On the other hand, there is a lot of hype and promises being made without the results to back them up.
Yes, there is.
You can debate the exact figures/circumstances, but the numbers are good, and improving all the time. Humans are just not very good at guiding tons of metal around at high speeds, which isn't very surprising when you think about it.
One accident for every 4.34 million miles is already pretty good (compared to 500k miles for humans) - if it were rolled out today across all cars it would probably save thousands of lives in the US. Yes these quarterly numbers are in the best conditions and supervised, no that doesn't invalidate them, particularly as they show dramatic improvement at the same time as they keep expanding the conditions in which autopilot functions.
There will always be a long tail, but computers are getting very close to good enough for highway driving, known truck routes, and known taxi routes.
https://electrek.co/2019/10/23/tesla-autopilot-safety-9x-saf... https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport?redirect=no
That is exactly what it does: it invalidates them. Comparing apples to oranges is an invalid comparison.
Let's compare the numbers again when there's sufficient data for self-driving tech driving in all environmental conditions without supervision and without human assistance jumping in whenever it gets rough. At that point, a comparison is valid. Until then you're comparing someone who aces tests with someone who is just doing good, but the first guy is only solving first-graders' multiple-choice tests and cheats by asking a friend who graduated at a university whenever a question pops up that isn't "choose one of these three", while the second guy is on his own in the middle of his college education.
Are they better than average humans in average conditions already? Yes.
They don't need to be all powerful AGI which can replace humans in all circumstances to be useful and save lives.
I think average conditions do matter, and supervised computers will continue to take over driving until humans are simply not required. Of course they will not replace humans this year or next, but at some point humans will be passengers, not drivers.
Creating an AI that only functions on dry sunny days is basically useless from a safety perspective.
...though it does save people time since they can be doing something else while in transit!
A human interferes in precisely those situations in which the machine either decided to surrender or - worse - started doing something stupid and the human caught it quickly enough to prevent an accident. It is safe to assume that the human has a much better safety record in such situations.
And who does the human surrender to when he fails at driving? Should we also not count human accidents that could have been prevented if there was a world-class race driver ready to take over when the actual driver makes the failure?
By quoting an average, assuming those numbers hold when scaled up, you are compressing the actual distribution into a single number. Overall that high-level number may be correct.
But at the same time, the kinds of people that get into accidents will be a different distribution.
How you drive factors a lot into how likely you are into getting in an accident, even allowing for the other drivers.
If the distribution becomes essentially random then you might actually have a higher chance of getting into an accident than before, if you were a very careful driver.
(Obviously those that benefit the most are the bad drivers since they'll no longer be bad)
Just remember that whenever you summarize a distribution into a single number like an average, you loose a lot of information in the process.
Most people are simply not careful drivers all the time. This is one major advantage computers have - they don't get tired or distracted.
Time will tell as we get more data about supervised driving, but I think it's inaccurate to say we don't have data yet, it is imperfect of course, but it does point to computers being safer than humans in some very common conditions over millions of miles.
Also keep in mind the outrage factor. The reason airplane crashes are so feared is because of the loss of control. Meanwhile alcohol and cars are much more dangerous but much lower outrage because you still feel like you have some control.
That's a vacuous statement. Evidence would be a deployed self-driving fleet. At which point it would be mission accomplished and we wouldn't be discussing this.
Now if you want theoretical considerations instead of evidence, then consider the lower reaction times of machines.
Meanwhile, Teslas run into the backs of car carriers because they only recognise the car it's carrying and not the truck bed extending behind it. It might react faster, but it needs to identify the danger first and up until now, it's much worse at that in many situations.
Yes, you're right, once it's safer, it's safer. That makes your statements just as vacuous as theirs.
And someone rear ended me the other day because they didn't notice cars were stopping. Yes, self-driving cars make mistakes, but humans make all sorts of mistakes, too.
The question is, do self driving cars have more accidents per mile (or more damage per mile/injuries per mile/ deaths per mile) than human driven cars?
It should matter if they have less, but in the real world it doesn't matter, because it's "scary" to be rear-ended by an unthinking machine, and business as usual to be rear-ended by a clumsy human, so people will always hold machines to a much higher standard.
Human makes a mistake, they could have been tired, distracted, got something in their eye, or anything else.
Machine makes a mistake, it becomes a question of why and will it make that same mistake every time?
Self-driving cars don't take risks when they make mistakes while humans are exposed to physical or legal consequences that are well understood by everyone on the road.
I know self driving cars feel different to us now, but they aren't really different in kind, just degree. I am sure people felt these concerns when cars were introduced in general.
"activating auto steer increased crash rate by 50%"
Tesla safety stats are ok when compared to the average car on the road. But that's because they are expensive, high quality cars driven by middle aged people. It's the safest car demographic on the road. When comparing auto drive teslas to equivalent luxury cars they look terrible. Though i think if you ignore the autodrive they're perfectly good cars.
