If a human can do it, I see no reason why an autonomous system can't, eventually, do it. It might take a very long time, but "never" seems short-sighted.
Imagine you're driving down a street when a kid playing on the sidewalk runs behind a truck and disappears from your view.
If the kid appears in the road from behind the truck, the computer can handle slamming on the brakes very easily - probably faster than a human can - without understanding the kid any better than a group of LIDAR points or a rectangle of pixels labelled 'obstacle' by a neural network.
But if you want to brake before the kid appears from behind the truck? For that, a fully attentive human driver will be making a bunch of estimates about what the kid is doing, whether they seemed to have noticed the car, how old they were, and so on. In other words, applying a theory of mind.
Needless to say, if the latter is a must-have feature, that's a pretty hairy problem.
Of course, it's possible the decrease in deaths from being fast on the brakes in simple situations will outweigh the increase in deaths from lacking a theory of mind in complex situations. If that's the case, the self-driving car programmer's job would be a good deal simpler!
There's no need for a theory of mind - the self driving car can identify the kid as a pedestrian, recognize that it started moving in a possible collision course, then disappeared, thus prompting either slowing down to a non-fatal speed until the truck has been passed.
Children playing in the street are a common occurrence in residential areas, I see no reason why you would not develop a set of rules and heuristics to handle them. Identifying a pedestrian as child, and knowing whether it is running or playing, is well within the capabilities of modern computer vision.
It's worse than that. That small thing heading toward the road... was that a leaf blown by the wind, or was it a ball? If it's a ball, you'd better be already braking, because a kid is likely coming right behind it, and paying attention to the ball rather than the road. If it's a leaf, though... you don't want to hit the brakes for every blowing leaf.
> There's no need for a theory of mind - the self driving car can identify the kid as a pedestrian, recognize that it started moving in a possible collision course, then disappeared, thus prompting either slowing down to a non-fatal speed until the truck has been passed.
Shouldn't it be possible to train for these scenarios using imitation learning and expert demonstrations? For example, Tesla seems to save replays of when its vehicles would have behaved significantly differently compared to how the driver actually behaved, and this data is supposed to be quite useful.
Is this type of crowdsourced driving data a crucial part of achieving Level 4+ self-driving? If so, it seems that driving around the same six city blocks of SF or cruising down Central Expressway in MV is going to produce diminishing returns in terms of producing measurable progress.
> For example, Tesla seems to save replays of when its vehicles would have behaved significantly differently compared to how the driver actually behaved, and this data is supposed to be quite useful.
I don't think such a system would catch a false negative like the above, where the human would slow down cautiously but the self-driving system would do nothing. That situation is indistinguishable from a human slowing down to read house numbers.
To realize the problem, the system would need a full model of "what would the car be doing if not for the human input" in order to find a later point of alarming divergence.
Humans can't do it. When your stopping distance (including reaction time) exceeds your visibility there's no way to drive safely, but humans do it anyways.
> When your stopping distance (including reaction time) exceeds your visibility there's no way to drive safely, but humans do it anyways.
this is bad, but not quite as bad as it sounds. most of the time, you only need to stop as fast as the car in front of you. it's pretty uncommon to encounter a stationary object in the middle of the travel lane. in fact, outside of driving on surface streets in the city, I can't remember the last time I had to avoid a stationary object in my lane.
I'm much more worried by how closely people follow the car in front of them, regardless of visibility. many leave barely enough room to react at all.
They typically leave enough room to stop for their estimate of how long it would take the car in front of them to stop + the distance to that car. That initial estimate does NOT assume the car in front of them will stop instantaneously obviously.
While this usually will be fine, there are definitely issues when something stationary does pop up.
While caravan-ing to Yellowstone with 3 vehicles, all traveling in the center lane of the freeway, we encountered a small car with a passed out passenger in the middle lane. My bro-in-law swerved with some room to spare, immediately behind him I swerved with basically zero room to spare, and my father behind me (luckily for them in a Suburban, but bad for the man in the VW) had no chance- I was immediately looking in my back mirror knowing what I was going to see.
There is a decent likelihood that a machine could have swerved in time, but nearly zero that a typical human could/would have in our typical following patterns.
Humans route around inefficient practices. Just as human driving speeds are typically unaffected by posted traffic speeds, they will optimize for their typical experience over written codes for how they drive.
Step outside of the US and Western Europe and things can become quite interesting pretty damn fast, for example I had to avoid cows nonchalantly walking down the road like in this YT video [1] at least once every year for the last 3 or 4 years (mostly when I visit my brother in the countryside). Horse-driven carts are also still a thing in these parts of Europe, and they’re basically stationary objects (fun thing when you end up behind one just before a blind curb, preferably with a lorry driving up just behind you). Just like other people have mentioned in here, driving is a AI-complete problem.
