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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

#261

Post by chongli »

barelyauser wrote: post #258
chongli wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Human drivers communicate with each other through subtle cues, body language, etc. Moreover, pedestrians, children playing in the street, pets running onto the road chasing a ball, construction sites, parades, protests, are all things involving intelligence and theory of mind that you can't reduce to "the goal is to point A to point B."

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

#262

Post by tshaddox »

colechristensen wrote: post #201
Zircom wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 treat…

Or until we are able to change the nature of driving to make it require less creativity. As a simple examples, I suspect a road network where all cars were self-driving would probably be an easier software problem.

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

#263

Post by barelyauser »

chongli wrote: post #261
barelyauser wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Human drivers communicate with each other through subtle cues, body language, etc. Moreover, pedestrians, children playing in the street, pets running onto the road chasing a ball, construction sites, parades, protests, are all things involving intelligence and theory of mind that you can't reduce to "the goal is to point A to point B."

We can try to reduce these things. Most things can be reduced to "obstacles". If obstacles are behaving the way we predict, then they are logical, otherwise they are flagged as illogical. When i engage in "subtle cues" or "body language" while on traffic i never trust it. If someone starts to drive illogically i never try to predict what they will do next, i just flag them as illogical and prepare for the worst.

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

#264

Post by weavejester »

bmitc wrote: post #226
weavejester wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I would argue that all of that is somewhat wishful thinking. I highly doubt it comes to be. And even if it would, it would still be less efficient than public transportation systems (possibly operated partially privately).

It's certainly the case that societal changes are hard to predict. It might be the case that self-driving vehicles will encourage longer drives, for example.

That said, I think my own personal carbon footprint would likely fall, because most of the time I could use a much smaller vehicle. Unless I doubled the amount of time I spent on the road, I'd probably use less energy overall, as I could use a 2 seater car with half the mass.

Public transport is, of course, much more efficient; but it's also much less convenient, and at least in my country, more expensive. It costs less to run my car for a year than it would be to pay the equivalent bus fare for a year. If buses were self-driving, maybe the opposite would be true.

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

#265

Post by throwaway173738 »

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.

If the dangerous situation is a flash flood or landslide stopping may be entirely the wrong response. The entire problem with these rigid failsafes and the whole idea of ai-driven cars is this idea that a programmer can predict every situation the car will encounter by extrapolating from the climate and road conditions in places like san francisco.

One project I worked on was a safety critical system that almost got sunk by an overly-simplistic fault response. The device would reboot if it detected any sensor readings out of range. One day someone put a bag over it while it was delivering concentrated oxygen from the air and it rebooted because the ambient o2 sensor was reading well below what anyone could reasonably expect were the machine not enclosed. The patient had to be bagged while the machine came back on.

You simply can’t predict every emergency situation and you most certainly shouldn’t assume a simplistic single-response model is enough to get the passenger to safety. Humans are really good at inferring correct behavior socially and it would be much better for an AV to watch what other drivers are doing to figure out how to handle unexpected situations. To the degree an AI-driven system is unable to do this it is completely unsuited for use on the road.

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

#266

Post by toss1 »

tshaddox wrote: post #262
colechristensen wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 treat…

Or until we are able to change the nature of driving to make it require less creativity. As a simple examples, I suspect a road network where all cars were self-driving would probably be an easier software problem.

If Only.

Single-track railroad like in airport terminal-to-terminal transport? Fine.

Out on the open rail network? Not even close. And that is a LOT more constrained & predictable than an open road network.

Getting to all cars being software-driven seems as much in the near-mid future as was the idea of having full vehicle-to-vehicle telemetry &communications - i.e., sounded like a great idea until it crashed on the rocks of practicality (and inter-corporate politics?); not likely happening in a relevant time frame.

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

#267

Post by weavejester »

morpheos137 wrote: post #252
weavejester wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

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

Sure, but by how much? What's the average extra overhead per person? By that I mean, what's the average distance that a taxi would need to drive between dropping one person off, and picking the next person up.

The more taxis there are, the lower the overhead, as the more likely it is a taxi will happen be nearby to someone who wants one. We're used to taxis being rare, especially outside of major cities, but if taxis were common, the overhead might be very low.

I can look outside right now, and see maybe 20 vehicles parked within 50m of my home. If that were 5 self-driving taxis instead, that would be easily be enough capacity for my immediate neighborhood, at least most of the time.

So you could likely reduce the amount of cars locally by a factor of 4 or 5, and I'd still have a vehicle less than a minute away at most locations. Yes, if you had a 5th of the cars they'd have to do 5 times the work; but likely not much more than that. In other words, the maintenance cost wouldn't significantly worsen, and may even improve; cars aren't immune to entropy while stationary.

The other advantage of having self-driving taxis is that you can more easily specialize. I have a pretty typical 5 seater car because I sometimes need that space. But most of the time, I could make do with a 2 seater with half the mass. My choice of car is determined by the edge cases, but my choice of taxi would be determined by what I needed at the time.

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

#268

Post by toss1 »

barelyauser wrote: post #258
chongli wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not true, at least for any skilled driver. N=1, & my prior racing training & experience is an advantageous influence, but I am constantly assessing the intent, attitude, skills, etc. of other drivers to adjust my actions.

Of course it is trivially true that we all intend to go from point A to B. But that is almost irrelevant. It is the million micro-decisions on the trip that count.

Without seeing the human, I assess in seconds whether the other driver is unusually high or low-skills, focused or distracted or impaired, polite or rude... and this constant assessment, with human understanding, of (others') human goals and attitudes is a key element of driving skills, and yes this is basically all covered in your exception of needing to account for stupidity of people. That exception is just bigger than you think.

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

#270

Post by chongli »

barelyauser wrote: post #263
chongli wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human drivers communicate with each other through subtle cues, body language, etc. Moreover, pedestrians, children playing in the street, pets running onto the road chasing a ball, construction sites, parades, protests, are all things involving intelligence and theory of mind that you can't reduce to "the goal is to point A to point B."

We can try to reduce these things. Most things can be reduced to "obstacles". If obstacles are behaving the way we predict, then they are logical, otherwise they are flagged as illogical. When i engage in "subtle cues" or "body language" while on traffic i never trust it. If someone starts to drive illogically i never try to predict what they will do next, i just flag them as illogical and prepare for the worst.

There is a way to solve all these issues: keep humans (and other animals) away. This is how it's done with railroads. Unfortunately, there's not a whole of advantage in eliminating the engineer of a train since the ratio of engineers to passengers is so small to begin with.

I think instead of flirting with this absurd fantasy of self-driving cars we should be doing more to invest in railroads and other forms of mass transit so that people don't need to drive at all. Europe and Asia are far ahead of North America in this regard.

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