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

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271–280 of 331 posts

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

#271
post #15

So what is the solution? Let emergency services have a remote control STOP button? But it would have many implications for passengers too

The solution is recognizing that we are nowhere near ready for driverless cars. With "ordinary" software, you can look at all of the use cases and if you solve 5% of them in a really good way, you can be successful, users will self-select whether those 5% of the use cases are valuable for them, and then not use your software for anything else. With driverless self-driving vehicles, you have no such comfort. Even if y…

We are nowhere near ready for cars with drivers either. Accidents happen everyday, drunk driving is common, quite a bit of people get their license while they shouldn't (and some drive licenceless anyway)

"A software handling 99.9% of the cases" wouls be a significant advantage over cars with drivers if it was true.

I think it is just a numbers game, we may not be there today but I believe we will have the a future with safer roads thanks to driverless cars. I am longing for that

So we should push for it instead of trying to shut it down. Solution to the problem in article sounds easy, allow law officers to mark roads as blocked so the car does not even to see the fire truck. Or just put a road signal or a person on the road so the cars (driverless or with drivers) don't step on your hose

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

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm too optimistic about self driving but it seems that a fail-safe default of "upon encountering an active emergency situation, stop at a reasonable distance away" is good enough and better than what a significant minority of human drivers do.

If the dangerous situation is a flash flood or landslide stopping may be entirely the wrong response. The entire problem with these rigid failsafes and the whole idea of ai-driven cars is this idea that a programmer can predict every situation the car will encounter by extrapolating from the climate and road conditions in places like san francisco. One project I worked on was a safety critical system that almost got…

I think many of us aren’t used to working on anything actually critical to human lives.

And I wouldn’t be surprised if quite a few of those who are have never actually fully understood what that means.

I certainly don’t.

But then, there’s a reason I stay away from life-critical systems.

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

#273
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm slightly alarmed by the general scenario of a driverless vehicle approaching an emergency situation. A human-driven vehicle will respond to gestures from firefighters to go around, etc. And even most dull humans will have more situational awareness and flexibility than an AI is likely to, particularly as these sorts of scenarios are edge cases by definition. E.g. depending on your jurisdiction and the situation,…

> Software is not ready for that yet, I think. It will never happen. Robots will never have the intelligence to manage dangerous situations in the open world, only in controlled environments. After a series of accidents passes the unforgivable threshold, certain levels of autonomous driving will be banned completely.

People can't even manage dangerous situations all the time. They panic, they freeze, and they make mistakes.

Driverless cars don't need to work perfectly all the time. They just need to injure fewer people than human drivers.

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

#274

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…

Or you can just put signs that road is closed in front of it so nobody has to second guess it. Seems like some cognitive bias that people have to have same knowledge as you and take an educated guess in a few seconds they notice hoses.

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

#275
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think never is a strong word. You genuine believe that we'll never create an equivalent or even comparable intelligence to our own artificially?

I personally don’t. We are not guaranteed endless progress or a good future.

> endless progress or a good future

The optimist believes progress will halt at a convenient moment. The pessimist fears otherwise.

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

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get why people think intelligence requires things like a desire for suffrage... There is no particular reason why advanced planning, modelling and pattern matching ability should need human-like goals. Heck, even counting votes would be quite impossible (how much divergence does a copy need before it gets its own vote? What it not all modules/nodes are copied?). Also, the anti-suffrage women seem to have been…

There is no particular reason why advanced planning, modelling and pattern matching ability should need human-like goals. Because driving requires the ability to understand what other drivers are doing. It requires a theory of mind, which means understanding human goals.

> It requires a theory of mind, which means understanding human goals.

Like chess?

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

#277
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question, wouldn't it suffice to just put a couple traffic cones in front of it? AVs should be already trained to recognize and stop for those.

As always, be wary of the word "just". Things that seem trivial can turn out to be surprisingly difficult. :-) In this context, the issue is actually pretty simple: it's a factor of available personnel and time. At least in the US, most municipal fire departments don't have the budget for enough staffing to run with all of their companies fully staffed (by NFPA standards). I'd posit that 3-person companies are the mo…

"Cone of Safety" is already a standard for anyone who drives a vehicle bigger than a golf cart professionally

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

#278
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.

> someone impersonating a cop A RFID tag would do. If you prefer going dystopia, a chip implant.

AI being able to tell an "RFID" chip is real vs fake is not much different than telling whether someone in a fake cop outfit is real or not.

And I mean given RFID is only detectable from inches to feet range, what's the point? And isn't under skin chip just RFID under the skin?

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

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I donno the robots in terminator seemed to have some self awareness. Why can’t we apply the same to cars?

Your comment, I am not sure if intentionally, encapsulates what is really going on with self driving cars. I.e. people assume fantasy or fiction can become reality with enough effort. This is not always true...

> I.e. people assume fantasy or fiction can become reality with enough effort. This is not always true...

More or less hit the nail on the head :)

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

#280
post #41

should firefighters wear cameras so we can see wtf is going on out there? i guess it would cost a lot of money, and prob be very wasteful, wreck privacy even more, etc. but... i wouldn't mind knowing a bit more of what's going on out there. now that our streets are even-more deadly beta robot playgrounds. and, with all the new tech, maybe we can learn some things.

This is victim blaming. Why should firefighters wear cameras so a autonomous taxi company can avoid accountability?

victim blaming? who's the victim?
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