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NVIDIA To Install Computers In Cars To Teach Them How To Drive
jfruh writes: NVIDIA has unveiled the Drive PX, a $10,000 computer that will be installed in cars and gather data about how to react to driving obstacles. "Driving is not about detecting, driving is a learned behavior," said Jen Hsun Huang, CEO of NVIDIA. The data collected by Drive PXes will be shared, allowing cars to learn the right and wrong reactions to different situations, essentially figuring out what to do from experience rather than a rigid set of pre-defined situations.
Is that you?
I recognize that analyzing lots of data across lots of cars, drivers, and routes might yield useful knowledge. I'll bet there are even insights that no single human driver could ever gain.
But an awful lot of driving behavior comes from things that have nothing to do with anything this computer can monitor -- specifically, the driver's thought processes. If I slam on the brakes suddenly because I remember something I forgot at home, what will the computer make of that?/p?
The computer isn't learning from experience it is being programmed by a different method. basically they are copying other drivers reactions to a set of obstacles so that the programmers don't have to create all those rules themselves.
Think of it this way instead of manually programming a replacement robot arm on an assembly line they are copying the program code over directly to save time. This isn't a bad thing. However it is far from learning.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
a behavior is: observable activity in a human or animal. the aggregate of responses to internal and external stimuli. a stereotyped, species-specific activity, as a courtship dance or startle reflex.
Driving is the appliaction of education, study, and practice of a specific set of rules and regulations pertaining to a specific type of motorized vehicle. the reason we have different licenses for motorcycles, cars, and semi tractor trailers is more than enough to discredit the idea that driving is a behavior itself. You could classify things like tailgating and jackrabbit starts as poor behaviors associated with operating a motor vehicle, but driving is far more of a learned skill than an expression of ones inability to cancel a turn signal.
if we distilled driving to behavior, as nvidia insists, we would have a car that refused to turn its headlights on in the rain and couldnt properly allow vehicles to overtake while passing. It would go 25 miles over the speed limit, ignore school zones, and divert 100% of its resources to text messages and cellular communication at random intervals. It would occasionally ignore green lights and red lights, and it would tailgate and merge without signaling almost religiously. it would erroneously yield right of way at a roundabout, it would ignore speed limits in construction zones, and it would short-stop at continuous merge lanes and wait for traffic to pass before entering. In short, it would be the single most dangerous thing on any tarmac or asphalt since Gary Busey.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Even for the often flawed human drivers, this rings true. It seems one of the more common single vehicle highway accidents is the slight drift off the road followed by the panicked, aggressive over-correction... experience teaches us to gradually bring the vehicle back in line by fighting the gut-reaction to hurry.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
What are they going to learn? How to not pay attention; how to not allow other vehicles to merge; how to force their way in when not allowed to merge; how to tailgate; how to brake check when others are tailgating; how to not use turn signals; what type of actions from other vehicles should cause them to rage; how to rage properly; how to ignore all the signs leading up to your exit and then cut across three lanes to take it at the last second; how to drive slow in the fast lane; how to pass when there isn't really room; how close they can get to a bicycle without actually hitting it; or hitting it, either way; ... etc..
"Driving is not about detecting, driving is a learned behavior," said Jen Hsun Huang, CEO of NVIDIA
It's about learning what to do with what you have detected, from position to collision detection is critical, then knowing what to do with that data is also critical.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
This is an indispensable aspect of the road to automated driving, so to speak. Yes, learning human behaviour behind the wheel would be detrimental if it were applied directly to the AI's own driving algorithms, but consider that it's going to need to anticipate the actions of all the human drivers around it. Yes, I would like my self-driving car to have a very fine-tuned set of expectations for the idiocy it'll encounter.
Suppose a crash looks imminent. Whose life is more valuable?
The car will choose to follow the rules of the road as best it can in an imminent-crash situation. Your car won't be able to tell the difference between a bus full of old folks and a bus full of children any time soon. It's just going to stack into whatever is actually in its lane after bleeding off as much velocity as possible, it's not ever going to go onto the curb to hit the old woman to avoid smashing the day care minivan. Now can we stop asking this question, since it has a rather obvious answer? Pedestrian steps into the crosswalk too late for it to brake, your car doesn't swerve and hit parked traffic, the pedestrian gets sent airborne. And they deserved it, too. The car's on-board camera will prove it, and the stored telemetry will prove that the car couldn't possibly have stopped.
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