Autonomous Cars Aren't As Smart as They're Cracked Up To Be (computerworld.com) 258
Gill Pratt, executive technical adviser at Toyota, offers a note of caution, even as more car companies start putting AI elements into their cars. Speaking in Tokyo at the announcement of a Silicon Valley AI research center that Toyota is to open in early 2016, Pratt pointed out the big shortcoming in an AI system as applied to automobile: Autonomous cars might look great in controlled tests or on pristine highways, "but soon fail when faced with tasks that human drivers find simple." From the article:
Drivers, for example, can pretty much get behind the wheel of a car and drive it wherever it may be, he said. Autonomous vehicles use GPS and laser imaging sensors to figure out where they are by matching data against a complex map that goes beyond simple roads and includes details down to lane markings. The cars rely on all that data to drive, so they quickly hit problems in areas that haven't been mapped in advance. ... A truly intelligent self-driving car needs artificial intelligence that can figure out where it is even if it has no map or GPS, and manage to navigate highways and follow routes even if there are diversions or changing in lane markings, he said.
I regularly drive a stretch of road that's just a few miles long, but between construction, accidents, poor marking, bicycles, and heavy traffic I'd be nervous about letting an AI system navigate. In what real-world driving scenarios would you most want humans to take over?
It will be like service areas for phones (Score:2)
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So just have the cars drive where it is easy (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't have to have the car drive everywhere, 95% of the places you drive will probably have all of the factors needed for the car to navigate easily. Just don't have the car drive in areas where it can readily get in trouble.
You don't start teens off in ambiguous hard to drive conditions, but rather low traffic side streets or empty parking lots, etc.
We don't need self driving cars that are perfect from the start, merely good enough to drive us most places most of the time, and do not have accidents in the areas that are suitable for it to drive.
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Don't know where you live, but here they change lanes around, close lanes, and reroute traffic on a nearly daily basis. Its been non-stop doing that for over 10 years straight. If auto driving cars depend on GPS that means I can't use it to just go to work even, not to mention going somewhere else.
What happens when they close part of the city for a parade and a lot of streets are closed? Your car just stops and waits the 4 hours for it to pass before continuing? Sure you could take over, but if your dru
Re:So just have the cars drive where it is easy (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't know where you live, but here they change lanes around, close lanes, and reroute traffic on a nearly daily basis. Its been non-stop doing that for over 10 years straight. If auto driving cars depend on GPS that means I can't use it to just go to work even, not to mention going somewhere else.
What happens when they close part of the city for a parade and a lot of streets are closed? Your car just stops and waits the 4 hours for it to pass before continuing? Sure you could take over, but if your drunk and you do that you committed a DUI, the reason you bought a self driving car to start.
I expect that in addition to cars being able to self-determine routes and find barriers there will need to be intelligent barriers that the cars can detect and follow the instructions of. These kinds of barriers would be used by construction crews, emergency responders, and perhaps even as a function of the four-way hazards when a car is stopped on the side of the road. Call it a more precise means for the autonomous car to determine what it should do or what the expectation is in a complex situation.
...emergency responders. Cars will need to respect things like fire trucks blocking the road, or police cars blocking the road, or tow-trucks blocking the road, or any other sort of obstruction that will be present for awhile and indicates that it isn't safe to be within a certain area. Cars may also have to react to barriers placed by these responders, and it may make sense for those barriers to have some kind of component that lets them more intelligently broadcast so that the cars don't have to figure out what they are visually. Obviously if the police are attempting to close a stretch of road due to an accident investigation they want to keep cars out of that area so that the evidence is not disturbed. If firefighters are working on a structure fire they need to keep cars out of the immediate staging area and from driving down the road that the firemen may be crossing regularly without notice. They also need to keep a wide berth when a tow truck driver is working with a disabled vehicle, wherever that vehicle is disabled and whatever is wrong (ie, difference between an overturned vehicle on the highway, a stalled vehicle on the highway, and a stalled vehicle on the median or shoulder). These are all complex situations that happen all of the time, and cars need to be able to handle them.
Just as an example, in long-term highway construction projects it's not uncommon to take a two-lane-single-direction stretch of Interstate and to route both directions on it, one going the natural way, the other driving what would normally be opposed, while the other two-lane stretch is being worked on. In cases like this there needs to be a way for the construction barriers themselves to notify the vehicles both that something has overridden the expected behavior, and that this particular path is the override. The car will in-turn have to account for this deviation in the path and to know that it's not actually trying to go the wrong-way even though its default programming would say that it is, and it would have to understand that while one lane is now no longer the wrong, way, the other lane still is the wrong way and to not try to use it.
Other construction-related examples include the ability to follow a pilot car and the ability to pay attention to flag-men. The flag-men method is a variation of the one-lane bridge in many cases with the addition of a very spontaneous control (ie, the switch from slow to stop and stop to slow comes without warning from the flag-man himself, so the vehicle must pay attention to the flow of traffic in addition to somehow figuring out the sign or receiving a signal from the sign), and the nature of pilot cars means that there has to be some means for cars to be subordinate to other vehicles, which leads into the next example...
I think the first application for autonomous cars will be open-highway dr
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You don't start teens off in ambiguous hard to drive conditions, but rather low traffic side streets or empty parking lots, etc.
