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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

#211

Post by bowsamic »

feoren wrote: post #115
bowsamic wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do driverless cars use ML in the decision making procedure? > A calculator absolutely "understands" arithmetic. That is absurd and obviously false

> That is absurd and obviously false It is actually "obviously true" unless you believe that human brains have a special metaphysical magic that makes them "more than just a system". That's literally the only alternative: human brains are magic and only humans are ever capable of "understanding". It's a vacuous definition of the word. Systems can understand things, which is good, because the human brain is nothing mo…

But doing arithmetic and understanding it are different things. The latter is some reflection on the concepts, but the former is just carrying it out. There are many humans that can do arithmetic but don’t understand it

Also I do believe there is a metaphysical difference between a human and a calculator, literally magic

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

#212

Post by krisoft »

anyfoo wrote: post #183
krisoft wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for example, swerving into an unmanned fruit stand without being able to brake is much better than swerving into an unmanned gas pump. This is just ridiculous. If you believe that humans are making rational decisions in split seconds then you are delusional. A swerving, breakless human driven car will hit whatever happens to be where physics takes it. The scared monkey descendant holding on to the controls will as…

Runaway trucks are a very real problem, we even have emergency escape ramps in places where they are most common. There is usually no split second decision here: You have a comparable eternity to decide where you want your non-braking truck to end up. However you construe my particular example to be "ridiculous" under the additional constraints that you imposed on it yourself, you are looking at an instance where an…

> Runaway trucks are a very real problem

Yes. And autonomous trucks are an engineering problem, not an abstract philosophical question. You can ask the question: “how is the autonomous truck going to know if it should slam into the petrol station or into the fruit stand?” And there is no good answer to that. Or you can ask: “How do we engineer autonomous trucks so the probability of a runaway incident is lower than epsilon?” And then suddenly it turns out this is a solveable problem with our existing tools. (With redundant brakes, and with built-in brake health checks.)

> under the additional constraints that you imposed on it yourself

I assume you mean comparing to what a competent human would do? It is implicit in the whole discussion. Human drivers are the current best practice. You are asking about the “fruit stand vs petrol station” question presumably because a human would know to choose the fruit stand.

Nobody is asking this alternate question, because they would immediately feel it is ridiculous: A young boy is crossing the road in front of an AV. In 30 years he will become a politician, will instigate a violent sectarian war which will result in the death of millions of innocents. Should the AV run him over thus preventing all that suffering?

Just to state the obvious: no, the AV should not run the boy over. But why is nobody asking this question? Because it is obviously silly. We as a human can’t look at a young boy and know them as a future mass murderer, therefore we don’t expect this from an autonomous car either.

> you are looking at an instance where an autonomous vehicle failed to make a reasonable decision that a human would right in this article.

Oh yes. And it is a fascinating one. I was reacting to your “fruit stand vs petrol pump” hypothetical not to the article directly.

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

#213

Post by kkfx »

The most important point is NOT a single car doing something, but what a flock of such cars can do once commanded from remote. We have already seen theoretical attacks against cities bricking few cars in strategic spot, trapping 99% of the traffic, attacks against electricity grid with spike loads or spike drops, individuals pushed to their death apparently by accidents or pushed toward others in an apparently terrorist action etc.

So the real point is: do we damn want to allow proprietary hw and private made/designed such complex tools instead of imposing publicly developed FLOSS code on open hw made out of public research?

Artists have envisaged tragic scenarios from Terminator to Matrix passing through Gattaca and Minority Report, techies have read much more substantial and realistic nightmares, civil society answer? Not seen so far...

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

#214

Post by Gordonjcp »

mr_toad wrote: post #186
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 It only needs to understand when to ask for help: the driverless car had correctly yielded to the oncoming fire truck in the opposing lane and contacted the company’s remote assistance workers, who are able to operate vehicles in trouble from afar. According to Cruise, which collects camera and…

An emergency vehicle coming up behind you is not a "one in a million scenario".

If an autonomous vehicle can't cope with a "one in a million scenario", it cannot be autonomous.

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

#215

Post by zinekeller »

droopyEyelids wrote: post #104
zinekeller wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does your point appreciably change the meaning of the argument? Definietely not, even a 10-second delay is too long for emergencies. There are times where that five-second difference matters but I feel this falls into a bad-faith argument.

"Bad Faith" is when someone is consciously trying to deceive you. It's not a superlative like 'really' or 'very'. If the point someone is trying to make is bad, inaccurate, or unconvincing that doesn't mean it's made in bad faith. It's actually less likely to be in bad faith.

While there are people who are indeed nitpicky, unfortunately I do think that it crossed the line. The specific time is not the main message: the point is that extra time hinders emergency response, and it can be reasonably interpreted that "half a minute" is a granular measurement.

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

#216

Post by sokoloff »

rglullis wrote: post #200
sokoloff wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of my car trips are random route. Most public transit (and all rail) runs on a fixed path. It’s rare that that fixed path aligns with my random route. The only trip I regularly take that vaguely aligns with a bus route is from 2 blocks away from my house to the grocery. (The grocery is about 4 total blocks from my house meaning walking halfway and then waiting for a bus still makes no sense.)

