[mumblemumble]

It's not clear to me that this is purely a software problem; it might be a "the car doesn't even have the sensors necessary to detect this kind of situation" problem.

It could also be a "the software can't anticipate that this would be happening the way a human can because it doesn't have object permanence" problem. That's probably at least part of how a human would do it. But I have a suspicion that we're very, very far away from being able to get computers to do that in any sort of reliable way. So I'm guessing we're probably looking at specialized sensors if we want to handle this kind of situation appropriately.

Basically some sort of self-driving car equivalent of a human driver getting out of the car to check and make sure everything's OK.

[marcosdumay]

I would be surprised if it turns out that those self-driving cars don't have object permanence. Making things move around without a physical model looks like a really nasty infinite bug-breeder.

[FireBeyond]

For the longest time, at least the visual representation of trains at a level crossing strongly implied challenges around object permanence for Tesla.

I will say that I recognize that the visual representation may not be a 1:1 (in fact quite certainly isn't) mapping of the computer's "world view".

But it was quite ridiculous and definitely disconcerting seeing a level crossing with a train going through it and seeing the Tesla I was in acting like there was a traffic light that was erratically going red, while dozens of semi trucks flickered in and out of existence across the screen in front of me.

[mike_d]

> strongly implied challenges around object permanence for Tesla

Anyone who has ever ridden in a Tesla knows they have no real perception of the world around them. Even just driving down the road they show icons of the things around them, which will randomly appear and disappear or change from busses to pedestrians to cars.

[marcosdumay]

Well, ok, in hindsight I have to make an exception for Tesla here. They are famously flickery, and I do expect them to have a bug after the other.

But I really don't expect that from the cars that go around without a driver.

[phatskat]

I’m guessing because Tesla uses cameras and everyone else uses LiDAR, right?

[marcosdumay]

Because Tesla is not self-driving, and thus their designers have no need to solve those bugs.

[phatskat]

They sure aren’t, Musk just keeps saying “this year”, and has been saying it for like a decade?

[mumblemumble]

And yet a common thread in post-mortems on so many self-driving car collisions boils down to, "the car doesn't have object permanence."

It may have some ability to track specific things in specific ways in a manner that's hard-coded by engineers. But if that's the same thing as an actual mental model of the world then that implies that we've had a significant piece of AGI in the form of many video games for about half a century now and just not known it.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

yeah, another poster mentioned they would have heard the screaming.

audio is difficult because a human can differentiate a woman screaming from the sounds of construction, etc. And also can tell that it's someone in shock vs someone in pain.

I'm unsure if audio processing is good enough for that yet, but imagine if someone were to try and you could get these vehicles to stop by screaming near them.

[kaibee]

An ML model to differentiate human-in-pain screaming from other noise sounds like scifi-satire.