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Programming Safety Into Self-Driving Cars
aarondubrow writes Automakers have presented a vision of the future where the driver can check his or her email, chat with friends or even sleep while shuttling between home and the office. However, to AI experts, it's not clear that this vision is a realistic one. In many areas, including driving, we'll go through a long period where humans act as co-pilots or supervisors before the technology reaches full autonomy (if it ever does). In such a scenario, the car would need to communicate with drivers to alert them when they need to take over control. In cases where the driver is non-responsive, the car must be able to autonomously make the decision to safely move to the side of the road and stop. Researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed 'fault-tolerant planning' algorithms that allow semi-autonomous machines to devise and enact a "Plan B."
If you're not aware of the level of performance of current self-driving cars, let me break it down for you. They can't stop for construction or understand rerouting from it or obey temporary signs. They can't see stoplight colors while the sun is setting anywhere near behind them. They can't drive on snow at all. They will slam on the brakes for a piece of newspaper blowing across the road or other low density objects. They think puddles are obstructions and will slam on the brakes.
They're basically deathtraps on wheels and they don't work at all plus they're illegal in several states.
this is a HUGE pet peeve of mine! if we deployed self-driving cars tomorrow we'd see a huge drop in overall accident rates but we're not doing it out of fear of edge cases! guess what: human beings encounter unforeseen scenarios on the road all the time & have to make reflexive decisions in real time. guess what? we f up a large % of the time! if a computer can reduce overall accidents by double-digit %s I'll be the first to say I'll accept the risk of being one of the edge cases that may (or not) have survived had a human been behind the wheel.
it's like the vaccine debate - guess what? there ARE people who have bad outcomes who would not have otherwise but the overall net gain to society is so big we (rightfully) shame people who don't participate...
So the car is travelling at 60 MPH on automatic when a situation arises that requires the car to switch to human-control ... and there might be a problem with the human not reacting correctly?
I think that the problem would be expecting the human to take control and do anything useful at that speed if the programming couldn't handle it.
They make the mistake of thinking that you can get to self driving cars with a lot of miniscule improvements on current technology such as automatic braking and cruise control. A self driving car is an entirely new paradigm, much like the horseless carriage was a completely different paradigm. If you want to make a self driving car, then the working assumption should be that it has one mode - self driving. Actually, imagine the car without a steering wheel, no accelerator pedals or brakes. Imagine the car going round town with no driver in it. If the failure mode of your imagined self-driving car requires a driver to take over, then you have failed to create a viable self driving car.
It's hard enough for human to keep attentive on the road when they are fully in control of the car. Can you imagine humans having to take over when something has failed. By the time the human being realises that their car has failed and they are required to take over, they will have crashed already.
"Human taking over" is a really really bad failure mode in a self driving car. It's way worse than the computer trying to take appropriate action to prevent accidents and loss of life.