this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2023
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I feel like the NTSB need to draft a min spec for self driving cars and a testing course that involves some of the worst circtimstances to get approved. I feel like all self driving cars should have to have lidar, and other sensors. Computer vision really isn't working out.
You build a benchmark and tesla will train on that benchmark, says nothing about real world use but gets them signed off.
But yes western society is currently in a hellscape of refusing to do even basic regulation of any new technology so it'll probably be a good 20 years of murder robots on the streets before anything gets written down.
By “western society” do you mean the US? Because the EU doesn’t seem to have any qualms about regulating new technologies. That seems to be a uniquely American thing.
Which somehow means that Europeans suddenly have headlights that makes sense while we’re over here dying from aftermarket HIDs that should be treated like the VA Highway Patrol treats radar detectors ( rip ‘em out and smash them with a sledgehammer on the side of the road)
To be fair we already have giant metal murder boxes zooming around on the streets. If AI kills even a single person everyone flips out even though over 40,000 people die every year in the US from car accidents. And that is just the deaths, not including injuries. Yet I don't really see anyone calling for more regulations on driving tests for humans.
People want AI to somehow be perfect when in reality as long as AI is even 1% better than humans that's saving over 400 lives per year. AI doesn't get sleepy, distracted, drunk, etc. so it probably already is at least 1% better in most situations. Humans are horrible drivers.
Speak for yourself, chief
But yes western society is currently in a hellscape of refusing to do even basic regulationUS regulations are only written in blood or money. the united states was built on the backs of slaves, and then wage-slaves. literal graveyards filled with workers.
im not disagreeing with you, i just found this comically disparate to history... ie, its always been a regulation hellscape.
Only the Usamerican country.
We Europeans are scratching our heads already for very long: why are they letting these guys do just everything they want?
Not really. The eu does more than most western nations, but it's generally things that get regulated ten years too late and only a tiny amount compared to what society actually needs. So again, better, massively lax compared to need and comparisons to other periods
We're the whole West. Didn't you know?
/s
I don't think mandating lidar specifically by name is right, seeing as computer vision is definitely a software problem. Instead they should mandate some method to detect objects in any light condition + a performance standard, which in practice during certification could mean lidar. Regulations should be as minimal and specific as possible.
Good point. Mandate the ends rather than the means. If they get better functionality with some new tech in a few years, we don't want outdated regulations holding the industry back.
No, it isn't.
If it were only software, don't you think Tesla should be the best of them all, being the pure software shop they are?
But it is a real world problem. Recognizing real objects in real world conditions like weather, natural and artificial lights, temperatures (want some ice on your camera?), winds & storms, all kinds of unforeseen circumstances, other bad drivers, police and firemen...
And that's why that pure software shop is so bad at it, while all the real carmakers shrug... they are used to it since forever.
You can be the best in the world and still not be good enough.
Driving a car around using a dozen cameras pointing in every direction isn't something that's fundamentally impossible. We just can't do it yet.
And don't forget vision is what humans use for navigation as well.
And a lot of them are not good at it
As well as human hearing, human touch, human balance / proprioiception, possibly even smell too.
If a person is rear ended, they might not even see the car that hit them, but they know they're hit based on how the impact moves their body. If a tire blows out on the highway, the first thing a driver might notice is that the steering wheel feels sluggish. I could even imagine a situation where someone driving sees something unusual up ahead and then smells something dangerous, and turns around in time to avoid driving into an active chemical spill. In that situation seeing alone might not be enough to signal the danger.
I would hope that a competent self-driving car design at least incorporates microphones, and some kind of "body" sensors that would notice an impact, notice changes to balance, and so-on.
So you haven't recognized that other car brands' assistance/autonomous systems make less dramatic mistakes?
Literally a different thread about someone dieing from a Cruize self driving car not moving over for an ambulance.
Dying... because he was hit by a human driven car. Maybe the Cruize cars exacerbated the problem, but the original problem was that the victim was hit by a car driven by a human being.
Should a self-driving car face more rigorous tests than actual human drivers? Honest question.
Yep.
Yes, because when there’s an accident with a person driving, you usually know exactly who is legally to blame in an accident. With self-driving, if the car accidentally hits and kills someone, who do you charge for it? There’s no one person you can point to for responsibility for if something goes wrong, like you can for a person responsible for an accident.
Human drivers should be facing more rigorous testing regardless. It’s horrifically easy to get a license… and then they never test you again for the rest of your life. That’s just insane when you think about it. My test was in 2002. Feels like I should have to retake it at some point.
And take them away for bad driving. But we don’t because our entire transportation infrastructure, outside of a few cities namely NY, is built around everyone driving a car.
Yes. A human brain can handle edge cases it’s never encountered before. Can a self driving car?
Ever stop at a red light only to have a police officer wave you through?
Ever encounter a car driving the wrong way down a one way street?
