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A Tragic Loss

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Re: A Tragic Loss

#311

Post by thaumasiotes »

ModernMech wrote: post #249
archagon wrote: post #221

This is on the road to being off topic, but still relevant given some of the commentary in this thread: It makes me a bit sad that the political zeitgeist in the tech community is leaning towards "acceptable losses" when it comes to accidents in automated cars, to the point of pre-emptively expressing disdain at ordinary people reacting negatively to such news. I sense it's going to become harder and harder for us to…

> It makes me a bit sad that the political zeitgeist in the tech community is leaning towards "acceptable losses" when it comes to accidents in automated cars Yes, this is another thing that makes me so angry about this situation. Back in the day, I worked on a project to give autonomy to power wheelchair systems. In order to get it to market, we had to go through FDA approval, which involved testing the equipment in…

It occurs to me that wheelchairs have a very low fatality rate when not autonomous, but the same is not true for cars.

Re: A Tragic Loss

#312

Post by [deleted] »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #21

I mean I understand Tesla has to make a statement here and I understand they want to ensure everyone that it's not really their fault but to title a post "A Tragic Loss" and then spend the majority of the post discussing all of your car's safety features and how it wasn't your fault just seems tone deaf and distasteful to me. Maybe they had to do it for legal reasons I don't know (I'm certainly not a lawyer) and I'd…

[deleted]

Re: A Tragic Loss

#313

Post by nickparker »

daveguy wrote: post #203

A direct reply from Elon Musk on twitter about why radar did not recognize the white side of a trailer across the road when the camera missed it: "Radar tunes out what looks like an overhead road sign to avoid false braking events" https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/748620607105839104 EDIT: When the "overhead sign" comes down below overhead clearance of the vehicle the signal should not be masked. There should have…

The radar might not be able to clearly distinguish between objects at the height of the cab and objects at signage heights. Just about everything on the road is mostly on the road.

If the system can bias its sampling towards the ground, it would make a lot of sense to do so. Lump "above the ground" and "very above the ground" into the same category and use other sensors (for example, the camera..) to detect the edge cases where it matters.

Re: A Tragic Loss

#314

Post by jfrisby »

archagon wrote: post #290
xoa wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It makes me a bit sad that the political zeitgeist in the tech community is leaning towards "acceptable losses" when it comes to accidents in automated cars What. "Acceptable losses" is, and has always been the rule when it comes to accidents in all cars , ever. We've made absolutely massive safety improvements in the last few decades, cutting the death rate to around 1/3 of its historical maximum, yet even so tens…

> So personally, I find your appeal to emotion and thinly veiled "what about the children" shtick disgusting and immoral. How do you counter a utilitarian argument without humanizing the situation? If my friend or loved one were killed by an ill-considered and poorly-implemented automated driving algorithm, no amount of statistics would convince me that the tradeoff was worth it. Who bears responsibility in that case…

Is your friend/loved one more valuable than the 90 other people who die in automotive accidents (in the U.S. alone) daily?

Your attempt at "humanizing" the situation is merely being dismissive of the values of others' lives.

Everyone who dies is special and important to someone. To wring your hands and rail against utilitarianism is to try and apply tribalism to moral reasoning.

Because this person matters more TO YOU, you're suggesting that we should treat them as if they matter MORE THAN OTHER PEOPLE.

That seems to me an intrinsically selfish -- possibly even narcissistic -- view.

Re: A Tragic Loss

#315

Post by zwily »

hermannj314 wrote: post #165
mikeash wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla's Autopilot uses a radar unit, a front-facing camera, and twelve ultrasonic sensors on the front and back bumper. The ultrasonic sensors are short range and are for detecting adjacent cars and obstacles while parking, the camera is used for detecting lanes, and the camera and radar work together to detect cars. The radar is low to the ground and probably doesn't pick up a trailer that's high off the ground. The…

Do you think they will/should change this? I understand the radar can't see an obstruction above x feet, but that doesn't do any good when the car is x+y feet tall. From what I read about humans, you need +/- 30 degrees up/down vision to get a license (varies by jurisdiction). And we kill a little over a million people each year on roads. Not sure what this should imply about a car's radar though.

New autopilot hardware is expected sometime in the next year. It will likely include triple cameras, more radar, and lidar. (I think)

Re: A Tragic Loss

#316

Post by daveguy »

zarriak wrote: post #258
daveguy wrote: post #203

A direct reply from Elon Musk on twitter about why radar did not recognize the white side of a trailer across the road when the camera missed it: "Radar tunes out what looks like an overhead road sign to avoid false braking events" https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/748620607105839104 EDIT: When the "overhead sign" comes down below overhead clearance of the vehicle the signal should not be masked. There should have…

Seems odd to me that the autopilot doesn't use them together, as it would seem that the autopilot would easily be able to see with the camera whether it was a sign, as at least in the United States they seem a somewhat uniform green.

I think the likely answer is Tesla "autopilot" is a glorified cruise control + lane assist + data collection for future intelligent controls.

Google probably has close to this capability, but they are at the leading edge of image recognition.

In order to depend on it the AI would have to be able to distinguish 99.9+% and would have to be able to tell the difference between a green truck and a road sign. I honestly think self driving cars will require intelligence indistinguishable from artificial general intelligence.

