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Comment by PeterisP | Hacker News Reader

For a self driving car, it's sufficient if its understanding of weird situations is limited to detecting "yep, I'm in a weird situation, I'm going to stop now and wait for a remote human to take control".

The situations you describe are rare - I've once had a diplomatic event that required weird rerouting and twice had cases where traffic was regulated by hand signals due to some crash on the road, but that means just a few cases over a whole lifetime. A system that can't solve these cases but recognizes them as unsolvable is a quite acceptable automated system if it can delegate control to a human inside or a remote dispatcher, which isn't that hard to do.

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These situations aren't rare at all. Just in the last few months, I've had: change in left-turn traffic pattern leaving my office onto a major road; humans guiding traffic on 2-3 separate occasions (very common around July 4th); cones dramatically changing lane patterns in construction zones; two occasions of cops blocking off a road with their cars to let a motorcade pass.

And this is just me driving (i.e. my car is parked 90% of the day). If you're talking about a self-driving Uber in D.C., one of the above events will happen on a daily basis.

Your mention of humans guiding traffic reminds me of advice from my father many years ago: never assume that a human giving you direction when you're driving is giving you good information. Always evaluate whether what they're conveying to you may be either misunderstood (e.g. what does "wave" mean??) or just plain false. Hard for a human to do.

I imagine traffic in D.C. is incredibly atypical compared to most US cities. Issues common to drivers in D.C. are probably very rare to most drivers in the US, including those in other major metropolitan areas.

I live in New England and the poster's description of DC traffic sounds like what I see all the time, from cities like Boston or even small towns like East Longmeadow.

http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2017/05/east_longmead...

We actually now understand that passing control to a human is seriously dangerous - unless you can do it a minute or so in advance, the human has to switch context from being a passive passenger (or, more likely, actively engrossed in something else) into being an active driver very quickly. Everything up to level 4 automation will cause accidents when the car attempts to hand control to a human.

Of course, there's a very reasonable argument that e.g. level 3 automation might cause fewer accidents overall, even if it kills people when it has no idea what to do, but convincing Joe Public that such a car with such a known flaw is safe is another matter.

>"yep, I'm in a weird situation, I'm going to stop now and wait for a remote human to take control".

Not that's not sufficient.

If ten people did that in a critical area during a high demand hour it would be a news story and there would be criminal charges depending on the details.

If you redefine "sufficient" to include stopping your car on the George Washington bridge because it's confused by a construction zone it still doesn't solve the backup you cause.

The exceptional cases can often be the most important, especially when you are talking about moving humans from place to place. I wonder how a self-driving car would react to something like driving in a hurricane?

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