One can learn to drive defensively, and be able to spot the said dipshit in advance, decreasing the likelihood of collision.
Yes, not in all cases, but there's a bell curve. As humans, we can read other humans.
Robots aren't inherently bad either. I love my Roomba precisely because if it fails, it fails predictably. I can and do make my apartment Roomba-friendly.
But the self-driving deep learning-driven cars don't have this feature. They fail unpredictabily, as in your example. We don't have an understanding of what really drives the decision-making there. And we keep discovering failure modes as they manifest.
One day, the car might think the river is a road. Another, it will not recognize a road block as such. But only if it's a Tuesday. Or something. We really don't know.
So I don't think we'll get acclimated to that. Unpredictable failure is a reasonable thing to be afraid of.
You can learn to drive a self-driving car defensively, in the same way you learn to drive a normal car defensively. Pay attention to your surroundings, blind spots, and other cars.
Maybe self-driving is a poor term to use.
My point was that you can't learn to drive a normal car defensively if there are self-driving cars on the road (in their current form).
When a self-driving car decides to do something stupid, you won't see it coming because the decision tree is literally beyond human comprehension.
See: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181204-why-we-should-worry...
And Uber's and Tesla's accidents have shown us that you can't rely on the human in the car to catch it before it does something stupid. After all, teaching someone how to drive and watching them attentively is difficult work.
Tesla's marketing videos for Autopilot have a caption along the lines of "driver is only present for legal reasons".
Then it is not a self driving car, maybe let's named them human supervised self running cars
There are no self-driving cars on the market, or in development by major car manufacturers.
They all explicitly require human attention.
Yeah, we can go back and investigate the person's life and say "see, they had a history of browsing extremist websites, making bigoted comments, suicidal thoughts, etc." The problem is that this description fits a very large group of people, compared to the subgroup which actually carry out the attacks.
So while it is true that we may have difficulty (or it may even be impossible) auditing a self driving car after the fact, it should not be any more comforting to know that human failure can be explained after the fact, given that the human failure was not predicted beforehand.
A Waymo is basically just following a virtual track on an extremely detailed LIDAR map of the area, obsessively watching for pedestrians and following the rules of the road the best it can. It will never think a river is a road.
Not to say that there aren't a million little things to be concerned about with this approach, or that there aren't major things to overcome (like heavy snow on the ground making your LIDAR map useless). But I think we'll get there, and in many places soon. There's nothing that says this tech has to exist everywhere out the gate.
Almost all of the startups in the space are following the Tesla approach of just throwing machine learning at the problem which means almost all work in the space suffers from novel input producing unpredictable results. This is one of the things that has killed trained and evolved systems in the past and the fact that few of the companies in this space are even trying to manage it (either by building interpretable models or by using models and using ML to do parameter fitting) is a good indicator that the whole business is either a fraud or is built on the premise that with enough data or, for the un-cautious and unaware, enough simulation, the problem solves itself.
I think what we are actually seeing is that Waymo (where, in ten years, they might have a solution) and Tesla (which is mostly worst-in-class but as a company is the master of hype) drove hype around self-driving. Then Uber and Lyft latched on (because they needed a story to paper over their terrible economics) and pushed it even higher. The Otto thing and Cruise's acquisition made VCs pay attention.
So these companies are acquisition bait for the assumed-clueless big auto companies. They will not deliver self-driving cars. At best they will deliver next-generation enhancements to emergency braking, etc.
A Tesla is not a self-driving car. Autopilot is an assistive technology.
If a human has to pay attention all the time, then they might as well just be driving.
And one of the advantages of self driving cars will be freedom for the elderly and disabled who already have difficulty driving cars. This is the group, in my opinion, that will benefit the most from self driving cars.
Right now the self driving tech doesn't do anything to communicate with the driver besides just a general warning. However that doesn't have to be the case. Maybe some type of confidence indicator should be added. A simple green, yellow, red warning system could help a driver know when a self driving car might not be as certain in its surroundings.
