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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.
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.
Why are we stuck in the "one car for every person" model of transportation? Why not work toward a more efficient means of mass transport; working from home, etc. etc. Almost everything we do except for pleasure driving can be accomplished with delivery services, really efficient mass transit, or tele-whatever.
Simple example to see how complex this idea is, would be just looking at CAPTCHA, anti-spam solution by google. It's only one little static image with couple of numbers. But cracking how to teach machine to read it took years.. And even now it's not 100% accurate on every case. So imagine now that you need to decode whole dynamic reality surrounding the car, reality in which everything can have similar shapes and colors. If i see drunk person walking on sidewalk i can determine if that person will maybe walk on road or not, how can computer determine that this person is even drunk? maybe it's someone that is showing other person how to dance or playing some silly game. Reality is so complex and unpredictable, so many variables, that until we get real A.I. you can forget about self driving cars. All the hype about this now is just marketing gimmick. Simple tasks like parking are doable because there is not much of computing there, just couple of sensors that can determine from reflection the distance and algorithm to count if and how to park there.... but real driving is unreachable, even if you will pack fastest supercomputer cluster in the world, i assure you that this car will make accident or injure someone. Computer can't achieve the same computation power as our brains in certain situations. It's just unreal. Ask anyone that is really working with AI and neural networks. If we would gather all computation power that was made by humankind (from computers, phones, microcontrollers etc.) it would not be enough with current our knowledge and architecture to make fully safe self-driving car.
The problem of over dependance on automation eroding piloting skill has already been addressed in the flying biz. Read about Children of the Magenta Line.
Once people give up hands-on driving experience, expect a rapid descent into complete dependence on the AI. At which time it would be better to take the steering wheel away and admit to ourselves that everyone in the car is a passenger. Even seeing a Zipcar coming down the road is enough to strike fear into the heart of the experienced driver. Here comes someone who thinks they can keep up their skill level by borrowing a car a couple of times a month.
Have gnu, will travel.
I don't think it's that much speculation.
First off - during your commute, how many people do you see doing something other than driving? I mean, paying attention and driving as if it was the only thing that mattered.
Then look at what everyone else who isn't treating driving as the serious activity it is - what are they doing? Texting, chatting, reading, watching TV/movies, etc. These people seriously do not want to drive - they don't care enough about driving to actually give it their full attention. (In fact, distracted driving is the #1 cause of accidents now, not drunk driving).
You tell me if putting those people who don't really care about driving in cars that do driving for them whether the roads will be safer. You can ignore the distracted driving as the cause of accidents if it helps you make your case.
And it ignores the fact that even in the edge case, damage can be reduced because an autonomous vehicle can react in a fraction of a second - most human drivers take several times between the event, seeing the event, recognizing and processing and deciding on a course of action, and executing the action.
If someone cuts right in front of you, an autonomous vehicle can be at max braking in under a second, while a human would take a couple of seconds if they were fast, to 10 seconds or more if they were taking a selfie. (And yes, I've seen drivers take selfies while driving.).
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.
About the ethical rules that should govern decisions like saving one baby who's lying on the railway track to the left vs 5 grannies toddling across the track on the right, when you're at the controls of the track-switch.
Now someone gets to actually program these rules into a car.
Cool!
The problem is, how will the car know which car contains the grandma, which one contains the brain surgeon on the way to save the popes life and which one contains 3 kids?
The simple answer from engineers is that it doesn't.
Engineers and safety experts have already got a bunch of rules to determine what to do in an emergency. Rule 1, avoid if at all possible a collision, rule 2, if a collision is unavoidable, do not swerve. Brake and stay straight as a rear end crash is the safest kind of crash.
It doesn't matter if the guy in front has an OBE and the guy to your left is a meth addict. The car will be programed to choose the course that causes the less damage and that is the rear ender.
The problem that will appear with autonomous cars aren't the cars, its the people. Everyone expects them to be some kind of motoring messiah that means they dont have to worry about driving. In reality, autonomous cars will be programmed to:
- Not speed.
- slow down for adverse and unexpected conditions.
- Maintain safe distances.
- Keep out of the passing lane even if the it means going slower.
- Slow down to anticipate potentially dangerous spots (I.E. pedestrian crossings).
- Slow down in areas heavily trafficked by pedestrians or when significant pedestrian traffic is detected.
- Not to change lane unless necessary.
- Indicate and give way to traffic when changing lanes.
- Obey all traffic signs and slow for give way (yield) signs.
How do I know all this, they're straight from the defensive drivers handbook (OK some are from the learn to drive handbook). This will frustrate a lot of todays drivers because it means the autonomous car will be perceived to be slower than they are (even though it will probably be just as fast due to better decision making) so you'll find a lot of the worst drivers taking manual control because the bleeping car isn't tailgating or lane weaving like they want it to.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
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.