This was state of the art in 2014 (improved in 2015, but this paper is on arxiv and gives the idea):

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.0575

Even top scoring Google had classification errors over 6% of the time in 2014. Object localization was much worse. Even if it is at 99% that means 1 of every 100 object will be misidentified. You probably identify that many random (non-car, non-sign, etc) objects in a week driving, maybe in a day. That kind of error is unacceptable in self-driving cars and it is state of the art. That is one of the reasons they are still testing and not selling self-driving cars at Google.

Better than human may not require quite 99.9+% object classification, but I do wonder how great the self-driving car records would be if someone wasn't always there to take the controls. It certainly wouldn't be "better than human" at this point.

Re: A Tragic Loss

#317

Post by rohit89 »

ModernMech wrote: post #249
archagon wrote: post #221

This is on the road to being off topic, but still relevant given some of the commentary in this thread: It makes me a bit sad that the political zeitgeist in the tech community is leaning towards "acceptable losses" when it comes to accidents in automated cars, to the point of pre-emptively expressing disdain at ordinary people reacting negatively to such news. I sense it's going to become harder and harder for us to…

> It makes me a bit sad that the political zeitgeist in the tech community is leaning towards "acceptable losses" when it comes to accidents in automated cars Yes, this is another thing that makes me so angry about this situation. Back in the day, I worked on a project to give autonomy to power wheelchair systems. In order to get it to market, we had to go through FDA approval, which involved testing the equipment in…

Doesn't Tesla have to get approval from the NHTSA for their autopilot?

Re: A Tragic Loss

#318

Post by mthoms »

mozumder wrote: post #269
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Notice how quick they are to bring up "this is the first fatality in 130 million miles", but AFAICT, traffic fatalities in the US occur at a frequency of around 10 per billion miles [1], which is the same. So even though this is just one data point, it's spot on the current average for fatality frequency in normal cars. Furthermore, to gather enough statistics to be able to say with confidence "semi-autonomous…

The IIHS compares car model fatality rates: http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/driver-death-rates If you want to do the numbers to compare the Tesla to other cars, where they measure driver fatalities per million registered years, do this: 130,000,000 miles / 12,000 average miles per year per car = 10,833 years. That's 10,833 registered years for the Model S. The IIHS site normalizes to deaths per million registered yea…

>So, right now, it looks like the Tesla Model S is about 4x deadlier than the average car when using Autopilot, and about 10-20x deadlier than the safest cars.

How you can draw such a conclusion from a singular data point? That's beyond ridiculous.

Re: A Tragic Loss

#319

Post by archagon »

jfrisby wrote: post #307
Kalium wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every life is special. Every life is sacred. Every life has rights and hopes and dreams and its own special contribution to humanity. Yet, losses have to be weighed against the alternatives. Would you think it ethical to not put out seat belts, because they don't save lives in all cases? Or may even be harmful in some circumstances? "Acceptable losses" is certainly a distasteful and dehumanizing perspective. Yet how…

And let's recall that this isn't a choice between "human drivers, no lives lost" vs. "AI drivers, some lives lost". It's a choice between "human drivers, MANY MANY lives lost" and "AI drivers, fewer lives lost". What would archagon have us do? Not have AI drivers until a perfect solution is possible? The "crash-unavoidable" scenario is an unavoidable reality as long as stopping distances/acceleration/reaction times a…

> It sounds as if archagon would have us spend all our time looking at trees

> I think perhaps the reason archagon is so aghast

> Archagon seems to be so distracted by the novelty of this situation

> If we follow archagon's hand-wringing

I don't know who this hand-wringing, tree-gazing, and monacle-popping archagon is, but he sure sounds like a hoot.

Re: A Tragic Loss

#320

Post by ars »

emitstop wrote: post #272
ars wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Self driving tech is poised to save many many lives. The computer would have to be 99.99999% reliable to do that. The accident rate is around 74 per 100 million miles (and fatalities is 1.13). It's unclear exactly how to turn that into a percentage, but no matter how you do it it's quite high. Say an accident takes 5 minutes, and people drive 30 miles/hour. Then that works out to 99.999% for humans. If you use the…

This is the first fatality collision after 130 million miles of tesla's autopilot, so it's already above that bar. Additionally, 92 people are killed in fatal car accidents in the US every day. So it's not as though this is some uncommon occurrence that autonomous vehicles would be unlikely to improve.

> This is the first fatality collision after 130 million miles of tesla's autopilot, so it's already above that bar.

It most definitely is not above that bar! The autopilot is combined with a human operating the car.

How many accidents were avoided by the human rather than the autopilot?

I suspect a ton of accidents (i.e. the autopilot has a high error rate).

How many did the autopilot avoid that the human would not have? Probably not that many, if any.

> Additionally, 92 people are killed in fatal car accidents in the US every day. So it's not as though this is some uncommon occurrence that autonomous vehicles would be unlikely to improve.

Do the math.

I did.

0.00001% seems pretty uncommon to me. There is a lot of driving in the US, so even that low of a number is visible, but it's still a low number.

Remember every single computer must be all but perfect to reduce the error rate.

Have you ever seen a computer to be that good? At even something as simple as not crashing? Never mind driving a car.

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