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Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

economist.com

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Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#161

Post by simion314 »

nytesky wrote: post #154
simion314 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those numbers are useless for concluding anything about what would happen if you remove the human completely, there are videos that show how the human intervened and saved the car from certain crash and I this situation should be counted as "Deaths" for the AI only column. Driving assistants would improve safety certainly, but removing the driver and letting the assistant drive will need real world like tests, for no…

Actually I’m not convinced assistants will improve safety. Level 4 for example could be a blood bath, where cars drive all the easy situations, and hand over emergency control to out of practice drivers barely paying attention at a moments notice. I believe our driving skills were better when we had manual transmission, and were more involved in overall operation. Hard to determine if safer, b/c of advances in crumpl…

It is possible , we would need data,

The extremely sad part is that we could reduce the number of deaths until true AI arrives using simple tech that could detect if the driver is drunk or tired, and controversially forcing the speed limits(the car knows that this road is max 90Km/h and that the driver has less then 1 year experience so it will not let you get over 70 (local laws apply) unless you activate emergency mode - this would trigger some bad consequences if it was no emergency)

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#162

Post by redwood »

bogle wrote: post #133

If we expect driverless cars to be further delayed and we continue building our cities to encourage micromobility (bikes, electric scooters, segregated lanes, car free streets, etc.) then at which point does the value of the driverless car become moot because we no longer drive? Does this sound unlikely? Consider European cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam which have encouraged cycling over the last two decades and…

That may be happening in Europe but for 95% of Americans it's sadly a pipedream.

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#163

Post by nkrisc »

crocal wrote: post #8

The article misses an important point. It’s not only a problem of technology, it’s also a problem of risk acceptance. While we accept to be killed by our own mistakes at the wheel, society (we) will not accept that a machine makes the same, even if the failure rate is on average /better/. This is the fundamental issue Elon Musk has. The driverless bar for safety is way higher than very clever driver assistance or eve…

Not only that, but it's the type of situations that will kill you in each case that make a difference too. From the various self-driving related death I've read about, most of them appeared to be situations that could have easily been avoided if a person had been driving and paying full attention. On the flip side, the kinds of situations that kill normal drivers are often ones that a self-driving car could trivially avoid.

So with a self-driving car, you have the mental hurdle of asking people to accept the risk of the car killing them in a situation they could likely have avoided had they been driving, even if it is statistically less likely than them killing themselves while driving.

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#164

Post by nkrisc »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #128
robotresearcher wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have data that supports what you think?

The OP is simply stating the base case: cars without drivers shouldn't be safer than cars with drivers. The industry claims that their cars are safer without drivers because AI. The industry must provide the evidence for its very strong claim. The fact that a majority of the public think it's the opposite way around, that skeptical opinions about self-driving cars must provide evidence, is the industry's succes- the…

> Personally the only justification I've heard for self-driving cars being safer is "computers are faster than people". Yes- but at what?

Faster at making the right decision - and the wrong decision too.

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#165

Post by mannykannot »

robotresearcher wrote: post #59
unityByFreedom wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how this works. If the cars are safer, there should be independent data that shows this. As it is, we get one-sentence "safety reports" from the manufacturer with a single data point. They're not safer by default because the manufacturer says so.

The claim was that Tesla’s system is not safer, and that only level 4 would increase safety. I asked if data supported those two independent claims. I’m ok if we assume that things are unsafe before we have evidence they are safe, but that’s not the same as declaring they are unsafe without evidence.

The current situation is somewhere between the two: There have been some crashes (e.g. Boca Raton) that strongly suggest there is a dangerous systemic problem.

In such cases, demanding statistical confirmation that it is a significant problem (as NASA did with the O-ring erosion problem) is not the right response. It reminds me of a case in the building of the 688 class submarines: a cracked weld, that had supposedly passed multiple inspections, was found in part of the torpedo-handling equipment. At that point, all welds, including pressure-hull welds, became suspect.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31730.Running_Critical

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#166

Post by nkrisc »

megablast wrote: post #120
crocal wrote: post #8

The article misses an important point. It’s not only a problem of technology, it’s also a problem of risk acceptance. While we accept to be killed by our own mistakes at the wheel, society (we) will not accept that a machine makes the same, even if the failure rate is on average /better/. This is the fundamental issue Elon Musk has. The driverless bar for safety is way higher than very clever driver assistance or eve…

> While we accept to be killed by our own mistakes at the wheel, society (we) will not accept that a machine makes the same, even if the failure rate is on average /better/. We seem to accept being killed by someone else, since that is how most of the 40,000 people are killed every single year in the US. I don't hear too many drivers complaining about that.

