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Comment by jstanley | Hacker News Reader

What does a human driver do when their vision is obstructed?

1. Attempt to use the vehicle's built-in windscreen wiper to remove the obstruction.

2. Failing that, stop the car. Preferably before the vision gets so badly obstructed that the car cannot safely be brought to a stop. But stop the car even so.

3. Get out and clear the obstruction. Admittedly the AI will have trouble with this, but it is vanishingly rare anyway, and if the car is carrying passengers, this task can be given to the passengers.

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When the human continues driving in incliment weather, and runs into the back of a van full of kids and kills all of them, we put them in jail for making a bad judgement call.

How do we handle the AI mowing over a pedestrian when it makes a bad judgement call? Right now, the status quo is that we do jack and shit, and I can't help but feel like that's not a good plan.

The same way we handle a failed brake system. Bad maintenance or bad design, that leads to operator's or manufacturer's insurance paying.

Car brake systems actually have several built in redundancies, including an entire secondary system for backup emergency use.

What redundancies can you implement in a black box "AI" model?

Automatic emergency braking is already available, unless some moron disables it.

It’s an interesting conundrum, but in a full AI world the hope is that it’s so rare we don’t feel the need to be punitive at all and can chock it up to bad luck and try to learn from it. Perhaps more similar to when a airplane crashes and people die.

This is whataboutism for ADAS.

People and ADAS have their own, different, and critical weaknesses. Neither is a panacea. (Which is why mass transit investment should be prioritized over scifi fantasy ADAS.)

Or walking, the most robust transportation option

Yeah, right. Since if there is snowfall we get out of the car and shoo the flakes away. Or scream at the sun to stop blinding us.

Humans have something called perception and cognition, we can make sense of things we don't see.

AFAIK we don't have cameras yet that can do that. We need better sensors.

The cameras are for perception and the AI is for cognition.

If we have to wait for "General" AI to have self driving cars, we should probably stop selling them today.

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