Normal desktop failure modes don't work well here.
"Hi, this is your car. I've discovered that the road is icy, and am currently in the middle of a 360. Would you like to (a) take over, (b) call an ambulance, or (c) retry?"
Too late! You've crashed.
"Hi, this is your car. I've discovered that the road is icy, and am currently in the middle of a 360. Would you like to (a) take over, (b) call an ambulance, or (c) retry?"
Too late! You've crashed.
You have no faith in AI. The car will always be better at driving than the human. It would be much better at handling a 360 than a human ever could. Actually humans are very bad at handling 360s unless you are a pro.
I don't think this is true yet. We can interpret the incoming data incredibly well in ways the machine vision can't yet match. This is absolutely vital for driving. The difference between an empty trash bag in the road and a toddler in the road is a matter of vital importance, and correctly identifying the difference matters a lot.
Humans area actually capable of being incredibly good at driving. The problem is we are also incredibly unreliable.
I'm sure I've stopped for empty trash bags before because I wasn't sure if they contained something solid. That doesn't mean I failed as a driver. Everything went fine. Same if it's a computer but it might stop more often than a human.
In order for any AI to handle any situation, it must first be programmed to do so. If that situation was an unknown, you get undefined behavior. Undefined behavior in a car traveling down the road is not a good thing to place a bet on... especially your life.
This is why majority of sane driverless vehicle talk has concluded a human driver must always be in the driver seat, ready to take control. There's an impossible volume of failure modes a driverless car must contend with, everything from someone pointing an infrared laser at the distance sensors, to complete power failure, to a sudden rockslide, a bird darting in front of the car, lines missing from a windy and hilly road, etc.
In normal, daily mundane driving - driverless cars are expected to excel. Sitting in traffic is mind numbing, and mistakes happen when driver's minds wonder. In "active" driving situations, a human brain will almost always excel.
And people who do research in this area have concluded that this doesn't work. People let their attention drift (even if they don't actively perform some other task) and, even if people are more or less paying attention, they haven't been driving and switching modes in that way is difficult.
We're definitely reaching the point with assistive driving systems where there probably needs to be more discussion about how much assistance makes sense if no one is willing to fully turn over control.
For many human drivers on the roads right now, the response to a sudden weird situation is either going to be "brake heavily" or "swerve dangerously."
You don't have to get "undefined behavior" in response to an unknown situation. The AI can simply default to braking to a stop in the absence of any better programmed alternative. This will already put it on par with most drivers. Better, in fact, because the AI can begin braking instantly.
I personally find that the majority of driverless vehicle talk vastly overestimates the average human driver, and demands unreasonable perfection from the computers.
Next up is per-wheel braking. Not just stability control, but actual directed thrust. The computer can control each wheel independently. Humans just have one brake pedal. Four wheel steering might even make a comeback.
Or a combination of both, potentially causing the tires to slip and the car to leave the roadway!
When people say that it doesn't work, I really think they're just saying that they can't stand having other people get ahead by breaking the rules, and they'd rather drive more dangerously than let that happen.
The list of situations a car has to react to is not infinite. You can program a reasonable response for a broader list of situations than you could for a human. And really, a human would fare very badly in your situations so a computer could hardly do worse.
Not exactly. The situations we're discussing are more-or-less unique, having their own environment variables to contend with.
Not to mention, there are scenarios where a driverless car will never be able to operate (such as off roads, or back-country/non-mapped areas, or when road lines are covered by snow or just not there due to road construction, etc...).
Roads are anything but a constant. I cannot foresee any future where someone can get into a vehicle, in the back seat, tell the vehicle where to go, and then promptly take a nap.
Even with high-grade multi-million dollar vehicles such as military drones, they still require two humans to be at the controls at any time (even though in the air, collision opportunities are almost non-existent). The sensors and computers in a mere $20,000 vehicle aren't going to compete with this stuff.
A human will always have to pay attention to the road and be ready to take control. This aspect almost completely nullifies the desire for a driverless vehicle.
No, that's not how AI nor computers work. It's quite trivial to have a default behavior like "brake", the notion that a new situation will confuse the computer is just you watching too many movies.
Would add also something that requires an actual driver to take the wheel periodically to not get lazy and forget what it's like to drive (as apparently what has happened with some airline pilots?)
Two engineers are arguing: a mechanical engineer and a software engineer.
The software engineer brags:
If we were the ones making cars, they'd go twice as fast as they do now and they'd use half the fuel!
The mechanical engineer replies:
Yes, but if you'd want to break in case of an emergency you'd get a pop-up saying: Are you sure you want to break? Yes/No/Cancel.
The mechanical engineer says, "It's a loose belt. Let's tighten that and we'll be all set."
The chemical engineer says, "No, it's fuel contamination. We need to drain the fuel, filter it, and then we can be on our way."
The software engineer says, "No, all we have to do is turn the car off, get out, shut all the doors, then get back in and turn the car back on."
The irony is that I now own a car for which "reboot it" is a valid troubleshooting step....
At a talk to an audience of avionics programmers, the speaker at one point asks: "Tell me truthfully; how many of you would be comfortable flying in a plane where your team had done the software?"
Onlt a couple of people put their hands up. The speaker targets someone at the front. "You have that much confidence in your work?"
"I'd be fine," they reply. "If my team wrote the software, the plane would never even leave the ground."