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Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

venturebeat.com

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Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#71

Post by gambiting »

chrisseaton wrote: post #69
gambiting wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, "as good as a human" shouldn't be allowed on the road or on the market. Errors that are allowed for humans should never be allowed for a machine.

> Nope, "as good as a human" shouldn't be allowed on the road or on the market. Errors that are allowed for humans should never be allowed for a machine. I don't understand why you'd have that opinion. If it's no riskier and relieves people from having to drive then that seems like a net benefit to me.

For the same reason why when a human pilot makes a mistake it's a mistake, but when an autopilot malfunctions every single plane of that type is grounded until the issue can be found and fixed. Machines cannot be just as good as humans, they have to close to perfect when human life is involved.

As another example, imagine if you had a radiotherapy machine, when operated manually it randomly kills 1/10000 patients, but when operated by AI it randomly kills 1/100000 patients. Yet I'm 100% certain even though it's a 10x improvement over a human operator it still wouldn't be allowed on the market.

Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#72

Post by chrisseaton »

gambiting wrote: post #71
chrisseaton wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nope, "as good as a human" shouldn't be allowed on the road or on the market. Errors that are allowed for humans should never be allowed for a machine. I don't understand why you'd have that opinion. If it's no riskier and relieves people from having to drive then that seems like a net benefit to me.

For the same reason why when a human pilot makes a mistake it's a mistake, but when an autopilot malfunctions every single plane of that type is grounded until the issue can be found and fixed. Machines cannot be just as good as humans, they have to close to perfect when human life is involved. As another example, imagine if you had a radiotherapy machine, when operated manually it randomly kills 1/10000 patients, bu…

> even though it's a 10x improvement over a human operator it still wouldn't be allowed on the market

Hmm I don't agree I think people would go for that.

Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#73

Post by ghaff »

anchpop wrote: post #70
ghaff wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As soon as you require human intervention, you require a sober, licensed human to be in the vehicle at all times. You no longer have a robo-taxi. It can also be hard to predict weather in much of the US. And as soon as you place too many restrictions, you no longer have a reliable transportation option. Imagine your public transit system only ran in good weather. How useful would it be?

> As soon as you require human intervention, you require a sober, licensed human to be in the vehicle at all times. You no longer have a robo-taxi. You have a robo-taxi that works when it's not raining, which is still pretty good (assuming it can safely disengage/pull over if it thinks the weather is getting bad). > Imagine your public transit system only ran in good weather. How useful would it be? I and many other…

Wait. So you're now going to just dump me at the side of the road if it starts raining?

I appreciate the general point that autonomous driving that only works under some conditions would be useful. But I think it's more along the lines of handling highway driving under most circumstances which already pre-supposes a licensed sober driver that can take over control with a minute or two notice.

I already have an option for local driving. It's called taxis/Uber/Lyft and robo versions won't be all that much cheaper.

Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#74

Post by gambiting »

chrisseaton wrote: post #72
gambiting wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the same reason why when a human pilot makes a mistake it's a mistake, but when an autopilot malfunctions every single plane of that type is grounded until the issue can be found and fixed. Machines cannot be just as good as humans, they have to close to perfect when human life is involved. As another example, imagine if you had a radiotherapy machine, when operated manually it randomly kills 1/10000 patients, bu…

> even though it's a 10x improvement over a human operator it still wouldn't be allowed on the market Hmm I don't agree I think people would go for that.

Then look up Therac-25, because that's roughly what happened

Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#75

Post by chrisseaton »

gambiting wrote: post #74
chrisseaton wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even though it's a 10x improvement over a human operator it still wouldn't be allowed on the market Hmm I don't agree I think people would go for that.

Then look up Therac-25, because that's roughly what happened

> Therac-25

That wasn't AI - it was a concurrency error, wasn't it?

You shouldn't discard technology because sometimes it's wrong. It can be better overall.

Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#76

Post by NightlyDev »

This is really cool, but the environment is also really simple and I think we're definetly at least 15+ years out before self driving cars can handle somewhat challenging situations as well as humans.

Just try to put one of this vehicles in a situation with varying road width, no markings, snow with no sticks to mark the edges so you really have to pay attention to where the road actually is. What would this do if you meet a car on such a road? Try to figure out who should go back, and maybe go back to the latest plase where its wide enough? Do random tests to check for grip every now and then? It also needs to know whether the road is salted, understand if the salt is working and so on and on and on...

Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#77

Post by gambiting »

chrisseaton wrote: post #75
gambiting wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then look up Therac-25, because that's roughly what happened

> Therac-25 That wasn't AI - it was a concurrency error, wasn't it? You shouldn't discard technology because sometimes it's wrong. It can be better overall.

Why would it matter if it was AI or not? 99.9% of the public won't care if an "AI" killed their mum in a car accident or if it was a badly written for loop somewhere. Literally irrelevant. If a computer makes an error people will want blood(as in - they will sue the company to absolute death, just because a human would make the same mistake or worse is irrelevant).

Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#78

Post by rootusrootus »

chrisseaton wrote: post #45
Jasper_ wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lived in Boston for 10 years. People drive on snow-covered roads just fine.

People in San Francisco struggle to drive in the rain let alone the snow.

Ha, we joke about that in Oregon, too, and it rains quite a lot here. And after a long, rainy winter, it gets a little nuts for a few days when the sun comes out again, because it seems like everyone has forgotten how to drive on sunny days.

Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#79

Post by dev_tty01 »

anchpop wrote: post #70
ghaff wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As soon as you require human intervention, you require a sober, licensed human to be in the vehicle at all times. You no longer have a robo-taxi. It can also be hard to predict weather in much of the US. And as soon as you place too many restrictions, you no longer have a reliable transportation option. Imagine your public transit system only ran in good weather. How useful would it be?

> As soon as you require human intervention, you require a sober, licensed human to be in the vehicle at all times. You no longer have a robo-taxi. You have a robo-taxi that works when it's not raining, which is still pretty good (assuming it can safely disengage/pull over if it thinks the weather is getting bad). > Imagine your public transit system only ran in good weather. How useful would it be? I and many other…

Hmm. If I'm a city administrator, I'm not going to license fair weather robo-taxis to operate in the city. They would drive out many other taxis and then people can't get home when the weather turns bad. Anything else is just bad resource management.

Re: Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

#80

Post by chrisseaton »

gambiting wrote: post #77
chrisseaton wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Therac-25 That wasn't AI - it was a concurrency error, wasn't it? You shouldn't discard technology because sometimes it's wrong. It can be better overall.

Why would it matter if it was AI or not? 99.9% of the public won't care if an "AI" killed their mum in a car accident or if it was a badly written for loop somewhere. Literally irrelevant. If a computer makes an error people will want blood(as in - they will sue the company to absolute death, just because a human would make the same mistake or worse is irrelevant).

> Why would it matter if it was AI or not?

I think people's idea of what a computer should be doing has changed a lot since then, due to the common knowledge of AI applications.

Perhaps we're close to the situation where when a person makes a mistake they're asked 'why weren't you using the computer?' I've seen this happen myself.

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