Ever come across a flooded out stretch of road? (if the road has no lines and the water is still it can be very deceptive looking)
These are a tiny number of things I’ve encountered over the past few years. I’m sure plenty of other drivers can provide other good examples. I’d want to know how a self driving car would handle itself in situations like these.
Those are pretty basic conditions that I hope are already in the training data.
What about a wildfire evacuation? Police might have people driving on the wrong side of the highway to make use of all the lanes. Smoke might be obscuring everything. A human driver would know not to pay attention to any of the road signs in that situation without ever having been trained on it, but would a self-driving car?
Or, how about any situation where a police officer has to have a driver roll down the window to give them instructions for dealing with some unusual situation, like a chemical spill or a landslide.
Or, what about highway signs that have been shot by a shotgun so that it's hard to read? Or, what about novelty highway signs that a business might put up as a joke?
Self-driving cars definitely need to be tested against a much bigger range of situations than a human driver. Much as we might be baffled by their lack of common sense, the common sense of an average 16-year-old is still off the charts compared to an AI. Having said that, I know how bad many drivers are, and I wouldn't be surprised if the competent self-driving car organizations (Cruize, Waymo, etc.) are already better than an average driver under 99.9% of common scenarios.
How will the bot car handle itself out in the country? Dirt roads? Deer? Roadblock checkpoints full of bored, mean spirited cops.
They don't go there. They have their limits. Simple as that.
But when the police has ordered them there (for example, the good road must be emptied because of an emergency) then the trouble starts... now imagine not just one or two, but hundreds of them.
Yes because each person must learn on their own and have limited experience relative to the general public as a whole.
Self driving cars can 'learn' from all self driving cars and don't get tired, forget, or anything like that. While they shouldn't be held to perfection, they should absolutely be held to a higher standard than a human.
First: none of these automated cars would pass a German driver's license test. By far.
Second: of course you cannot compare tests for humans with tests for machines.
What are the things you think would cause a self-driving car to fail the German test?
Many. But the most obvious currently: they are going too slow.
And maybe the most funny: they are unable to turn their heads (in order to prove to the inspector that they are looking where it is required to look).
Going too slow where, in the city? They're following traffic and/or speed limits. They also go on highways, but again, there are speed limits. I'm sure they could have a version for Germany where the max speed was adjusted to be appropriate for the autobahn.
As for turning their heads, does Germany make no exceptions for people with disabilities? I'm sure that they could implement a version of "show the instructor you're paying attention to the right thing".
Everywhere.
Well, not that kind of exception where "the requirements are forgotten and we can make everything easier just for you".
I don't know this specific thing, but in general, a disabled person must have some kind of aid that fully compensates the disability.
Think of eye glasses: your eyes are bad, so you are required to wear glasses (or contacts). Note that it is on you. You get an extra order written into your license saying that you always have to wear them when driving, and they must fully compensate your vision - otherwise you are not allowed to drive.
Only Tesla self driving cars need to have more rigorous tests. Other brands are fine as it is because they have lidar.
LiDAR isn’t some sort of magic eye. The self driving system is only as good as the software that takes the inputs from cameras, LiDAR, etc., processes them, and ensures safe operation of the car.
Finally someone who actually uses critical thinking instead of being an anti-Elon bandwagoner.
I feel like all them do, have you seen wayze nearly getting black people killed cause it didn't stop for s cop. And it can't recognize construction zones.
Five LiDAR sensors hasn't stopped Cruise from running into a bus, multiple cars, and a fire truck. Maybe self-driving is a myth?
Maybe we should just build buses and trains and pay people good salaries to operate them??
Throw I some pot holes and child pedestrian crossing the street, etc and they'd even come out with a powerful marketing ad.
Everyone would build to pass the test track. This does get at the problem though: the permutations of scenarios an L5 system has to correctly process is a huge number. Trying to build a system that can do that appears to be beyond anyone’s av system right now. This is why the most advanced deployments are all geofenced. That way at least the traffic signs and signals, lane markings, etc all understood and tested. Even then ‘shit happens’. Untested scenarios still occur. Also the maps are always out of date.
The problem really requires AGI, and nobody has one of those, or if they do it’s a secret.
Pretty much what the UNECE did.. there are standards for these things. Tesla doesn't meet them, which is why FSD 'beta' is still 'seeking regulatory approval' in the rest of the world.
AND have triplicate back up system that runs in parallel.
It's not really a sensor issue, as much as having software that can interpret the sensor data and act on it. Cameras and lidar effectively provide same thing, distance to objects in 2d/3d. But u need software to process that data and identify where the road is, where little jonny is, and what to do...arguably, the distance measuring problem has been solved for a while with lidar or with cameras, it's object identification and reaction to that info that's not solved. You can't really solve it with traditional if/else programming, while AI gives you only a probability of what something is or what action to do...so the problem is hard.
But ntsb/dmv whatever needs to come up with a way to test and classify autonomous driving software...probably doing real world test and identifying edge cases where it fails.
bUT thAt WOuLD StiFle proDucT iNnoVatIoN!!!