This is good, this is how the AI learns and gets better.
Just like a learner driver who stalls the engine, forgets to put on a turn signal and can't keep up with traffic.
We've all got to learn sometime.
Just like a learner driver who stalls the engine, forgets to put on a turn signal and can't keep up with traffic.
We've all got to learn sometime.
Also humans can learn from this too. It’s not hard to imagine a new type of safety cone that has an explicit sign for autonomous vehicles to stop far far away.
Isn't that kind of defeating the point of autonomous vehicles if we need to build a world that will accommodate them?
It'd just be done such that new signage is made to be easily readable, so that over time, as old stuff is replaced, the signage becomes more readable for machines.
This sort of thing can also benefit regular vehicles.
I'm not sure what "This sort of thing can also benefit regular vehicles." means in this instance. If the cone is machine readable how does that help me?
The cones being machine readable would allow regular vehicles to also be given the ability to read them more reliably (and potentially with less equipment than needed by a current autonomous vehicle), so, they could do things like warn the driver, which could be valuable in reducing the cases of distracted drivers slamming into closed off lanes.
This comparison doesn't make much sense. We're highlighting a dangerous failure in capability here, not a desire to change out the engine. Either engine works perfectly fine, it's secondary properties that we care about with transition. It's a primary responsibility of an autonomous vehicle to be able to identify and react to obstacles.
We either need the enhanced cones or we don't, but only a fraction of cones being enhanced means they aren't actually that useful or that the situations without them are inherently more dangerous. Are we OK with a situation where autonomous vehicles identify the enhanced cones 90% of the time but the non-enhanced 50%? No, we want both to be very high.
I agree that we should strive to improve the vehicles' ability to detect even unenhanced cones. Doesn't mean that we can't also aim to gradually improve detection accuracy further with enhanced cones. That is, if autonomous vehicles identify regular cones correctly 98% of the time, but enhanced cones can be identified 99.99% of the time, we should be okay with a gradual transition to the latter, even though tautologically it means that the former is less safe.
We already do this with all sorts of things, safety standards improvements often have at least a grace period during which the comparatively less safe things are still allowed to exist and operate alongside the safer ones.
I dont believe thay every car maker will not try to invent their own models
Car companies will never build in failsafes like that, it would be too easy for anyone to put up those signs anywhere. Cars and streets are made for human drivers, there is no way around it and no alternative to making your car AI as good as human drivers. If you can't do that, you can make a much simpler train "AI" and put it on tracks. We did that in the 60s.
Two things:
The promise of self-driving cars is that they can operate themselves in an environment not specifically designed for them. If that promise is broken, and it's the position of the industry that things like traffic signals, construction, emergency services, road markings etc need to be modified for functionality with self-driving cars then I think public will to accommodate them dries up quickly.
That being said, I can imagine having a lot of fun with a physical token that can remotely stop an autonomous car.
The lesson should be that San Francisco isn't the right place to run a highly disruptive experiment.
Do these experiments where the potential for disruption is a lot lower, like a smaller city with less congestion.
Should they be banished too?
But I'll take your bait:
I grew up close to a city, (Worcester MA,) with plenty of weirdo streets like San Francisco, and had plenty of teenage friends who lived in the city or travelled through it.
Needless to say, we didn't get behind the wheel for the first time in Worcester. We stayed in calmer streets until we were ready. When we drove in Worcester with learner's permits, we had adult supervision. Afterwards, we were only allowed to drive without adult supervision once we passed the driver's test. (I should also point out that, at the time, Worcester had a very serious problem with unlicensed drivers.)
Clearly, Cruise's vehicles aren't ready to drive in San Francisco without adult supervision.
But let's get back to the thesis: It is highly inappropriate to equate a machine with a human. Machines have no rights whatsoever. The "We've all got to learn sometime" attitude doesn't apply to this discussion, because an autonomous car is not a human.
What instead applies to this argument is conventional engineering and business development: Where is it appropriate to run Cruise's early marketing experiments, where bugs (and other unanticipated behavior) is expected? What are the appropriate limitations to put on vehicles when they have no driver? For example, what if the first use of the vehicles was a private resort (like Disney World) where the nature of a malfunctioning vehicle is easier to absorb because there are very few passenger vehicles.
Am I to assume you never made a single mistake while doing so?
Of course not. Learner drivers stall, they forget turn signals, they don't keep up well with the flow of traffic. That is fine, that's all part of learning and perfectly normal.
> Clearly, Cruise's vehicles aren't ready to drive in San Francisco without adult supervision.
I don't think that is clear at all. Sure, they're making mistakes, but so did you and I and everyone else that ever learned to drive.
> But let's get back to the thesis: It is highly inappropriate to equate a machine with a human. Machines have no rights whatsoever. The "We've all got to learn sometime" attitude doesn't apply to this discussion, because an autonomous car is not a human.
