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For Tesla, Facebook and Others, AI’s Flaws Are Getting Harder to Ignore

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Re: For Tesla, Facebook and Others, AI’s Flaws Are Getting Harder to Ignore

#131

Post by jcranmer »

Domenic_S wrote: post #128
jcranmer wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a per-mile-driven basis, Tesla's self-driving accident rate is somewhere in the region of 5-10× that of human drivers, IIRC. And keep in mind that the self-driving here is already in a state of selection bias where it's more likely to be used in safer conditions (i.e., fully-grade-separated highway driving in clear conditions, rather than dense urban environments in inclement weather).

Maybe you were thinking the autopilot accident rate being 5-10x _less_ than human drivers? > In the 2nd quarter, we recorded one crash for every 4.41 million miles driven in which drivers were using Autopilot technology (Autosteer and active safety features). For drivers who were not using Autopilot technology (no Autosteer and active safety features), we recorded one crash for every 1.2 million miles driven. By comp…

I know there are several wildly different statistics for Tesla's crash rate. Some of these statistics suffer from poor data quality, and the first big study saying "Tesla is safer than average drivers!" was really affected by this (I don't recall the exact details, but the consensus of pretty much everyone not Tesla was the statistics were complete garbage).

Re: For Tesla, Facebook and Others, AI’s Flaws Are Getting Harder to Ignore

#132

Post by tguedes »

drcode wrote: post #82
amelius wrote: post #11

What will happen if a deep-learning bug is found in Tesla autopilot where it misclassifies a fire truck for a bridge? Will they ground all the Tesla cars remotely? Or disable autopilot remotely? Until they have gathered new training data and updated the software?

The same thing that happens to a human that is at risk of misclassifying a fire truck for a bridge: Once the odds of this happening are low enough (say 0.00001%) they can pass a driver's test and we give them a drivers license.

The problem is that's 1 person. For Tesla's autopilot, that's the hundreds of thousands of cars running that broken model. The scale of the problem is much larger.

Re: For Tesla, Facebook and Others, AI’s Flaws Are Getting Harder to Ignore

#133

Post by Sodman »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #124
BurningFrog wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If new technology X saves 100 lives for each person it kills, it will be banned. Because the dead person has a name, a tragic story, and grieving relatives, which will make the news. The 100 saved people are anonymous, don't know they were saved by X, and this will be unreported outside of obscure research journals.

If you save a child from drowning you don't get a 'a kill coupon' you can retrieve next time you are accused of murder.

Certainly not, but if we invent a life-saving medicine that 1 in 1 million people have a fatal reaction to, we'll still consider it enough of an overall positive for humanity to celebrate it as a technological win for society.

The ratio isn't 1:1 or even 1:10, but there is a line somewhere where X deaths is acceptable because of the X^Y lives saved .

See also: Most modes of transport, most medicines and surgical procedures.

Re: For Tesla, Facebook and Others, AI’s Flaws Are Getting Harder to Ignore

#134

Post by caditinpiscinam »

gibsonf1 wrote: post #83
rootusrootus wrote: post #76

I've lost count of the number of people I've talked to who think that neural nets means we've created brains that will just magically learn how to do new tasks. So we just need more training and then automated is just around the corner. Tesla, et al do not have the luxury of ignorance to explain that away however, they know what the technology is and is not currently capable of, but they don't want to admit it.

Its all artificial but no Intelligence. Statistical pattern matching, no matter how sophisticated, does not understand "why" from conceptually thinking about a space/time model of the world as we humans do.

Even if our ML systems were meaningfully intelligent, there's still the issue of proper training. You can't teach humans to be a safe drivers by showing them a huge slideshow of dash-cam images. Why do we expect ML to do any better?

Re: For Tesla, Facebook and Others, AI’s Flaws Are Getting Harder to Ignore

#135

Post by tragomaskhalos »

Forge36 wrote: post #47
machinelearning wrote: post #37

Question for people here: Is it justifiable to accept these flaws in the short-term if it results in a car that has a lower-error rate than human drivers in the medium/long-term?

It's about risk trade off. If it's 2x better than humans is it worth it? 10x? 100x? 36,096 deaths in 2019 in U.S. ~1.3 million worldwide (I couldn't find injury statistics this morning) If the flaw is found before someone dies from it I'm not concerned. If 1 person dies instead of 10 I'm all for it. (I'd take 2x better than humans any day)

The problem is, it's not a level playing field. 100 incidents of a person ploughing into a bus queue and killing a child, each is news for a day, everyone accepts the tragedy and moves on. A self-driving car does it once though, and the mob will be at the factory gates with torches and pitchforks.