I've had a similar experience driving around rural Mexico. The laws are far more lax and you run into all kinds of unexpected obstacles, but as a whole it actually works out pretty well because people understand and adapt to the situations.
One example is that there are a number of small towns with two way streets that are parked on but only the width of two cars. That creates bottlenecks where cars can only travel in one direction at a time. This might seem like a disaster and it certainly wouldn't work on a busy city street, but in these locations everyone adjusts and when two cars approach a choke point from opposite directions drivers are really good about being cautious and pulling to the side to allow the other party to pass.
There are probably thousands of these local quirks around the world. Handling all of these situations effectively in a fully self-driving car will take an advanced AGI.
Accident rates in the US on the highway are on the order of one per million miles. And in a million miles of driving you will encounter quite a few stationary or otherwise unexpected objects in the middle of the travel lane.
Object sure, but generally it’s not really an issue. Simply avoiding or driving over broken tire bits etc is generally a non issue.
A object would need to be substantial enough to cause an accident and then roll into or fall onto a highway. That’s far from a 1 per million miles of driving situation. Remember, something falling off a truck would also take a while to slow down.
But human drivers hit deer all the time, and it's often unavoidable. An autonomous driver is probably more likely to miss a deer than a human, due to substantially better reflex time.
And one would think infrared vision that could be useful (except possibly when it's a magic number between 98.6 amf 104 degrees somewhere)
To me, every brown mailbox with a white reflector could be a deer coming to the road, to infrared, with a larger lens, it should be able to tell a lot better.
Which is why I keep saying autonomous driving doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be better than humans. And that's a much lower bar, because we are lousy drivers.
I vote for neither. We don’t need to drive, and we certainly don’t need computers to do it for us. There are other—much more easily automated—systems that are several orders of magnitudes more efficient then driving and—if implemnted sufficiently—almost always faster.
Autonomous driving doesn’t need to be perfect because we don’t need it. With sufficient alternative systems the only reason for driving will be for hobby (and we don’t want that automated anyway) and heavy load work (like agriculture, mining, or logging) which is already heavily automated.
We need transportation. A world of sitting on our butts in front of a computer isn't a solution to much of anything. Maybe we don't need to actually operate the vehicle, but we need the vehicle.
I'm not walking halfway across the country just to visit my mother.
Whoa. Misunderstanding here. I’m not talking about eliminating transportation. That is just stupid. Alternative transportation from driving include: busses, trains, bikes, walking, trolleys, bicycles, ski-lifts, airplaines, taxis, boats, rollerskates, escalators, etc.
The sum of these alternatives will almost always outweigh driving in terms of benefits with a notable exception of convenience. So if you are willing to sacrifice convenience when you want to visit your mother, you will almost certainly get there faster and more economically (with the right systems in place) then driving.
Note that I'm giving my self all of the advantages of all of the alternatives. And I’m also painting this scenario in a world where all of these alternatives have all of the required infrastructure in place[1].
With that said, yes there are faster ways (albeit still less convenient) of getting you outside of said city. You might have to change your mode of transportation a couple of time (I said it was less convenient) but it will still be faster with the right systems and infrastructure in place.
1: This is not an unfair scenario because this is already almost the case for all of the non-alternatives.
But this is where HN is blind; a non insignificant portion of America doesn't have access to a reliable automobile. So, there are already 10s of millions of Americans (and Europeans) that transport luggage and a baby just fine.
Actually, no. I know people who are too poor for a car. I've been people too poor for a car.
Kiss an extra two hours of your day goodbye just to get to and from work (assuming you have a job). Going to the doctor is a nightmare (assuming you have medical insurance). It sucks a lot, unless you're living in a city so dense that cars are impractical.
From your situation it seems like the system in place that provide alternatives to driving could benefit from being expanded, increased, and optimized.
I hope your local politicians agree with me that expenditures going into making these alternatives are money better spent then waiting for the technology to dedicate highway lanes for autonomous vehicles.
That is I hope they agree that your situation of not being able to go to the doctor within a reasonable amount of time takes precedence over people wanting to sleep during their 8 hour highway trip but are unwilling to take the bus for some reason.
Will a computer ever write War and Peace or compose the 9th Symphony too? How about solve an unsolved math proof? No reason it can't be automated, right?
People were saying this in the seventies before the long AI winter.
It's always just around the corner, and has been since the dawn of AI. Maybe we will get there some day (I never say never), but cautious realism has never been the AI field's strong suit.
There's an emotional component to art, and I don't see nearly as much work on artificial emotions as I do on task-oriented artificial intelligence.
A lot of people are working to create a car smart enough to drive humans anywhere. How many people are working to create a car smart enough to refuse to drive because it's feeling inspired to write music instead?
