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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

#71

Post by ganbatekudasai »

anonporridge wrote: post #55
aetherson wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your suggestion here? That garbage trucks don't pick up on streets without two lanes in each direction? The reality of driving is that there are a lot of these messy situations, and driverless cars need to be able to handle them.

They need to be able to handle messy situations at least as good as human drivers, which isn't necessarily a high bar. And importantly, unlike human drivers, autonomous cars will only get persistently better at handling these kinds of situations as they encounter more of them.

Yes it is an impossibly high bar, and no they will not persistently get better unlike humans until they develop fully generalized AI.

It's so an easy to just say human drivers aren't as good, but it's not grounded in any reality.

Just take voice controlled assistants for example. We've made pretty big strides on them, haven't we?

And yet an entirely unmotivated teenager who's doing badly at school working a 7-Eleven outperforms voice assistants by several orders of magnitudes, through the sheer wonder of context clues and general intelligence, no matter how dim you want to assert that teenager to be.

I am proud of my voice assistant when it properly understood that I wanted to indeed set a timer for 50 minutes instead of 15 minutes, while any person would immediately understand what I mean even in a noisy environment just from why I'm setting the timer, and even fuzzily adjust their behavior based on what continues to happen.

Anyone who claims automated cars can fully learn the arbitrarily complicated physical situations they have to navigate around is either disingenuous, or does not know how computers work.

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

#72

Post by rglullis »

ripper1138 wrote: post #66
rglullis wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may seem an wild idea for those in North America, but how about just eliminating car dependency in the first place ?

Are there no cars in Europe?

There are, we are not as dependent on it, and you can bet that the absolute majority of people could live on car-sharing and cab-hailing systems, which would mean that 99% of the "self-driving" problems would go away.

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

#73

Post by boomboomsubban »

gkop wrote: post #65
boomboomsubban wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you yield to oncoming fire trucks.

Is this mentioned in the article, or do you have inside knowledge, or are you guessing? Edit: you are correct, flutas explained in sibling comment that it was alluded to in article. Thanks you both!

I'm just stating a common traffic law. If you're driving, and an emergency vehicle is coming at you with it's lights on, you yield.

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

#74

Post by tadfisher »

Volundr wrote: post #48
flutas wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Personal opinion here, but I think defaulting to "stop and contact support staff" is as good of a "fix" as we will have for a long time. According to Cruise (so potentially biased) it to…

> Personal opinion here, but I think defaulting to "stop and contact support staff" is as good of a "fix" as we will have for a long time. I both agree, and see this as yet another reason driverless cars are on the road WAY too early.

Then there will never be driverless cars on the road, because that's kind of a requirement to gather knowledge to build capable driverless vehicles.

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

#76

Post by capitainenemo »

_ea1k wrote: post #58
tpmx wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

An average pilot takes ~4 seconds from noticing an engine failure to when they respond. I don't know how long getting out of the way would take an average driver in this situation, but I'm guessing that its at least 15 seconds. People are nitpicking your nitpick, but the distinction really does matter in this kind of scenario where the argument is that "seconds count".

Only because the garbage truck moved out of the way.

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

#77

Post by robbrown451 »

anyfoo wrote: post #45
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…

The problem is that there are literally uncountably many situations that a human with "general intelligence" will understand and react to accordingly. Sometimes smoothly, sometimes less so. But a non-conscious automatic entity needs to have the required behavior programmed in explicitly. So yes, you might argue that for this particular situation, you "just" need to put in the proper programming and AI/ML training and…

"But it does not change that the autonomous machine does not understand the complex world it is driving in in the slightest, and that, for example, swerving into an unmanned fruit stand without being able to brake is much better than swerving into an unmanned gas pump."

It seems it would have a way of prioritizing such things. That doesn't seem particularly complicated, to be honest... weighted decision making is certainly within its capacity. E.g. shopping cart has fewer "avoid hitting" points than stroller.

It's not like every scenario has to be explicitly programmed in, nor does the program need to run some analysis on a detailed backstory to justify that a baby is more valuable than groceries. In effect, somebody -- probably not a programmer either -- just needs to enter some numbers into a spreadsheet.

(yes there is complex programming that allows that to be manifested in the car's decisions, but the idea that programmers are themselves constantly making "moral calls" in the code, rather than the control data, is fiction)

And if it does have such prioritization in its logic, I'd say yeah, it "understands" the world in that respect. Unless you have defined the word "understand" in some mystical way that precludes non-biological machines by definition.

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

#78

Post by sroussey »

Volundr wrote: post #48
flutas wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Personal opinion here, but I think defaulting to "stop and contact support staff" is as good of a "fix" as we will have for a long time. According to Cruise (so potentially biased) it to…

> Personal opinion here, but I think defaulting to "stop and contact support staff" is as good of a "fix" as we will have for a long time. I both agree, and see this as yet another reason driverless cars are on the road WAY too early.

I mean, not backing up into cross traffic at the intersection is also a good thing. I’ve seen accidents where cars got out of the way of an emergency vehicle only to crash into another.

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

#79

Post by est31 »

ripper1138 wrote: post #66
rglullis wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may seem an wild idea for those in North America, but how about just eliminating car dependency in the first place ?

Are there no cars in Europe?

No but there is way less dependence on cars, at least in medium cities and up. Many developments in america just build suburban deserts where there is just more single family homes around you, where you have to drive to the next supermarket, both because it's so far away, and because sometimes there literally isn't a way for pedestrians to walk on. There are a few good videos on the subject:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajSEIdjkU8E

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnKIVX968PQ

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul_xzyCDT98

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

#80

Post by rglullis »

throwaway92394 wrote: post #62
rglullis wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may seem an wild idea for those in North America, but how about just eliminating car dependency in the first place ?

To put it mildly - this is unrealistic in the US except for major cities. Even then, depending on the city and where in the city, its going to be very difficult to convince and implement methods of cutting cars. While I think it's a good idea I just don't see this happening in the majority of the US other then major cities. In my state I just don't see how it would be possible given people commute 30+ miles regularly…

Start with better zoning laws so that people are not pushed to live 15 miles away from the their work and general/light commerce areas.

After that, just copy the playbook from the Netherlands. Amsterdam was very much like most big American cities until the 70s, their streets were steadily being redesigned for human scale and less car dependency.

It can be done and it can be done easily if Americans stop believing in their Exceptionalism.

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