Re: For Tesla, Facebook and Others, AI’s Flaws Are Getting Harder to Ignore

#136

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

I am starting to wonder if we’re pretending to live a little further into the future than we realistically can right now. Modern Silicon Valley is built around businesses with software margins. If you can scale via software, it’s huge. If we actually saddled these companies with their externalities or with doing what they say they do, would they still have been able to have software margins, or would they have had to wait until the tech/science was better?

It gives me a wary feeling when people talk about tech regulation and warn that it would change the internet as we know it. Like, if putting the externalities on the company means the company can’t exist as it does today, is that really so bad?

Re: For Tesla, Facebook and Others, AI’s Flaws Are Getting Harder to Ignore

#137

Post by pfortuny »

moralestapia wrote: post #67
3dfan wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the time people are allowed to let their cars drive unsupervised, the crash rate of AI versus human will probably be 1:10 or so. So even when those cars ram into fire trucks from time to time, it would be better to let them do their thing. Otherwise people will grab the steering wheel, drive drunk, sleepy, angry etc and ram into all kinds of things again. Currently, there are 6 million car accidents per year in th…

>By the time people are allowed to let their cars drive unsupervised, the crash rate of AI versus human will probably be 1:10 or so. This sort of statement keeps being parroted over and over again. As Linus would say, talk is cheap, show me the code ; then we can speak. >So even when those cars ram into fire trucks from time to time [...] This is just insane, honestly, and if this is the premise that guides the devel…

There is no code, that is the problem.

You (or the Transport Administration) do not have access to the training data, the training parameters or anything at all.

It is just a black-box which we are all to trust because "it works, mostly".

In my book, that goes against any notion of admissibility by a government agency.

Re: For Tesla, Facebook and Others, AI’s Flaws Are Getting Harder to Ignore

#138

Post by sharkjacobs »

whimsicalism wrote: post #105
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had to google aggro, no aggression intended at all, but I frankly found the severity of GP question too scary to be considered. > I considered this before posting ... To me this is not someone asking a hypothetical but someone who is aware that what they are about to write is controversial yet are still considering it to be the best way forward. I happened to strongly disagree with that.

If there is clear evidence that these cars would have lower fatality rates than human drivers (I don't think this evidence currently exists), then holding off release to continue development is potentially a moral bad, for the same reason that we end clinical trials early when they demonstrate clear life-saving potential that would save lives in the control group. I don't think it is morally reprehensible to ask what…

> Is it worth killing n random people, for a uncalculated and unknowable chance of saving n+m lives in the future. The pool of people randomly selected to die have not volunteered or consented to be part of this project. There are ways to achieve the same lifesaving endgoal without the upfront sacrifice of lives.

The part which really strikes me as morally reprehensible is where the companies are saving money on test drivers and controlled test environments and externalizing those costs onto every other driver sharing the road with their training data collectors

Re: For Tesla, Facebook and Others, AI’s Flaws Are Getting Harder to Ignore

#139

Post by [deleted] »

shkkmo wrote: post #110
moralestapia wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>By the time people are allowed to let their cars drive unsupervised, the crash rate of AI versus human will probably be 1:10 or so. This sort of statement keeps being parroted over and over again. As Linus would say, talk is cheap, show me the code ; then we can speak. >So even when those cars ram into fire trucks from time to time [...] This is just insane, honestly, and if this is the premise that guides the devel…

The entire way we approach driver liability in general is insane. The Attorney General of South Dakota was looking at his phone, swerved into the shoulder, killed man and then left the scene. He claimed he thought he hit a deer, even though the victim's head went through the windshield and the victims glasses were later found inside the car. What consequences did the Attorney General face? Was his licence revoked or…

[deleted]

Re: For Tesla, Facebook and Others, AI’s Flaws Are Getting Harder to Ignore

#140

Post by moralestapia »

shkkmo wrote: post #110
moralestapia wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>By the time people are allowed to let their cars drive unsupervised, the crash rate of AI versus human will probably be 1:10 or so. This sort of statement keeps being parroted over and over again. As Linus would say, talk is cheap, show me the code ; then we can speak. >So even when those cars ram into fire trucks from time to time [...] This is just insane, honestly, and if this is the premise that guides the devel…

The entire way we approach driver liability in general is insane. The Attorney General of South Dakota was looking at his phone, swerved into the shoulder, killed man and then left the scene. He claimed he thought he hit a deer, even though the victim's head went through the windshield and the victims glasses were later found inside the car. What consequences did the Attorney General face? Was his licence revoked or…

The problem with this is you're using the worst possible examples of driving as a benchmark, and that is quite a low standard to have.

Take a look at the best possible examples, instead, and try to improve over that, then we're talking.

You cannot be a shitty doctor and bring out an excuse like "Oh, but wait, this guy has lost more patients than me, so I'm fine".

You really don't want to have a race to the bottom where human lives are at stake.

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