Do you think that people living in countries that are not car-dependent have all "perfectly aligned routes"? No, they use bicycles, they walk, they rely on better public transit than the one that is available to you. But anyway, how does that relate to the original question? Are you trying to justify your interest in FSD with the argument that would you give you some network of autonomous taxis?

Sure. I thought I’d left the dots close enough, but perhaps I didn’t. I believe that full self-driving cars will bring benefits above an area just being less car-dependent in general because of their inherent random route ability, which represents a huge time savings over rail and buses which seem to run in a radial spoke fashion.

Take the case of an elderly person with limited personal mobility. They are likely driving today because that’s their best option by far. They’re probably not going to start walking to their doctor; it’s probably not a good idea for them to take up biking. Taking a bus into the city center and another one back out to get to a point that’s radially 2-3 miles away and then reversing that to get home seems wildly less practical than hopping into an FSD ride, whether billed like an uber or privately/family owned. That’s what FSD brings over a status futurus that is less car dependent but lacks FSD.

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

#217

Post by jstanley »

hamburglar wrote: post #179
jstanley wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's a question of knowing what an axiom is or how a calculator is implemented. I think it's a question of disagreeing on what "understanding" means. What does it mean to understand something? Obviously (to me and I presume to you) a calculator doesn't understand anything! It doesn't have the capacity for understanding. Obviously (according to, I presume, feoren and Dennett) "understanding" means someth…

There is no math in a calculator. It’s a pile of logic gates assembled in a way to appear to perform mathematical operations. An ALU has no “understanding” of arithmetic, it’s just a canned, finite set of inputs and outputs. Not an axiom to be found.

I expect the argument would go like:

The pile of logic gates is an encoding of the axioms. The fact that it evaluates mathematical expressions correctly is both necessary and sufficient to show that it understands arithmetic. Therefore the calculator knows the axioms and understands arithmetic.

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

#218

Post by rglullis »

sokoloff wrote: post #216
rglullis wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that people living in countries that are not car-dependent have all "perfectly aligned routes"? No, they use bicycles, they walk, they rely on better public transit than the one that is available to you. But anyway, how does that relate to the original question? Are you trying to justify your interest in FSD with the argument that would you give you some network of autonomous taxis?

Sure. I thought I’d left the dots close enough, but perhaps I didn’t. I believe that full self-driving cars will bring benefits above an area just being less car-dependent in general because of their inherent random route ability, which represents a huge time savings over rail and buses which seem to run in a radial spoke fashion. Take the case of an elderly person with limited personal mobility. They are likely driv…

Please, please watch the videos I linked. Especially the Not Just Bikes channel. For example, this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQY6WGOoYis can quickly explain why a transport system flooded with autonomous cars and poor public transit would make the overall system worse for everyone.

There is also another video that talks about microcars for people with disability and reduced mobility: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9ly7JjqEb0&t=397

No rational person can watch those videos and conclude that the best course of action to solve urban transportation requires self-driving cars. Getting FSD cars is just a rich nerd fetish which will not solve anything and likely contribute to make suburban sprawl worse.

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

#219

Post by Gordonjcp »

hamburglar wrote: post #179
jstanley wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's a question of knowing what an axiom is or how a calculator is implemented. I think it's a question of disagreeing on what "understanding" means. What does it mean to understand something? Obviously (to me and I presume to you) a calculator doesn't understand anything! It doesn't have the capacity for understanding. Obviously (according to, I presume, feoren and Dennett) "understanding" means someth…

There is no math in a calculator. It’s a pile of logic gates assembled in a way to appear to perform mathematical operations. An ALU has no “understanding” of arithmetic, it’s just a canned, finite set of inputs and outputs. Not an axiom to be found.

> It’s a pile of logic gates assembled in a way to appear to perform mathematical operations

In what way is Boolean logic not maths?

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

#220

Post by sokoloff »

rglullis wrote: post #218
sokoloff wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. I thought I’d left the dots close enough, but perhaps I didn’t. I believe that full self-driving cars will bring benefits above an area just being less car-dependent in general because of their inherent random route ability, which represents a huge time savings over rail and buses which seem to run in a radial spoke fashion. Take the case of an elderly person with limited personal mobility. They are likely driv…

Please, please watch the videos I linked. Especially the Not Just Bikes channel. For example, this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQY6WGOoYis can quickly explain why a transport system flooded with autonomous cars and poor public transit would make the overall system worse for everyone . There is also another video that talks about microcars for people with disability and reduced mobility: https://www.youtube.co…

I’ve watched all the Not Just Bikes videos in the past and just rewatched part of the first one you linked immediately above.

The Downs-Thompson paradox may explain exactly what I see. We recently got priority bus lanes in my city (Cambridge, MA). The primary effect is that buses can now more quickly travel to where I didn’t need to go in the first place. Cars are still significantly faster, so people choose them.

Regardless of the amount of car traffic, a bus that goes from the outer edge of my city into the center to let me transfer to another bus to go out towards an outer edge at a different radial will never come close to driving point to point, even with parking aggravations. That explains why nearly everyone who is capable to drive and can afford a car has one. I think it’s also why many public transit advocates seem to focus so much energy on penalizing cars to enable public transit to become competitive. If competitively superior public transit existed, people would use it because they aren’t generally stupid. Even if it was roughly equal, people would use it in a lot of cases.

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