>If a human has to pay attention all the time, then they might as well just be driving.
I just don't get this mindset. There are different levels of "paying attention" that require different levels of mental energy. The discussion also isn't made with nearly any other driver assist technology. No one suggests that automatic transmissions or cruise control are worthless because the driver still has to pay attention.
>And one of the advantages of self driving cars will be freedom for the elderly and disabled who already have difficulty driving cars. This is the group, in my opinion, that will benefit the most from self driving cars.
I agree with that, but it doesn't mean that other drivers won't benefit as well.
I think this probably fails to understand how quickly it's making decisions, how quickly the situation could change, or how it could even judge it's own confidence. It could quite confidently drive you into a river; it's not likely to do that unless it's pretty sure it's a road.
As self-driving technology gets better, the robot is going to be much better and the failure situations much more rare.
> I just don't get this mindset. There are different levels of "paying attention" that require different levels of mental energy.
If one doesn't have to provide direction or speed, there is literally nothing to keep a human attentive enough to make a difference. You expect someone to passively look at a green/red/yellow indicator for hours at a time while not otherwise engaged with driving? And then when that indicator turns red you expect them to immediately be able to make a useful judgement? I think humans are more than likely to make that situation worse!
> The discussion also isn't made with nearly any other driver assist technology. No one suggests that automatic transmissions or cruise control are worthless because the driver still has to pay attention.
There is a huge difference. If you have cruise control or automatic transmission, the vehicle still doesn't go where it's supposed to without you paying attention. The driver still has to pay attention because they have to pay attention or they don't anywhere. With self driving cars, the driver is now a passenger and doesn't have to pay attention for the vehicle to work.
No self driving car that doesn't have at least level 4 autonomy allows the driver to not pay attention like you are suggesting. The benefit of a cooperative tech is that it takes mental load off the driver. Like I said previously, there are different levels of mental energy that a person can spend on a task. It isn't like the choices are either 100% or 0% of your attention.
Computers can have a perfect 360 degree view and track and categorize every object around them. Humans will be both physically and intellectually outmatched eventually. And humans just aren't that good at driving on average.
Past rates of progress are not indicative of the future. The easy problems have already been solved. Now progress is already slowing down.
In particular the notion that computer vision can reliably track and categorize every object is just laughable. The state of computer vision research is nowhere close to that capability. Errors are frequent, especially under adverse conditions.
In Arizona, Waymo has fully autonomous taxi service you can use right now. https://waymo.com/apply/
Is that a lot of hype? Maybe.
I think it's more because there's someone to yell at - someone to blame.
Think of it like a taxi driver with a passenger; people ride in these all the time, or uber, or lyft - and have no problems doing so. Even though they aren't in control, and they have no idea about the driver's driving capability. They assume the driver is an average to better driver, when that may not be the case at all. So what happens when an accident occurs?
Well - if the passenger is still alive, and believes it to be their driver's fault, they can yell at their driver. If they believe it's the other driver's fault, they can yell at them...and so forth.
But you put a robot in place of any driver - then who can you yell at when an accident occurs? Nobody. You can yell all you want, you can even blame the corporation that made the car/robot - but you are still yelling at a machine. It won't change anything. It won't feel bad. It probably won't even make you feel better, because it won't restore your agency in the situation.
That's my guess anyhow - pulled straight from my nether regions, with nothing to back it up. I wonder if there have been any studies on this? Are there any data on what happens in other "self-driving" incidents; like perhaps completely automated trains with no humans other than passengers on-board? Do such things even exist?
Or do companies already know this - and put a human "in charge" to take the blame and heat for when an accident happens (maybe they also provide an e-stop button for the human to press - whether it's actually connected to anything or not - but it's logged as to whether it was pressed, just to help "assign blame" later)...?
While I have no proof or anything to back this assertion or theory up, it seems like it would match human nature. When things go wrong, humans want to blame somebody - some actual, sentient being. I'm sure there's a psychological term for this need and the action; I don't know what that term is, but I'm almost certain it's been studied.