We don't need self driving cars that are perfect from the start, merely good enough to drive us most places most of the time, and do not have accidents in the areas that are suitable for it to drive.
This might be true if we lived in a "rational" society. We don't. We live in a society whose concerns are driven by media hype. These days, the media seems to be on the side of self-driving vehicles because they seem really cool and awesome as a concept.
But the media is fickle and could change its mind the moment something more sensational happens.
We've already seen issues with idiots using the Tesla "autopilot" feature in ways it wasn't intended, and the company is starting to rein in its use [csmonitor.com] to pre
Two camps (Score:2, Insightful)
There seem to be two camps of people. Those that think we will be living on mars and have fully autonomous cars in a couple of years, and those that actually look into it and see how hard it is going to be. For some reason, the media seems to prefer the first one. Reality prefers the second one.
Pessimist (Score:2)
There seem to be two camps of people. Those that think we will be living on mars and have fully autonomous cars in a couple of years, and those that actually look into it and see how hard it is going to be. For some reason, the media seems to prefer the first one. Reality prefers the second one.
I'm guessing you're either a taxi driver or a martian. Reality prefers the first one, but boy would life be more exciting if it was the second.
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You are a cynical pessimist that is unaware of the state of current technology and the deep need for it.
Yes, if the choice was between a sober, experienced, 30 year old driver familiar with the roads and a self-driving car, no self-driving cars would ever be created. That is NOT the market for them.
The market for self driving cars will start out being wealthy parents with kids that have a history of drinking alcohol,
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We're in the future right now - I'll lay even odds you have in your pocket or nearby right now, a personal magic map that nearly always knows where you are and can show you how to get to where you want to go, and you can even use it to communicate with people over a distance!
"It has to be perfect before it'll work" (Score:3)
Frakly this is BS... I drive a large portion of my day for work (not a trucker, IT guy going to clients.) I run into "diversions or chaning in lane markings" and have to stop and think about what to do at times too! Why should an AI have to understand the intentions of a road worker/civil engineer better than we do before it can be accepted as intelligent?
" that can figure out where it is even if it has no map or GPS"
I know the media hype's this up, but he's going the other way and just being all doom and gloom.
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The issue here is that these cars won't know even how to get off the god damn parking lot without GPS and mappings
That's a good example
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Frakly this is BS... I drive a large portion of my day for work (not a trucker, IT guy going to clients.) I run into "diversions or chaning in lane markings" and have to stop and think about what to do at times too! Why should an AI have to understand the intentions of a road worker/civil engineer better than we do before it can be accepted as intelligent?
As long as it is feasible and SAFE for it "to stop and think about what to do" in these situations, that's fine. When you're on a highway traveling in a pack of bumper-to-bumper traffic at 60mph+ between concrete barriers on both sides in a construction zone and the lane changes and signs come suddenly, I don't think just stopping in the middle of the road seems like a good idea.
Almost every time I travel any significant distance on highways, I end up driving through such construction zones (including im
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Frakly this is BS... I drive a large portion of my day for work (not a trucker, IT guy going to clients.) I run into "diversions or chaning in lane markings" and have to stop and think about what to do at times too! Why should an AI have to understand the intentions of a road worker/civil engineer better than we do before it can be accepted as intelligent?
As long as it is feasible and SAFE for it "to stop and think about what to do" in these situations, that's fine. When you're on a highway traveling in a pack of bumper-to-bumper traffic at 60mph+ between concrete barriers on both sides in a construction zone and the lane changes and signs come suddenly, I don't think just stopping in the middle of the road seems like a good idea.
What are you talking about? If you are in a construction zone and the lane changes suddenly, I think you will find yourself in a traffic jam. For that matter, I don’t think you will be driving “60mph+” in a construction zone; I think you will already be in a traffic jam.
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Regardless. If the cars in front know where to go ... the route is by definition mapped and the data shared into the pool of knowledge about the route change and how to handle it.
Done and Done.
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" that can figure out where it is even if it has no map or GPS" ... OK, I'm going to drop you off in the middle of Kentucky mountain area with no GPS and no map, leave you stranded with noone to talk to and you should just magically know where you are.... sorry but NO. Unless I had been there before (i.e. prior knowledge or.... mapping) I will have no clue where I am and will have to basically start driving in one direction (which these cars can do) until I figure out where I am.
Note that a self-driven car will almost always have GPS and now its exact location. It will just sometimes not have an accurate map of the area directly around it. Both self driven car and car driven by me will proceed to the nearest road, then make a guess which direction to turn. The difference is that the self driven care will always know where it is and what direction it is going. It can't get lost. If it returns to a place where it was before it can take that into account.
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If you have used Google Maps / Waze / Apple Maps recently you will have noticed that they do a pretty good job of showing congestion for your route in real time.
For any obstruction on the highway, the FIRST car may have to figure something out, the SECOND car will simply have an updated "map" saying that there is an obstruction use the left lane and pay attention for a flagger.
Toyota getting left behind (Score:5, Insightful)
Translation: Toyota is woefully behind in autonomous car development, and rather worried about it.
The FUD begins.
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Yep. It's hard to take someone seriously when they are the executive technical adviser of a company that is pushing hydrogen cars over battery electric.
