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Video suggests huge problems with Uber’s driverless car program

arstechnica.com

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Re: Video suggests huge problems with Uber’s driverless car program

#101

Post by ryandvm »

perfmode wrote: post #77
ryandvm wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bingo. This is the difference between "intelligence" and "artificial intelligence". AI as we know it today is pattern recognition. There is no ability to form even the most basic of concepts. They may have incredible sensors, but these driverless cars hardly have the intelligence of a dragonfly.

I challenge you to prove that you are capable of more than recognizing patterns.

Okay, for the sake of argument let's suppose that I was clever enough to come up with the famous Grandfather Paradox of time travel. Certainly no one has observed such an event before - or anything like it. I would posit that it takes more than pattern recognition to build the necessary mental concepts to design, much less understand, such a thought experiment.

In fairness, I will concede that pattern recognition is crucial to intelligence. I would clarify my earlier position by saying that pattern recognition alone can only get you so far. Intelligence is the process of taking data, recognizing patterns, constructing multi-layered concepts and models from those patterns, and then being able to simulate and extrapolate potential outcomes based on varying inputs.

The inability of modern AI to build complex concepts from they patterns they observe is why I know to slow down my car on a Halloween night in a residential neighborhood and a self-driving Uber doesn't.

Re: Video suggests huge problems with Uber’s driverless car program

#102

Post by mabbo »

Buldak wrote: post #96
mabbo wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With one data point, you can't extrapolate much. This is misuse of statistics. Consider if there was a new lottery and you weren't sure what the odds of winning were. You play it three weeks in a row and the third time you win a million dollars. Conveniently, no one else tries the new lottery yet. Does it follow then that the odds of winning a million dollars are 1 in 3? Or should you play it a few more times before…

One data point? So if Uber had driven a billion miles with zero deaths, they'd have zero data?

If you're looking for the rate at which something happens, for the purpose of predicting events in the future, you need to see the event occur many times before you can fairly estimate it's rate. That's what my example means.

I'm not defending Uber here- I'm defending statistics!

With more data, we may discover that Uber cars are 100X worse, not just 25X. Or we may discover they're better. But we don't have the statistical power to make that estimate when we've only seen the event happen once.

Re: Video suggests huge problems with Uber’s driverless car program

#103

Post by [deleted] »

mabbo wrote: post #76
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #62

"Uber announced that it had driven 2 million miles by December 2017 and is probably up to around 3 million miles today. If you do the math, that means that Uber's cars have killed people at roughly 25 times the rate of a typical human-driven car in the United States." Wow there goes that "safer than human drivers" argument.

With one data point, you can't extrapolate much. This is misuse of statistics. Consider if there was a new lottery and you weren't sure what the odds of winning were. You play it three weeks in a row and the third time you win a million dollars. Conveniently, no one else tries the new lottery yet. Does it follow then that the odds of winning a million dollars are 1 in 3? Or should you play it a few more times before…

[deleted]

Re: Video suggests huge problems with Uber’s driverless car program

#104

Post by falcolas »

mabbo wrote: post #76
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #62

"Uber announced that it had driven 2 million miles by December 2017 and is probably up to around 3 million miles today. If you do the math, that means that Uber's cars have killed people at roughly 25 times the rate of a typical human-driven car in the United States." Wow there goes that "safer than human drivers" argument.

With one data point, you can't extrapolate much. This is misuse of statistics. Consider if there was a new lottery and you weren't sure what the odds of winning were. You play it three weeks in a row and the third time you win a million dollars. Conveniently, no one else tries the new lottery yet. Does it follow then that the odds of winning a million dollars are 1 in 3? Or should you play it a few more times before…

One data point might not be enough, but two may be too many for the industry to bear.

It only took two incidents to shut down the Concorde program.

Re: Video suggests huge problems with Uber’s driverless car program

#105

Post by username223 »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #62

"Uber announced that it had driven 2 million miles by December 2017 and is probably up to around 3 million miles today. If you do the math, that means that Uber's cars have killed people at roughly 25 times the rate of a typical human-driven car in the United States." Wow there goes that "safer than human drivers" argument.

Given exponentially-distributed distance between fatalities, this would have a 3% chance of happening if Uber cars were as safe as humans. So it's unlikely.

