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Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

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Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

#171

Post by comesee »

carapace wrote: post #142
comesee wrote: post #60

> “Rather than building AI to solve the pogo stick problem, we should partner with the government to ask people to be lawful and considerate,” he said. “Safety isn’t just about the quality of the AI technology.” Wow. What a goal post move. I don't think this is how successful technology spreads. Governments usually accomodate tech because it proves itself in the market, not vice versa.

It was done for automobiles. "Fighting Traffic - The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City" By Peter D. Norton > Summary > The fight for the future of the city street between pedestrians, street railways, and promoters of the automobile between 1915 and 1930. > Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets wer…

There is still accountability when a driver causes harm to someone on the road, pedestrian or otherwise. He's suggesting that AVs shouldn't be accountable when they harm pedestrians under abnormal circumstances. I think that's a lot different than simply making roads amenable to drivers.

In regards to my initial point, government made regulations around cars after there was already an overwhelming market demand for them.

Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

#172

Post by Animats »

saas_co_de wrote: post #170
jcfrei wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo might also tell a different story: They've realized that a fundamental breakthrough in self-driving cars is unlikely to happen in the next decade and therefore there's no point in waiting any longer to perfect the technology - and instead rely on remote controlling of the cars for difficult situations. They can still gradually improve the self-driving systems but from a business perspective it might make sense…

This is right on. Waymo is not an autonomous car in the way people typically imagine them. More like a remote control street car on a digital track.

It doesn't work that way. Waymo's remote control does not even support direct manual remote control. It just lets the remote operator give some direction to the onboard systems.

Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

#173

Post by ryanmarsh »

notheguyouthink wrote: post #161
rifung wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So put them on the road. Let's give it a try. Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn't and people die and they sue. That's been part of driving since day one. Roll the dice. I'm sick of the endless debates. Well I'd certainly hope that there is a high level of confidence that they don't kill people BEFORE they're put on the road with other people.

And people will die anyways. It would be the biggest miracle on earth I think if those things ended up being perfect (at least, the ones that work.. not Uber, obviously) . So it's all a numbers game. What's acceptable, and what we can improve on.

I had a famous cancer researcher at a world famous cancer treatment hospital tell me (paraphrasing) “we won’t ever see the kinds of breakthroughs we saw in the past because we were reckless back then, foolish even. It was the Wild West.”

I’m not saying I want the highways to be a Wild West for self driving cars, but it’s worth admitting it would probably accelerate the pace of innovation.

Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

#174

Post by Animats »

freerobby wrote: post #148
mdorazio wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has used Autopilot and many of its "clones" as well as worked with several OEMs on these features, Tesla's offering is not more mature, it's more irresponsible. Autopilot is a combination of ADAS features that many other OEMs have had for a while and deliberately chosen not to tie together due to safety concerns. These concerns have been validated multiple times now by Autopilot errors. The "clones" ar…

How mature a system is and whether it's morally responsible (or imperative) to release it are different questions. > The "clones" are deliberately less good because the manufacturers offering them care more about safety and reliability than about marketing beta products. When I say "maturity," I'm not talking about holding back features. I'm saying that Tesla's system works better in situations where other manufactur…

Tesla seems to have focused on getting lane following to behave well. That gives the user the impression that the system is competent. Obstacle detection, though, is not reliable, as has become painfully clear from crash reports.

Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

#175

Post by UnderProtest »

dsnuh wrote: post #22

This is tangentially related, and something I have wondered, so I will ask it here. Does anyone know how self driving cars will react to attempts by law enforcement officers to pull over the vehicle?

The only reason this even looks like a problem is that humans don't follow the law.

In most jurisdictions if there's an emergency vehicle running flashers and/or siren behind you on the same side of the road you're supposed to slow, pull over, stop, then proceed only when the vehicle passes you.

If the emergency vehicle parks behind you then you have effectively been pulled over.

Pulling over safely is practically the first thing a self-driving car team works on. It is very easy to detect flashers and sirens. So... no problem.

Well, except that self-driving vehicles may accidentally be pulled over by firetrucks.

Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

#176

Post by carapace »

zwieback wrote: post #38

How much better than human drivers do self-driving cars have to be to succeed? If you take a metric like fatalities or damage per mile I'm guessing we ask our robots to be much better than humans, even though it doesn't really make sense. Over time the differential will come down but a better intermediate strategy would be to keep humans away from robot cars until collision avoidance techniques improve substantially.

I had this argument the other day with someone else.

You can't make a robot that goes out in public and kills random people. You just can't do that. Okay?

Q: "What if the robot looks just like a car and there's a person inside the robot watching TV? Can it kill random people then?"

Still no.

Q: "But people do that all the time! Tens of thousands of people die or are maimed by traffic collisions every year! My robot can't join the fray?"

