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

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

#151

Post by gojomo »

thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #24
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…

> How would one go about finding that data?

The autonomous car companies have a lot of the data, since they've run the same cars with drivers extensively. They can see the differences in rates-of-situations between cars-working-autonomously, and cars-with-drivers.

Given the long periods of operating with autonomy-plus-backup-driver, they also have stats on how often an in-car driver overrides the car, and exactly why.

Cities also can & should independently collect such data. Some big-city buses are already equipeend with a photo-ticketing mechanism for immediately recording, & citing, and cars illegally parked in their paths/pickup-area. Emergency vehicles should have the same.

> This doesn't comfort me.

Well, I can't make you comfortable if you've got free-floating paranoia about abuses by the powerful. There are many such abuses!

But I can point out that the exact same rational comparative criteria should apply before making a tangible policy decision about the use of the shared roads. We shouldn't be ruled by imaginative worries extrapolated from other insecurities, but rather real measurements of how often a "send a request to clea roads for emergency vehicles" is broadcast, whether each use has a recorded & verified legitimate justification, whether such broadcasts save lives versus not-using-them, etc.

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

#152

Post by PragmaticPulp »

aeturnum wrote: post #29

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 s…

> 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.

I understand where you're coming from, but I disagree.

There's no reason to expect self-driving cars to play by a looser set of rules than human drivers in the same arena.

If a self-driving car fails to behave properly on the road, that's a fault of the self-driving car.

Blaming everyone else for expecting a car on the road to behave like any other car on the road feels like victim blaming. We shouldn't have to drive around guessing which cars are human-driven or self-driven and change our behavior accordingly. There's no way that's going to work.

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

#153

Post by seanmcdirmid »

capitainenemo wrote: post #131
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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===FIRE…

It is a two lane road constricted with packed street parking on both sides of the road. This being SF, even in the best situation where there isn't a garbage truck double parked in the other lane, I'm sure a U turn isn't feasible, or even a 3 point turn around. Backing up was the only option, yet the road is two lane, so more traffic than a residential one lane coming from behind is also a concern.

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

#154

Post by markdown »

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…

HOWTO: Make a Tesla pull over with a fake siren.

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

#155

Post by gojomo »

InitialLastName wrote: post #46
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…

> Human drivers sometimes fail-to-notice sirens or other high-priority demands on road capacity. In the lane directly in front of them, facing them, and honking?

> In the lane directly in front of them, facing them, and honking?

Yes! In SF and other big free-country cities at 4am, some human drivers are high!

Sometimes human drivers are passed-out or suffering a health crisis. Sometimes they've left their vehicles blocking key rights-of-way as they go somewher else for many minutes.

In San Francisco, I've seen human-driver-unattended cars block light-rail trains many times. (I live not far from the N-Judah line, which also has a history of pedestrian bystanders physically moving cars to clear the road: https://www.munidiaries.com/2014/02/10/muni-riders-lift-car-...)

We need to judge autonomous car suboptimalities against real human drivers, with all their failures - not against idealized, unerring humans-at-their-best.

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

#156

Post by gojomo »

kazinator wrote: post #109
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…

You're missing the angle that when a human blocks passage for an extended period of time with their vehicle, it's almost always because the human is away from the vehicle: the human has deliberately parked where they are not supposed to and then walked away. When the computer does this, it's always "sitting" in the vehicle, and is not acting on a selfish intent: it's just carrying buggy/incomplete requirements. A hum…

But if the human-away-from-vehicle blocks things for minutes, while the temporarily-confused-AI has a remote-operator fix the issue in 30 seconds, or others in the area find another solution even faster than in the unattended-car scenario... isn't the advantage, given the actual weighted occurrences, still for the autonomous car?

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

#157

Post by SllX »

treesprite82 wrote: post #96
SllX wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s be generous and say 50/50. But look at it this way: one was a vehicle with no driver present in the seat, and the other was a vehicle in which a driving agent is never not present. A human driver in that situation should not spend longer than 5 seconds figuring out and implementing a way to safely let the fire truck pass. The Cruise car took longer. If a human were present with two working eyes and ears and arm…

> A human driver in that situation should not spend longer than 5 seconds figuring out and implementing a way to safely let the fire truck pass. The Cruise car took longer. Impossible to say for certain, but I'd bet that a significant number of human drivers would yield to the right (as the autonomous car did), or take longer than 5 seconds to reverse back into the intersection (as was desired of the autonomous car).

If there’s no vehicles or people directly behind the car, no traffic close enough to pose a danger, and a quick spot check confirms this, why would it take you longer than 5 seconds to reverse out of the way? You don’t need to back up into Canada or something, a short distance is enough to let another necessarily impatient vehicle pass. In the end the garbage truck moved, which is why the fire truck was “able to pass within 25 seconds of encountering the Cruise car”.

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

#158

Post by robbrown451 »

dogecoinbase wrote: post #128
robbrown451 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would imagine the car has ways of identifying things that are specific hazards, such as a gas pump. Fruit stand is probably categorized as "other." "the problem is in having the correct ontology to even get to the "prioritization" stage." That part isn't done by the program, it is done by whoever enters the prioritization numbers. That is, someone, possibly a committee, can dial up the "avoid gas pumps" weighting r…

Sure, we'll just write down all the things there are in the world in order of how bad it is for a car to hit them.

You don't think self driving cars categorize and prioritize things?

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

#159

Post by gojomo »

SoftTalker wrote: post #103
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…

> 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 These cars can barely drive themselves with hyper-accurate maps on a sunny day without any surprises, and we want them to receive and evaluate emergency d…

The cars relying on external routing guidance, from cloud services similar to 'Google Maps' driving directions. An alert from emergency services can simply... remove roads from consideration, the same as is already routinely done when other accidents/traffic cause dynamic routing updates.

So, you don't even need to upgrade the autonomous vehicles, you just change the other, existing, flexible, proven system for recommending routes.

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

#160

Post by gojomo »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #87
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 co…

As far as I can tell, none of the reported incidents in SF involved a "computer crash". Further, none have been as 'catastrophic' as other very-common accidents with human drivers.

So yes, the details of recovery are important – but only in comparison to the human baseline. If incidents happen less often than with humans, and/or recovery happens as fast or faster than with humans, that's the relevant criteria.

Also deserving weight: might autonomous cars avoid dangerous panics in some situations where humans sometimes panic & overreact? I've often seen human drivers make things worse by making an ill-advised impatient navigate-around. I've seen people trying, earnestly, to avoid a block or prior accident who – distracted, anxious – do something else wrong, causing another collision.

Weigh all the rates & severities. Don't set policy based on selective worst-cases, including many imaginary/theoretical contrived cases.

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