Re: Video suggests huge problems with Uber’s driverless car program

#106

Post by URSpider94 »

mabbo wrote: post #76
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #62

"Uber announced that it had driven 2 million miles by December 2017 and is probably up to around 3 million miles today. If you do the math, that means that Uber's cars have killed people at roughly 25 times the rate of a typical human-driven car in the United States." Wow there goes that "safer than human drivers" argument.

With one data point, you can't extrapolate much. This is misuse of statistics. Consider if there was a new lottery and you weren't sure what the odds of winning were. You play it three weeks in a row and the third time you win a million dollars. Conveniently, no one else tries the new lottery yet. Does it follow then that the odds of winning a million dollars are 1 in 3? Or should you play it a few more times before…

It should be possible to create a Bayesian model of the posterior distribution of fatalities at this point. That distribution will be pretty broad, and not Gaussian, so talking about the mean is somewhat meaningless. Nonetheless, you could certainly compare that distribution with the posterior for human-driven cars and draw a conclusion like: “it is Xx% likely that the Uber fatality rate is at least twice that of a human driver.”

Re: Video suggests huge problems with Uber’s driverless car program

#107

Post by tonysdg »

bigger_cheese wrote: post #98
ilaksh wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may have been an executive that just said to turn off LIDAR for testing. Then the engineer probably mentioned it wasn't ready for live testing, was overruled, did it knowing it wasn't ready, because if he refused he may have been fired.

One of the things I was taught whilst studying engineering (in Australia) was if you, whilst acting in capacity as a professional engineer certify something knowing it is unsafe then you can be found personally liable. Likewise if you knowingly observe anyone else in your company breaching safety/regulatory guidelines then as a professionally certified engineer you have a legal responsibility around ethical disclosur…

Professional Engineers (note the capital 'E') are protected in the U.S. by such laws.

Professional engineers (note the lowercase 'e') are usually not protected in the U.S. -- they're regular employees whose profession happens to be engineering.

Re: Video suggests huge problems with Uber’s driverless car program

#108

Post by URSpider94 »

femto wrote: post #43
vamin wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author is making a distinction between whether Uber was legally at fault (as stated in the article, likely not) versus whether the accident was avoidable. I agree with the author's position that the accident was likely avoidable.

I think there is an argument for removing this ambiguity by making self driving cars automatically liable for all personal injury, whether the person be inside or outside the car. The only exception would be if the tester could prove intent by the other party, keeping in mind that a self-driving car will have extensive logs of its environment to use in such a defence. Supporting arguments include: 1) The physics of d…

Your concept that there are no accidents, only oversights, is not correct. Say I’m crossing the street and I don’t see your car coming, because I look the wrong way or I’m distracted, or my view is blocked by the sun. You may not be able to avoid hitting me.

Additionally, if we train self-driving cars to always give way to pedestrians who even look like they might cross the street, they’re going to have a heck of a time getting through cities. Kids are going to learn that they can trigger a squealing emergency stop by lunging towards the curb - great fun!

What I think WILL happen is that autonomous cars will have to buy blanket insurance policies that cover their entire fleet. High accident/fatality rates will result in high insurance premiums, which will put bad actors out of business.

Re: Video suggests huge problems with Uber’s driverless car program

#109

Post by slavik81 »

mabbo wrote: post #76
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #62

"Uber announced that it had driven 2 million miles by December 2017 and is probably up to around 3 million miles today. If you do the math, that means that Uber's cars have killed people at roughly 25 times the rate of a typical human-driven car in the United States." Wow there goes that "safer than human drivers" argument.

With one data point, you can't extrapolate much. This is misuse of statistics. Consider if there was a new lottery and you weren't sure what the odds of winning were. You play it three weeks in a row and the third time you win a million dollars. Conveniently, no one else tries the new lottery yet. Does it follow then that the odds of winning a million dollars are 1 in 3? Or should you play it a few more times before…

One accident is clearly not one data point. If Uber had driven a billion miles with 0 accidents, we would safely conclude they were safer than human drivers with "0 data points".

Assuming that accidents are independent, we can model this as a Poisson point process. If the accident rate is 1 per 100M miles and Uber has driven 3M miles, the probability of there being zero accidents in that time is P{n=0} = ((λt)^n / n!) * e^(-λt), where λ=1/100M and t=3M. Doing the math, it seems that's 97.04%.

So, yes. It is possible that Uber's accident rate is 1 in 100 million. If so, this incident would fall in that remaining 3%. It's unlikely, but possible.

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