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An autonomous car in SF blocked a fire truck responding to an emergency

wired.com

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Re: An autonomous car in SF blocked a fire truck responding to an emergency

#21

Post by BeefWellington »

flutas wrote: post #14
gkop wrote: post #12

Um so WHY was the Cruise car stopped in a travel lane to begin with? I skimmed 2x but don’t see this explained..

From the article. > a San Francisco Fire Department truck responding to a fire tried to pass a doubled-parked garbage truck by using the opposing lane. a traveling autonomous vehicle (...) was blocking its path. While a human might have reversed to clear the lane, the Cruise car stayed put (......) Tiffany Testo, a spokesperson for Cruise, confirmed the incident. She said the driverless car had correctly yielded to t…

> I think the real issue here is a double parked garbage truck forcing the fire truck to go into oncoming traffic in the first place. Maybe there's a need for a loading only zone there so that the garbage truck doesn't have to block the travel lane.

I disagree. Driverless vehicles NEED to be able to handle these unexpected situations in an appropriate manner. That they don't currently is in fact a "real issue" and in this case at least is evidence this tech may not be ready for primetime.

Re: An autonomous car in SF blocked a fire truck responding to an emergency

#23

Post by anyfactor »

The trend of autonomous cars is one of the things that I believe is not practical. Even the most sophisticated machine learning algorithm requires repetition and constant input to be optimized. But there is infinitely many variables when it comes to driving on a street level.

Driving is intuitive on a city street. The scope of autonomous vehicles should be limited to places where there is clarity of transit and very few variables. I would be comfortable if a fleet of autonomous vehicles driving 200 miles/hour on a a dedicated side on a highway but not in a city or even an empty suburban neighborhood. I think for those intuitive situations the vehicles could even be driven remotely by a real person in a data center.

Re: An autonomous car in SF blocked a fire truck responding to an emergency

#24

Post by thr0wawayf00 »

gojomo wrote: post #6

Given that often human-driven, or human-parked, cars create similar temporary obstacles, the most important question here is: does this happen more-often, or for longer-periods, with autonomous cars? I don't see the article, or quoted sources, even trying to make that comparison - so this is really only a half-story, compared to what's relevant. Further, given the remote-guidance possibilities with autonomous cars, i…

> does this happen more-often, or for longer-periods, with autonomous cars?

How would one go about finding that data? Is there an authority that tracks how often and for how long emergency vehicles are impeded by human drivers? You might get something along the lines of average time to first response on the scene.

> Human drivers sometimes fail-to-notice sirens or other high-priority demands on road capacity. But, an automated system could broadcast the planned-routes of dispatched priority vehicles to every autonomous car in the city, allowing the autonomous cars to preemptively clear paths, before it even becomes an issue of local-reasoning about an exceptional-situation.

This doesn't comfort me. We already live in a society whose leadership doesn't believe in net neutrality, I have a hard time believing that an automated driving system that programmatically prioritizes vehicles on the road won't be co-opted in the same manner to benefit those with capital at the expense of those that don't.

Re: An autonomous car in SF blocked a fire truck responding to an emergency

#25

Post by SllX »

tpmx wrote: post #17

> According to Cruise, which collects camera and sensor data from its testing vehicles, the fire truck was able to move forward approximately 25 seconds after it first encountered the autonomous vehicle.

Half a minute is a long time when you’re responding to an emergency.

Re: An autonomous car in SF blocked a fire truck responding to an emergency

#26

Post by ben174 »

anyfactor wrote: post #23

The trend of autonomous cars is one of the things that I believe is not practical. Even the most sophisticated machine learning algorithm requires repetition and constant input to be optimized. But there is infinitely many variables when it comes to driving on a street level. Driving is intuitive on a city street. The scope of autonomous vehicles should be limited to places where there is clarity of transit and very…

This seems to warrant repeating every time this is brought up:

It just needs to be 1% better than human drivers. If the net result is 1% less tragedies - sign me up. If it's better than the alternative, I'm in.

Re: An autonomous car in SF blocked a fire truck responding to an emergency

#27

Post by tpmx »

SllX wrote: post #25
tpmx wrote: post #17

> According to Cruise, which collects camera and sensor data from its testing vehicles, the fire truck was able to move forward approximately 25 seconds after it first encountered the autonomous vehicle.

Half a minute is a long time when you’re responding to an emergency.

Stating the obvious, but: 25 secs I agree that the difference (5 secs) most of the time isn't all that important. I just don't see the need to round up for no particular reason.

Re: An autonomous car in SF blocked a fire truck responding to an emergency

#29

Post by aeturnum »

I do think this is a little unfair, but I think it points to a real issue "around" driverless cars (that is not the cars' fault exactly): everyone is trained to deal only with human agents.

It does seem like the car "acted reasonably" (so to speak) - but it still did not act like a person which is what the emergency workers were trained for. The challenge of integrating non-human actors into a previously human-only space is, I think, going to be more difficult and wide-ranging than we imagine. It will probably require a substantial commitment that goes beyond the self-driving car companies.

It's worth saying that a lot of the critique of self-driving cars is that...they were sold on the premise that they would integrate into "existing infrastructure" without big changes and critics have always felt that would not really happen. We've had self driving cars in special environments for...50 years now?

Re: An autonomous car in SF blocked a fire truck responding to an emergency

#30

Post by SllX »

flutas wrote: post #14
gkop wrote: post #12

Um so WHY was the Cruise car stopped in a travel lane to begin with? I skimmed 2x but don’t see this explained..

From the article. > a San Francisco Fire Department truck responding to a fire tried to pass a doubled-parked garbage truck by using the opposing lane. a traveling autonomous vehicle (...) was blocking its path. While a human might have reversed to clear the lane, the Cruise car stayed put (......) Tiffany Testo, a spokesperson for Cruise, confirmed the incident. She said the driverless car had correctly yielded to t…

> I think the real issue here is a double parked garbage truck forcing the fire truck to go into oncoming traffic in the first place. Maybe there's a need for a loading only zone there so that the garbage truck doesn't have to block the travel lane.

If there’s a discussion to be had here, it’s not through the frame of the needs of driverless cars. Self-driving has to work in the driving environment that exists today to be viable, and double parked garbage trucks are part of the regular order of that driving environment.

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