Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Video suggests huge problems with Uber’s driverless car program

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 244 posts

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

#201

Post by pjc50 »

PinkMilkshake wrote: post #165
pdkl95 wrote: post #99

> We don't need redundant brakes & steering or a fancy new car; we need better software," wrote engineer Anthony Levandowski Any engineer with this attitude needs to learn the lesson of the Therac-25. The issues in the Ars article are very similar to section 4 "Causal Factors" of the report[1]. > To get to that better software faster we should deploy the first 1000 cars asap. Is that admitting that they do not have t…

Agile methodology applied to safety-critical systems engineering, god help us.

"Move fast and break things. Also break people, but if they're homeless or ride bicycles nobody cares"

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

#202

Post by bonesss »

AlexandrB wrote: post #153
jon_richards wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, you have to keep in mind that deploying 1000 cars would quickly make self-driving cars safer than humans. Yes, you lose some life in the interim, but you accelerate the creation and adoption of something that saves much more life in the long run. But that is human experimentation, something we as a culture generally agree is abhorrent.

> To be fair, you have to keep in mind that deploying 1000 cars would quickly make self-driving cars safer than humans. This seems unreasonably optimistic. First, this particular crash is an egregious counter-example. The car doesn't even seem to slow down when it first sees the pedestrian's foot. Nor does it try to swerve. This is basic stuff for a human driver, never mind more complex avoidance and risk mitigation…

> the most advanced AI and search company in the world still can't keep adult-oriented conspiracy videos off of Youtube Kids

In fairness here: Google could do this so easily by throwing people at the problem. A whitelisted set of content producers could do this, with people dedicated to whitelist curation. Google can keep them off, and quite readily. Keeping that off automatically and cheaply is the issue...

On that front: automated content recognition that can parse the nuances between regular claymation Elsa and spooky claymation Elsa who talks about jamming things in her "happy spot" is AI-hard. These are not random videos, they are content tailor made and adapted to pass whatever filters are in place.

For data scientists there is a massive gap between working with concrete sensor data that can be managed reasonably, and undefined philosophical/moral/sexual boundaries in dirty noisy counter-programmed video content... One replaces our eyes and ears and reflexes, the other seeks to replace our fabulous brains.

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

#203

Post by davidgould »

spacehome wrote: post #121
mozumder wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you want to increase the death rate by pushing more autonomous vehicles onto the road?

Because doing so will cause issues (like this one) to be found and fixed faster. When enough bugs are fixed that the autonomous drivers are safer than the meatbag drivers, then the death rate will start to decrease. The argument is that you can trade more deaths today for a sooner decrease later. Under certain assumptions, you'll save net lives.

This argument assumes that autonomous drivers will be safer than human drivers. Which is an unproven proposition. It is possible that autonomous driving may never be safer, or that the rate of improvement may be much slower than expected. How many "more deaths today" do you think are reasonable to test this question? One? ten? one thousand? ten thousand?

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

#204

Post by Slartie »

Fricken wrote: post #169
tmd83 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand a whole of similar comments. It's as if Uber and all other autonomous driving pursuer is doing so for the betterment of life for everyone and so their laziness in making sure their tech is good enough can be excused. The car in question failed spectacularly and the response is her death was not in vain? Uber is doing this for money, so is all the other companies even if there are some potent…

The pharmaceutical industry tries to save lives, for money. They're driven by greed. They also have a long track record of fucking up big time and people dying because of it. Does this mean we should stop giving people medicine? Would letting people get sick and die be preferable than allowing imperfect industries with a profit motive try and save them?

What is currenly being done with self-driving car testing on public roads is basically like a pharmaceutical company mixing a new experimental drug into the dishes of random people at a restaurant, which neither are compensated in any way, nor did they have a chance to decline their involvement in the test.

Such a thing would be entirely unthinkable in the pharmaceutical industry of today. So if this comparison suggests anything, it is to much more strictly regulate self-driving car development and testing!

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

#205

Post by spacehome »

davidgould wrote: post #203
spacehome wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because doing so will cause issues (like this one) to be found and fixed faster. When enough bugs are fixed that the autonomous drivers are safer than the meatbag drivers, then the death rate will start to decrease. The argument is that you can trade more deaths today for a sooner decrease later. Under certain assumptions, you'll save net lives.

This argument assumes that autonomous drivers will be safer than human drivers. Which is an unproven proposition. It is possible that autonomous driving may never be safer, or that the rate of improvement may be much slower than expected. How many "more deaths today" do you think are reasonable to test this question? One? ten? one thousand? ten thousand?

Yea, it does assume that. I happen to think that's true, but it's a separate argument, and one worth having. Humans are really quite bad at driving, so I think a conservative estimate is that autonomous vehicles could cut road deaths by at least 90%.

Cars are killing by the millions now, so do the math, and I'm willing to tolerate a lot of deaths in the process, contingent on the deaths actually helping researchers and engineers reduce future faults. I would happily take a million deaths right now if it meant driverless tech instantly became available to everyone, but I think there's an upper limit to how many accidents can be realistically examined at once.

What's the alternative position? That you're for more road deaths in total? Are you also the kind of person who wouldn't pull the lever in the trolley problem?

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

#206

Post by Slartie »

spacehome wrote: post #121
mozumder wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you want to increase the death rate by pushing more autonomous vehicles onto the road?

Because doing so will cause issues (like this one) to be found and fixed faster. When enough bugs are fixed that the autonomous drivers are safer than the meatbag drivers, then the death rate will start to decrease. The argument is that you can trade more deaths today for a sooner decrease later. Under certain assumptions, you'll save net lives.

