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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

#81

Post by steveBK123 »

skinkestek wrote: post #79
amluto wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, in cool or cold weather, a pedestrian can easily have little or so visible skin — long sleeves, hair, and possibly a hat of any sort can hide skin very well. Pedestrians (and cyclists) should wear bright clothing and/or retroreflectors at night! (Ideally both. Retroreflectors are mostly useless if a car has its lights off.)

Around here you get a fine if you drive with the lights off, even in the summer.

Taking your life in your hands (biking in dark clothing, especially at night) because someone is going to get a fine for having their lights off after they kill you is not a good risk calculation.

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

#82

Post by zephrx1111 »

tetromino_ wrote: post #63

Human driver eyes (and I suspect any other optical systems working in the visible color range) are also less likely to detect people of color. Five years ago I avoided running over a pedestrian at night only by luck: he was black, wearing a black jacket, black pants, walking across a badly-lit suburban street; I think that either my visual system did not perceive him at all until the last fraction of a second, or per…

Apparently the media wanted to sell an optical problem as racial problem.

Some saying: racists are people that are thinking of race, talking about race, and acting based upon race.

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

#83

Post by sokoloff »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #47
sokoloff wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s intended to replace human drivers who have not yet evolved radar. I agree that radar could make it easier and/or more reliable, but there’s a pretty strong argument that building a system to equal/exceed humans using vision alone is possible.

Humans haven’t evolved radar, but computer vision systems are also worse than human vision systems in many ways, so they need to compensate

They are currently worse in many ways. So, perhaps the computer vision systems need to continue to improve until such time as they deliver clearly superior results to the as-observed outcomes of human drivers.

I worked on the vision system for an autonomous vehicle program in 1991, using the processing power available then. Our team held several world records at the time for different categories of completely autonomous travel on public highways.

If you fit any kind of curve between what (relatively little) we could do then for ~$200K in equipment and what a production car with < $1K of BOM costs can do today, it's reasonable to predict that well within my lifetime that vision-only autonomous driving systems could be better than a human on typical roads (absent snow cover).

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

#84

Post by joker_minmax »

tetromino_ wrote: post #63

Human driver eyes (and I suspect any other optical systems working in the visible color range) are also less likely to detect people of color. Five years ago I avoided running over a pedestrian at night only by luck: he was black, wearing a black jacket, black pants, walking across a badly-lit suburban street; I think that either my visual system did not perceive him at all until the last fraction of a second, or per…

Regardless of race, it shouldnt be on the road if it cannot detect jaywalkers at night wearing all black. Where I live POC are more likely to be the pedestrians because it's an immigrant-heavy community. I've seen a white guy jaywalking at night wearing all black in between street lights but I couldn't tell he was white until he got across the street and I could see him head-on.

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

#85

Post by micromacrofoot »

sokoloff wrote: post #83
micromacrofoot wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans haven’t evolved radar, but computer vision systems are also worse than human vision systems in many ways, so they need to compensate

They are currently worse in many ways. So, perhaps the computer vision systems need to continue to improve until such time as they deliver clearly superior results to the as-observed outcomes of human drivers. I worked on the vision system for an autonomous vehicle program in 1991, using the processing power available then. Our team held several world records at the time for different categories of completely autonom…

> better than a human on typical roads (absent snow cover).

the weather caveats feel like evergreen statements about self-driving and make me feel like it's further off than most people realize — I agree that the improvements have been impressive over our lifetimes, but like in most general tasks there's still an enormous gulf between biology and technology

we'll get there eventually, and much faster than biology did (ie, not millions of years)... but I wouldn't be surprised if full self-driving was another 20 years out

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

#86

Post by sokoloff »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #85
sokoloff wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are currently worse in many ways. So, perhaps the computer vision systems need to continue to improve until such time as they deliver clearly superior results to the as-observed outcomes of human drivers. I worked on the vision system for an autonomous vehicle program in 1991, using the processing power available then. Our team held several world records at the time for different categories of completely autonom…

> better than a human on typical roads (absent snow cover). the weather caveats feel like evergreen statements about self-driving and make me feel like it's further off than most people realize — I agree that the improvements have been impressive over our lifetimes, but like in most general tasks there's still an enormous gulf between biology and technology we'll get there eventually, and much faster than biology did…

I've made the same "never, ever will we completely replace human drivers" predictions before, informed by my experience trying to do it 30+ years ago but also by dozens of winters' worth of driving on snow-covered roads in New England.

But there are huge potential gains even if self-driving is only usable in 99.8% of driving scenarios, provided there's adequate safeguards and sensible hand-overs to human drivers. (Not dumping an out-of-control, at-speed automobile into the human driver's lap with 50 milliseconds of notice.)

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

#87

Post by mola »

sokoloff wrote: post #36
candiddevmike wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of the article, to me, is computer vision will never be enough. These are machines and need to be augmented with radar and other object detection methods.

It’s intended to replace human drivers who have not yet evolved radar. I agree that radar could make it easier and/or more reliable, but there’s a pretty strong argument that building a system to equal/exceed humans using vision alone is possible.

The human eye is a better "camera" than anything we use today in self driving cars (just read about the eyes dynamic range). Not to mention that human hearing has unbelievable audiolocalization ability that we struggle to explain.

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

#88

Post by mola »

foooorsyth wrote: post #31
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…

> Feels like a case of outrage-for-clicks Like 99% of these “AI discrimination” articles. >human-detecting AI is developed in a western country with ~60% white population. Most of the training data is collected there >the AI performed slightly worse in Uttar Pradesh, where the people and everything else in the background look different >AI is prejudiced! Get outraged! Every time.

Weird, you articulated the exact point of bias in AI but the tone you used is dismissing. Yes obviously AI is not a moral agent and it isn't racist per se. But if it's input is biased and the test is biased then the application will be biased. That's a problem, if you go and deploy these models where their training data is lacking. Let's say, self driving car using the AI you described deployed in Uttar Pradesh is less safe because of bias.

What is wrong with this statement in your opinion?

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

#90

Post by zirgs »

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…

Yup - as someone from a country where -10 degrees is considered a normal winter day I think that self driving cars should not rely on road markings at all. Even road signs can be unreadable after a particularly nasty blizzard.

I've yet to see self driving cars successfully navigating during bad winter conditions. They can't even avoid killing pedestrians in California.

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