They are absolutely not "less safe", because they are all human driven cars.
Why not say the rest of your argument with the fact that cruise control made cars "less safe than human driven cars" because people fell asleep at the wheel and drifted off the road.
This is very much a solvable problem.
If your standard is that self driving must be perfect then i'd argue you're being unreasonable.
If your standard is that self driving cars must be better than that is something that can easily be tested.
"Teslas" do not "run into the backs of car carriers".
I don't know where you are repeating that from, because you've clearly never driven one, but the core concept of autopilot is that the human should step in whenever a situation is confusing and/or dangerous. If the car does not recognize a situation it will always alert the driver to take over.
The parent poster was referencing this, which I found immediately using Google:
https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/cars/1231834/tesla-mode...
That's just your opinion, while my comment is a statement of reality as it stands.
> Evidence would be a deployed self-driving fleet.
This is also just your opinion. Evidence could also be a self-driving vehicle that doesn't drive under the beds of trucks, run people over or is statistically safer than human drivers.
> Now if you want theoretical considerations instead of evidence, then consider the lower reaction times of machines.
Consider the high error rate of machine learning when it comes to novel situations that driving exposes drivers to. Human beings can understand situations they are in and adapt based on that understanding, whereas this generation of ML does not.
Computers have the theoretical potential for a lot of things. The internet had the theoretical potential for mass informational enlightenment, democracy and resource allocation in the face of dwindling scarcity of resources.
Instead, the computers and the internet have become tools of mass manipulation, weapons for totalitarian regimes, and despite an abundance of food, people still go hungry.
I understand that a lot of people are sold on hype, and believe promises that were made, however the results are just not there.
No, perhaps I am to blame for incomplete quoting, but you're asking for evidence about the future, whether machine learning will be able to tackle this problem. So it's not just about current computers but also future computers. We can make predictions, but hard evidence would require a time machine or some first-principles proof that humans are the optimal arrangement of atoms for car control.
> however the results are just not there.
Well of course, but what information does that add to the discussion? That level 5 autonomy is an achievement that lies in the future is a premise of this thread and I think most people take this as fact. Bemoaning the absence of evidence for the results of a technology that's expected to only arrive in the future... doesn't make sense.
The relevant part is the last: "statistically safer than human drivers."
Every driving system that has existed or will exist will make errors due to extremely novel situations. Given the energies involved, such errors will lead to crashes, some of which will be horrible.
The standard for self driving systems is, at a high level, simple: statistically safer, by a fair margin, than human drivers.
Considering other utility unlocked by autonomous cars (e.g. less stress, life-hours freed up, helping the disabled) they could even be marginally less safe than human drivers and still provide a net benefit.
And not just that, but individually they have to be seen as safer. As in, I am not going to be happy with a computer driving me around that is merely safer than an average driver. Given that I'm middle aged, don't drink and drive, or drive while exhausted, etc, and I haven't ever caused an accident, I'm going to need a little more assurance.
I believe Elon Musk has talked about targeting '10x safer' than an average driver. My guess is that's a sufficient margin to cover the vast majority of better than average drivers.
Reacting quickly except in emergencies is almost always worse and more likely to cause an accident in an environment consisting mostly of human drivers.
I don't think your use of statistics is correct.
Tesla's self driving has resulted in cars swerving into gore points, for example.
That's assuming accidents are caused by complex and unusual scenarios instead of humans being inattentive during routine tasks. If machines fail at complex tasks but fail safely then that's not an argument against self-driving cars being safe, it's only one about their limited usefulness.
They don't, not at the moment. The software detects the situation is outside its capability space and says "jesus, take the wheel!".
For all practical intents and purposes the only reasonable way to interpret the current self-driving car statistics is to treat every single human intervention as a would-be accident. That rate is somewhere in the 1 per 10000 km ballpark. That's - for now - orders of magnitudes worse than human drivers.
Not to mention that many of the times control has to be taken have nothing to do with other drivers or even other cars.
The reality is that a car can only be driven by a general artificial intelligence. We're nowhere in that ballpark.
Not necessarily. If the AI response is to stop the car when it can't figure something out, then the cost of each of those situations is the car not continuing on as quickly as it should (and maybe stuck cars if we dont have a way to override the stop/take control manually).
Every hand over to a driver is not an accident.
It seems that most accidents are caused by human error and humans being distracted or under the influence of a substance.
Weather and complex situations would only rank at the bottom of the list and therefore could be considered a YAGNI problem.
If you remove the human element from the driving, already the top 4 causes of accidents on the road would be reduced drastically.
