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Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

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Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#341

Post by KKKKkkkk1 »

cwkoss wrote: post #291
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…

'Series of malicious actors dressed as police directing car into a shipping container to kidnap occupants'

Malicious actors posing as police officers pose just as much risk to human-driven cars.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#342

Post by ghusbands »

foobiekr wrote: post #323
TomMarius wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars could communicate together though

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

Most self-driving efforts do not consider malicious actors and instead aim for sufficient caution to avoid danger. Malicious actors can never be entirely accounted for, as a driver on a narrow road can turn into your path in moments and you can't avoid the impact.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#343

Post by KKKKkkkk1 »

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…

What do you mean "no one"? Press coverage of Waymo is full of references to engineers who are teaching cars and cars that are learning. The AI car is a big part of the hype.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#344

Post by wpietri »

chemicalnovae wrote: post #337
thereisnospork wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of immaturity, not cognitive or physical capability. Kids start racing go karts as young as five - and that's a far more difficult, requiring fast reflexes, precise car control, and situational awareness. It's a far more challenging task than an average commute.

Not really, racing carts is primarily about the ability to control the thing under very well defined conditions (read: much better than your average 3 lane highway with hundreds of other road users) with other road users with the exact same end goal.

Exactly. "Immaturity" includes a big lack of detailed domain knowledge and domain-specific judgment, which is one of the things I think is going to be very hard to teach to computers.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#345

Post by codebje »

taneq wrote: post #314
Fricken wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

"Perception" in the context of autonomous agents means a mapping from sensors to a model of the world; how effectively can the agent establish a reliable model given its sensor readings?

What GP means by perception being a solved problem is that existing sensors and algorithms produce high quality and reliable models in a wide range of environment conditions.

A webcam is a sensor device, the human observing the webcam feed most likely cannot construct a good model of the car and its surrounds, as they can't do things like shoulder checking or looking in the rear view mirror, which a good driver does frequently to maintain a model of where other cars are.

But then "reasonably well" for a human driving a car remotely via webcam feed is likely to be a far lower standard than we're holding self-driving cars to.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#346

Post by waterhouse »

stevep98 wrote: post #340
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…

Driverless cars have advantages over humans too. Faster reaction speed, constant 360 degree surveillance, lack of distraction, (theoretically) better control of brakes and steering to handle skids. Waymo has demonstrated solutions for many of the edge cases you mention. This video is from 3 years ago: https://youtu.be/tiwVMrTLUWg?t=530 Regarding snow, it maybe a difficult problem, but if cars can't see road markings,…

Weather and trips being not completely predictable, the car would have to be able to pull over and stop if there was weather the car wasn't certified to handle, and if the human was asleep in the back seat or whatever and took a long time to get ready to take over.

I think I've seen at least a prototype Waymo car (it was exhibited in the Computer History Museum) that was designed without the steering wheel and pedals for a human to use. That wouldn't work so well given that the car might pull over and be unable/unwilling to drive anymore. (Maybe you can put an expected upper limit on how long the weather will remain bad ... Nah, storms can last for days, by which point a human who didn't bring food and water could be in bad shape.) I guess you could rely on being able to call AAA. Though a bad blizzard might be exactly the case where AAA would have a hard time reaching you. The human being able to take over eventually seems like an important feature. I guess that is the way all the cars in the field (that I've seen) work.

Does anyone happen to know if self-driving cars are practicing "pull over and stop" maneuvers? For some reason I've never heard of it. I think it is the only potentially reliable fallback mechanism if the car encounters, say, weird terrain it knows it can't handle. (I don't think you can assume the human will be able to respond within n seconds.)

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#347

Post by leesec »

dragontamer wrote: post #194
beat wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 100% attention thing I why I have tremendous faith that computers will be out-driving humans in short order. Even really good human drivers have a limited perspective and focus. And even the best human drivers are subject to emotional state.

Yeah, humans suck at attention. But until we can program computers to tell me what is a foreground moving object, what is a shadow, and what is the background... you literally can't solve the "Should the car apply the brakes right now" problem. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.02225.pdf Just go through this recent paper I found on DDG.gg and see the amount of effort it takes to parse foreground / background data that a sel…

Umm, Radar?

Comma.ai is doing vision+radar right now and driving cars with it.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#348

Post by kart23 »

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?

Because they are companies that sell a product to consumers, who expect that this will keep them safe on the road. We need to hold them to a much higher standard than a teenager.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#349

Post by wpietri »

majewsky wrote: post #300
wpietri wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I had a look at his predictions re: self-driving cars. He clearly invested quite a lot of thought went into these because he makes a lot of subtle distinctions. However, one of his predictions (probably the one that you're referring to) is this: > A driverless "taxi" service in a major US city with arbitrary pick and drop off locations, even in a restricted geographical area. > Not Earlier Than 2032 This is odd becau…

I think his note clarifies it pretty well: "This is what Uber, Lyft, and conventional taxi services can do today."

What I've seen about Waymo (and maybe I've missed something) is very hazy. And it's not out yet. I'll be very surprised if they go from "operating in secret" to "completely competitive with Lyft" in one jump. My guess is that there will be significant limitations for whatever their first release is.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#350

Post by kart23 »

tim333 wrote: post #294
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.

Waymo have driven 8 million miles and had one minor accident that was the cars fault where it thought a bus would give way and a dent resulted. I've driven about 200,000 miles and done considerably worse including two cars written off, though no injuries. I'd say Waymo seems safer than me. And judging from my insurance premiums which are low, I'd be safer than the average human driver.

Waymo alone is fine, but when you take into account fatalities caused by others like uber, right now I think self driving cars are worse than humans by a pretty large amount.
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