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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

#131

Post by capitainenemo »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #130
capitainenemo wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Double parking is extremely common for a garbage truck in that situation (picking up along a crowded road). And yes, I absolutely would have checked my rear view mirror, then reversed (slowly). Or tried to move over as much as possible to the right. Or depending on the road and my position, U-turned and pulled in front of the garbage truck. Lots of options, blocking the firetruck not being high on the list.

You claim this, but have you ever been in that situation before? Backing up on a road with traffic is extremely dangerous, and I'm not sure I could do it while under the stress of an emergency vehicle situation. There was no room to U-turn (if there was, the fire truck would have been able to get through), and I'm guessing parked cars on the side of the road prevented any kind of "moving further to the right".

Yes, I have backed up for emergency vehicles in the past. (and gone through red lights if necessary and pulled all the way off on shoulder and crossed double yellow line... - all of things an bot might not have done). I've been driving for 3 decades, most of it in an extremely congested area, so it happens.

There might have been room to U-turn for the automated vehicle. Bit of ascii art here

===DUMPTRUCK==

BOT===FIRETRUCK

Bot, in that situation can U-Turn. Perhaps maybe back up a metre or two first (let's pretend there was another car or two there but there was a metre or two to backup - although if bot slowly backed with hazard lights on and honking a car behind them hopefully would have too - maybe no U-Turn necessary). Yet there would be absolutely no way for a (large) firetruck to get through. Point is, require's a human's full awareness of world and flexible thinking and when it is appropriate to break the rules (rule of arriving at destination, rules of road conduct). These bots still don't have the neural complexity of a crow, much less a human (probably not even that of a goldfish really). They are ok at the predictable but that's it.

I have no doubt they'll get there eventually, at which point we might be having another ethical conversation about what a AGI should be allowed to do with its life, but they aren't there yet...

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

#132

Post by simion314 »

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.

>It just needs to be 1% better than human drivers. If the net result is 1% less tragedies - sign me up.

Say you have a child and want to send him to school, would you chose

1 drive him yourself, knowing you have 10 years of experience with zero accidents and you are responsible and care for your child

2 use a lottery that will give you a random driver, could be a 16 years old teen with 1 day experience, could be a 80 years old elder or a drunk or tired dude or a super driver

3 use an AI , is better then the drunk dude , 1% better then the teen but worse then you and much worse then a professional driver

I am curious why would chose 2 or 3 if 1 is an option. 3

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

#134

Post by mint2 »

flutas wrote: post #52
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.

> What's your suggestion here? That garbage trucks don't pick up on streets without two lanes in each direction? Maybe they don't block the travel lane for extended periods, just like any regular person is expected to not do. The article is basically saying "it's ok for the human driven car to do, but not the self driving car."

Not familiar with sf or cities? Cars, delivery trucks, garbages trucks often stop in traffic lane for loading/unloading because there is literally nowhere else to stop. It’s annoying but expected and understandable.

If they do that prior to sirens showing up there is no issue. They can’t predict the future.

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

#135

Post by qgin »

treesprite82 wrote: post #37

Rough diagram of my understanding from information I can find: https://i.imgur.com/VOp8cWi.png Fire truck wants to use oncoming lane to overtake the double-parked garbage truck, autonomous car in that oncoming lane yields to the right to the extent allowed by more parked cars - but doesn't back up into the intersection to completely clear the lane.

Thank you, this helps quite a bit. The garbage truck really is the primary obstacle, which you wouldn't realize from the title.

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

#136

Post by defen »

feoren wrote: post #118
defen wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is missing the entire point of ML. ML is literally defined as not having to explicitly program responses in for every situation. So how do you know how the system will respond to an arbitrary situation? You could easily argue that we don't know how an arbitrary human will respond to an arbitrary situation, but we have systems in place to deal with the consequences if they handle it badly. For example, if a dri…

> So how do you know how the system will respond to an arbitrary situation? You put them in that situation and see how they respond. If they respond badly, you keep training them until they respond better. I'm not saying it's easy, but I am saying it's exactly what autonomous-car developers been doing all this time.

> If they respond badly, you keep training them until they respond better.

Right, but what do you do with all the other cars on the road that presumably still have the bad behavior (while the fix is being developed)? Just assume that the situation is rare enough that you'll be able to fix it before it happens again?

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

#137

Post by ssivark »

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.

Only because the garbage truck driver responded promptly. Otherwise the situation would likely have continued arbitrarily long.

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

#138

Post by gondolgames »

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…

> [...] swerving into an unmanned fruit stand without being able to brake is much better than swerving into an unmanned gas pump.

That's a great example.

Not to mention triggering any Rube Goldberg-machine-like chain reaction (even with just a few steps) where a series of events would need to be predicted.

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

#140

Post by bagacrap »

ripper1138 wrote: post #64
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.

Thanks to the garbage truck driver.

the blockage was thanks to the garbage truck driver
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