[davidhs]

> Yes machine learning vision systems hallucinate, but so do humans.

When was the last time you had full attention on the road and a reflection of light made you super confused and suddenly drive crazy? When was the last time you experienced objects behaving erratically around you, jumping in and out of place, and perhaps morphing?

[hodgesrm]

Well there is strong anecdotal evidence of exactly this happening.

   We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like, “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive . . .”And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about 100 miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?” [0]

[0] Thompson, Hunter S., „Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas“

[fipar]

Hopefully we can expect FSD systems not to act like humans on hallucinogens though, right? :)

[hodgesrm]

One hopes so. Many of the comments assume an ideal human driver, whereas real human drivers are frequently tired, distracted, intoxicated, or just crazy.

[ben_w]

Many accidents are caused by low-angle light dazzle. It's part if why high beams aren't meant to be used off a dual carriageway.

When was the last time you saw a paper bag blown across the street and mistook it for a cat or a fox? (Did you even notice your mistake, or do you still think it was an animal?)

Do you naturally drive faster on wide streets, slower on narrow streets, because the distance to the side of the road changes your subconcious feeling of how fast you're going? Do you even know, or are you limited to your memories rather than a dashcam whose footage can be reviewed later?

etc.

Now don't get me wrong, AI today is, I think, worse than humans at safe driving; but I'm not sure how much of that is that AI is more hallucinate-y than us vs. how much of it is that human vision system failures are a thing we compensate for (or even actively make use of) in the design of our roads, and the AI just makes different mistakes.

[davidhs]

If the internal representation of Tesla Autopilot is similar to what the UI displays, i.e. the location of the w.r.t. to everything else, and we had a human whose internal representation is similar, everything jumping around in consciousness, we’d be insane to allow him to drive.

Self-driving is probably “AI-hard” as you’d need extensive “world knowledge” and be able to reason about your environment and tolerate faulty sensors (the human eyes are super crappy with all kinds of things that obscure it, such as veins and floaters).

Also, if the Waymo UI accurately represents what it thinks is going on “out there” it is surprisingly crappy. If your conscious experience was like that when you were driving you’d think you had been drugged.

[ben_w]

I agree that if Tesla's representation of what their system is seeing is accurate, it's a bad system.

The human brain's vision system makes pretty much the exact opposite mistake, which is a fun trick that is often exploited by stage magicians: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3iPrBrGSJM&pp

And is also emphasised by driving safety awareness videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRFMuGBP15U

I wonder what we'd seem like to each other, if we could look at each other's perception as directly as we can look at an AI's perception?

Most of us don't realise how much we mispercieve because it doesn't feel different in the moment to percieve incorrectly; it can't feel different in the moment, because if it did, we'd notice we were mispercieving.