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Comment by goodplay | Hacker News Reader

I am also human driver and I feel safer around "dumb" cars. I don't ever intend to ride a self driving car, and will do my best to avoid being near one.

Aside from being vulnerable to malicious actors, self-driving cars make "cold-hearted" mistakes that don't make sense; mistakes that humans would never make. Sure, the total number of mistakes they make will be lower than the equivalent number of accidents caused by humans. However, having human life lost to the type of mistakes self-driven cars make is, in my opinion, an unacceptable price to pay.

If I must loose my life to a car-related indecent, I want the it to be caused by a human, and not some quirk or edge-case in an algorithm or neural net.

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As someone almost killed this evening while driving home from the Thanksgiving holiday weekend by a driver texting and not paying attention behind me at highway speeds (with my wife and newborn daughter in the car), I welcome the cold, calculating embrace of self driving cars with open arms.

Edit: The driver ended up impacting a semi trailer that had been in front of us, with me leaving the lane for the safety of the grassy interstate median.

Firstly, I'm glad you and your family were not harmed.

I do not in any way mean for this to be offensive or disrespectful, but would you still welcome self-driving cars had this incident been caused by a malfunctioning self-driving car as apposed to a reckless driver?

My point is that self-driving cars lack the common sense that humans have. A human would immediately halt if they hear a child scream near their car, a car would continue moving along as if nothing is happening if it isn't designed or trained to detect screams.

Until machines gain sensory and cognitive capabilities that exceed ours, and a working comprehension of human values, I maintain my stance regarding this issue.

> A human would immediately halt if they hear a child scream near their car, a car would continue moving along as if nothing is happening if it isn't designed or trained to detect screams.

I don't know to what extent they use sound as an input (makes sense that they'd do, given horns). But for what I've seen, self-driving cars are much better than humans at detecting pedestrians in their vicinity, including cases in which a child can't actually be seen by a human driver and he happens not to be screaming.

Machines are much better than humans at detecting pedestrians, but only in situations they are specifically designed or trained for. If a machine finds itself in an unfamiliar or unknown settings (or if its sensors fail in a way not accounted for in the design), it will fail catastrophically. A human will not.

Hell, machines tend to fail even if the setting varies slightly from what they are designed for; just see the numerous ways self-driven machines failed recently for examples.

Machines must gain sensory and cognitive capabilities that exceed ours and a working comprehension of human values for me to trust them.

> but only in situations they are specifically designed or trained for

Where are you getting this from? An obstacle in the LIDAR is an obstacle, there's no common-sense or training needed for the car to know that.

> the numerous ways self-driven machines failed recently

I can only think of the Tesla crash, Tesla cars being notorious for trying to work around the need of LIDAR or similar (being deemed too expensive). What are the other, numerous examples?

> If a machine finds itself in an unfamiliar or unknown settings (or if its sensors fail in a way not accounted for in the design), it will fail catastrophically. A human will not.

Fail catastrophically how? Worst-case scenario for a well-designed car in a situation it can't understand is to park itself and refuse to go on unassisted. There's no neeed for general AI to implement such a behavior.

>An obstacle in the LIDAR is an obstacle, there's no common-sense or training needed for the car to know that.

>Worst-case scenario for a well-designed car in a situation it can't understand is to park itself and refuse to go on unassisted.

All these are false positives. What I object to are the costs of false negatives; A situation where the car mis-recognizes an abnormal situation as normal, and then proceeds to act on it's failed understanding.

The Tesla is a good example of this; the car failed to recognize the obstacle in front of it and acted accordingly (namely, crashing full speed into the object). Regardless of the underlying reason, a machine did not recognize it was in an unknown setting, and thus failed to react correctly. A human, on the other hand, notices, and will generally use what capabilities they possess to at least attempt to handle the situation safely.

I do acknowledge that self-driving cars will likely be statistically safer, but until these cars completely exceed the all the capabilities of human drivers, I refuse to trust them. Regardless of statistics.

>The Tesla is a good example of this

A car without LIDAR, only relying on camera.

>A human, on the other hand, notices

The camera didn't even doubt that there wasn't an obstacle in its path due to how it camouflaged against the background. I doubt the human would've seen it.

And you're speaking of a prototype hacked on a car barely prepared for self-driving situations (again, no LIDAR and early iteration) and being used improperly.

You're not making a good argument here.

So your numerous examples are the one example of a car crash for not using a LIDAR?

> would you still welcome self-driving cars had this incident been caused by a malfunctioning self-driving car as apposed to a reckless driver

Absolutely yes. Because if a malfunctioning self-driving car will cause an accident, this will be treated as a bug and fixed. Updates will be rolled out to every self-driving car, making it very unlikely the same accident will ever happen again.

Issues with human drivers, on the other hand, cannot be easily fixed with an update. Human drivers repeat the same "malfunctions" again and again (like driving too fast, driving while being drunk, not paying enough attention to the situation, ...).

Do you take flights or go near where a plane might crash? Because they're autopiloted. They are safer than manually-driven cars too.

A self-driven plane doesn't share the same challenges a self-driven car does. Furthermore, planes usually have at least one rigorously trained pilot to handle it should the computer fail or make incorrect discussions, and a relatively large response time window.

Apples and oranges.

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