Computers don't get board and start daydreaming (when I win the lottery where will the pool go in my mansion). Computers don't get distracted reading (ie facebook) while driving. Computers can have redundancy so the equivalent of a heart attack won't be endanger everybody (this assumes of course the redundancy works - computers have a lot of failure modes of their own)
There is plenty of opportunity for computers to be better than humans. It is a hard problem though.
Re:Driverless cars are stuck in a jam
by rootusrootus on Tuesday October 29, 2019 @12:55PM
(#21389316)
OTOH, humans can tell that a merging lane is a merging lane. Hard problem indeed :).
Today that is a factor. When (if...) computers figure that out though they never forget to look to see if the lane is merging.
Re:Driverless cars are stuck in a jam
by rootusrootus on Tuesday October 29, 2019 @02:39PM
(#21390608)
At the risk of showing just how ignorant I am of current state-of-the-art AI, it feels like the biggest block with self-driving cars is how short their memory is and how little high-level logic is implemented. The computer doesn't feel like it's driving the car as an activity so much as simply responding to inputs as they come into sensor range, sometimes correlated, frequently not.
> Personally the only justification I've heard for self-driving cars being safer is "computers are faster than people". Yes- but at what?
Faster at making the right decision - and the wrong decision too.
Computers can "watch" every direction at once.
Re:Driverless cars are stuck in a jam
by EForEndeavour on Tuesday October 29, 2019 @01:37PM
(#21389859)
They'll also happily be fooled by adversarial patches (optical illusions) in ways that wouldn't fool humans. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/4/8/18297410/ai-tesl...
And humans are happily fooled by conditions (optical illusions, rain) in ways that wouldn't fool machines.
If you want to murder people on the roadway, there are lots of ways to do this that are easier than fancy adversarial attacks (which only fool one sensor type, at best... and are then patched).
Re:Driverless cars are stuck in a jam
by rootusrootus on Tuesday October 29, 2019 @12:56PM
(#21389338)
But can they remember that they just saw something that is not visible any more because it went behind another object?
The fact that a majority of the public think it's the opposite way around, that skeptical opinions about self-driving cars must provide evidence, is the industry's succes- the triumph of marketing over reason.
Of course the industry has no such data. Research has shown that this data would take many decades to obtain:
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1478.html
Personally the only justification I've heard for self-driving cars being safer is "computers are faster than people". Yes- but at what?