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by amelius 1716 days ago
Yes, would you trust a car with an error rate of 0.001%?
5 comments

The question is, what do you mean by "trust"?

Would I be happy for it to be driving around on the road? Probably.

Would I be happy for it to drive me, and it's 'my fault' if I don't notice it's gone wrong and kill someone? No.

So far Tesla (for example) seems nowhere near the point where they would accept responsibility for crashes -- they still always blame the driver for not paying attention.

That's the key tell right there: Musk always blames the customer and never takes responsibility.
Tesla's drives on a highway, encounters a difficult situation, turns off autopilot, and voala, the error is now counted against the human!

It does not even work in difficult situations and busy chaotic streets, and that's when all the crashes happen.

It's like the statistics that says sharks only attack near beaches - that where 99.99% of people are!

Well, what's the baseline?

I'm all in for a way to reduce any accident.

But there's a choice involved. Reduce baseline accidents, but increase being exposed to completely random events that will kill you.

Nope. I won't be part of that statistic.

We make those choices all the time.

Taking a plane instead of driving is similar. You lose direct control, but it's orders of magnitude safer.

I'll take a 0.001% chance of death over a 0.1% chance every time.

I'll take 0.1% chance of death which I (arguably) can control, over a 0.001% chance of death which I absolutely cannot control at all.

It's so clear to me. Yes, taking a plane is similar, but I only take that risk a couple of times a year.

The 0.1% (to me) is a probability number as I have some control over each event. The probability is so low that it likely never will happen.

The 0.001% number is an eventual outcome number. "Run the experiment X amount of times, and death will happen 0.001% of the time". And it's more relevant than flying as we drive so much more.

Nope! Thanks!

That's not how statistic works
Anytime you get on the road you are exposing yourself to the possibility that a suicidal or drunk or elderly person with dementia will kill you.

Personally, I would like to have very rigorous driving tests for old people and remove licenses for people with DUIs. The obvious question then is, how are old people and drunks supposed to get around. Self driving cars seem like an option eventually. It makes you safer compared to the alternative, which is we generally wait until someone is killed before we permanently remove someone's license.

I have some chance of controlling the outcome of the suicidal/drunk/elderly driver situation.

I have no chance of controlling a buggy AI.

I like my chances better :-)

I wonder how many people say this whose personal driving habits make them much higher risk than the baseline.
Regardless.

Nothing short of 100% reliability will convince me that handing over control to a closed-box AI is better.

And even then, one small "bug" could change that conclusion. It just takes one weird, anomoly in the real world to mess things up. And maybe handling those things will eventually be perfected*. Maybe. But I don't intend to be the beta tester for that.

*I know the default is to hand control back to the driver, but then you may as well be driving (which I enjoy). "Shut up and drive" is far more fun than being your cars KPI manager.

Is the failure mode that I die in a lithium fire?
Average humans have a higher error rate.
For me the question is how high is the error rate for a non drunk non sleepy non elderly non reckless human, since that is what my car would replace.

in my 20s you would need to bring the reckless back in.

Problem is, you are not alone on the road. And if somebody else does something really stupid, you can die as a consequence, without any chance to avoid it.

We are definitely not there yet, but I think of myself as a decent driver, and some assistant tools on high-end models are way better (just faster, probably) than me predicting stuff. For the first year this summer, I've driven a car that was quicker than I in an emergency break situation: while I started breaking, it depressed the pedal, and I was quite surprised, 'cause the car in front of me didn't begin breaking yet.

There's also the fact though, that if you're elderly you can't really avoid being a worse driver. I know particularly in rural areas where there's no public transportation, a lot of elderly people would accept an error rate higher than what their own driving used to be. It seems pretty tough for the rest of us to deny them access to a technology like that while it's in the interstitial stage.
Only if you’re the only driver being replaced.
If you classify an image 30 times per second, then 0.001% is quite a large error rate.
You said car, not image classifier.

If errors in any subsystem surface out to the car, well then okay. But it's not unlikely that the overall system would deal with an error in the image classifier.

Pay wall so I can’t read the article. But can someone comment on what 0.001% error means in real world scenarios?

To keep the maths easy, that’s 18 wrong frames/10min. So roughly 2/3 of a second.

If these images are spread out, maybe it’s fine. If it’s failing on certain types of images, then those images could be grouped and 2/3rds of a second is more than enough time for a serious failure.

Don't forget - the error might be reproduce-able. As in, it will error rarely, but at that one obstacle, with that one light config, it will error repeatedly and constantly.

AI related car accidents and deaths will have special places and dates, were they will repeat annually.

No they don't, humans have a error rate of between 0.00001 and 0.000000001 depending on how you measure it.
But, I assume, a lower completely random error rate, which an AI might produce.