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Comment by rich-w-big-ego | Hacker News Reader

The main point you offer is that models can't be statically analysed and will do things unexpected that result in loss of human life. Here's my response:

- Humans also do unexpected things, like stepping on the gas instead of the brake. If Autopilot does unexpected things at 0.01% the rate that humans do unexpected things, then it is a huge safety bonus to use autopilot.

- How can we solve image recognition any other way? We must move the needle forward on our technology. If we do not struggle against the adverse side-effects of our software and make it better, we will never advance it and we will be stuck requiring human drivers for all driving tasks.

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> If Autopilot does unexpected things at 0.01% the rate that humans do unexpected things, then it is a huge safety bonus to use autopilot.

You’re forgetting a variable - the frequency or likelihood of a situation to occur. Go far enough down the long tail and neural AI can get far more deadly than human drivers.

It's unclear what your argument is

I’ll try to clarify. In my opinion, the weakness of neural systems is their inability to deal with input for which they have comparatively little or no training. There’s no way around that, except by introducing structures or systems outside the neural nets themselves that provide logical frameworks for dealing with rare events. (And I don’t just mean a bunch of logic in code. Expert systems are one potential approach, for example.)

Your point was that mosern autonomous driving systems can drastically reduce fatalities over human drivers—-and I agree, but only for circumstances for which the car’s neural systems have been well-trained. But the systems ought to be able to handle ~99.99% of the types of circumstances gracefully before most of us will trust them to safely drive us around.

>Humans also do unexpected things, like stepping on the gas instead of the brake. If Autopilot does unexpected things at 0.01

But the difference is, one human doing the wrong thing does not mean every human Will do the same thing, given the same scenario. But whereas a software running on all cars will exactly do the same wrong thing given the same input. Sure, three is also an advantage (arguably), as fixing it once fixes all cars but that has other problems in taking on the update.

You've got a point, the only problem is that we know when humans are more likely to do errors : stress , night time, long hours, high traffic, etc.

With AI we could enter a world where you'll have 0.0001% of having an accident, but this could happen anywhere anytime in any random situation (such as a specially shaped cloud in the sky).

This is what makes it unacceptable, IMHO.

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