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Comment by sharkmerry | Hacker News Reader

>> Humans fucking drive straight into lakes because the map told them to.

I had to check if this was real or just a bit from the office that imprinted. Googling "humans drive into lake" only finds one incident. Which occured at midnight.[1]

and if you look at the research, they didnt convert it into an 8, they simply extended the middle part of the 3 a little bit [2]

[1]https://fox8.com/news/a-little-embarrassed-woman-follows-car...

[2]https://cdn0.tnwcdn.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2020/02...

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> Googling "humans drive into lake" only finds one incident.

You'd find more examples if you tried slightly harder ("lake" isn't the important part!):

https://kfgo.com/2020/02/10/man-drives-into-mississippi-rive...

https://www.cnet.com/news/man-drives-into-river-gps-china/

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/man-watches-wife-bu...

https://abc13.com/587100/

https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/03/gps-tracking-...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/bradford/7962212....

https://www.boston25news.com/news/man-drives-into-pond-while...

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/gps-leads-nj-motorist-...

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1164705/BMW-left-te...

https://www.westsiderag.com/2013/05/01/gps-brain-fail-driver...

https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/driver-follows-g...

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/01/waze-app-directs-dri...

https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/2-drivers-stuck-on-train-tr...

https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2013/06/19/mbta-train-ac...

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-01/car-being-hit-by-trai...

https://abc7chicago.com/395218/

People act like humans are immune from making idiotic decisions or from ignoring their surroundings or something. That's...super naive.

But in these examples, would AI driving not fail there too? Heres an example of AI driving into a river https://electrek.co/2019/03/10/tesla-crash-river-claim-unint... so it happens as well.

would you be fooled by the attached image in my previous comment? If you were fooled, would your default action be to accelerate by 50mph, when no other drivers are?

> would AI driving not fail there too?

It might if it were relying solely on a GPS and nothing else, but, of course, none of them do that. The biggest difference is that navigation software can improve and sensors don't stop paying attention. You can't say either of those things about people who screw up in exactly the same circumstances.

> Heres an example of AI driving into a river https://electrek.co/2019/03/10/tesla-crash-river-claim-unint.... so it happens as well.

Let's note that the article is skeptical that the problem was actually the car:

"I want to give the driver the benefit of the doubt, but every time we have seen similar circumstances, the logs always pointed to a user mistake."

But even giving the driver the benefit of the doubt and asserting as a premise that the AI caused the accident, we're still left with the fact that people unintentionally accelerate their vehicles all the damn time. If a machine does it once in a while, that's not a regression, that's the baseline.

>> we're still left with the fact that people unintentionally accelerate their vehicles all the goddamn time.

Again, do they do this by 50+mph ALL THE GODDAMN TIME?

>> If a machine does it once in a while, that's not a regression, that's the baseline.

If all the machines do it at once though? The impact of self-driving failing is a lot more than 1 person, typically.

Also, we dont know the rate of error. There are 1.2 Billion drivers in the world. 3.5 Billions smartphone users. Its safe to say 50% of drivers use GPS. So 600 Millions Drivers using GPS? There arent even 1 million Tesla's on the road yet and they are already having incidents.

> Again, do they do this by 50+mph ALL THE GODDAMN TIME?

No. Usually they crash into something first. I can tell you one personal anecdote, though, where in 1995 the gas pedal in my truck actually got physically stuck in the down position and I had to hold the brake pedal down with one foot while wedging my other foot underneath the gas pedal to loosen it. Of course I could only do this after the several (5 or 6?) seconds it took for me to understand what was happening and then react. 6 seconds is a long time to react to a catastrophic event. Humans aren't great at it. We almost always do the wrong thing. We turn the wrong way. We push the wrong pedal. We don't understand our surroundings. We ignore our surroundings.

Anyway. Please note I'm not saying that this isn't a failure of the nav system. It is. I'm saying that anyone claiming that humans are magically immune is wrong because humans are very dumb and make dumb mistakes all of the time.

Why not just pop it into neutral?

Panic and adrenaline? I think you must have missed the part where I said "humans are very dumb and make dumb mistakes all of the time".

One important thing all drivers should be repeatedly told (trained) is that the breaks (in a technically sound car) will always overpower the engine. In a runaway scenario, hit the break with full force and stay on it till engine cutoff.

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