Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

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We can cross that bridge when, if, we come to it. At the moment, AI products are nowhere near as safe as human drivers in no-compromises realworld driving situations (ie a foggy/snowy/icy night, driver asleep, mountain highway etc).

If we really cared about using AI to promote safe driving, we would turn it away from the road and towards the human driver. Take the above scenarios. While AI driving is a difficult problem, an AI that can detect a drunk/tired/inept driver is not. Any car could easily be equipped with internal cameras or other systems to tell if a driver is unfit. Any car cold be equipped with a dead man's switch to safely deal with a driver that has fallen asleep. How about a car that calls the cops whenever it thinks its driver may be drunk? Heck, you don't need AI to install a speed governor that would curtail any and all speeding[1]. The fact that the market repeatedly rejects such simple AI implementations tells me that all-up AI driving is a long long way away.

[1] My dream is an automatic switch that turns on a police car's lights/sirens every time they break the speed limit. Why else would a marked cop car ever speed unless it was chasing someone?

> We can cross that bridge when, if, we come to it. At the moment, AI products are nowhere near as safe as human drivers in no-compromises realworld driving situations (ie a foggy/snowy/icy night, driver asleep, mountain highway etc).

I'm not entirely convinced this is true, even though it's commonly stated. People are terrible at driving in fog and snow and ice (and... asleep?). It's intuitive why a self driving car company would not want to release the cars to do this in extra dangerous situations while they're still improving the easier stuff, but we don't exactly have stats to say the cars would necessarily do worse.

>> People are terrible at driving in fog and snow and ice

They are considerably better than the AI systems who currently just stop and say "I see no road" or facetiously stick to markings/signs that mean little during winter conditions. The last time I rented an SUV (2020 Jeep grand Cherokee) it wouldn't let me reverse into a parking spot because the rear camera/sensor was caked in snow/ice. In order to be dangerous at winter driving you must first be able to actually move.

There's a line of can't/won't/shouldn't here though. The AI systems probably could drive in these conditions. Most of them utilize GPS to navigate. But they don't because that's a high risk activity. I'm not totally convinced that even now, the average accident rate of a self driving car wouldn't be lower in adverse conditions compared to a random driver- if the car were just told to do its best and let loose.

Not that I'm advocating this is a good idea.

To be clear, human driving that is augmented by “AI” (lane following, collision detection, blind spot warnings, etc) is much safer than human driving alone.

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To a point. There is an inflection when the AI becomes a crutch that allows the human to stop paying attention. Tesla may be at/near this point. For instance: lane assist is great until it causes people to take their hands off the wheel, to stop looking at where they are going. I'd rather see such systems implanted as enforcement mechanisms. Let the AI prevent a car from drifting out of its lane. Let it monitor the lane position and scream at the driver when they start to drift. Don't let the AI become a comfortable crutch that allows the driver to take their mind off the task.

I agree, driver monitoring should absolutely be a core part of self driving systems. This is something that George Hotz (Comma.ai) is getting right, and Tesla is getting wrong.

The problem is that Elon/Tesla has the hubris to think that their self driving is soon going to be so good they don’t need to worry about driver monitoring, but that’s obviously wrong at this point.

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