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Yep. It's hard to take someone seriously when they are the executive technical adviser of a company that is pushing hydrogen cars over battery electric.
Hydrogen cars? What could possib- *KABOOM* (debris and body parts rain down)
Re:Toyota getting left behind (Score:4, Insightful)
Forget autonomous car development, Toyota is woefully behind in computer-controlled car development. Random relevant article: Toyota's killer firmware: Bad design and its consequences. [edn.com]
we automate routine tasks (Score:3)
I don't see that as a problem. If it works on most of the roads people drive every day, that's good enough. As with all automation, we automate routine tasks and let humans do the rest.
But we don't need "truly intelligent self-driving cars" for self-driving cars to be very useful any more than we need "truly intelligent factory robots" for factory automation to be very useful.
Well, then don't. In fact, your AI driver would probably simply avoid that route altogether precisely for those reasons and still get you to your destination safely and efficiently. Nobody says that an automated driver needs to take the same route as you do; after all, bikes, motorcycles, buses and light rail probably don't either.
So they aren't as smart as they're supposed to be. (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, neither are human drivers.
Last quarter mile navigation (Score:5, Interesting)
The biggest problems aren't actually going to be point to point navigation or even obstacle avoidance, though those aren't trivial. Navigation when you know the destinations is a solved problem and we've got a pretty good idea how to handle obstacle avoidance and terrain following though there is progress to be made
Possibly the hardest problem to solve it you want completely autonomous cars will be navigation in the last quarter mile and for destinations where you aren't actually sure exactly where you are going. This is a human interface problem and those are always challenging. In those circumstances it is REALLY hard to instruct a computer efficiently without actually taking the controls yourself. For example how do you explain to the computer that you want the parking space 3 places over but you want to back in? Or that you don't want to block in the car so park next to it on the lawn? Sounds easy but it really isn't - not yet anyway. Humans can do it mostly competently but we don't have any computer that is anywhere close to human level processing of verbal commands. Stuff like parking lots will be surprisingly hard to automate in a way that will be pleasing to most people. There are solutions but they are going to take a long time and require a lot of infrastructure. Probably several decades away at minimum. Sort of how we had autopilot for planes many year before we had the ability to do autonomous takeoffs and landings. (and the aviation problem is arguably easier as it has fewer variables)
I think we will see semi-autonomous systems relatively soon particularly for stuff like highway driving. But I think there is going to remain driver controls for quite some time because steering into that parking space or instructing the car to back up to the front door is actually pretty hard to do well. What will happen is that you'll program in your destination, the car will take you close to where you want to go and then you'll probably drive the last little bit yourself in a lot of cases. I think this piece of navigation will be solved last if at all.
Re: Last quarter mile navigation (Score:2)
I've been thinking about that problem too. A good example would be unstructured situations, such as spill over event parking on lawns or gravel lots. Given existing cars cars already there certain pattern formation algorithms can be applied, such as continue this or that line of cars. Otherwise things get even trickier and some spacial user interface will have to let the passenger point out in an overhead view where exactly to place the car and in what orientation. None of these are unsolvable problems per
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The real killer for adoption is going to be the couple minutes you have to spend punching in a destination before you get going. We are so used to just getting in and going where we want that such delays will be very frustrating for short trips.
Worse will be the times where you know where you are headed, but don't really know the address or proper name such as that italian place downtown, you know the one with the good meatballs. Or the soccer field just past the railroad tracks. Judging by how awful som
Oh noes (Score:2)
"Autonomous Cars Aren't As Smart as They're Cracked Up To Be"
Let me be the first to say, "No shit."
Autonomous cars (Score:2)
No, autonomous automobiles.
Did the TFA also mention the imaging lasers? (Score:2)
How much fog/rain/snow/smoke does it take to degrade the sensing level?
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Thing is an autonomous car is not limited to the narrow visible light range of the EM spectrum that we humans are. Just because you can't see in fog does not mean the autonomous car is unable to see.
Not that I have any special knowledge of the sensors being used by Google et. al. but if they are restricting themselves to the visible spectrum then they are pretty stupid. At a bare minimum I would be using infra-red as well, probably thermal and UV for good measure.
I would also expect them to be listening to
It's what I've been saying all along... (Score:2)
... Autonomous cars might look great in controlled tests or on pristine highways, "but soon fail when faced with tasks that human drivers find simple." ...
I want to see those so-called self-driving cars navigate a New England winter, or the pothole-filled roads that occur after said New England winter.
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So you live in the 20% of the 80:20 rule. We'll solve for the 80% for great benefit. And let the 20% hang out to flap in the wind. It simply doesn't matter that we can't drive there. We probably don't want to drive there. And you can be like the Amish driving around in their horse drawn carriages.
You say it like it's a bad thing (Score:2)
Fact is, roads and road markings aren't supposed to just pop up out of nowhere. Here in Norway every public road (and many private roads, pedestrain/bike roads, forest roads closed for general traffic and soon) is mapped out in NVDB (Norwegian Road Database), and it's supposed to be authoritative guide on speed limits, road signs, pedestrian crossings, speed bumps, bridges, tunnels, road classification including lane types and weight restrictions, railing and so on. This is all public data, I'm looking at i
In other news, Toyota researcher finds... (Score:3)
Toyota researcher finds autonomous driving technology is hard to do, beyond the autonomous accelerator pedal.
