331–340 of 658 posts
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> it's really hard for me to see me being better at it than a computer There's a big difference between seeing and interpreting. The car sees literally everything and can maybe identify most things, but a pedestrian window shopping across the street isn't really that interesting and neither is a bollard. As humans, we filter out the unimportant stuff to focus on the important stuff. We can also pickup on subtle clues…
you think the average driver is aware of other people's posture and eye contact while driving?
As one example, let’s say you have a right turn a few hundred yards ahead of you. There are no cars behind or beside you, but there is a long row of parallel parked cars next to the right lane.
An average human driver, anticipating the danger of a car door opening, will stay in the left lane until the last minute, or at least slow down considerably. A current self-driving car will likely stay in the right lane and proceed at the speed limit.
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I'd love to see a Tesla on auto pilot on a Vietnamese 'freeway'... buffalo crossing street while 3 people are driving directly at you on your side of the road, in the wrong direction, while 8 people are crossing the street laterally from both sides (2 of them are drunk), while one person is merging without looking and also dodging a wheel eating pothole and a truck driven by a meth addict, is about to rear end you.
Actually, sounds like it wouldn’t be tough for a Tesla to drive safer than the human drivers on that road ;)
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> There's no evidence that computers are any better at driving than humans That's a vacuous statement. Evidence would be a deployed self-driving fleet. At which point it would be mission accomplished and we wouldn't be discussing this. Now if you want theoretical considerations instead of evidence, then consider the lower reaction times of machines.
> That's a vacuous statement. That's just your opinion, while my comment is a statement of reality as it stands. > Evidence would be a deployed self-driving fleet. This is also just your opinion. Evidence could also be a self-driving vehicle that doesn't drive under the beds of trucks, run people over or is statistically safer than human drivers. > Now if you want theoretical considerations instead of evidence, then…
The relevant part is the last: "statistically safer than human drivers."
Every driving system that has existed or will exist will make errors due to extremely novel situations. Given the energies involved, such errors will lead to crashes, some of which will be horrible.
The standard for self driving systems is, at a high level, simple: statistically safer, by a fair margin, than human drivers.
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I've wondered why cars don't have a built-in communication mechanism. I should be able to broadcast somehow (using a voice message?) to nearby cars that "I'm going now, don't go".
As long as it is there just to improve safety. But it should not be relied on. In other words, if you 'hear' "don't go", you don't go. But if you don't hear anything, it still doesn't mean it's safe to go, so you'll have to rely on something else. And if you are doing that anyway, is the added complexity worth it?
This, in the long run, is a selling point that seems to be missing from most discussions in this comment section.
I can't communicate "telepathically" with fellow human drivers.
Do all these self driving systems work with regular IR cameras? Somehow I always expected they also used some sort of depth camera to detect distances instead of figuring it out based on pixels.
Tesla uses only cameras (some color and some black and white I believe) along with a radar system and perhaps sonar? But Tesla is controversial in their approach - essentially all other self driving systems use depth sensors. Tesla makes the argument that you can actually calculate depth from moving cameras, which is true. The technique is called structure from motion and it is well understood. However a lidar is a m…
Do Tesla owners know about this? Is this an opt-in feature?
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Two issues, first: I thought fully autonomous driving was meant to be done by now? Second, don't Tesla & SpaceX have a reputation for being a terrible place to work, with Musk expecting everyone to be working as hard (or harder) than him, and firing people in weird and capricious ways.
>I thought fully autonomous driving was meant to be done by now? Musk was bullshitting when he made that prediction. Maybe he did it because he had bought his own bullshit. Personally I think what's more likely is that he was cynically conning people. In reality, I think no-one is anywhere close to fully self driving cars. I would be surprised if we saw fully self driving cars any time in the next 50 years. The whole…
And that's just on the decision to not use LIDAR because "it's dumb", not the whole concept of self-driving as it has been marketed being decades away.
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There's no evidence that computers are any better at driving than humans, and there is no evidence that this generation of machine learning will be able to tackle this problem sufficiently. All signs point to driving requiring an understanding of what's going on around you, which this generation of ML does not provide. On the other hand, there is a lot of hype and promises being made without the results to back them…
> There's no evidence that computers are any better at driving than humans Yes, there is. You can debate the exact figures/circumstances, but the numbers are good, and improving all the time. Humans are just not very good at guiding tons of metal around at high speeds, which isn't very surprising when you think about it. One accident for every 4.34 million miles is already pretty good (compared to 500k miles for huma…
That is exactly what it does: it invalidates them. Comparing apples to oranges is an invalid comparison.
Let's compare the numbers again when there's sufficient data for self-driving tech driving in all environmental conditions without supervision and without human assistance jumping in whenever it gets rough. At that point, a comparison is valid. Until then you're comparing someone who aces tests with someone who is just doing good, but the first guy is only solving first-graders' multiple-choice tests and cheats by asking a friend who graduated at a university whenever a question pops up that isn't "choose one of these three", while the second guy is on his own in the middle of his college education.