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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

I think these 'humans are terrible at driving' statements, while true, also forget to mention that 'computers are also terrible at driving'. There are near infinite edge cases in driving a vehicle, and I have yet to see any convincing proof the current machine learning efforts are truly up for the challenge. Edge cases are where computers fail: That general intelligence they're missing is needed to decide what to do. Even Waymo is offloading that to a call center of remote drivers. Humans can definitely be faultier at consistent driving in a way computers are not.

I think the ideal case remains investing in safety systems that ensure inattentiveness of a driver doesn't cause an accident, while still leaving the human in control of the ultimate decision making of a vehicle.

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Presumably, computers can get better at driving cars while humans cannot, so eventually computers will win this particular competition like they've won on chess, go, and tons of other things.

Chess and go are closed systems. And humans can get better at driving, especially if they have better tools. And really, if you want to maximize safety, you can just make cars safer and slower. Then it won't even matter how good of a driver you are.

But what computers are good at is not getting drunk, tired, and distracted.

You have hit the mark. And it isn't just exceptional circumstances; there is a skill and expectation distribution amongst human drivers that can be eliminated here.

We don't really care about the best human drivers. The challenge is preventing the worst human drivers from sitting behind the wheel and eliminating edge cases where an otherwise competent driver is not fit to drive due to some personal circumstance.

To piggyback off what you said -- "best" is much harder to define in driving compared to chess and Go, because those games have a much more defined victory condition than does normal driving. How do you "win" at (non-competitive) driving? A driver with a 0% accident rate might not necessarily be better if they drove at a speed of 0.5 mph.

OTOH, I could reductio, humans can get better at language translation, while computers cannot.

Think of it this way: driving is a translation problem.

Why can’t computers get better at language translation?

I translated many Russian scientific journal articles to English via Google Translate, and the improvements since 2015 are striking. A friend of mine pointed out that might be largely due to the corrections I provided. Either way.

Well, I've been using Google translate to translate small sentences of Greek to English and back and the results have been consistently abysmally bad since the start (whenever that was- I can't say I remember; but before 2015 anyway).

Indeed, they demonstrably have over the last decade.

Humans can get better at driving. Instructional campaigns, assistive technology, art, these things can all make ya better.

Sure, but when you fix a bug in the driving software you deploy it to all cars simultaneously. It's harder to teach all humans about a corner case you encountered only a couple of times.

Similarly, all your cars can decide slamming into a wall at full speed is a good idea; they all run the same software.

In 2018 it is still easier to teach the humans as a point of fact.

Ok but, isn't it fair to assume we're already doing everything we can in that regard? There's only so much energy we as a society can invest in making better drivers. AI seems to have no limit to speak of.

Ridiculously expensive for only a marginal improvement, and then people still have their hard wetware limits of concentration and reaction time. Machines have orders of magnitude better reaction time, are always 100% focused, and on aggregate, are much cheaper to teach.

If society makes driving safety a priority, it can be made really, really safe.

For example, school buses are the safest mode of transportation of any kind whatsoever in the US. Millions of kids ride naturally millions of miles per week and fatalities per year are usually in the single or double digits.

Professional drivers, professionally maintained equipment and set procedures really are enough. Most accidents happen as some combination of people in bad mental states, equipment in bad conditions and bad stuff like weather.

Remove that and driving is something people are pretty reliable at doing - especially, people don't really need faster reaction time 99% if they drive sensibly.

http://www.nsc.org/learn/safety-knowledge/Pages/news-and-res...

School buses are also more or less a long tank. They are built like rolling fortresses, they weigh a lot, and they are going to "win" any collision with anything less than a train most of the time. (You do not need the kids to wear seatbelts because, again... really nothing is going to stop that bus.) I saw an the remnants of an accident between a car and a school bus once. The car was smashed to bits. The bus did not look like it had been hit.

This, of course, doesn't scale. If everyone drove buses then buses would not be as safe. And let's not even talk about gas mileage...

I don't think GP's point is really about buses. To quote:

> Professional drivers, professionally maintained equipment and set procedures really are enough.

There is something to that. We let people drive cars after close to zero training (something I personally find to be completely ridiculous, but the world is what it is...), and then we let them drive without any direct consequences of not paying attention (penalties for breaking traffic laws are absurdly low, and enforcement way too lenient). For the other extreme, compare with professional pilots.

That said, I feel that getting all cars self-driving will be much easier to achieve than restructuring society around professional driving only, or training every driver properly and giving them appropriate incentives.

Reaction times is not all you need to drive safely though. You also need situational awareness, which means an understanding of your environment. Which machines can clearly not do at all, yet.

Until AI can develop an understanding of the world that is on par with that of humans, it will remain unable to tackle the breadth and variety of situations that humans can.

Chess, go and tons of other board games. Outside of that very limited sort of activity, computers have "beat humans" in maybe machine vision and speech recognition, but then again only on very strictly defined challenges. And once the same (kinds of) systems are deployed in the wild all sorts of tiny little details emerge that suggest maybe the computers are not so ready to take over the world, yet.

Like, oh, I don't know- adversarial examples fooling state-of-the-art machine vision systems, or speech recognition failing for all but a very few target languages etc.

The only metric which matters is fatalities per billion km, which is lower for machine drivers.

While I agree we should control for distance when comparing humans to machines I think we should also compare the type of driving. Are machines safer at driving on ice? How many human-driven fatalities happen on ice or in inclement weather?

On ice... Or driving without secondary human intervention. When a human is intervening every 1-1,000 miles do we really know how machine driven fatalities compare to human driven fatalities?

So far we have metrics on how autonomous driving fatalities where the machines are treated like a student driver in limited road conditions -- they don't drive in the rain and an instructor is ready to take over.

I wonder how the fatalities per billion miles compares between autonomous systems vs student drivers in driver's ed. I don't recall a story about a driver's ed fatality and there has probably been a lot more miles in drivers ed than autonomous miles.

> When a human is intervening every 1 1,000 miles do we really know how machine driven fatalities compare to human driven fatalities?

Do you think remote drivers can intervene so fast as to prevent a crash? I think it's only useful when the car is blocked in traffic in an unusual situation, such as when something happened to the road, or there is a protest, or something like that. SDC's should be able to stop on their own when a dangerous situation appears.

Waymo likes to play up statistics that don't matter. For instance, most of their "hundreds of thousands of miles driven" statistics they brag about in every press release constitute driving around the same handful of streets in Mountain View, CA. They don't experience variety of driving, just... the same set of roads repeatedly. In a place with ideal weather. And they can tick up a disengagement count to prevent an accident whenever they want.

The statistic we deserve is "contiguous miles driven without intervention", and it needs to be spread across a large geographic area (something Waymo cars are completely incapable of right now due to their mapping requirements).

Only if you assume that the miles are equivalent, but they aren't. The machines are handed the easy work because that's what they're currently good enough at handling, and they have a human standing by to take over at a moment's notice.

So by your rationale, we should be deploying self-driving cars now? Because AFAIK, the number of fatalities per km for cars classified as self-driving is zero, especially if you ignore all the accidents in which the human participant tried to intervene. Which of the self-driving car companies do you think would argue that their cars are now safe for general usage?

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