Figure out 99.9% of driving, but otherwise take a family off a bridge when the sun is blinding the camera? Still need a steering wheel.
The person he was talking to said they were talking like normal and suddenly the phone cut off.
Computers probably can not be worse that the people already on the road.
The psychological, ethical and legal implications are completely different. If tomorrow I drive a car and run a kid over then I'll be in trouble and you'll probably never hear about it. If tomorrow I get in my Tesla self-driving car and it runs a kid over then you'll hear about it everywhere and Tesla's responsibility will be invoked. Because whose else?
The bar for self driving cars is not being as good (or bad) as a human driver, they need to be orders of magnitude safer in all situations. They need to have airplane industry numbers, not Average Joe drunk driving numbers.
Self driving needs to be better than me, not better than average.
If you tell me that no such driver assistance exists, just apply it to scenarios where it exists, like lane keep assists and automatic emergency assists
If you are better than average you can keep your dumb car.
I drive about once or twice a year, always in a rental, and consequently never really know how well my car handles or its dimensions. That, plus generally being rusty, tends to make me fairly nervous.
Yet, nevertheless, I am in charge of a 2000kg block of metal hurtling around pedestrians and cyclists at 70mph.
Scares the shit out of me, to be honest.
The last time I drove was taking my rabbit to the vet at 2AM on X-mas day, where the vet said due to Covid I would have to wait outside. Not really practical when the temperature is below zero, so I used Zipcar!
Besides that, mainly if I'm going somewhere for a week with poor public transport and high distances to cover (impractical to cycle/walk).
Both of those things relate to the fact that I have significantly better situational awareness and driver training than the vast majority of people, including significant time on track racing cars. To match my situational awareness it will not be enough for self-driving cars to rely on their own sensors, but they will need to communicate with one another and act in concert, otherwise my reading of traffic patterns and looking far ahead in the distance will always beat it out for the quickest path through traffic, or the safest response.
To me, where I see a benefit for myself personally, is that self-driving cars don't necessarily need to be better than me, they just need to be better than most, and turn driving from an active to a passive activity. It means I can be engaged in other things. But, that's also the rub. I /like/ driving, so I don't want to exist in a world where I am /forced/ to have a self-driving car to use the roads, as I still want the ability to go out and enjoy myself from time to time. But for a daily commute, turning driving into a passive activity would make me a happier and more productive person (other people are horrendous drivers and it frustrates me observing their unsafe and careless behaviors).
That's a psychological problem that self-driving cars will have to overcome. They need to be so obviously better than any human driver for people to actually consider them. A handful of fatal accidents that people think they could have avoided as a driver and they won't want to get on board.
People are bad at risk assessment, but that's a fact of life. As a result, self driving has to be better than what people _perceive_ as their risk of being in an accident while driving, not what the actual risk may be.
Machines doing horrible mistakes that no conscious person would ever do is problematic because we don’t have reliable error correction methods for that kind of mistakes.
A FSD car will never accidentally press acceleration pedal whey trying to press the brakes or loose control when trying to read an SMS. Instead it will mistake a bird for a train, hit and run someone and it would be like “something slowed me down, are my batteries degrading?”
How do you deal with a driver that fails to understand what’s going on?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
It's not that we're bad at driving, I suppose, it's that we do an awful lot of it and it's quite a risky activity - especially if you're not 100% engaged.
That being said, if the US cared about road safety, there's quite a lot they could do to improve it already. Many techniques have been used successfully in other countries to significantly reduce road deaths, for example, a nationwide vehicle safety inspection standard and lowering speeds on urban roads.
The fact that these aren't being done leads me to think the concerns about road safety are actually rather irrelevant for the country as a whole. When self driving cars exist and are convenient, people probably will switch to them, as long as the accident rate is vaguely comparable.
All vehicle-related deaths in the US average around 32,000 annually, of which about 50% of those are alcohol and/or drug related, leaving the true accidental vehicular death number around 15,000 annually.
