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Self-driving cars less likely to detect children and people of color

businessinsider.com

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Re: Self-driving cars less likely to detect children and people of color

#51

Post by matwood »

notamy wrote: post #38
luma wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have lidar and radar when you drive? Should it be illegal for you to drive without those things?

What is it with people on this website (not specifically the user I’m replying to) and going with "the computer vaguely does the thing the human does, literally what's the difference???" (or similar) as an argument/gotcha/etc. around ML/AI/self-driving/...? It’s painfully obvious that the computer and the human are different systems that process information differently and therefore likely need different sets of inpu…

I agree that they are different, but if I read the comment you responded to charitably, it's pointing out that the bar often seems unreasonably high for self driving. Human drivers are terrible leading to ~100 deaths/day in the US. How much better does self-driving need to be in order to make it worthwhile? Does it have to be perfect?

Re: Self-driving cars less likely to detect children and people of color

#53

Post by Lewton »

yorwba wrote: post #45
Lewton wrote: post #6

they're testing 8 different detection algorithms > The detection systems were 19.67% more likely to detect adults than children, and 7.52% more likely to detect people with lighter skin tones than people with darker skin tones, according to the study. while they all had a harder time with adults vs children, that 7.52% is gotten by averaging 2 algorithms that performed abysmally, with 6 that had no statistically sign…

I think you misunderstood table 6. All algorithms show significant differences in miss rate for children, two show significant differences based on gender, and four others based on skin color. The four that showed no statistically significant difference between light and dark skin had very high miss rates overall. Of the other four, two are much worse for dark skin, and two are slightly better. Those last two are als…

Yeah I missed the two statistically significant algorithms that favor darker skin since they have smaller percentage differences than the ones they didn't mark as statistically significant (but I guess that's because of how it relates to the overall miss rate)

RE: 28% miss rate, I think this is meaningless as it's looking at single images/data points, while self driving cars get a continuous stream of data

Re: Self-driving cars less likely to detect children and people of color

#55

Post by dee-bee »

jl6 wrote: post #19

> While the study did not use the exact software companies like Tesla use to power self-driving cars because they are confidential, the software systems used for the study are based on the same open-source AI those companies use, according to Zhang. I was under the impression that commercial self-driving software was deeply proprietary and confidential, and there is no way to know that this study will generalize if r…

Presumably these companies are free to provide their software for research. The onus is on them to demonstrate it works in the first place....

> how do we know this isn’t a problem they have worked extensively on and made great improvements to, relative to the open source components?

They are a private, for-profit entity with a strong incentive to mislead people about their products. I see no reason to assume they've addressed this issue.

Re: Self-driving cars less likely to detect children and people of color

#56

Post by ben_w »

helmette wrote: post #34
candiddevmike wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what you're trying to say is cars will start identifying folks and logging their location. Cell tracking/triangulation data is already available from cell companies. Self driving cars aren't going to make things worse.

Carrying a mobile phone is optional.

And visual detection more precise. You can tell not only if someone is usually within a few tens of metres as you can with cellphone data, but exactly where they are, what they're doing, and who/what they're looking at.

Re: Self-driving cars less likely to detect children and people of color

#57

Post by mrweasel »

asddubs wrote: post #30
hermannj314 wrote: post #23

"A new technology reduces mortality risk for all people, but has slightly better outcomes for white adults." Conclusion - we call on lawmakers to make this technology illegal. We prefer more people die at equal rates more than we prefer less people to die at unequal rates. I am not sure I agree with the ethics that underlies this way of seeing the world.

What if the technology was only/primarily tested with white people, rather than inherently having better outcomes for white adults? It's not really as clear cut as you make it out to be, technologies at this level of complexity aren't just derived from physical/biological principles. Perhaps there was a better variant of the technology that was scrapped as a cost-cutting measure, because it performed the same for whi…

> What if the technology was only/primarily tested with white people, rather than inherently having better outcomes for white adults?

I think we have a precedence for that in testing of drugs. The majority of drugs are primarily tested on white men, meaning that their effect and dosages may be problematic for women or people of color.

There's also the issue of the majority of tools being designed for right handed people and any left handed either needs to spend more on tools or accept a certain risk when operating a chainsaw.

Re: Self-driving cars less likely to detect children and people of color

#58

Post by seanmcdirmid »

im3w1l wrote: post #2

The researchers supposedly used similar but not quite the same approach as Tesla, and claimed it worked worse for people of color. That makes sense since optical recognition is harder for dark skinned people. However, the article leads with a picture of a Cruise car, which use lidar technology. Those should afaik recognize people with the same accuracy regardless of skin color.

I thought Waymo and Cruise are both using optical and LiDAR (using fancy sensor fusion algorithms to make those work safely together), so this would impact them as well? LiDAR alone isn’t going to be able to tell if something is a pedestrian, just that something is there, optical is still needed to determine that the thing is a person.

Re: Self-driving cars less likely to detect children and people of color

#59

Post by skinkestek »

steveBK123 wrote: post #35

To be fair, human drivers would likely have the same problem given seating position in cars & certain lighting conditions..

Can confirm to some degree.

I had one dark skinned kid in dark clothes casually crossing the road in front of me during the dark months here were I live.

I didn't have to slam the brakes or anything because it was a bit ahead of me, bit it was scary because of how hard it was to detect.

Re: Self-driving cars less likely to detect children and people of color

#60

Post by snakeyjake »

mrweasel wrote: post #49
zirgs wrote: post #8

How do they work in winter then? You can't see much skin if someone is wearing a winter coat. Right - self driving cars are a solution for Silicon Valley only only so they don't even bother testing those cars elsewhere.

The skin color is going to be the least of your issues in the winter time. How are the cars going to "see" the road under 10cm of snow? Granted humans shouldn't really be driving in those conditions either, but we do and mostly successfully, to avoid sleeping on the side of the road in -10C. What is it that makes it so hard for all these algorithms to work on people with darker skin? This has been an issue for more t…

My employer makes a multi-band synthetic aperture radar that penetrate snow and is high-resolution enough to "see" painted road markings and reflectors beneath a layer of snow.

It is nowhere near small or cheap enough for self-driving car applications, but will be one day.

Another challenge is affordable real-time processing of the data. Churning through 3,200MB/s of phase-history data is expensive but again that will solve itself given time.

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