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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

#251

Post by closeparen »

a4isms wrote: post #15
cuteboy19 wrote: post #3

So what is the solution? Let emergency services have a remote control STOP button? But it would have many implications for passengers too

The solution is recognizing that we are nowhere near ready for driverless cars. With "ordinary" software, you can look at all of the use cases and if you solve 5% of them in a really good way, you can be successful, users will self-select whether those 5% of the use cases are valuable for them, and then not use your software for anything else. With driverless self-driving vehicles, you have no such comfort. Even if y…

>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.

Other than working and sleeping, driving is the main thing adults do with their lives. Not having to do it anymore would be transformational. I'd prefer to see that accomplished through urbanism and public transit, but that's about as much of a moonshot politically as self-driving is technically.

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

#252

Post by morpheos137 »

weavejester wrote: post #160
bmitc wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not an attitude. It's reality. Self-driving cars, if even attainable (which is questionable), don't solve any real problems besides bolstering the want for cars and thus more roads and highways, which are primary contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. That is, other than creating "cool" jobs and supporting get rich schemes and startups. If we cared about transportation and climate change, we'd be investing in…

> Self-driving cars, if even attainable (which is questionable), don't solve any real problems besides bolstering the want for cars and thus more roads and highways, which are primary contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. It may be the opposite, as driverless cars can potentially be utilized more efficiently. If I drive to a destination, my car will sit in a parking space doing nothing and wasting space. A driver…

Ever consider if the effective duty cycle of your car is increased the vehicle wears out quicker?

The whole idea of autonomous robo taxis is bad on its face for many, many reasons.

When will we grow up and admit it?

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

#253

Post by steveBK123 »

cowmoo728 wrote: post #93
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.

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.

How do we know we can make the machines smart enough to detect the dangerous situations it is incapable of handling on its own?

It's just a bit too perfect, no?

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

#254

Post by buzzert »

AlexandrB wrote: post #243
buzzert wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they aren't solving any real problem, and they will increase problems of congestion and also climate change, since they will continue to bolster cars and thus roads needed to support cars. Again, this is zero sum thinking. We can have both efficient and safe driverless EVs as well as trains/buses run by the government. Personally, I'd prefer to take the former given how little interest the government has in enforci…

> Personally, I'd prefer to take the former given how little interest the government has in enforcing laws on public transportation, and this trend seems undue to change. I'm not sure what you mean by this. Are you talking about HOV lanes and bus lanes not being enforced, fares not being enforced, or literal lawlessness on public transit?

Literal lawlessness on public transit. I gave up on Muni in SF and started driving my car a lot more after the n-th encounter with drug addicts ruining public transportation for everyone.

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

#255

Post by steveBK123 »

alasdair_ wrote: post #179
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.

It will definitely happen, and likely (>50%) within the next 10-15 years. We need true GAI to do this, of course, and the question is: will a "real" GAI be willing to drive a car? How much will we have to pay it?

Have you tried any of the state-of-the-art out there?

ChatGPT is easily circumvented to violate all its own guardrails with a few instructions.

Knowledge without understanding.

It clearly doesn't understand it's own rules well enough to realize when it is asked to violate the rule "don't do C" that being asked to do A->B->C is the same as being asked to do C.

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

#256

Post by matthias509 »

ecnahc515 wrote: post #108
kube-system wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human drivers are smart, and will generally judge your appearance, confidence, and context to determine whether or not your actions are legitimate. And you likely always pass these tests. Imagine a teenager, dressed in street wear, who jumps into the middle of a street to stop traffic in a way that has no explanation given the scene, while their friends laugh on the sidewalk as they observe. Or a group of men in mask…

In basically every example you gave, you still have to stop until people move though. The result is the same, despite everything else. The only one that's a bit iffy is if you're being carjacked, is a bit of an exception. Legitimacy isn't really the problem, it's the circumstance of a human being in front of your car that prevents you from moving forward, and beyond getting out of your car and talking to them, or jus…

One reason carjacking is rare is because people don't foolishly stop for obvious carjackings. If an autonomous car has trouble telling the difference between a carjacker and a construction worker, then it will be much more likely to get carjacked.

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

#257

Post by Psychlist »

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…

> Pedestrian of any kind, including a firefighter in full gear.

