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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

> but otherwise take a family off a bridge when the sun is blinding the camera?

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.

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> When was the last bridge you saw without a barrier to prevent going off the edge?

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.

"Blinded by the sun" is an understandable failure-state when you design a driving system that's reliant on cameras. From https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/05/feds-autopilot-was-acti...: "Theoretically, it should be possible to detect the side of a truck using cameras. But it's not always easy. In some lighting conditions, for example, the side of a trailer might be hard to distinguish from the sky behind it."

How many of the 100 daily fatalities on the roads in the US do you think are caused by drivers not "seeing clearly"?

The goal of an AI driver isn't no crashes. The goal is less crashes than human drivers.

Idk if it's that simple, what if you reduce highway deaths by 100 but rural roads go up by 10. If I'm primarily a rural driver that's not enticing.

OK then, let's not put it into full scale production until all types of driving are an order of magnitude (10x) less.

>The 16 year old new driver texting and talking to friends coming towards you at 60mph has two.

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.

The human driver's two eyes still have a wider dynamic range than any current affordable video camera. This makes a huge difference in difficult lighting situations like looking into the sun.

>What makes you think a vehicle vision system will handle "blinded by sun" any worse than humans already do?

Self driving software tends to have very poor object permanence.

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