So at the moment a self driving car may not be able to handle some of the most extreme situations that a human driver could handle however, I would challenge that assumption and simply ask: does it have to?
This is a logical fallacy. You are inferring from a comparatively low incident rate that the condition must also be rare, which is not a reasonable conclusion to make.
#1 was speeding. Self driving cars would be trivially programmed not to do that, of course. But this one is tricky to interpret, because Americans habitually speed. That means two things: Speeding is trivially something that can be listed as a factor; it wouldn't be a lot less meaningful to say that bucket seats are a factor. And not speeding might actually be more dangerous. That leaves me thinking this one is equivocal for the purposes of the debate.
#s 2, 3, 4 and 6 are drunk driving, distractions, cell phones, and driver fatigue. Those are easy point for self driving cars, of course.
#5 is weather. This feels like an easy one in favor of humans, considering that all the major self driving car companies deal with weather by avoiding it. That's not much of a vote of confidence.
#6 is red light accidents. I would want to see more about override statistics before interpreting this one. It could be that self-driving cars literally never miss a red light. But, given that some of the intersections in my city have quite confusing traffic light arrangements - reflectors that make the light invisible outside of certain angles, lighted intersections spaced 40 feet apart that are separate lighted intersections nonetheless, printed signs informing drivers of non-standard semantics for that light, wildly varying yellow light durations, etc. - I have my doubts about self-driving cars being able to properly deal with the traffic lights. If there are any tests going on in a similar city, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that operator overrides are routine at lighted intersections.
Zooming out to the big picture, though - the ones that are a clear win for self-driving cars are all instances where the human's decisionmaking capacity has been impaired. Which implies that humans are really quite good at operating vehicles when they aren't being stupid. But it also implies something that I think doesn't get enough credit among many advocates of self-driving cars: the fact that, behind the wheel of every safe self-driving car, there's a highly trained human operator who is not drunk and not tired and not diddling around with their cell phone. And we've got evidence to suggest that, when the human operator is a bit more human, the self driving car's accident rate suddenly spikes considerably.
And that's a big deal. It's common to place those errors on the shoulders of the car's driver, but that's trying to have your cake and eat it too. You can't wave away every fatality involving a car on autopilot by saying, "Oh, that wasn't the car's fault, the driver was being an idiot," and also claim that we've got good evidence to suggest that we know how to make cars operate safely without relying on a human driver to act as a backstop for the fallibility of the human programmers. It may eventually come - I think we all hope it does - but given how, in AI, the last year or two's worth of R&D always ends up taking another decade or two before everyone just gives up on the whole enterprise and moves on to a greener field, a little skepticism is far from unwarranted.
As the number of situations where self-driving kicks in increases to include more complex environments, it's likely the numbers will shift.
That's why it takes years to enable city level (L2 and maybe L3 in rush hours) driving.
At the same time it really looks like Tesla will enable it this year, as Elon's predicted timelines are getting shorter.
People said that about computers when it came to basic computations.
They said it about computers when it came to landing on the moon.
They said it about computers when it came to electronic tax returns, digital currencies, music, movies, video games and everything else in the history of the world that computers once couldn't do, but now do with ease, and much much more accurately and faster than the old way of doing whatever it is.
With sub-millisecond reaction times and eight cameras and radar instead of only two eyes, it's blatantly obvious computers will be better drivers than humans.
It's just a question of when.
Does it matter though? If it drives like my grandma, I can still do other things while in a car and hate commuting/traffic jams a bit less.
So you can't do other things while in the car.
But then again, I am actually able to discern what is a bridge and what isn't, and thus don't have the need to suddenly cover my eyes and scream, "I'm confused and I don't want to drive anymore!"
These vehicles have a superior sensor system to us. Our processing is better but sometimes their superior sensors are better.
Except arguably that's when the car is least effective! That is when pedestrians walk out or vans reverse with the wrong kind of shiny paintwork. Reaction time is less important at low speeds vs effective and accurate processing.
Actively driving results in my attention being engaged, all the time. Passively letting the car drive will 100% reduce my engagement, and when the car fails I will not notice. And sure, for now it's my decision, until it becomes mandatory on new cars alongside automatic breaking etc...
https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1202778123433119745
It's even fricking speeding up!
That may be very true, but are most of us fully present in the act of driving ? Where the ML is deficient we can make up for it by making the infrastructure more robust.
Can't make human behaviour inside that infrastructure more robust though. So we'd need to completely split human and autonomous traffic. That'll be about as big a challenge as creating the autonomous cars in the first place.
My guess is at least 15 years before we'll see any large scale adoption of autonomous vehicles. And that's for countries like the Netherlands which are already pretty well organised. Countries with chaotic driving styles and roads like Italy will take longer and the third world might take decades longer because of the lack of rules in many of those countries.