You assume that a firefighter will be recognised as a person. Even if they're wearing breathing gear or carrying a sack etc. And would definitely respond appropriately to hand gestures, driving away from the fire rather than queuing neatly behind a fire appliance or something.

For all the people concerned that a driverless car might stop somewhere it shouldn't, I'm way more concerned that the car will drive on when it really should stop. Especially given some of the insanity we've seen in Auckland with the current floods, the idea that a driverless car might not recognise someone standing waist deep in floodwaters or whatever, then just drive on through, doesn't excite me.

There's too many cases where actual human drivers fail to respond appropriately even though we have 100-odd years of selection pressure encouraging them to.

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

#258

Post by barelyauser »

chongli wrote: post #233
concordDance wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get why people think intelligence requires things like a desire for suffrage... There is no particular reason why advanced planning, modelling and pattern matching ability should need human-like goals. Heck, even counting votes would be quite impossible (how much divergence does a copy need before it gets its own vote? What it not all modules/nodes are copied?). Also, the anti-suffrage women seem to have been…

There is no particular reason why advanced planning, modelling and pattern matching ability should need human-like goals. Because driving requires the ability to understand what other drivers are doing. It requires a theory of mind, which means understanding human goals.

Moving from point A to point B is the goal of humans while they drive. You don't need "human like" understanding of human goals. You do need to account for the stupidity of people though.

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

#259

Post by runarberg »

fasterik wrote: post #215
runarberg wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GAI is a pipe dream. There is no technology that we can even conceive—let alone build in the next 10-15 years—of which passes as GAI. Our current AI is based on statistical inference, GAI will need to be able to do far more than infer from data and interpolate actions. No we will never have GAI. --- I know never is a long time, but I can comfortably predict this because there is not only technological problems with G…

I'm trying to understand the worldview that leads to what you believe. As far as I can tell, you're assuming there is a supernatural aspect to the human mind. According to my worldview, humans are just robots built out of DNA, proteins, etc. The idea that machines couldn't do everything a human can do (and more) doesn't make any sense to me.

I’m sorry but I don’t have that world view. I must not have been clear enough (english is not my first language; and I’m not even super clear in my native language).

I actually don’t believe in the superiority of the human mind, I think the word intelligence is actually a scientific distraction. Humans are remarkably—but not uniquely—adapted at communicating with each others and manipulating our environment for our benefit (most of the time; but sometimes to our determent, e.g. by causing a climate disaster). My statement about intelligence was not to share my believe about humanity, but a statement about human believes about our humanity (a theory of mind of sorts). I believe that humans are so human centric that we will always evaluate intelligence in human terms. As such nothing will ever supersede it as we will simply alter our former believes in order to keep our mind at the center of the universe.

Now as for machines that can do everything that humans can do (and more), I still consider this a pipe dream, even if we disregard the word intelligence. This is not because I believe the human mind is superior to machine, it is more because we haven’t conceived of how we would do this. Statistical inference has its limits, even with all the computing power in the world, it will never do what specialized machines like our brains have evolved over millions of years to do (well maybe if we allow our machines to freely evolve and procreate and set them loose in a dynamic self sustaining environment; but that wont provide any benefits for us).

I also have my doubts about the utility of AGI. People state that full self driving cars is easier with AGI, but I haven’t seen any proof of this statement (nor for the utility of AGI driven cars for that matter; we’ve had self driving trains for decades without AGI). With traditional machine learning models, there is tons of utility in the data analysis in all sorts of fields (just like there was with factor analysis and linear regression before it), but with AGI I fail to see what we will get from a vague notion of can do everything humans can do, which doesn’t apply to traditional machines that are specifically programmed for that task. In short, I don’t even think there is a market for AGI.

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

#260

Post by c22 »

jimjimjim wrote: post #222
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,…

driverless cars will have endless problems. When I was on sales trip to KL in Malaysia there were times when the tropical rain could half flood a street in minutes. Our driver was able to creep around the shallow side of the road (alternating with cars in the other direction). How would a driverless car cope? Would it even detect that there was problem? and if it detected it and wouldn't drive on that might be the wo…

There's a one-lane bridge near where I live that would pose a similar challenge. Drivers coming from the east always have right-of-way, but the only way to know this is by reading the bespoke traffic sign posted next to the bridge. To make matters worse, during times of heavy traffic westbound drivers will often stop and let through a stream of eastbound traffic. How many cars are let through is negotiated with hand signals or flashing lights and smiles.
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