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Comment by wetpaws | Hacker News Reader

It's not that humans are bad, it's more about humans being unreliable by definition. That's why we have autopilots, industrial robots, elevator or traffic light control system, or, in general trying to automate stuff.

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The problem is there is no proof AI is better then humans, probably it can't ever be better then a human with the current hardware in the current cars, but we have "hopeful" people that want to sacrifice lives to gather data for shitty startups that need the self driving cars ready this year or it will fail.

So we need this:

-real numbers of AI to have a meaningful discussion on real statistics

-we need good statistics, so not compare different car types and driver ages/categories

-IMO we have a low hanging fruit related to preventing drunk drivers to use a car, a system to detect a driver that is not looking ahead for more then n seconds, someone needs to handle this, it would improve the numbers a lot

-when we compare say a chess AI we compare it with professionals so it would be more honest if we want to say that self driving AI is better we should compare with a driver with experience that is not drunk

-we should not RUSH this because it will backfire,wait for hardware and software to be ready so if a concrete object is in the front of the car the radar can detect it's position and the cameras and image recognition can detect what it is and not ignore it like it is a road sign, hardware and software should be ready to detect signs, bottles, people, bikes, animals as good as humans, if is not as good as a human then we already lost since a human also many more "features" like intuition,

Why does everyone assume the vendors don't have data? They're recording full sensor logs in these tests, tracking everything they can. They wouldn't even be in this field if they didn't think they could outperform humans - and dozens of companies are doing this, from tiny startups to Google to General Motors. No one wants to take on the liability of crappy systems that perform worse than humans.

One interesting point of the development is that every failure is an opportunity to learn. The same cannot be said for human drivers. When the automation doesn't detect a hazard correctly, they can analyze it and tweak it so it detects better next time. Do humans do that?

A single human can potentially learn from experience. The result is 1 human learns.

A "auto" can learn from a failure, and every car using that AI system learns. 1 car results in thousands of systems all learning together.

That's the win of cooperative cybernetics, and something we humans haven't grasped very well at all.

Yes, that is the hope, but the problem is it "CAN" but this does not mean it actually learns, if you seen what this AI do is just ignoring most of the data since the hardware is not powerful enough, the reality should be that the radar and cameras would work together and identify all the detected objects and not ignore any input. Tesla hit a firetruck, then a police car, it killed 2 humans in similar conditions, did Tesla cars learned from it anything? if it did it was not enough

During some political protests a couple of years ago, in my part of town, a driver panicked and chose to drive through a crowd of high school kids crossing a street, with a walk light and police supervision. Luckily no one was killed, but one girl went under the car and had her leg crushed.

I wonder how many drivers learned from that one?

Do cars actually live stream everything? If not did Tesla and Uber extracted the data and did any improvement? I did not read anything about that, just blaming the driver and obfuscating the truth.

I am not against the self driving car idea, I can't drive because of my eyes and my son also has bad eyes(not as bad as me ) and epilepsy so he probably will not be able to drive a car, I am disappointed because the startups fucked this up by pretending that they can solve the problem with the crap weak hardware and software they have, as long as you can't detect the exact object position and use image recognition to correctly tag all objects and compute all speed vectors this can't be solved and it is clear the current hardware Tesla and Uber use is not enough.

Self driving may the future but is not the present and it is not the near future either.

Imagine an AI doctor,would you feel good if you know is better then a drunk doctor?

Would you send your child with a self driving car that is better then a drunk driver but not then yourself? ,after 1000 kills the ANN would MAYBE adjust some weight somewhere and the changes will increase a bit

Oh, that wasn't a Tesla, just an ordinary car, driven by a person who was terrified of that many young black people in one place. Which rolls around to a point that I keep making, that humans are emotional, and their emotional states greatly affect their driving, to the point of deliberately doing things that will hurt or kill others. Road rage is a common problem.

I agree self driving is not the present, but I think it's the near future - 10-20 years.

And to be absolutely clear - I believe that full-on self-driving technology, with no human assist or failover in normal on-road cases, will be a better driver than me within the next decade. I've had my driver's license for 37 years, and I love driving. I've had two moving violations in my life (last one over a decade ago), haven't been in an accident in 17 years, and haven't been in an injury accident ever. I'm a really good driver. And I'm kind of neurotic about being in a car with other people driving - it makes me nervous, even when I know they're good too.

But I'm totally looking forward to the day I can trust my car to do the driving for me, knowing it's better than I am.

Then we agree in most things, except I am most pessimist on how much time it will take for the technology to be at the level of a good human driver. Maybe if we get cheap and good enough radar/lidar or similar sensors maybe we could at least get cars that would not hit static objects.

