Hacker News Reader

Comment by JelteF | Hacker News Reader

These people are basically giving driving lessons, just to cars instead of people. Regular driving instructors can do their job fulltime in a safe way without getting distracted. They don't control the car most of the time, yet they still are able to stop it in case of a student error.

So to me the question is: What is making this difference? Is it the level of training for the instructor? Human interaction? Is it the sign on their car that shows it's a lesson car to the other drivers? Or is it something else?

PS, this post is based on the way driving lessons happen in the Netherlands. I'm not sure if it's completely comparable to the US.

View on HN

  What is making this difference?

Driving instructors are constantly graduating their most experienced students and recruiting zero-experience students.

These zero-experience students need the instructor to intervene from time to time, thus justifying and reinforcing the instructor's habit of vigilance.

On the other hand, if an autonomous car has one near-accident every 100,000 miles, it's not often enough to maintain and keep strong a habit of vigilance.

Though impractical to implement, this is an interesting thought experiment. What if the autonomous driving system has a "chaos monkey" that required intervention by the trainer every so often?

Note that we already do this to keep people vigilant in rote tasks, e.g. for airport x-ray scanner operators or train drivers.

Self-driving car companies are "newbies" who could learn from railway companies, which have decades of experience with keeping drivers alert in vehicles that keep moving without driver action. For example, locomotives have "dead man" switches to make sure the driver is still on the job. Japanese drivers are trained to point and vocalise. Why shouldn't the car drivers be required to call and point out every hazard whilst in autonomous mode?

Maybe part of the problem is that the self-driving companies view their drivers as temporary measures, so choose to invest their resources into the machine component rather than the human component?

The question is how do we do that in a way that is good enough to get engagement without actually endangering anyone. Imagine the uproar when one of these chaos monkeys cause a crash because the driver didn't react in time and it's evaluation of 'safe but seemingly dangerous' was just a bit off. For other systems this is easy because the system and the response are both totally contained inside the software so fake events are easy to generate and the user responds back through the system so the response can be caught and evaluated.

The two roles are not comparable in my opinion. In most cases an instructor of humans has no capability to control the car. I've heard of some cases where they have brakes installed on the passenger side, but I'm not sure how common that is. I've never heard of a teaching car with full duplicate controls, though it's certainly possible they exist. I think even a bad new human driver is still better than an Uber automated system at the moment.

Every student car I've see had a brake on the passenger side, some even have a steering wheel.

Driving instructors probably don't drive nearly as long without a break (each lesson is 30-60 minutes). They also probably have much more mental stimulation, since (1) they're talking to the student, (2) the student probably needs much more frequent intervention than a self-driving car does, and (3) they have a variety of different students each day, each of which has a different skill level and personality.

The teacher also asks the student to do increasingly difficult challenges and actively provides feedback on their performance. The same should be done for self driving cars, millions of miles in ideal conditions is worthless. These cars need to be driven by bank robbers, gang members and stunt drivers for a Quentin Tarantino movie.

I'd say it was human interaction. The AV is a black box that calmly goes about its business, after a few hours you're probably inclined to trust it. A human learner, on the other hand, is a bundle of shakes and nerves and jerks and danger that you wouldn't completely trust until several months after they passed their driving exam.

For my driving lessons, the instructor was actively telling me which way to go (e.g. "I want you to take the next left"). That conveys a certain level of road awareness even if they aren't actually driving.

They are also probably expecting a student to make mistakes, which puts them in a different mental state than with a car that is right almost all of the time.

there is a very different kind of learning at work in autonomous cars vs humans. these people are "backups", not instructors giving explicit instruction to any student.

and have you seen the vide of the "instructor" during the fatal uber crash? completely zoned out compared to what a human-instructing instructor would do.

The student is also the client and supervisor.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com