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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

#81

Post by kergonath »

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.

> They need to be able to handle messy situations at least as good as human drivers, which isn't necessarily a high bar.

You might have an overly-optimistic opinion of what AI can do. Not to say that humans are not stupid quite often, but we are very far from having AIs that can be as good as a 4 years old child.

AIs are good at what they know and what they can account for. So yes, they will get better at what they know, but they cannot, by design, get better at what they don’t. So there will always be situations where they will be unbelievably stupid because their designers did not think it would happen. There is no solution to that at the moment.

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

#82

Post by acchow »

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…

On the other hand, I’ve seen an enormous number of human-driven vehicles be absolutely assholes to emergency vehicles with lights blinking

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

#83

Post by california2077 »

1. When autonomous cars are numerous enough to pose a statistically significant issue for first responders, the lives they will save by preventing traffic accidents will absolutely outnumber the possible damage from an odd edge case like this one.

2. If you're still worried about it, perhaps the solution is to require manufacturer to make some kind of override for autonomous vehicles, then give it to first responders like fire, medics and police.

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

#84

Post by anyfoo »

robbrown451 wrote: post #77
anyfoo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cer…

> It seems it would have a way of prioritizing such things.

You are putting the cart before the horse. The problem is not in prioritization, the problem is in having the correct ontology to even get to the "prioritization" stage.

Does the car know what a fruit stand is? Does it know what a gas pump is? Does it know how the fruit stand relates to the gas pump in "expected outcome when being hit by a car"?

If you say "we can program that in", read my post again.

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

#85

Post by feoren »

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…

> needs to have the required behavior programmed in explicitly

This is missing the entire point of ML. ML is literally defined as not having to explicitly program responses in for every situation.

Needing to pull over because a fire truck has told you it's coming your way in 2 minutes is pretty easy compared with some of those other "uncountably many" situations these cars need to deal with.

> the autonomous machine does not understand the complex world it is driving in

Daniel Dennett would like to have a word with you. It's perfectly possible for systems to "understand" things for any useful definition of the word "understand". A calculator absolutely "understands" arithmetic.

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

#86

Post by axg11 »

ben174 wrote: post #26
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.

This is an unrealistic take. There are many other differences that you need to consider. For example, what is the nature of that 1% difference in tragedies? Perhaps there's a 1% improvement in overall fatalities but also an increase in very gruesome accidents. Technologies that are rapidly adopted often need to be 10x better than existing solutions, otherwise adoption is a slower uphill battle.

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

#87

Post by ClumsyPilot »

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 most important question here is: does this happen more-often, or for longer-periods, with autonomous cars?

The nost important question is - how do you recover. With every autonomous system, when it does fail, it is often catastrophic because there is no recovery path.

When a human clerk makes a mistake, you can talk to them, when a human driver stops in the middlw of the street, you can tall to them - when a computer crashes, you are tipically fucked.

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

#88

Post by bowsamic »

feoren wrote: post #85
anyfoo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> needs to have the required behavior programmed in explicitly This is missing the entire point of ML. ML is literally defined as not having to explicitly program responses in for every situation. Needing to pull over because a fire truck has told you it's coming your way in 2 minutes is pretty easy compared with some of those other "uncountably many" situations these cars need to deal with. > the autonomous machine…

Do driverless cars use ML in the decision making procedure?

> A calculator absolutely "understands" arithmetic.

That is absurd and obviously false

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

#89

Post by bsder »

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…

> Driving is intuitive on a city street.

Driving on a city street is habitual--not intuitive. Humans memorize their driving area and then act within that.

Put a new stop sign onto a road and watch the circus.

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

#90

Post by google234123 »

rglullis wrote: post #80
throwaway92394 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We live in a democracy where people living in an area have some control over it. And they use this control to block zoning laws.
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