> We seem to accept being killed by someone else, since that is how most of the 40,000 people are killed every single year in the US. I don't hear too many drivers complaining about that.

As a driver, that's not really something you have control over, apart from driving defensively. Your AutoPilot Tesla can still get T-boned in an intersection by some guy running a red.

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#167

Post by dsfyu404ed »

bogle wrote: post #133

If we expect driverless cars to be further delayed and we continue building our cities to encourage micromobility (bikes, electric scooters, segregated lanes, car free streets, etc.) then at which point does the value of the driverless car become moot because we no longer drive? Does this sound unlikely? Consider European cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam which have encouraged cycling over the last two decades and…

>then at which point does the value of the driverless car become moot because we no longer drive?

When nearly everywhere people live is sufficiently urban to for it to not be economically insane to deploy good enough public transit to replace cars in all those areas.

So not in the lifetime of anyone discussing it here. Maybe never if predictions about population leveling off hold.

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#168

Post by manmal »

nytesky wrote: post #154
simion314 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those numbers are useless for concluding anything about what would happen if you remove the human completely, there are videos that show how the human intervened and saved the car from certain crash and I this situation should be counted as "Deaths" for the AI only column. Driving assistants would improve safety certainly, but removing the driver and letting the assistant drive will need real world like tests, for no…

Actually I’m not convinced assistants will improve safety. Level 4 for example could be a blood bath, where cars drive all the easy situations, and hand over emergency control to out of practice drivers barely paying attention at a moments notice. I believe our driving skills were better when we had manual transmission, and were more involved in overall operation. Hard to determine if safer, b/c of advances in crumpl…

We do have some data. E.g., the Volvo XC90 hasn't killed any passengers, ever, thanks to collision detection and emergency braking systems: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/04/15/britains-safest-...

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#169

Post by raxxorrax »

theieindjri wrote: post #38
crocal wrote: post #8

The article misses an important point. It’s not only a problem of technology, it’s also a problem of risk acceptance. While we accept to be killed by our own mistakes at the wheel, society (we) will not accept that a machine makes the same, even if the failure rate is on average /better/. This is the fundamental issue Elon Musk has. The driverless bar for safety is way higher than very clever driver assistance or eve…

I don't understand why so many otherwise smart people fell for FSD hype. I'm not talking about the many con artists - I'm talking about the tech-savvy people who genuinely bought into FSD hype. How is it not obvious that FSD most likely requires artificial general intelligence and is, thus, probably somewhere between "many decades away" and "humans will never achieve it"?

Frame shift drives? I would need one of those very badly.

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#170

Post by ilaksh »

deepnotderp wrote: post #4

The most pertinent point here being that although collecting lots of self driving car data is easy, the tail and unexpected events that you care about are surprisingly rare. And many of these events can also be entirely new (never seen before). Current AI SOTA techniques simply require too much data and cannot reason well enough to solve this. Leaving Musk aside, amongst those who are serious about self driving cars,…

That's false. The main reason Waymo is held up is because the accepted standard of driving is unsafe, and it has data and simulations that prove it.

For example, an unprotected left turn during rush hour. The gap between cars that people drive into in that situation often does not leave any room for chance. For example, if another car speeds up or changes lanes, there can be an unavoidable accident. But the standard for human drivers is to take those chances during heavy traffic, and drivers that try to avoid that are not accepted.

The issue is that people are incorrectly going to hold Waymo's computer responsible for some unavoidable accidents in those types of scenarios, but at the same time expecting them to make those maneuvers even though the computer knows there isn't enough margin.

That's not a weakness of the AI. That's an inability of people to understand the nature of traffic and the relationship between AI and people.

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