Hacker News Reader

Comment by soziawa | Hacker News Reader

> How many times does "attention needed" beep is needed before customer can be considered reasonably informed that it is not fully self-driving?

I mean there is a warning telling you that it's not self driving. People are dumb, that's it.

View on HN

I don’t think it’s helpful or even correct to say “people are dumb,” as if this is purely a user problem.

The system exists in a bad gray zone — one that works well enough most of the time you stop paying attention. But it’s not full proof, so you get the worst of cognitive bias here.

Personally I think this faux self driving (literally falsely named auto pilot) should be outlawed. We cannot depend on people to take over when the car generally is handling the situation most of the time. Either manual or fully automatic — this in between will continue to cause too many bad accidents.

Agree, if you are not actively driving, your attention, and therefore reaction time, will inevitably deteriorate. In addition to that your reaction time is further reduced by the fact that even if you anticipated a problem looking at the road, you need to wait long enough after when you expected the car to react before realising that the car didn’t react and you need to take over, which further reduces your reaction time. Which is why I have some sympathy for the drivers of experimental self driving cars. Doesn’t excuse them playing with their smartphone at the wheel but they are tasked with a really hard exercise while being legally liable if things go wrong.

How do we make the eventual evolution from faux self-driving to full self-driving if not through incremental improvements?

I'm far from an expert on the subject, but I assume real data must be acquired for that to happen.

You raise the bar of what you need to deliver which will change your approach, and don’t ship products that aren't ready.

It seems to me that delaying self-driving cars for any appreciable amount of time will lead to more deaths/injuries, not fewer.

You're assuming that the quickest route to safest auto-driving lies via incremental improvements to existing systems and that's not necessarily true; see: AlphaGoZero

Fair point. I think a game with specific rules is probably better suited to the self-learning process that AlphaGo uses, whereas real-world driving rules are much more complex and nuanced. But I think it's still something worth considering.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com