The problem we're trying to solve with FSD just doesn't exist at the levels FSD proponents would have you believe. Humans are incredibly safe drivers when you account for the number of people driving, and the number of miles driven per year.
Criticize human driving all you want, but even the worst of us can typically manage to get from point a to point b... Somehow.
I mean, that industrial agriculture eventually results in food on tables across the globe. So many systems at work. Run by the same people using their smart phones in their cars, haha. We manage to collectively make things happen.
Easy to criticize, but hard to argue against the results?
A million miles sounds like a lot, but it isn't. The average American drives 12,000 miles annually. Assuming a driving career of 52 years (from age 18 to 70), the average American will drive 624k miles. So the lifetime chances of getting into a serious accident are not exactly small.
(I don't know how to calculate the probability here, actually. Is 624k/1M the lifetime probability of getting into a serious accident?)
624k/1M is the expected number of serious accidents.
The probability of getting into at least one serious accident is 1 - (999999/1000000)^624000 = 46% (Every mile, you have a 99,9999% chance of no serious accident. You want that 624k times in a row).
And yet there is no evidence that computers are better drivers than people are.
I do have to ask, are we using the same computers? I've been using them for decades, and they're consistently buggy, error prone and straight-up factually wrong a lot of the time.
But there is no reason we should be happy if a self driving technology "only" kills 1.2 million people in a year. That number is absurd and should not be considered acceptable. I think in the semi-distant future we are going to look at manual operation of a motor vehicle as a dangerous party trick, something only to be attempted by professionals or in limited circumstances like pulling into a field to park or some other low speed maneuvering.
1. That's an incredible amount of saved time, people now get that time back that they use to have to spend driving. We would have eliminated the largest suck of human time on the planet (truck driving). Etc. The main benefit of self driving is not safety.
2. We have a working baseline that we can improve upon to drive that number down, and since computer programs don't have the "new drivers need to learn from scratch" problem, those improvements will stick around approximately forever.
totally agree but I'm skeptical of current tech to get there in the near time frame being talked about. It's all in how you define semi-distant
Computers are better than some drivers, but they're worse than others. If the goal is safety, computerized assistance is almost certainly better than self driving. Keeping the human driver engaged and doing their best, but having the computer supervising works a lot better than having the human supervising; it's hard for a human to remain alert enough to intervene quickly enough when needed. I don't know if there are good studies yet, but I expect automatic emergency braking to reduce severity of a lot of collissions. Cross traffic warnings probably eliminates a lot of minor (and some major) collisions. There are systems now to detect wakefulness; if those are combined with something to safely pull over and stop, that could reduce a lot of tragic collisions as well.
If the goal was safety, a computer assisting a competent driver would be the best. If the goal is private profits for a few individuals, then a computer that doesn't take a paycheck would be best.
Computers currently are far worse than the good drivers out there. It is not clear if they ever could be better than a trained and cautious driver.
For example you can easily avoid the situation above by not talking on the phone while driving across rails.
if the AI abruptly crosses the median how are you going to avoid that?
I laughed at this, thinking about how the German trains are usually ±30 mins and often off by hours.
The train schedule would probably not fare better than a coin flip, except in Switzerland or Japan.
Just check the train locations instead :)
Similarly, lidar resolution is a great overkill, and overcomplication over a moderatly sophisticated mm wave radar, which is on top of that will be much more durable, and reliable.
Much easier than all of the weird edge cases related to the behavior of other drivers or pedestrians.
The reality is that for a long time we will combine both sets of capabilities and use "self driving" tech to enhance human driver capabilities.
In that case self-driving first needs to be able to avoid the relatively simple case of not of smashing through a barrier and the human driver can use their wetware to figure out how to handle railroad crossings which are diverse and complicated.
I don’t want to risk getting figuratively in a car with one if I turn on FSD.