On a side note, this stuff has been worked on for ages. I worked with a company in 2000, doing image recognition for lane departure warning systems and other subsystems that are currently in use today. The technology is there, but not all companies are happy that many of those technologies are tied to patents and would rather be able to use in-house sources. Developing those sources now is a bit late in the game.
In 5 years, comments like Pratt's will be completely laughable. The only reason he's taken remotely serious now is because it isn't ubiquitous yet. Consumers do not have serious experience with autonomous driving, so his FUD is accepted at face value. In reality, he's just faced with a tremendous uphill battle to catch his company up in the game, and it's overwhelmed Toyota, to the point they are sowing caution to the masses, mostly in the hopes to catch a breather in the court of public opinion.
This was always completely obvious (Score:2)
The best chance self drive has is on closed loops, e.g. airport terminal transfers where vehicles can drive separately than the other traffic in mostly predictable conditions. Even there there'll probably be some guy in a booth whose job it is to takeover if the car gets stuck, confused or breaks down.
On the public roads it would be better f
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Everyday driving is filled with problems that intractable for humans. Computers will be better at some things, people at others. How about using the strengths of both?
Three anecdotes. (Score:3)
Just a few of the many things I've encountered in 60 years of driving that are going to be a problem for computers.
1. GPS? My wife and I bought a new GPS on sale at a local mall a few years ago. First thing we did when we got in the car was to program the thing to take us home. We hit GO. It thought a while and then told us that home was 2700 odd miles away and that the trip might take a while. Guess what? GPSen don't work in parking garages. It apparently thought it was still in Sunnyvale where last it was turned off, and it was contemplating a trip across the continent.
2. A couple of days ago I was using that same GPS to navigate through a rural area in Vermont. Seeking the shortest route, it put me on a (dirt) road that ran about a half mile, turned a corner, and ended in someone's barn. Care to try your hand at a program to recognize and deal with that situation?
3. Many years ago while traveling up the (dirt) road to an obscure National Monument out West, I came around a corner and found myself in a large herd of sheep. Couldn't see the road. Or the ditches. Or anything but sheep. What now Kit?
Not that cars a few decades from now won't be able to deal with thousands of situations like that. But it'll take a while I think.
Answer (Score:2, Insightful)
Whats this guys definiton of real world? (Score:3)
"Autonomous cars might look great in controlled tests or on pristine highways"
Hasn't Google been testing out their cars in the real world? And if the wiki article is right they've driven over a million miles and only had 14 minor traffic accidents, none of which were the fault of the autonomous system (at least according to Google). If that is true and if my math is correct that puts their accidents per mile ratio at about 1 / 71,400. Again if my math is correct your average human vehicle experiences accidents at a rate of 1 / 66,700. Suggesting Googles autonomous vehicle is safer. Admittedly there are probably limitations, letting one drive in torrential rain or snow/ice covered roads may result in far less advantageous statistics, the roads do have to be pre-mapped and there are almost certainly situations they can't handle. But most of those situations go for any vehicle/driver, I've driven in a variety of terrible weather and I've never been in an accident that was my fault, I have siblings who have been in a half dozen accidents most of which were in good weather. Most humans generally do well when encountering road work areas, I've seen others driving in oncoming lanes because they failed to notice the gigantic signs pointing them somewhere else. Some people are going to be safer drivers than these autonomous vehicles, some people should be encouraged to let the vehicle drive instead.
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Hasn't Google been testing out their cars in the real world? And if the wiki article is right they've driven over a million miles and only had 14 minor traffic accidents, none of which were the fault of the autonomous system (at least according to Google). If that is true and if my math is correct that puts their accidents per mile ratio at about 1 / 71,400. Again if my math is correct your average human vehicle experiences accidents at a rate of 1 / 66,700. Suggesting Googles autonomous vehicle is safer.
A much more interesting statistic that Google hasn't released is how often their engineers have either intervened or pre-emptively taken over control in order to avoid a potentially bad situation. Not to oversimplify what Google has done, but if I think of my commute to work and map it out to a computer with relatively simple rules like here's the lanes, there's an intersection and there's the light, there's a crossing that you don't pass until it's clear I would say at least 95/100 times it'd get by on ver
Re:Whats this guys definiton of real world (Score:2)
Part of Google's testing involved lending out Beta cars to employees. Sure enough, they whipped out laptops, went to sleep, and otherwise were in no position to take over if HAL gave up and handed over control. These were well educated folks who knew they were in Beta cars (and who should have been fired for such negligence). So as far as the general public goes we can expect zero backup for the system from the human inside. So the system needs to be truly autonmous in every sense before it gets release
The point of self-driving cars.... (Score:3)
Any autonomy that an automobile might appear to exhibit should be seen as a side effect of that goal, and not a direct manifestation of intent.
Stop saying "Artificial Intellgence" (Score:3)
"Autonomous" is the perfect adjective, because these cars are automatons, not conscious, thinking beings. Because we have only the foggiest definition of "intelligence", we are in no position to create an artificial one. If someday we do have that knowledge, what will we call artificial intelligence when we actually make one? That'll be a problem if we sully the term today with myth and superstition.
