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Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it

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Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it

#201

Post by colechristensen »

Zircom wrote: post #172
colechristensen wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Software is not ready for that yet, I think. It will never happen. Robots will never have the intelligence to manage dangerous situations in the open world, only in controlled environments. After a series of accidents passes the unforgivable threshold, certain levels of autonomous driving will be banned completely.

I think never is a strong word. You genuine believe that we'll never create an equivalent or even comparable intelligence to our own artificially?

I think there's no stage at which you trust such an entity with something like driving until it wants a robot to drive it's car so it can do other things than focus on driving. In the same way you don't trust a 5 year old with a loaded gun, you don't trust real synthetic intelligence with something like driving you safely. Not until it reaches the level where it wants equal rights, suffrage, and generally to be treated as alive. That's way off into science fiction land.

Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it

#202

Post by treeman79 »

redtriumph wrote: post #20
retrac wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm slightly alarmed by the general scenario of a driverless vehicle approaching an emergency situation. A human-driven vehicle will respond to gestures from firefighters to go around, etc. And even most dull humans will have more situational awareness and flexibility than an AI is likely to, particularly as these sorts of scenarios are edge cases by definition. E.g. depending on your jurisdiction and the situation,…

Sounds like having support for interpreting human gestures will solve some of the problems. But how do we distinguish real emergency scenario from fake one? Such kinds of problems will only scale up as we apply L5 cars take on more public roads, but I wonder how long or what changes will have to be done in current road signs, critical city infra to support them.

Was in backroads and ran into a cop directing travel. Apparently a small fair nearby.

Dude was totally pissed and gesturing every which way wildly. When I couldn’t immediately decode. He just started swinging even more wildly. Turning redder and redder.

Was fairly sure I was going to get shot arrested. So I just did a U turn. As I was leaving the next guy started yelling at cop that he was blocking all possible routes to his town.

Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it

#203

Post by buzzert »

gambiting wrote: post #117
buzzert wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really believe that with that attitude, we'll never be "ready" for driverless cars. > We are not curing cancer or feeding the world here, we are trying to make people get rich by eliminating the cost of labour for a human driver. No way this calculus should prioritize investors over human lives in any sane society. How about, we're trying to make transportation cheaper for everyone by eliminating the most expensive…

>>How about, we're trying to make transportation cheaper for everyone by eliminating the most expensive part of taxi cabs (human labor)? Does anyone really believe that? Right now I could commute to work by taking an Uber - it costs about £10 for a one way trip. Now you're telling me that a company somewhere, would send a state of the art car equipped with incredibly advanced computers and sensors, car which they nee…

That £10 trip is "artificially" cheap. Uber/Lyft are effectively tricking drivers into thinking it's a good deal to use their own cars (and thus their own fuel and pay for their own maintenance), and are partially subsidized by venture capital.

This, in my opinion, is unsustainable. Soon there won't be any new "suckers" in the pipeline, and it will suddenly get a lot more expensive as these rideshare companies need to reckon with the actual cost of human labor and leasing their own cars.

Investing in driverless technology, which can be replicated and will eventually become cheaper as it's mass-produced, is a very smart move. These costs will eventually get passed down to consumers as well once there's enough competition, and then everyone wins.

Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it

#204

Post by BizarreByte »

Zircom wrote: post #172
colechristensen wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Software is not ready for that yet, I think. It will never happen. Robots will never have the intelligence to manage dangerous situations in the open world, only in controlled environments. After a series of accidents passes the unforgivable threshold, certain levels of autonomous driving will be banned completely.

I think never is a strong word. You genuine believe that we'll never create an equivalent or even comparable intelligence to our own artificially?

I personally don’t. We are not guaranteed endless progress or a good future.

Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it

#205

Post by crooked-v »

atrettel wrote: post #138
btbuildem wrote: post #72

I can see how this kind of thing would not be in the self-driving training sets. But a person standing in the way should cause the vehicle to stop, right? Pedestrian of any kind, including a firefighter in full gear. It's hard to speculate what happened without knowing the details, but I'm imagining a scenario where someone stood there to block the car's progress, and once they realized it's a dumb robot that will pr…

There are a lot of these kind of edge cases that are just not going to end up in training data sets, at least not in sufficient quantities in sufficient time. That makes it hard for 100 percent data-driven approaches to adapt to all circumstances, since so much data is needed. A human can reason and understand odd circumstances without prior "training data". That's an advantage in my view. Current AI systems like the…

You might like the scifi story "Car Wars", which does some exploring of the subject: https://doctorow.medium.com/car-wars-a01718a27e9e

Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it

#206

Post by philliphaydon »

colechristensen wrote: post #87
retrac wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm slightly alarmed by the general scenario of a driverless vehicle approaching an emergency situation. A human-driven vehicle will respond to gestures from firefighters to go around, etc. And even most dull humans will have more situational awareness and flexibility than an AI is likely to, particularly as these sorts of scenarios are edge cases by definition. E.g. depending on your jurisdiction and the situation,…

> Software is not ready for that yet, I think. It will never happen. Robots will never have the intelligence to manage dangerous situations in the open world, only in controlled environments. After a series of accidents passes the unforgivable threshold, certain levels of autonomous driving will be banned completely.

I donno the robots in terminator seemed to have some self awareness. Why can’t we apply the same to cars?

Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it

#207

Post by lmm »

ghaff wrote: post #55
mattlondon wrote: post #46

To be honest, as a human driver I'd not give a second thought to driving over a hose. Not saying that is right or not, just surprised this is apparently an issue worth smashing a car up for. I have no recollection of this being in the highway code for instance

Seriously? You'd just drive over a firehose because it was in your way?

I've ridden over cleaning hoses (and one time a boat's hose that I assume was supplying water or fuel or something) without a second thought. Obviously I'd be careful around an emergency vehicle setup with lights and sirens and all that, but just a random hose lying across the road? Yeah I'd probably drive over it without thinking.

Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it

#208

Post by freitzkriesler »

thereisnospork wrote: post #184
freitzkriesler wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't be a fool. You know what I mean. Medicines and self driving cars can cause irreperable damage on a larger scale than a shoe does. You sound like you would be first in line to give a pregnant woman Thalidomide too and that was considered "safe and effective" as well until it wasn't.

>Medicines and self driving cars can cause irreperable damage on a larger scale than a shoe does. Don't be a fool - irreparable harm is occurring and you and people like you are standing in the way of fixing it. The current state of the art kills 40,000 people a year.[0] You've got to consider the bigger picture around 'dangerous'. Skepticism here isn't prudent, isn't reasonable, and frankly will be responsible for t…

I bet you like to run untested alpha builds in production environments too.

Be my guest and risk killing yourself by beta testing dangerous self driving vehicles and medical procedures that haven't gone through their trials.

I risk nothing by not participating.

Just do us all a favor and try not to take out others For Science™. Enjoy doing someone else's QC for free.

Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it

#209

Post by colechristensen »

ulizzle wrote: post #161
cowmoo728 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm too optimistic about self driving but it seems that a fail-safe default of "upon encountering an active emergency situation, stop at a reasonable distance away" is good enough and better than what a significant minority of human drivers do.

Who are the significant minority? This is the same claim always given by the A.I boosters. Who sees firefighters fighting a fire and decides to just plow through and make matters worse? Because by "significant minority" what you are saying is that 2 or 3 out of 10 human drivers do this.

Exactly. The fact that some humans are drunks or psychopaths does not mean that AI mistakes are going to just be accepted. We send people to prison when they make those kinds of mistakes, what do we do when machine learning models kill while functioning entirely normally?

Re: Firefighters forced to smash window of driverless Cruise taxi to stop it

#210

Post by Willish42 »

This is one of those futuristic sounding headlines I would've found so cool to dream about 10+ years ago as a not-too-far-off sci-fi hypothetical.

Weird how mundane and unsurprising this feels after many years of headlines about self driving. It's hard to have a lot of faith in a concept that seems so doomed for failure before it's even hit a critical market size.

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