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

businessinsider.com

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

#131

Post by beambot »

jcoder wrote: post #110
onion2k wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously autonomous vehicles need to be able to respond to officials directing traffic for any reason. In that case it would also need to tell the difference between a cop and someone impersonating a cop, or it's going to be really easy to mess with self-driving cars.

That sounds like a them problem—society won’t change any practices to accommodate these toys that are demonstrating how little value they bring every day.

You mean the same society that built thoroughfares, roads, stop lights, and laws for the benefit of transporting people and goods? Why wouldn't they modify the infrastructure to save a substantial fraction of the costs?

Transportation is literally the 2nd greatest household expense [1], and the cost is dominated by labor. I'm not sure how you could conclude that the potential for massive savings is a "toy".

https://20somethingfinance.com/transportation-costs/

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

#132

Post by mindcrime »

bsder wrote: post #120
mindcrime wrote: post #2

Less anybody think "this is no big deal", let me assure you as a former firefighter, cars driving over fire hoses is a MAJOR deal. Whether the car is driven by a human or AI. And sadly, humans do this all too often anyway. FWIW, the reason(s) this is bad - if not obvious - include: - The hose can (and does) get snagged on the car's under-carriage, which can rip it away from a hydrant, or engine, or yank an attack lin…

> And sadly, humans do this all too often anyway. This is actually probably one of the best arguments for self-driving cars. The self-driving cars will eventually stop doing this. Humans, never.

Agreed, in the general sense. I do also think it's important that we not get caught up in holding self-driving cars to an overly high standard, especially in comparison to error prone humans. Speaking only for myself, once self-driving cars are consistently as good as or slightly better than humans, I would find them acceptable for broad use. I don't think the standard needs to be "zero error, ever" although that would be a nice aspirational goal for sure.

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

#134

Post by cma »

uses wrote: post #100
onion2k wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously autonomous vehicles need to be able to respond to officials directing traffic for any reason. In that case it would also need to tell the difference between a cop and someone impersonating a cop, or it's going to be really easy to mess with self-driving cars.

I mean you could just stand in front of a self-driving car and it'll probably stop rather than swerve around you, I imagine. There was an episode of revisionist history that discussed this a bit https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/i-love-y...

In the submitted article it says firefighters stood in front of the car to stop it and it just continuously kept creeping forward anyway.

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

#136

Post by vorpalhex »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #27
__s wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throw on a reflective vest & you'll have no problem pranking human drivers with your traffic signals

A surprising number of humans have no problem with doing things to faceless computers and public or corporate infrastructure that they would never do to another human being with whom they were making eye contact. Few are willing to don the reflective vest and ruin someone's day by lying to their face and directing them down a bad detour, but I have no problem believing that a lot of people would laugh at a stupid sel…

But a self driving car SHOULD follow anyone directing traffic.

There are valid reasons for to be directing traffic, like losing their load on the highway or helping traffic flow around a stopped vehicle.

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

#137

Post by pugworthy »

onion2k wrote: post #77
crazygringo wrote: post #24

Obviously autonomous vehicles need to be able to respond to officials directing traffic for any reason -- making way for ambulances, stopping for firefighters, being pulled over for a faulty headlight. Surely Cruise and Waymo have thought about this. Curious how it's supposed to work normally, and whether something about it failed in this case? How is an official supposed to get a moving autonomous vehicle to stop or…

Obviously autonomous vehicles need to be able to respond to officials directing traffic for any reason. In that case it would also need to tell the difference between a cop and someone impersonating a cop, or it's going to be really easy to mess with self-driving cars.

There's some truth to this. See "US Marines defeat DARPA robot by hiding under a cardboard box"[1] which is another case of fooling AI.

Whether we want it to be or not, vision AI at the moment is somewhat an idiot-savant when it comes to interacting with the real world.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34518299

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

#138

Post by atrettel »

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 these just respond to the data given to them --- garbage in, garbage out, as the saying goes.

In my view, we should be worried not just about what data is missing but also what data is either unintentionally or even intentionally incorrect. One day a hacker will find a way to insert malicious data (in contrast to malicious code) and try to exploit these systems. That's just inevitable at this point. I hope that these autonomous systems end up with a lot more fail safes, since episodes like this one are only going to become more common, in my view.

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

#139

Post by eep_social »

crazygringo wrote: post #24

Obviously autonomous vehicles need to be able to respond to officials directing traffic for any reason -- making way for ambulances, stopping for firefighters, being pulled over for a faulty headlight. Surely Cruise and Waymo have thought about this. Curious how it's supposed to work normally, and whether something about it failed in this case? How is an official supposed to get a moving autonomous vehicle to stop or…

> Surely Cruise and Waymo have thought about this. Curious how it's supposed to work normally

I was in a Waymo that encountered a fire engine parked in the center of an intersection. Traffic was stopped already when we arrived. We were maybe three cars back. Our light was red and no one was directing traffic. I recall the car acting a little hesitant as we came to a stop. It pulled towards the curb a bit and might have stuttered rather than coming to a completely smooth stop. Either way, the first car at the light went right on red. And we pulled up smoothly to fill the gap. When our light turned green, the Waymo waited a bit for the first car to go. Slowly crept past the fire engine in the open lane, and accelerated somewhat aggressively away. I literally whooped.

My assumption is that the software flagged the situation to an operator and they were able to instruct it in the time we were stopped. I heard from a friend that the car basically prompts the operator with a few pre-planned choices to select among — so the car is following a route it planned, but it provides the operator with options to keep the human in the loop for the tricky decision while still allowing autonomous driving execution (no remote direct driving is allowed iiuc).

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

#140

Post by morpheos137 »

Are driverless cars are a solution in search of a problem or a problem in search of a solution? I think the latter. The problem is psychological and and the solution is for people to grow up. Technology is no where near the state necessary to navigate the real world, because it has no model of the real world comparable to the human brain. Competent adults who have looked into this problem understand this. The "driverless" phenomenon is a fascinating case study in how dumb investors can be when cheap money is coupled with baseless mass delusion.

Cars are not smart in 2023. They can't be because the technology does not exist, for example, for a robot to reliably recognize and flexibly respond to open ended an emergency situation in the real world the way a human can.

Maybe some situations can be some of the time but not any where near the rate a competent driver can.

The principals of so called self-driving company's should be held personally liable for accidents if the technology is so great. Because that is what happens to human drivers who commit infractions.

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