Turning Test (Score:3)
Now, then, for all of you with all your complaints about 'other drivers' being so bad: Hush up already, you're probably at least as bad as the ones you're complaining about. That being said, what we need to do in this country is to improve driver training and education, and tighten up testing procedures and frequency to improve the overall competence of drivers on the roads, and exclude the ones who can't (or won't) show an acceptable and consistent level of competence. This should include tougher and longer-lasting penalties for individuals convicted of DUI. Furthermore any use of any kind of any mobile wireless device while driving should be strictly prohibited and punished severely; I think a six-month suspension of driving privilege with a hefty fine should be sufficient.
Meanwhile, auto industry, please do continue to develop and produce collision-avoidance systems that warn the driver when they're screwing up.
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We can't even, after decades of trying, create an 'artificial intelligence' that can pass the Turing Test, and that's just text on a screen. What makes any of you so sure that 'autonomous cars' were ever so close to being a reality?
Because those are two wildly different problems?
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Magic roundabout (Score:2)
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As long as the car can drive me home after the last bar in the line, I'm happy.
That's called a taxi, and it's cheaper than an autonomous car. The only downside is, if you barf on the back seat, the cab driver might smash your teeth in - something the autonomous car won't do.
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That's called a taxi, and it's cheaper than an autonomous car. The only downside is, if you barf on the back seat, the cab driver might smash your teeth in - something the autonomous car won't do.
I also don't like to play grabby-squeezy in a taxi, that's disgusting on multiple levels.
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I also don't like to play grabby-squeezy in a taxi, that's disgusting on multiple levels.
At least with an autonomous car you'll have no one there to disgust...
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The problem with taxis (if there actually are any running that late in your area- mine there aren't) is that if you didn't start off intending to drink, it costs double because you have to retrieve your car. Of course it could be double anyways because you have to get to the bar in the first place.
It would be so much easier to just program the destination in before having a drink (say on way home from work or something) and then just push some buttons to get home. The vast majority of my drinking away from
A human-driven taxi is better right now. (Score:5, Interesting)
The "AI" we're talking about presently and in the near future is mostly "A" and almost no "I" at all.
The kind of thing marketroids and the naive are calling AI today, including the tech that's beginning to show up in vehicles, is so one-dimensional in its "intelligence" as to be on about the same level as a toaster that "knows" not to burn my toast, or a chess playing program that can kick my ass at chess. The toaster "AI" couldn't control a robot vacuum cleaner, and the chess "AI" can't even play checkers, much less deal with anything further out of it's 1D "I" zone of competence, including not burn my toast.
In order for a vehicle to be able to "know where it is" and "know what to do about it", it will have to be more than one dimensional; it will have to be able to read signs, it will have to know destinations as things other than map references and paths other than mapped roads (parking lots, unmarked roads, etc.), it will have to make decisions based on extremely vague inputs and be able to do things such as ask for, and locate sources for, directions and understand them in pretty much whatever form they are provided. It will have to deal with the various situations that come up when the maps don't match the roads, too. Judging by my GPS, that's a lot more common than one might otherwise assume. It changes over time in random, unpredictable ways, too.
A general intelligence system designed for service (by which I mean to imply not conscious... otherwise we're talking about slavery, and we should know better than that by now) is not that close as yet. Frankly -- and I'm speaking with my AI researcher hat on now -- I think we'll get to a conscious general purpose intelligence well before we get to an unconscious one. We have a great deal of experience with imparting information to consciousnesses and we have considerable information available to us about what comprises one in our study of the human brain, whereas we have almost none about building a general purpose non-conscious intelligence, other than stacking multiple one-dimensional intelligences one upon another, which approach is approximately equivalent to solving the problem of multiplying by a million by adding one to an initial value of zero a million times. In other words, it'll eventually get the answer, but it's not in any way efficient.
As far as AI goes, all we really have right now is AI research, and various (not insignificant) benefits from the various tech insights and advances that fall out of that process. We don't have AI at all, at least not in the sense that is even slightly worthy of the term. The way AI is being used today, you'd want to be very careful telling your kid they were "intelligent", because they're likely to take away the idea that you think you just told them they're about as bright as the toaster. Not to mention the fact that when an actual AI is finally brought to light, we're not going to have anything useful left to call it. At that point, "AI" would be an insult. Not a great way to start a conversation with a new entity, IMHO.
The whole "it's AI!" meme reminds me strongly of the whole "3D TV" debacle. Again, marketroids and the ignorant built and propagated that appellation as a supposedly appropriate designation for fixed-viewpoint stereo vision, where fixed-viewpoint stereo vision is constrained, even by a relatively coarse and generous measure using whole-number degrees, to about 2 and 1/64800D or 2.000015432...D, whichever notation you prefer, leaving the viewer with something that in very few ways indeed resembles an actual 3D perception. When trying to describe actual 3D imaging, one is left with no accurate terminology. Unlike AI, we even actually have some low-performance versions of real 3D imaging now, so the linguistic problem is already on the roost, so to speak.
Sure, language evolves, that's a legitimate and real thing, but language also devolves, and that's what we're seeing in both these cases. I'm going with it, but I'm going kicking and screaming about the word-crap the marketroids are leaving on my lawn. Goddamn kids and their unleashed word-mutts. Where'd I leave my shotgun, anyway?
