Re:Uber’s self-driving car could not detect pedestrians outs...
by SilasX on Wednesday November 06, 2019 @03:23PM
(#21466769)
This classification failure reminds me of the concept of "Disguised queries" I saw on LessWrong [1]. That is, there's the question you really want to answer:
A) Should I avoid driving this car into this thing?
and then there are subsidiary questions that help to answer that, but would be fully obviated if you already had a good answer for A):
B1) Is this a human?
B2) Is this a vehicle?
B3) Is this unrecognizable?
The "natural category" here is "drive into" vs "don't drive into", not "human vs vehicle vs fruit stand vs other".
In the article, the A)-type question is whether the object has vanadium, and the B)-type questions are whether the object is a blegg (blue round thing) or a rube (red square thing). The distinction becomes stark when you know it has vanadium, but it doesn't neatly fall on the blegg/rube continuum.
A) Should I avoid driving this car into this thing?
and then there are subsidiary questions that help to answer that, but would be fully obviated if you already had a good answer for A):
B1) Is this a human?
B2) Is this a vehicle?
B3) Is this unrecognizable?
The "natural category" here is "drive into" vs "don't drive into", not "human vs vehicle vs fruit stand vs other".
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4FcxgdvdQP45D6Skg/disguised-...
In the article, the A)-type question is whether the object has vanadium, and the B)-type questions are whether the object is a blegg (blue round thing) or a rube (red square thing). The distinction becomes stark when you know it has vanadium, but it doesn't neatly fall on the blegg/rube continuum.