Still no. It's insane and horrible that we set up a death and mayhem lottery and that we force everyone-- children, old people, pregnant ladies, folks in wheelchairs, ev-er-ee-one -- to play it whether they want to or not. That's a bad thing we shouldn't do. But it still doesn't make it okay for you to make a robot that goes out in public and kills random people.

If you make a robot, send it into the world, and it kills someone, you are a murderer and you should go to jail, even if your robot looks like a car and there's a person riding inside it.

- - - - -

We could make a self-driving golf cart that never went fast enough to be able to injure people and it could take my mom (who has dementia and can't drive or ride the bus on her own anymore) to the doctor and back safely. We could build that today, with existing technology, there's a market for it, and it wouldn't kill anyone.

Self-driving cars are a fetish that distracts from solving real problems! (One day that won't be true, let's not kill too many more people until then, hey?)

- - - - -

Humans drive really well. Like really really crazy good well. When I first realized how well people drive it made me consider that Guardian Angels might be a real thing. But then I learned more about how the motor cortex worked and some of the uncanniness faded.

We should be so lucky as to have robots that drive as well as we do.

In the meantime, the industry should concentrate on incrementally automating traffic and stop trying to bite off more than current technology can chew.

What we're seeing now is hubris driven by ego and greed. And it's killing people.

Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

#177

Post by notahacker »

Symmetry wrote: post #105
brudgers wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the scale of Alphabet, $1.25B about 1% of of 2017 revenue and about 5% of operating income. [1] Alphabet isn't betting the future on it. Relative to the automotive industry sixty thousand vehicles in 2018 compares to about 100,000,000 vehicles worldwide per year. [2] Compared to the number of cars in my driveway and the balance of my checking account, the numbers are big. At industrial scale, they are small. If al…

Corporations like Alphabet don't spend 1% of their revenue on something unless they're very confident it will pan out.

On the other hand, irrespective of how confident they are that things will pan out, corporations like Alphabet and Fiat Chrysler have no problem whatsoever with issuing press releases saying that Fiat Chrysler is willing to sell up to 62k Pacificas to Alphabet within the next few years under an agreed framework if Alphabet decides it's made enough progress to actually spend 1% of its annual revenue on more cars.

Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

#178

Post by jonknee »

CPLX wrote: post #158
Fricken wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are very good reasons as to why Waymo and all the other major players are focused on robotaxis. A truck still needs to be able to drive in cities, and if you figure out how to automate all the other thing a trucker does you can replace 3 million of them. Big whoop. Robotaxis stand to challenge the economics of personal vehicle ownership, the potential market is many orders of magnitude larger.

Why can't they just have normal cars for sale that also drive themselves to start with? Like I have a car and recline and read a book on a commute most of the time. If snow gets crazy or there's very strange construction or a flooded road or a flat tire we go back to manual driving. That's plausible and incremental. No cleaning problems, no homeless people living in them, no need for remote monitoring, a far simpler…

> That's plausible and incremental. No cleaning problems, no homeless people living in them, no need for remote monitoring, a far simpler liability and insurance situation, and so on.

These are all solved problems, I mean when was the last time you saw a homeless person camped out in a Zip Car? BMW's ReachNow vehicles are all over Seattle and they are clean, insured, fueled/charged and exactly 0 people live in them.

Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

#179

Post by [deleted] »

abathur wrote: post #134
brudgers wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the scale of Alphabet, $1.25B about 1% of of 2017 revenue and about 5% of operating income. [1] Alphabet isn't betting the future on it. Relative to the automotive industry sixty thousand vehicles in 2018 compares to about 100,000,000 vehicles worldwide per year. [2] Compared to the number of cars in my driveway and the balance of my checking account, the numbers are big. At industrial scale, they are small. If al…

The Alphabet-scale comparisons are fair wrt to whether this is a "big" bet or not, but trying to minimize this via comparison to total world sales or California registrations less so (given that a primary promise of transit AVs is that they may replace many privately-owned vehicles). While some have projected how many traditional vehicles they can displace, I don't think anyone really knows how that'll play out. I do…

[deleted]

Re: Self-driving cars are headed toward an AI roadblock

#180

Post by pintxo »

Brakenshire wrote: post #20
brookhaven_dude wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just lay out a network of rail lines then?

The technology actually seems perfect for some kind of hybrid between road and rail, if we could build a city from scratch you could make something better than either, with train-like capacity alongside road-like routing. Although I suppose the difficulty limits the market enough to make investment in such a scheme uncompetitive. Perhaps this is what Musk is hoping to get around that with his tunneling idea.

I'd vote for the other way around. Combine the flexibility of the car with the freedom of riding a train.

Let people drive manually to predetermined locations, let's name them a "station". Where the "AI" takes over and lines up cars on predetermined routes, let's name them "tracks". The AI will control the car on the "track" up until the nearest "station" to the destination. From there the driver will manually continue to her destination.

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