

Post by xnx »

briandear wrote: post #308
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…

Aircraft are the perfect driverless technology candidate.

Also trains

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#327

Post by jimmy1 »

zanny wrote: post #233
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…

> come close to being workable in adverse conditions Given how people drive in the rain and snow in the Northeast, I would argue human drivers have not even come close to being workable in adverse conditions. We drive in them anyway, despite often times magnitudes more risk of crashing, because we want to.

I see this fallacious argument made as a counterpoint time and time again and it is getting tiresome.

If you look at all the relative statistics, both IIHS and insurance, the drivers who practice safe driving techniques and do not drive distracted have something crazy like a 3-4 fold lower accident rate. Moreover, those drivers who have had an accident are much more likely to have another one. Have you ever met someone who has gone their entire life without an accident? They exist, I encourage you to speak to them about how they drive -- more often than not it isn't by...accident (sorry)

The other point I am making here -- the drivers who do account for reckless, endangering driving, or who are careless by some measure of frequency (not careless as a whole, but maybe they forgot to change to their winter tires and properly inflate them?) -- they tend to pay the price the most. Their insurance rates are higher, they get tickets and points, and eventually the worst ones aren't allowed to drive at all.

When the "worst" AI's that are responsible for some amount of crashes, who is going to pay the price? Whose license is going to get deducted? Whose insurance is going to go up? In the world of driverless ubiquity, who is going to be the check and balance? What self-selecting mechanisms are going to protect us? You think Waymo will give a shit?

There are other reasons this argument is fallacious, the most obvious one that driverless cars have not yet proven they are safer or can remain statistically significantly safer than safe human drivers. How do we know driverless cars cannot or won't be compromised? What if a foreign nation state deploys an attack that exploits a known weakness? What if a car company is infiltrated by a bad actor and uses bad training data? We were able to break into a country's nuclear reactor. Russians were able to break into our democracy. I imagine this would be a nice juicy target for a country that really doesn't like us. Ect. Ect. It is going to come with a whole host of it's own unique problems, so comparing them to current human driving problems (which have potential solutions that our government won't embark on -- different story for a different day) generally won't be fruitful.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#328

Post by mattnewport »

majewsky wrote: post #298
pretendscholar wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One possible answer would be that we aren't intelligent enough to create such systems. I don't think that's true but its a possibility.

> we aren't intelligent enough to create such systems Evolution suggests that you can, in fact, create systems that are more intelligent than what came before them.

Evolution achieves that in part by a callous disregard for individual lives. The intelligences that evolution has produced are built on an unimaginable pile of corpses. Even Uber doesn't seem quite as willing as mother nature to spend quite so many lives to achieve incremental improvements.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#329

Post by chongli »

felipeerias wrote: post #267
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…

"There's a ball in the middle of the road, is a kid going to pop up from behind a parked car and run towards it?"

"There's no ball in the middle of the road, a kid pops up from behind a car, you have 0.1 seconds to apply the brakes before you hit the kid."

It's just as easy to come up with any sort of contrived situation for which a machine would outperform a human.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#330

Post by chongli »

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…

As a human, you understand that if you behave one way, it will cause the pedestrian, the cyclist and the other car to respond a certain way, but if you respond to the situation another way, it will cause all three to respond differently.

Why does the self driving car have to restrict itself to extremely subtle human nonverbal communication? Just put a loudspeaker on the outside of the car and have it announce its intensions clearly, yielding to pedestrians/bicycles according to the laws of the land.

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