The AI needs/has advantages like you said but those are needed to compensate the big missing part , the human intelligence, I am afraid of stupid scenarios where say a bridge would collapse and all the self driving cars would continue jumping of the bridge because this exact bridge colapse was not programmed into the car.11

>Do humans do that? do you have proof that with current software and hardware Tesla or Uber can make an AI better then a human?

Because it feels to me they are faking it to buy time until some new hardware is ready. They have the data but the hardware is to slow so they can't analyze it in real time so they ignore it, even if say they want to put a concrete related update it may be too intensive and it won't run in current hardware.

The point is that, until now, humans are _better_ drivers than self driving cars.

An alert, attentive, sober human will be a better driver than a self driving car for some time to come.

It's the exhausted, distracted, drunk ones you need to look out for.

And we could install some cheap device in each cars to detect when a driver is tired and keep him awake, and detect a drunk driver and stop him drive or perform some other action.

Until most of people will afford a self driving car you would still have to face the drunk, or the ones that text so you will not remove those of the roads.

Not a bad idea.

There are luxury cars that attempt to detect when a driver is falling asleep, and people are sometimes mandated to have an interlock on their cars that prevents starting if they have alcohol in their breath. So if these things are not universal, presumably it's because of cost-benefit analysis, not because they need to be invented.

I was involved back in 2003-2004 with an Australian company called SeeingMachines (I worked for a UK redistributor).

These guys made a remote video face-and-eye tracker that they sold to automotive companies wanting to research different dashboard designs -- they would look for blinks and head-nods to measure how fatigued a driver was, and to optimise the dashboard design to keep the driver awake.

I'm sure they are now selling their technology to automotive OEMs for placement in driver-facing camera ECUs.

Their technology worked OK back in 2003. I'm sure it is very robust and mature by now.

The key part here is "until now"

Which is why they aren't quite legal yet. And it's arguable anyway, given the noise in the signal (a tiny handful of fatalities to compare with the ~100k "normal" traffic deaths over the same period).

But like all new technology, it's improving. People aren't.

So at what point will automation become better than humans at this task? Are you saying "never"? Or just "not now"?

They are also better pilots than self-flying planes. And better writers then self-writing blogs.

And so on. There, of course, are many examples of things in which computers have outpaced human capabilities, and it's certainly plausible that some day this could apply to cars. But it hasn't happened yet and it's also more than plausible that none of this will happen in the lifetime of anyone now living.

For some values of 'human' e.g. alert, sober. Which is sadly, a minority?

Its arguable that self-driving cars are better already. What we need to do is, secure the roads so they won't get confused (fence them & remove pedestrians/bikes). I know, we can't do that everywhere but we could do it for long-haul etc. Like freeways already do.

>For some values of 'human' e.g. alert, sober. Which is sadly, a minority?

I think the vast majority of human drivers are alert and sober. It's the long tail of drunk / aggressive / distracted drivers that causes crashes.

>Its arguable that self-driving cars are better already. What we need to do is, secure the roads so they won't get confused (fence them & remove pedestrians/bikes). I know, we can't do that everywhere but we could do it for long-haul etc. Like freeways already do.

I mean as a human driver, I obviously love limited access roads (and human drivers perform very well on limited access roads). We won't have more of those though - the cultural paradigm for urban planning is one of tearing down freeways, adding bike-lanes, and ensuring pedestrian friendliness for maximum walkability.

Everything you've listed involves repetitive actions (or complete lack there of, if my limited understanding of aviation is accurate), which is known to cause humans to lose focus (and make mistakes).

Driving a car, on the other hand, is usually NOT a repetitive, dull process. You're comparing apples to oranges.

Have you never commuted a long-ish distance?

Driving a car is absolutely a repetitive process. It's improvisational to a degree, but the mechanics and decision-making in response to stimuli are consistent, learned behaviors. And it's hard to argue that humans are mechanically better at driving than machines can be - better sensors, better feedback, more direct connections, better reflexes. So we're only questioning whether self-driving cars can respond to unexpected stimuli better than humans.

Technically, you are correct, but the spirit of my argument is in disagreement. Driving has a repetitive list of tasks, but unlike an elevator, the "buttons" to accomplish the task are moved around every single time. Sometimes new buttons appear, and sometimes some go missing. It's a chaotic environment. Thus, it is not a repetitive process in my mind, because a chaotic environment is not repetitive. It's like saying "A chaotic environment is repetitive because it's always chaotic".

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