Winter driving as a human driver requires an entirely different approach and Waymo hangs out in the Arizona desert where there is basically never any inclement weather.
I think we'll get such a war within the next decade, so we may see FSD vehicles sooner than expected, just not in the way we want.
* Coverage as a percentage of scenario's occurrence over the total duration of driving. For example, over 90% of a long-distance trip will be spent on a highway following traffic patterns within a lane with the occasional lane change.
The hardest part was that Google hadn't mapped a service drive, so it thought the adjacent service drive was the best route (which would be addressed pretty fast if you were trying to deploy self driving service in that area).
I don't think we get to level 5 very soon, but level 4 cars will have the ability to go lots of places pretty soon. If I overestimate driveway distances from yesterday, it's like 99.966% lane miles. There was some construction, but it was already well marked for human drivers.
Humans are terrible drivers. If a self-driving car got into half as many accidents as the average human, it would save millions of lives. And kill people, to be sure, but fewer on net.
I also think you could make a reasonable argument that all cars should be banned, right now, based on how many people they kill, but since I don't think that's gonna happen...
I'm a pretty attentive and cautious driver. In the 20 years I have been driving I've been in one accident and that was because another driver was attempting to make an illegal left turn, came across two lanes of traffic, and t-boned me. So if self driving vehicles are only doing better than the worst human drivers, I'm going to be pretty hesitant to turn over control. I'd be in favor of that other driver that hit me using an autonomous vehicle though.
It doesn't seem impossible for there to be a long tail of driving (in)ability: most people drive pretty well, with a small fraction that are distractible or reckless enough to account for most accidents.
Think about it — most software is deployed cloud first these days, but one of the most complex computing tasks we have is relying on some black box computer.
I'd be willing to bet it's a quarter century or longer problem. (Longbets, anyone?)
FSD is absolutely achievable, but the task is much bigger than some proponents give it credit.
https://medium.com/starsky-robotics-blog/the-end-of-starsky-...
Then the steering-wheel-less car at least has the ability to call for help when it's only 98% sure of what to do instead of 99.99% sure. But obviously this kind of model only makes sense in a fleet context, not as an extension to something you own, so it requires greater shifts, at least for personal automobiles.
I love these wildly over-the-top exaggerations.
When was the last bridge you saw without a barrier to prevent going off the edge?
What makes you think a vehicle vision system will handle "blinded by sun" any worse than humans already do?
Remember it's projecting and predicting the road ahead, even around corners and in the dark - so being blinded by the sun isn't going to cause it to swerve wildly off course and off the bridge - it can continue to use the data it had before being blinded (just as you do).
Also remember it has eight cameras it uses for this. The 16 year old new driver texting and talking to friends coming towards you at 60mph has two.
That's a disingenuous question. Many bridges have wooden guards that will prevent you from going off if you make a small mistake, but not a large one.
> What makes you think a vehicle vision system will handle "blinded by sun" any worse than humans already do?
Humans can move their head, and block the sun with a hand, hat, or sunshade in the car. Humans have two eyes so if one is obstructed, the other may still get good vision.
> so being blinded by the sun isn't going to cause it to swerve wildly off course and off the bridge - it can continue to use the data it had before being blinded (just as you do).
Unless it's an incredibly well-trained AI, it may mistake lens flare for oncoming traffic, or a pedestrian. Car AI is not at the point where it has common sense to assume that lens flare is incorrect information.
The goal of an AI driver isn't no crashes. The goal is less crashes than human drivers.
My two analog eyes see this perfectly well, why didn't the AI?
https://www.thedrive.com/news/33789/autopilot-blamed-for-tes...
I think there's a lot unfair criticism of human drivers in this thread. I don't think we're at the point where we can call machines better than humans when it comes to these tasks.
Self driving software tends to have very poor object permanence.
A real solution has to be capable of cleaning all cameras (probably faster than a windshield wiper would), because the distortions caused by even normal rain are hellish to train an AI to handle.