Re: That's OK, I only care about bar crawls (Score:3, Insightful)
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Why would its insurance be cheaper?
Re: That's OK, I only care about bar crawls (Score:5, Insightful)
As customer of a Taxi, you don't have to pay any of those things, only a miniscule portion of them.
The AI is more expensive, because all new cars are super-expensive, and you have to add Research and Development costs, "brand premium", And "coolness premium" the manufacturers will charge b/c the thing can drive itself.
If instead of buying a $12,000 used car that meets all your needs, you spend $60,000 on a brand new car-that-can-drive itself and lasts 10 years, plus a $50 monthly service fee for the cloud maps service, then you're paying approximately $5000 extra a year for self-driving capabilities.
That would buy you 333 $15 taxi rides.
Anyways, based on that, unless you spend more than $5000 a year on the Taxi, then it just isn't a worthwhile economic proposition.
Also, the self-driving cars are probably going to be introduced at about the $120,000 price point, not the $60,000 price point.
Then you'll also spend an extra $10,000 in vehicle loan interest per year to get the self-driving feature.
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Where do you find a $15 taxi? for $15 you can go about 3 miles. if i am that close i will just walk, and i will be sober when i get home.
The last time I got a taxi it drove me 5 miles and cost $35 plus tip. Uber helps, but taxi's aren't cheap.
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Where do you find a $15 taxi? for $15 you can go about 3 miles.
In N.O., a cab is about $4 to start, plus $2.50 a mile, so 5 miles is about $16.50 plus $1.70 tax. You could easily do some walking, take a streetcar to get across town, and then find a cab ride for the last few miles.
Even if you had to pay $30 for that cab ride home, though... it's still not going to justify the expense of a self-driving car economically. Seriously.... who goes out and get drunk at a bar more than two or three n
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Even a tiny taxi ride in my town is at least $40.
And you may have to wait up to an hour for a taxi.
And when you really need them most (like after new year's eve), it could be four or more hours.
And one reason uber sprang up besides cost is that taxi's just don't like to go to low density or "bad" areas. They'd prefer to have a fare back as well.
Taxi's (and public transportation) make more sense in New York City and similar locations perhaps. When the city is more flat than vertical, Taxi's (and public tr
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And when you really need them most (like after new year's eve), it could be four or more hours.
Convenience. Trade $$$ for time. These are good non-financial reasons to want a self-driving car.
Even a tiny taxi ride in my town is at least $40.
This is still workable. Suppose you go out 2 nights a week; 3 weeks per month.
4 taxi rides X 3 X 12 X $40 = $5,760/Year
That still looks better financially than the figured $48,000 upfront + $600/Yr, that comes to $5400/Year.
What we haven't mentioned..
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Nope (Score:2)
No, it wasn't:
That is equivalent to the following, just as you were told:
The correct usage for that sentence is:
"its" is possessive. "it's" means "it is."
The mistake is usually made (and I make it as well, though I certainly know better) because in English, the general rule is that the apostrophe followed by "s" indicates possessive; but English is also riddled with exceptions. The "it's" / "its" i
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The important thing is not to loose your cool when playing fast and lose with grammar on the internet.
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The horse is dead.
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I'm confident that with a little work, cars can be programmed to express dissatisfaction with driver behavior. Maybe release the seat belt, run the speed up to 50kph, then stand on the brakes.
Just don't expect all the features to be there in V1.0 of the software.
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I don't see the issue.
For many scenarios where a human will have to fave that decision the autonomous car never will because it would have chosen option C, avoid situation long before it became an issue. Take the Oklahoma parade a few weeks ago, an autonomous car would not have had to decide should I kill the drunk driver or plow into the parade.
But lets pretend that the car has to decide and chooses poorly and wipes out 10 people in a crowd including little kids. How is that a problem if across the set of
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The issue is, human drivers have a strong instinct of self-preservation. Someone who has to decide between the parade and the tree in a split second will probably avoid the tree out of sheer instinct.
Now then, you might think the cool-headed computerized car will make the right decision and kill its occupant. But I can just imagine the following court case: "Your honor, my father's car killed him wilfully. I therefore sue Toyota/BMW/Honda/Google for murder, and for 100 kajillion dollars in damage".
One such
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I think you are spot-on the crux of the issue. This will determine the future of fully-autonomous vehicles. Even if there are legislative/regulatory decisions in place before the first fatality, the ambulance-chasers will do their best/worst to get around them.
Privately owned vehicles can be covered by existing case law -- if it's yours then you are responsible even if your were sleeping | drunk | makin' whoopie.
Driverless taxis or their taxpaying equivalents are the new issue. One solution would be a broad
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Re:That's nothing (Score:4, Interesting)
No, the correct decision of an car's AI is to always prioritize the life and safety of it's occupant. And you can bet that's what every vehicle will be programmed to do. People on the outside can take care of themselves.
Note that this doesn't mean speeding recklessly and then plowing into a crowd to save the driver. That only occurs because of previously made poor choices. Obstacles don't magically teleport in front of cars. It only appears that way to human drivers because we have a bad habit of not paying attention. Computers don't have that little flaw, and so will be braking the car before the human occupant even realizes there's a potential situation ahead.
