Bear case for self-driving: in 1 million miles of driving, roughly the number between major human accidents, do we really think these cars will not encounter one AI-complete problem.
It is perfectly reasonable to expect these cars to do at least as well as humans at avoiding mind-bogglingly stupid scenarios that the least experienced driver could avoid while drunk, talking on the phone, and applying makeup. This is absolutely one of those scenarios.
We hold machines to much higher standards. We accept human imperfection and human error. People killing people on the road because they are sleepy or not paying attention is a risk we are willing to accept. The reason is that people have a skin in the game themselves. Being in a accident means they risk injury, fines, jail time.
I think few are willing to accept autopilots that are only as bad as (or as good as) humans. They must be significantly better than human drivers, simply because we don't accept their errors like we do human errors.
This is completely irrational when looked at purely from a safety point of view (Who doesn't want safer roads?), but this obstacle is very real.
Worse: that autonomous cars are better in many scenarios or aspects (they don't get sleepy, they are never drunk) doesn't mean we accept that they are ever worse in any other aspect, despite the total safety being better.
That is: autonomous vehicles must not just be as good as human drivers, they must be significantly better (or at least safer) than human drivers. And not only that, they must be significatly better in every aspect of driving, for them to gain acceptance.
It is not irrational because self driving cars are not interchangeable with human drivers 1-1. If autonomous cars are put on roads it is very likely net traffic increases. We put up with bad driving because we have to, this is absolutely not the case for machines. I, personally, don't want more average drivers on the roads.
The problem is that the flaws of humans tend to be random and stochastic, while the flaws of machines tend to be consistent and systematic. This is the at least the fifth example of Tesla missing stationary objects on the road.
Humans might have a judgment failure every so often, but they might realize how unsafe they are and change their behavior, or drive less, or get their license taken away. A machine consistently crashing cars has no self correction protocol, and will consistently make the same mistake over and over.
If there was an autopilot that nailed every scenario in any weather condition except clearly overturned trucks in good weather, should that system be approved for general public use?
Considering the fact that accidents often attract bystanders and emergency personnel to help the incapacitated driver, the inability to avoid an existing wreck in clear weather is a glaring hazard to human life.
Moreover, trucks sometimes contain hazardous or flammable materials.
So the answer to your question is a resounding no, in my view.
You can bring in new safety features without having full self-driving. I think the safest option is to have human drivers, with the car always monitoring to avoid any serious accidents. People will still be attentive, since they are in full control, but you avoid just as many accidents as you would if the car was driving itself.
I agree. By establishing an "auto-pilot," you actually eliminate redundancy by putting the driver in a passive position. (No matter how many times you tell the driver to remain attentive)
The machine ought to be an error handler for specific failures of an active human driver (sudden braking of lead vehicle, lane straying, etc). This is the only way to get both machine and human to pay full attention. A person in a co-pilot role will struggle to react quickly enough to handle errors of the machine auto-pilot.
So, yeah, you're right - there aren't any alternative systems that manage to avoid this problem. Even humans suck at it. And if even humans can't handle construction areas safely, how can you possibly expect computers to be perfect?
There are. Use two or three alternative AI implementations, which will watch each other. Kind of famous "Predator" algo, but for driving. If one will fail, second will pick up. If one makes mistakes, second will teach it.
Nope, it shouldn't. A system that happily plows into a massive static object that blocks 3 lanes of traffic just because the system didn't recognize it as a danger should never be allowed on the road. In fact Tesla should remotely disable autopilot on every single car out there until this is investigated, tested and patched. And even then I have my reservations about the naming, it's not an autopilot.
Why not? In that hypothetical, ramming every overturned truck while avoiding all other accidents would be a massive improvement in safety. What about the truck scenario makes it so bad as to outweigh avoiding the other accidents?
The other scenario is whether fully autonomous vehicles out-perform humans in sufficiently many other scenarios such that we will consider the comparatively rare scenario of an overturned truck not that big of a deal compared to the massive numbers killed due to raw human carelessness. Furthermore, autonomous vehicles will likely get better and better at driving collectively, something which I would make a heavy bet against for human drivers.
1. Technology should not make mind-bogglingly stupid mistakes like this, regardless of how rare they are in the grand scheme of things.
2. Because these systems use neural nets, they're black boxes and it's impossible to conduct a proper engineering analysis on them to find out when they will fail. Fuzzing the system with live humans is not engineering; it's callous disregard for human life and anybody who practices it should lose the right to call themselves an engineer.
In order for there to be a major accident, there not only has to be a mistake, it has to be a mistake with a major consequence, and it has to be that nobody else there avoided it either.
In general a car that doesn't see a pedestrian isn't a major accident unless the pedestrian also doesn't see the car. If not for that there would be a whole lot more fatalities with human drivers as well. A self-driving car obviously shouldn't do that, but neither should a human, and they do. Which makes it less hard for the computer to do it at least as well.
You can also expect the computers to improve over time by learning from each others' mistakes, which human drivers generally don't.
While it is the case that it usually takes two people to cause an accident, there are plenty of scenarios where there is only one person who is capable of taking the action necessary to avoid it. For example, an elderly person in the crosswalk is not going to be capable of getting out of the way of a speeding car.
It's already the case that pedestrian/car collisions are usually written off as the pedestrian's fault until proven otherwise--the Uber self-driving car that killed a pedestrian is a great example of that in action.
And the same is true of human drivers, is my point. You don't just need the mistake, you need all the other things to go wrong too. The pedestrian entered the crosswalk even though a car was coming, instead of waiting to make sure the car stops first (as pedestrians often do). The car failed to identify something. The thing it failed to identify was a pedestrian and not a mailbox or a trashcan. The pedestrian was elderly and couldn't jump out of the way fast enough etc.
It all has to go wrong at once. Mistakes are common but most mistakes aren't fatal.
> Mistakes are common but most mistakes aren't fatal.
And by choosing to drive a car, you are dramatically raising the odds that any mistake you make is fatal (not necessarily to you).
While my personal experience on the matter is thankfully limited, I strongly suspect that the vast majority of vehicular-pedestrian accidents are mostly (or entirely) the fault of the driver, where the pedestrian started an action where it was safe to do so and the driver rapidly caused it to become unsafe before the pedestrian could react.
Is 1 million miles really the approximate distance between major accidents? Because in a lifetime, many people would approach that, and yet most people don't die in auto accidents.