You need to have SERIOUS evidence for the claim that autonomous driving will actually be safer than human driving one day to even attempt to make this argument of yours. "Faith in technology" is not "evidence"!

If your faith is strong enough, you'll surely be welcome if you sign away all of your rights and serve as irrational traffic participant in a city where self-driving cars are tested. You could run through the city all day and produce difficult safety-critical situations by suddenly walking in front of them.

My faith isn't strong enough for doing that, so I expect lawmakers to protect me from companies like Uber who apparently think it's okay to basically make me their guinea pig in their public experiments. But I'll applaud you if you decide to take the risk on yourself for the (potential, unproven) advancement of the human race!

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

#207

Post by spacehome »

stevesimmons wrote: post #190
spacehome wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently we're losing a million lives a year (about a 9/11 per day) to auto accidents. I think there's a serious argument that it's ethical to push autonomous driving onto the road before they're safer than humans if that would help them debug the software faster and advance to superhuman safety levels even a day sooner.

So you're volunteering to be an unpredictable pedestrian or cyclist around large numbers of early-stage driverless cars? Put your ethics into practice! The rationale response for individual cities is to say: "Do your risky testing elsewhere, thank you very much. You may come back here once you are as safe as our average driver."

I'm already a pedestrian surrounded by unsafe human drivers, and every day I hate what I see. What I'm talking about is making a tradeoff between risk now and risk later such that my total risk is lower. I'd take that tradeoff, and I think it's the ethical thing for society to do. What you're talking about is NIMBY, which certainly makes sense locally -- better for some other locale to perfect the technology -- but on the societal level I think it's wrongheaded. But don't worry; there's no danger anybody will take my stance on it seriously. Autonomous vehicles will not be widely deployed until they're provably drastically better than humans.

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

#208

Post by gambiting »

wdr1 wrote: post #124
pdkl95 wrote: post #99

> We don't need redundant brakes & steering or a fancy new car; we need better software," wrote engineer Anthony Levandowski Any engineer with this attitude needs to learn the lesson of the Therac-25. The issues in the Ars article are very similar to section 4 "Causal Factors" of the report[1]. > To get to that better software faster we should deploy the first 1000 cars asap. Is that admitting that they do not have t…

Is it better for self driving cars to have a flawless record & low adoption, or to have a 100x improvement over human drivers & broad adoption? Creating the perfect self-driving car, with redundant systems, safety everything & so on will certainly help its safety records. But it will also drive up the cost. And put it out of reach for a lot of people. If the goal is to save lives, the bar self-driving cars should be…

Absolutely not. The cars should launch perfect, not just as good as humans. If you have any other human operated machine and replace it with an automatic one that sometimes kill humans, does it matter if it does it less often than the human operated one? Absolutely not - a machine cannot have an operating mode where death is possible. Look at Therac radiotherapy machines - they surely saved hundreds if not thousands of lives from cancer - but they had an operating mode that would kill the patient. Does it matter than a manually operated radiotherapy machine would most likely kill more people due to operator errors? Again - absolutely not.

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

#209

Post by Slartie »

spacehome wrote: post #205
davidgould wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument assumes that autonomous drivers will be safer than human drivers. Which is an unproven proposition. It is possible that autonomous driving may never be safer, or that the rate of improvement may be much slower than expected. How many "more deaths today" do you think are reasonable to test this question? One? ten? one thousand? ten thousand?

Yea, it does assume that. I happen to think that's true, but it's a separate argument, and one worth having. Humans are really quite bad at driving, so I think a conservative estimate is that autonomous vehicles could cut road deaths by at least 90%. Cars are killing by the millions now, so do the math, and I'm willing to tolerate a lot of deaths in the process, contingent on the deaths actually helping researchers a…

> What's the alternative position?

Developing and testing the technology in actual test scenarios (build entire testing cities and fill them up with paid stuntmen and -women, if necessary) instead of in public, until you're able to prove that the tech is statistically at least as safe as human drivers. After that, you can continue testing in public, provided that you deal with any changes to your system responsibly and ensure that the public is not exposed to additional danger because of your testing.

This is actually very common in the software development world. For production-critical systems, companies go to great length of creating a staging environment as realistically as possible, but fully separated from the production systems. You may get around that effort if the only damage you can potentially do is people not being able to see stupid cat pictures on a social network. But sorry, for life-critical tech, the move-fast-and-break-things approach is irresponsible bullshit.

> I would happily take a million deaths right now if it meant driverless tech instantly became available to everyone

What if your own death is guaranteed to be among them? Still "happily taking" it?

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

#210

Post by spacehome »

Slartie wrote: post #206
spacehome wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because doing so will cause issues (like this one) to be found and fixed faster. When enough bugs are fixed that the autonomous drivers are safer than the meatbag drivers, then the death rate will start to decrease. The argument is that you can trade more deaths today for a sooner decrease later. Under certain assumptions, you'll save net lives.

You need to have SERIOUS evidence for the claim that autonomous driving will actually be safer than human driving one day to even attempt to make this argument of yours. "Faith in technology" is not "evidence"! If your faith is strong enough, you'll surely be welcome if you sign away all of your rights and serve as irrational traffic participant in a city where self-driving cars are tested. You could run through the…

I'm already doing it all day for human drivers to no benefit at all.

I am pretty convinced that computers have the potential to outperform humans in this, but I'm not really interested in hashing out the debate here; the arguments have all been made more elegantly elsewhere. Though I don't know why you keep ascribing 'faith' to me. I never brought that dirty word up. I reasoned my way into my positions.

Post reply on HN