Car manufacturers are not exactly strangers to litigation. The notion that any single court case will doom an industry is overstating things, I believe.
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More likely they'll try to miss the tree, but overcontrol and end up in a skid and hit anyway, sideways. Or clip it, spin, and hit the parade too.
But if you're in the situation where you have to make that decision haven't you already crossed the border into Fuckupland?
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The issue is, human drivers have a strong instinct of self-preservation. Someone who has to decide between the parade and the tree in a split second will probably avoid the tree out of sheer instinct.
Actually, the most likely thing that person would do is nothing (and the car goes wherever it goes). The second most likely thing is that the person avoids whatever is happening without action. If the car aims at people, that's the immediate danger and the driver will try to avoid that without thinking about the secondary danger of killing himself. If the car aims at the tree, that's the immediate danger and the driver will try to avoid that without thinking about the secondary danger of killing many others
Re: That's nothing (Score:4, Informative)
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Agree. People keep bringing up this scenario, but it really is very unrealistic. If you are travelling at motorway speeds, then why is there a crowd of people near the motorway? If you are travelling at urban speeds (50kph) then a car can come to a stop on dry tarmac within 15m. At 30kph (the actual speed in many busy urban areas) the stopping distance is only 5m. Most of the stopping distance you normally have to leave is due to the really rubbish reaction time of humans (> 1 second). If the Google car'
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Agree. People keep bringing up this scenario, but it really is very unrealistic. If you are travelling at motorway speeds, then why is there a crowd of people near the motorway?
I was told by British police that four percent of road deaths happen on the motorway (which makes it the safest place to drive by far). Of these four percent, 20% are pedestrians. Which makes the motorway an awfully dangerous place for pedestrians.
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I don't see the issue.
For many scenarios where a human will have to fave that decision the autonomous car never will because it would have chosen option C, avoid situation long before it became an issue.
Autonomous cars are subject to the same laws of physics as any other car. If something steps out in front of it at a distance too close to be able to stop in time then depending on what other traffic is on the road and what is around the vehicle its choice is going to be hit that thing that has just stepped out in front of it or hit something else. As the occupant of that car I want it to be the option that does the least harm to me. Problem is that the AI may not share the same concern for me as I do.
Are you trolling or just boring? (Score:5, Insightful)
People keep saying this, but the truth is that the car is going to [be programmed to] follow the law. That means it's going to approach intersections at safe speeds, and it's going to avoid hitting pedestrians in crosswalks but will simply murderize them even if there's ten of them in your lane, and a cancer-ridden octagenarian driving a yugo in the other lane — even if the car has enough sensors to smell cancer, it's still going to run right into those pedestrians like you've gone bowling rather than deviate from the marked lane. It's going to make a good-faith best effort to stop. But remember, it's not going to go around a blind curve at a speed at which it can't stop if there's an obstacle. It's simply going to decelerate for the curve, and then accelerate again on the other side. If someone is in the road, it won't hit them, because it's not driving for fun. It's driving to minimize risk.
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People keep saying this, but the truth is that the car is going to [be programmed to] follow the law. That means it's going to approach intersections at safe speeds, and it's going to avoid hitting pedestrians in crosswalks but will simply murderize them even if there's ten of them in your lane, and a cancer-ridden octagenarian driving a yugo in the other lane â" even if the car has enough sensors to smell cancer, it's still going to run right into those pedestrians like you've gone bowling rather than deviate from the marked lane. It's going to make a good-faith best effort to stop. But remember, it's not going to go around a blind curve at a speed at which it can't stop if there's an obstacle. It's simply going to decelerate for the curve, and then accelerate again on the other side. If someone is in the road, it won't hit them, because it's not driving for fun. It's driving to minimize risk.
Yes, and apart from the law-abiding aspect there's also the whole "is it reasonable to kill someone else to save you from your own stupidity" argument. Let's for the sake of argument say you're going 55 mph and two people drop down from an overpass smack in front of the car and the car can either run them over or slam into a concrete wall, two lives versus one since you have no passengers. Or alternatively, that you could mow down one person on the sidewalk. Sure you could save lives but I'd say it's the pe
Re:Are you trolling or just boring? (Score:5, Interesting)
dee du dee du doo de doo, dum dee dum dee dum ... (Score:3)
Do you have an uncle with a country place that no one knows about? Perhaps a former farm?
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I would guess that the car will be traveling at the posted speed limit meaning it will likely have time to slow down, and if it absolutely doesn't have time to slow down, it won't. Furthermore, the automated car behind it will be traveling at a safe distance behind it, not tailgating as asshole humans are known to do, so it will have plenty of time to slow down as well.
The point is, cars should never have to make that kind of decision because they aren't shitty drivers to begin with.
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Whatever you say, Nostradamus.
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Sure. But is it going to slow down or come screeching to a halt when some dumb cat or dog runs out into the road, and cause the vehicle behind it to rear-end it,
No, because rear-endings are caused by insufficient following distance.
It won't, because it won't differentiate between a cat, a dog, a squirrel, or a human child, or some kids' balloon that drifts on the breeze from his birthday party into the roadway.
They're going to see that stuff before it even enters the roadway, so they don't have to hit it to begin with. In situations where the sides of the roadway are obscured, the vehicles will simply reduce their speed — the same thing a human driver should be doing.
