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Comment by rabbidruster | Hacker News Reader

I actually ran into a simple example of a challenge like this. The power went out in mountain view a few weeks ago and a bunch of stop lights stopped working. I pulled up behind the self driving car which had stopped at the disabled light. Instead of treating the light like a stop sign, the car remained stop. After 5 or so seconds stopped at the light (there were no other cars at the intersection), I honked at them. I assume someone took manual control because it started to move right after.

While this situation could probably be addressed, it is a great examples of challenges these cars may come across.

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> Instead of treating the light like a stop sign, the car remained stop. After 5 or so seconds stopped at the light (there were no other cars at the intersection), I honked at them.

There are many normal humans who don't know what to do when the traffic lights are in a non-normal situation

The difference is that once a self-driving car is programmed for what to do, it won't get it wrong again.

Self-driving cars will get continually better and will eventually surpass human drivers simply because human drivers will never improve.

It handled it completely correctly. Lights being out is an exceptional situation where the usual rules of the road are suspended.

Sometimes it means "treat it as a stop sign", but other times it means "turn the car around because ignoring the lights on this particular road would be positively suicidal". e.g. a level crossing.

Computers have no conception of danger, and so they don't get to decide what's dangerous and what's not.

Actually, in California, that isn't true. An intersection controlled by a traffic light converts to a 4-way stop when the traffic light is out.

However, even for your example of a level crossing, humans fail regularly. People regularly run into trains in Texas at a level crossing because the train has a long stretch of flatbed cars that someone missed at dusk or at night.

Human drivers follow a bathtub curve. Young drivers (particularly male), are very dangerous in the beginning (so much so, that their insurance rates are much higher). Drivers become more dangerous as they get older, and their reflexes, vision, situational attention/awareness decline. I think one of the best uses of self driving cars initially will be for those populations.

That's why they get tested for years before being sold; so almost every possible situation comes up at least once and can be included in the system. I bet that driver filed a note about what happened and it was fixed soon.

Woah.

What do you think actually went down, there? "Hey, of course, let's just implement the StopHandler::HumanStopSign() subroutine, thanks for the report!"?

This is Google we're talking about. I think they will spend time to generalize this situation as much as possible.

I hope it's not the same people that wrote the VAT handling code on Adwords.

1. Find a way to recognize when this situation occurs. Test that. 2. Decide what the optimal decision should be for the car. 3. Program the car to do 2 when it's in that situation.

I assume someone took manual control because it started to move right after.

This is why I believe self-driving cars will always need a human to take control whenever unusual situations arise, just as planes with autopilot still need a pilot's attention.

But there are autonomous planes known as drones.

Almost nothing "in production" with the military is autonomous for the entire flight, just piloted from the ground. Those that do have some autonomous operation still require manual takeover for critical situations i.e. landing. And we don't trust them with human passengers.

Drones are essentially treated as disposable, because they are. We just lose them sometimes. This is not a state of affairs you can have with a car containing multiple humans navigating pedestrian, cyclist, and construction-laden streets.

There's also a lot less that happens during (most of) flight. Surroundings are relatively static, other planes in the environment actually broadcast what they are and what they're doing, so you don't have to discern it from visual noise. There are no stop signs, no intersections, very little traffic, etc.

> Almost nothing "in production" with the military is autonomous for the entire flight, just piloted from the ground.

We are awfully close:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_X-47B

http://www.wired.com/2013/07/navy-drone/

There is definitely a point where the drones are going to be better at take off and landing than human pilots, in that case...safety will become an issue (why let humans do it when the drone can do safer?).

The same will happen with cars. It is only a question of whether that happens in 2020 or 2030.

Airplanes on autopilot usually have many minutes and several hundred miles worth of buffer before something bad happens.

Cars that say "I don't know what to do, Jesus take the wheel!" might only give drivers a fraction of a second.

At some point quantitative differences become qualitative ones.

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