Essentially one of two things would have to be done to overcome this: Either the machine would have to become perfect at driving and avoiding accidents (even to the point of avoiding things of natural random consequence, such as rocks falling on the road, or something of that nature) - or it will have to become more sentient, and ideally emotive; that is a GAI with human traits.
The former is likely impossible - randomness will always get ya; even trains have what should be "avoidable" accidents.
The latter - well, if it's achievable; that is, if we can make such a GAI, etc - it will likely also suffer the same problems humans do, most notably that we are failable and we make mistakes.
...but at least then we can blame them on something, right?
One example I can think of is Russian Roulette. I would be quite a different game if each player had to shoot the neighbour instead of himself. It would be literally the same expected outcome, but an entirely different game.
Each human I encounter everyday has a small chance of murdering me (let say one in a million) would I like a robot wandering around with one in a billion chance of murdering others?
We accept that we cannot endlessly manipulate and control other humans, that we cannot forcibly "fix" arseholes, we have no such limitations for robots.
We already have an example of strong automation-driven transports: aeroplanes. Honestly I see no reason to have lower standards for self-driving cars.
Exactly! When (not if) a fully autonomous self-driving car causes a terrible accident resulting in death, how are the loved ones going to feel when they've only got a company to blame? In such an emotional situation, the response needs to be better than Uber or whoever saying "we're very sorry our car did that, but hey, we're trying our best, and these things are going to happen". Are people really going to accept that? That's simply not going to fly.
What would be the point of self-driving cars which were no safer than the status quo? That's just removing freedom from drivers and adding more complexity to infrastructure for no added benefit.
It's also exactly the narrative that proponents of self-driving cars have been driving (pun intended), self-driving cars would eliminate all, if not nearly all, accidents and fatalities.
What they're saying (and I agree) is that human nature means people won't be willing to get into a car that's 'just a little better than average.' There's a couple reasons I think that will be true: 1) people generally think they're better than they are at driving 2) moving from people to autopilot moves the responsibility from generic 'bad drivers' causing accidents to a single system. Going from a diffuse responsibility to a more concentrated liability on the part of the manufacturer will probably mean they'll be blamed much more for the failures of their cars.
Second, what you call "freedom", is called a "chore" by a good chunk of the population. I can't wait to not touch another steering wheel ever.
I'll gladly deal with the "chore" of being able to turn my own key and drive my own car as an alternative.
The fact that we can't replace the windshield with something else will likely never be a practical limitation for the foreseeable future.
What?? Safety is a great side dish, not the main course. The point is to free up hundreds of millions of man-hours spent daily focusing on roads.
Also, commuters will still have the same commutes whether they or their car is doing the driving. The deployment of self-driving cars is not going to magically transform a multi-hour commute into ten minutes.
I'm sure there will be a difference at the margins in cities where many people don't need a car on a daily basis. I assume that's already the case with Uber/Lyft today. And self-driving when it eventually arrives in those areas presumably will decrease costs some. But for someone who lives outside of dense city centers it seems likely they'll continue to want to own a car that is a model they like, equipped to their specifications, and storing all the various things they keep in a car.
It doesn't matter what you want, it matters what car companies do. They're not going to spend millions of dollars on R&D and marketing hype for self-driving cars only to make far less money on them than they do now on conventional cars.
>My car is a never ending money pit with insurance, gas, maintenance, registration, tires, it never stops.
Yes. That's the entire point, cars are micro-economies supporting multiple businesses and profit centers. And self driving cars will be the same, for the same reasons.
But it's the devil we know, It's fine that we average 3,287 fatalities a day[0].
We also have more empty homes than homeless, more food than starving people, crippling homelessness and 1:4 malnourished children in the US alone. I expect nothing from humanity yet I am still disappointed.
Human nature doesn't end up meaning much as soon as insurers start seeing the statistical difference.
As the difference gets more pronounced with the lane assist and auto stopping features, rates on any new cars without these features will go up relatively.