Also there will always be bicyclists
In California, we're already required to stay three feet away from them at all times. That helps account for their inherent variability. A self-driving car won't get pissed
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"But is it going to slow down or come screeching to a halt when some dumb cat or dog runs out into the road, and cause the vehicle behind it to rear-end it,"
That kind of thing would be a rare event if the tailgating driver was criminally charged - as he/she should be.
There's a reason for safe following distance laws and what you've described is an argument in favour of more AI in charge of cars, not less.
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Quick follow up because editing isn't an option. I sort of jumped the gun and replied to a statement you weren't making.
I agree that the day probably will happen and agree that there will be outrage and hand wringing. My post above was actually picking a side in that discussion and not a response to whether there would be such a discussion.
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The real test of artificial intelligence will come when the self-driving vehicle will have to decide between plowing into a crowd of people to protect the driver, and smashing into a tree to protect the crowd of people - but killing the driver, when the accident is inevitable.
Yeah, I hate it when that happens (and it happens all the time). So far I've always chosen the crowd of people - why can't we just program the car to do the same?
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In actual fact, computers are very good at making that kind of decision, and unlike humans, they can make it consistently and reliably, without panic, anger, or selfishness.
So, s
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The real test of artificial intelligence will come when the self-driving vehicle will have to decide between plowing into a crowd of people to protect the driver, and smashing into a tree to protect the crowd of people - but killing the driver, when the accident is inevitable.
I don't believe AI now or in the near future is capable of the sort of recognition needed to determine to make such a determination. It would probably pick the tree because the tree is a single object of unknown mass and density which is moving slightly (due to wind, but the AI doesn't know that) whereas the crowd of people is a bunch of objects of unknown mass and density that are sitting still, moving slightly, or moving a lot. AI also is not capable of determining the damage that may be caused to the tre
Re:That's nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
decide between plowing into a crowd of people to protect the driver, and smashing into a tree to protect the crowd of people
People hold up ridiculous scenarios like this as some sort of hypothetical metric, but how well would a human do with an insane choice like this, presumably with only a split second to make the decision? Not very well, I'd imagine. Don't put AI up against ridiculous situations. Put them up against realistic obstacles, which we might actually have a chance of seeing in our lifetimes. Road construction. Temporary obstacles with police directing traffic. Blizzards. Temporarily flooded road. Parking lots or garages.
There's also this false dicotomy presented, wherein some people seem to think that unless an AI can can handle ALL situations possible, it can't possibly work. I'll tell you what will happen in many situations. The AI will come to a controlled stop and tell the human "Hey, I don't know what's happening. Take over the wheel, please." That seems perfectly reasonable for crazy scenarios that only rarely occur.
The answer to what would likely happen, by the way, is that the AI in the car would have long ago started braking, so as to avoid the problem in the first place.
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Computers just aren't good at all at that sort of thing.
It's a simple trivial problem that doesn't need any AI to solve. One variable and a couple IF statements is all that is required.
Have the car reset a counter at midnight to zero. For each person the car runs over and kills, increment the counter by one.
Once that counter reaches 2999, shut down the engine and refuse to start until the next day.
If self driving cars limit themselves to less than 3000 people killed on the road per day, they will already be safer and kill less humans that our current situation
Re: That's nothing (Score:2)
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The real test of artificial intelligence will come when the self-driving vehicle will have to decide between plowing into a crowd of people to protect the driver, and smashing into a tree to protect the crowd of people - but killing the driver, when the accident is inevitable.
The real test of driver intelligence and ethics will come when the driver of a human-driven vehicle will have to decide between plowing into a crowd of people to protect himsel, and smashing into a tree to protect the crowd of people but killing himself, when the accident is inevitable.
On the other hand, if you as the driver ever allow such a situation to arise, and you plow into the crowd, you'll hopefully go to jail for a very long time.
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Actually, it would just hit the breaks.
What if the braking distance is too long?
Or, you know, swerve the other way.
Into oncoming traffic?
Computers can hit the breaks a lot faster than a human, and better too.
That isn't my experience of the system fitted to my 44 tonne truck. The times its chosen to hit the brakes because it "thinks" there's going to be a collision even though there isn't, if I'd been carrying any load other than the one I was at the time or being empty, there would've been a serious accident.
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No, that's clearly not what the GP meant. The GP meant that the car would cut a corner, drive across the beach, and crash into the underground coral reefs. I would have thought that was obvious from context....
Re: Good Summary Until... (Score:2)
Yep, the unstructured garage situation is a much better example than the poorly marked highway with missing markings or potential conduction areas. The sudden lack of GPS and maps is highly contrived anyway (!), and these conditions can be coped with fairly easily by analyzing traffic if other cars are around, staying on the right half of unmarked roads (dynamically calculating virtual lanes, something the software does anyway), recognizing obstacles and objects in motion around construction sites. These ar
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People who own parking garages own them so that people can park in them. It follows that if any substantial portion of the potential market for your parking structure cannot use it because of X (in this case because the mapping company for the auto-car industry has not mapped your garage) then you will solve for X (in this case get the mapping company in.)
In other words... there will be new businesses that are created to solve these problems. You need to repaint the lines in your parking lot because the mun