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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

#161

Post by dane-pgp »

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.

I mean, you're right; someone making that list might not think to include "centaur", and maybe one Halloween a child is dressed up as one, and the computer vision system interprets the "centaur" as a horse instead of a child, and it makes the wrong decision, but how many centaur-related accidents do you think self-driving cars are going to be involved in each year?

It's completely feasible to imagine writing a list of the top, say, 100 things in the world that a car needs to make morally-significant decisions about, and then deal with every other accident or near-miss after the fact. Interactions with unrecognised objects should be rare enough to be a rounding error when comparing accident rates between autonomous and human-driven miles.

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

#162

Post by rwbhn »

bagacrap wrote: post #140
ripper1138 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks to the garbage truck driver.

the blockage was thanks to the garbage truck driver

Literally doing the job they are paid to do (by the city I presume), in the expected manner.

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

#163

Post by munk-a »

markdown wrote: post #154
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…

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

We've solved that as a society.

People can affix fake sirens to their cars and if they blare them at you you should pull over... after the incident society then throws an incredibly harsh penalty at the offender.

To make sure things run smoothly it benefits society to never doubt or question whether people who say they're police officers actually them - they might have something incredibly important to say (Like, hey, there's an active shootout ahead - please don't keep driving and get yourself injured).

If you as an individual create some funny gag to fake out autonomous vehicles into thinking that you're a cop whether you cheekily do it with "TOTALLY NOT A COP CAR" written on the side to get a laugh or not... you're almost certainly going to be charged with a felony crime.

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

#164

Post by godshatter »

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…

It stopped because it recognized that it needed to stop to let an emergency vehicle get past it. Unfortunately, it stopped right next to a double-parked garbage truck in the next lane. No one had programmed in a set of contingencies for "stopped to let something pass, no room for it to pass". This is one of who knows how many contingencies it doesn't have a solution for which is why, in my opinion, this kind of thing will be quite common for a long time until enough events like these are found and software is changed to handle them. I'm hoping that none of these kinds of unanticipated events will cause fatalities, but I'm skeptical that will be the case.

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

#165

Post by RugnirViking »

bagacrap wrote: post #140
ripper1138 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks to the garbage truck driver.

the blockage was thanks to the garbage truck driver

That's just what garbage trucks do, pick up garbage. Typically, they need to stop in order to achieve that. Thankfully, there are two lanes, so with some negotiation, humans can work around that fact...

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

#166

Post by sokoloff »

SllX wrote: post #157
treesprite82 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

5 seconds is a very short amount of time. Humans are pretty bad at quickly solving for and safely executing an unusual response to a scenario they’ve never encountered.

I would hope that after coming up with the strategy to reverse that you’d take most or all of 5 seconds to confirm there were no obstacles behind you. It may take you 2 seconds to realize the fire truck is stuck unless you move, 2 seconds to conclude you can only help by reversing, 3 seconds to check your mirrors, 0.5 seconds to shift to reverse, a couple seconds to look at the backup camera to check the spot not visible to the mirrors, 2 seconds to move the car 40 feet, longer if you have to check for cross traffic in the intersection.

Aviation research points to the effect of startling to have a negative effect on decision making quality and speed for up to 30 seconds. That’s for trained, generally fit aircrews.

Quibble with the times, but I doubt you get to a “most people would complete the task safely in under 5000ms” conclusion.

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

#167

Post by gojomo »

gmfawcett wrote: post #42
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…

Wouldn't the apples-to-apples comparison be: how many human drivers have been in the path of a honking fire truck, yet refused to move? Including parked cars and other "obstacle" cases is imbalanced.

That's a fine micro-comparison to consider, alone!

But also, what if this is a rare situation where the autonomous car completely fails compared to a human-in-seat? But, even this failure still resolves in under-a-minute. Or, worst-case, approximates the (quite-common) case of a breakdown or human-accident blocking traffic, in a manner that takes tens-of-minutes to resolve.

In that case, who cares that we've found one narrow failure? Humans show impatience, poor-judgement, bad exception handling, recklessness, and so forth at ample rates across many road interactions. It's the net total of blockages by autonomous cars, in count & duration & severity, that matters, and specifically whether overall they do better or worse than human drivers.

That net comparison is the most important consideration.

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

#168

Post by routerl »

gojomo wrote: post #145
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…

There are not uncountably many – we live in a finite world governed by understandable physical and civic laws. There's an actually measurable rate of humans blocking other traffic, and for how long before resolution, and an actually measurable rate of autonomous vehicles blocking other traffic, and for how long before resolved. If the rate for autonomous vehicles is already below that of humans, or rapidly headed the…

> There are not uncountably many

OP was obviously not using that term mathematically (i.e. the cardinality of the power set of natural numbers), and obviously meant something in the neighborhood of "effectively not countable". And, again, in all but the formal mathematical meaning of the word "countable", many things are not countable (e.g. no one will live long enough to count all the natural numbers).

In the real world, assigning an ordinal number to an object/event/thing has a nonzero time cost. And accounting for every situation in software has a much greater cost.

> If the rate for autonomous vehicles is already below that of humans, or rapidly headed there, that's far more important to note than to theorize about other corner-cases.

Okay, but dangerous human drivers get systematically removed from the streets. Are we doing the same for self-driving cars? In this context, does every Tesla count as the same "driver"?

Maybe all Teslas should have their autonomous driving centrally disabled every time one causes an accident, or breaks a law, until that specific issue is fixed. But it would be impossible to run a car company that way, so of course that takes priority over, say, keeping innocents alive, right? /S

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

#169

Post by everforward »

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…

> It does seem like the car "acted reasonably"

I would firmly say that it did not act reasonably. Blocking the other lane of traffic is the second worst action I can think of, only behind ramming into the emergency vehicle. It would have been better to ignore the emergency vehicle and continue driving, which would have at least cleared the jam.

I worked in the space at one point, and I would put the issue down to autonomous vehicles being trained entirely to keep themselves safe. E.g. they know to stay a certain distance from other cars, but they have no concept of "could another get around me?". A similar example would be parking. On a street without lines to mark spaces, I would not be surprised to see an autonomous vehicle park in the middle of a space large enough for 2 cars, preventing someone from using the rest of the space. Another would be opening space for someone to merge. I don't think that's something they ever do on purpose.

We're teaching them to not hit things or get hit by things, rather than teaching them how to drive, which is a far more nuanced skill. The same thing would have happened with 2 autonomous vehicles, because neither even attempts to understand what the other is trying to do. They would just deadlock until the garbage truck moved.

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

#170

Post by simion314 »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #150
simion314 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Not everyone has option 1 available to them. It’s why school buses exist. - Not everyone has access to school bus options - not everyone can drive - not everyone owns a self driving car .... I would prefer if we stay on topic and answer at in Hypothetical question. Or if you have a bias, let use a different domain Your child is ill and you call for a doctor, but in this universe doctors are a lot of time drunk or ar…

Chill out. I never said I was an AI enthusiast. Maybe don’t assume things because someone made a small critique about your comment? I was simply responding to your question of why people choose 2 or 3 when 1 is an option. Because it’s not always an option. You even admit that at the top of your comment. Which leads me to ask: what are you trying to prove here?

I had a question, if you don't care about answering then please ignore.

I am attempting to show that 1% better then a terrible calculated average is bad, it could be great for someone that is a bad driver. My problem is that averages are dragged down but drunk driving or speeding, I am fine if we implement in parallel multiple solutions, like use tech/AI to prevent illegal driving (drunk, tired, texting) and in the same tiem continue the research on actual good AI drivers that are actual good at driving.

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