What insurers are really scared of is when your 16yo kid and four of his/her friends drunkenly go off a cliff on their way to prom. That's hard to assess the risk of and it costs them big bucks. These kinds of oddball high dollar edge case accidents are exactly the kind that self driving cars seem to be getting into. A Tesla killing someone by driving into a barrier or semi truck sends chills down the insurer's spine because it's only a little bit of bad luck (from the insurer's point of view) away from a not so dead customer that's maxes out their collision and medical coverage.
If I were an insurer I would not be offering any automation discounts until we have more data.
Well, yes, obviously. The commenter's point is that there will be a tipping point where insurance agencies look at those "crazy prom death" accident stats and see they happen 2x or 10x more often with human drivers. At that point, the cost of insuring a human driver is going to be 2x or 10x the cost of insuring an AI driver.
Not at all. Computers are supposed to be orders of magnitudes better than humans at certain tasks. If you're going to put computers in charge of our lives on the road at high speeds, why wouldn't we expect them to also be orders of magnitudes better at driving?
Also, if I'm a lot better than the "average driver" (where I assume such statistics also include people texting and driving or driving drunk or having not slept for 40h, etc), then I certainly wouldn't be satisfied with an automatic system that is only a little better than the average driver.
And I didn't even get into the whole thing about car companies, including (especially?) Tesla, which compare highway Autopilot accidents to all road conditions accidents, to show how their Autopilot is "better," or the thing about such systems making errors that humans would never make, just like language translation systems can make totally different translation errors compared to humans, even if they "score the same."
To keep things short, yes, I think it's completely reasonable that self-driving systems should be far FAR better than your "average human driver." I don't even know why this is controversial.
Also, I agree with the Ford CEO that all carmakers, even Tesla, overestimated self-driving capability over making an electric vehicle. The ability to make a great EV will matter far more for these companies' survivability in the next 10 years than making a good self-driving car. But it's almost like most of them focused more and invested more in the self-driving capability than switching to EVs. Big BIG mistake!
Even Tesla, the only major pure EV company, mistakenly almost "bet the farm" on self-driving to the detriment of making a high-value EV. How? Well, by putting very expensive "full self-driving hardware" (that turns out is not actually full self-driving) into every Model 3 car out there. Terrible decision. They would've done a lot better if every Model 3 was $5,000-$10,000 cheaper by default without all of that gimmick.
Who claimed that driving is among those "certain tasks"? No, in the near future computers will at best be marginally better than human drivers. Computers are better at decision latency. But that merely compensates for some of their current shortcomings.
And that will be sufficient to save thousands of lives every year. Do you not like preventing deaths?
Delaying "marginally better" for "orders of magnitude better" means delaying the deployment of life-saving measures.
They need to be safer than me, not the average driver. I suspect the lower 50% of drivers cause > 50% of the collisions.
But I'd they are safer than the average driver, you gain from their widespread adoption even if they aren't safer than you. Because you don't have the choice of replacing other drivers with you...
If we're talking about removing dangerous drivers from the road, I'm all for it. It should be next to impossible to get a license for most people, if what we really care about is safety.
They probably, for acceptance, have to be consistently as safe in like circumstances, they can't just be as safe on average. Which, if there are circumstances in which they are much safer, also means they end up needing to be much safer on balance, but it's not really the on-balance comparison that drives that.
And the promise is that they're only going to get more reliable with time.
Conversely, keeping back self-driving cars just because they upset your sensibilities who specifically should die, i.e. random group A instead of random group B even though A is larger, means you're effectively advocating that more people should die. That's grossly negligent.
https://www.claimsjournal.com/news/international/2018/06/01/...
I'll bet that to really make it work well, you also need to redesign roads to suit the new cars.
In any case, I'll believe it when I see widespread/universal adoption of self-driving in constrained environments (mining vehicles, warehouses, storage yards). Step two will be things like garbage trucks (slow, expensive, otherwise automated, phone home when it gets in trouble).