I don't think that has anything to do with it. Driving a car is not a "right" that all humans have, it's a privilege that can be quickly taken away.
Everyone is afforded the opportunity to learn at some point, and we need self-driving vehicles to have that opportunity too. Fast forward 20 (or whatever it is) years to when self-driving vehicles are much, much safer, they mean long-haul truckers don't have to be away from home in an unsafe and unhealthy profession, they mean less vehicles on the road, etc. etc.
Society NEEDS those benefits, and if we never give the self-driving vehicles the opportunity to learn, we'll never get there.
> What instead applies to this argument is conventional engineering and business development: Where is it appropriate to run Cruise's early marketing experiments, where bugs (and other unanticipated behavior) is expected? What are the appropriate limitations to put on vehicles when they have no driver? For example, what if the first use of the vehicles was a private resort (like Disney World) where the nature of a malfunctioning vehicle is easier to absorb because there are very few passenger vehicles.
Absolutely, those are very important discussions to have. They are being had, by people in a position to make those decisions. Like a million things in our society, if you don't like the decisions they're making, you need to get yourself into that position.
For example: Yes I did stall, but I did not block traffic for 20 minutes. I started the car and moved the shifter from 3rd to 1st. I did not require outside intervention to move my car.
I am also a person with fundamental human rights. A self-driving car has no rights, and deserves no empathy.
Which is why I'm trying to refocus the discussion back to "tech."
For example, when we talk about disruptive tech: The early customers need to be willing to put up with the "faults." In this case, San Francisco's emergency response departments aren't willing to put up with these faults.
Likewise, when we talk about choosing a market for early markets: That means making sure the market is well-chosen to suite the capabilities of the tech. One of the issues in San Francisco is that demand for self-driving cars outstrips the capabilities at this point. IE, it's better to choose a place where Cruise can meet the demand.
Are you saying that driving a vehicle is a fundamental human right?
Becuase it is absolutely 100% not.
> In this case, San Francisco's emergency response departments aren't willing to put up with these faults.
What are you talking about? San Francisco's emergency response departments absolutely ARE putting up with these faults, and the regulators and people who make decisions about if they should or should not be on those streets are deciding they should be.
I understand the self-driving cars can be inconvenient right now, but that always happens when you're aiming for improvement or progress. When lanes get added to a road the traffic suffers during construction. When you renovate your kitchen it's painful to live in during the work, etc. etc. Just because it's inconvenient doesn't mean you shouldn't do it - the eventual improvement will be worth it.!
This argument comes from my interpretation of two books: "Crossing the Chasm" and "The Innovator's Dilemma."
Cruise can choose any market they want: any city, any municipality, any closed road network like a resort. I keep arguing that San Francisco is the wrong choice right now.
Choosing an early market is an important step in developing a technology business. It doesn't matter how wonderful your technology is, your company needs to succeed in its first market in order to move to another market and then to larger markets. Furthermore, your customers must be willing to put up with the bugs and shortcomings of your product compared to existing technology.
If a company overestimates the maturity of their product, they can lose the goodwill of the future customers who don't want to put up with bugs or other shortcomings.
I think the big problem that Cruise is facing is that they will be regulated out of existence before they fully debug their product. (For the sake of argument,) if they had used resorts as their first customer, They wouldn't have to worry about being regulated out of existence because they would only have to deal with a government; and they would have had a much easier situation to debug the product.
There are plenty of regulators and people who's entire job is to figure out if it makes sense in their city or not. Those people are in charge of making that decision for San Francisco, not you.
As a city, San Francisco has a lot of citizen initiated ballot questions. (When I lived in the city they had an initiative to rename the sewage treatment plant after George W. Bush.)
I wouldn't be surprised if an upcoming ballot has an initiative to ban self-driving cars.
DMV tells Cruise to reduce its driverless vehicle fleet in SF by 50%: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/firetruck-siren-lights-o...
Proves my point that San Francisco is a horrible place to test market driverless cars.
> In a statement released Friday night, the DMV said it is investigating “recent concerning incidents” involving Cruise's vehicles in San Francisco. In addition to halving the number of vehicles in the city, the DMV called for Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, to have no more than 50 vehicles operating during the day and 150 vehicles driving at night until the agency's investigation is complete.
> As SFGATE previously reported at the time of the Aug. 7 meeting, which featured a slide deck on autonomous vehicle performance in the city, “In 2023, the department logged about 50 incidents involving AVs that nearly crashed into personnel, obstructed travel or blocked stations, per the presentation — and five more reports were written up over the weekend.”
> Nicholson provided a statement in response to Chiu’s move, sent to SFGATE on Thursday by the city attorney’s office. “We do not believe the industry has any incentive to remain at the table and solve their problems,” she said. “These incidents with Public Safety are not going away and are in fact increasing.”