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People Are Losing Faith In Self-Driving Cars Following Recent Fatal Crashes (mashable.com)
oldgraybeard shares a report from Mashable: A new survey (PDF) released Tuesday by the American Automobile Association found that 73 percent of American drivers are scared to ride in an autonomous vehicle. That figure is up 10 percent from the end of last year. The millennial demographic has been the most affected, according to the survey of more than 1,000 drivers. From that age group, 64 percent said they're too afraid to ride in an autonomous vehicle, up from 49 percent -- making it the biggest increase of any age group surveyed.
"There are news articles about the trust levels in self-driving cars going down," writes oldgraybeard. "As a technical person, I have always thought the road to driverless cars would be longer than most were talking about. What are your thoughts? As an individual with eye problems, I do like the idea. But technology is not as good as some think."
The Mashable article also references a separate study from market research company Morning Consult "showing increased fear about self-driving vehicles following the deadly March crashes in the Bay Area and Arizona." Another survey from car shopping site CarGurus set to be released Wednesday found that car owners aren't quite ready to trade their conventional vehicles for self-driving ones. "Some 84 percent of the 1,873 U.S. car owners surveyed in April said they were unlikely to own a self-driving car in the next five years," reports Mashable. "79 percent of respondents said they were not excited about the new technology."
The Mashable article also references a separate study from market research company Morning Consult "showing increased fear about self-driving vehicles following the deadly March crashes in the Bay Area and Arizona." Another survey from car shopping site CarGurus set to be released Wednesday found that car owners aren't quite ready to trade their conventional vehicles for self-driving ones. "Some 84 percent of the 1,873 U.S. car owners surveyed in April said they were unlikely to own a self-driving car in the next five years," reports Mashable. "79 percent of respondents said they were not excited about the new technology."
How many crashes happen every day because of humans? Yes I know it is sad, no one wants bad things to happen. But in the long run this is going to save far more lives than take.
Show me the statistics, not the emotion-laden stories. I'll bet money that self-driving cars are safer now and will be even safer in the future. Id love to have one, just can't afford it.
There is way too much starry-eyed magical thinking about tech in general at the moment. AI this and machine learning that...you would think people's day to day interactions with their phone assistants would get people to quickly understand things are still fledgling, but apparently not.
I'm in favour of developing the technology. And very, very much in favour of not overhyping it to destruction.
The link is to a local file, not net-accessible....
The right question to ask is : would you prefer to ride in a self-driven car, or with a drunken driver ? and with a very tired driver ?
We can safely ignore this headline.
In surveys people think Facebook is evil but I don't see many of them cancelling their accounts.
Surveys also prove that people want more leafy green salads in McDonalds but nobody ever eats them if they appear.
Nope. The day people figure out they can use Facebook all the way to MacDonalds and back will be a good day to look for a second hand car.
No sig today...
I do industrial automation for a living, since about 2000. There's a certain class of automation problem where getting to a 90% solution is easy, getting to 95% takes a lot of work, and getting to 97% is extremely hard. That is, 90% of the parts coming down the assembly line are easy to categorize correctly, the next 5% you can do with a lot of effort, and so on. Unfortunately that last 2 or 3% are damn near impossible due to problems with how good our sensors are, or how good our algorithms are, or how good our mechanical sorting solutions are.
These problems are notorious for causing run-on projects that slurp up money but never end. That's because your initial effort appears to produce amazing results - 90% with almost no effort. How hard can the remaining 10% be? My first encounter with one of these problems was a barcode-reading system at an industrial facility reading barcoded tags with a camera instead of a barcode reader. The problem was that the barcodes were becoming more worn and faded over time, and management believed that if we used a camera instead of a barcode reader we'd be able to enhance the image, etc., and get a good read because clearly a human looking at the picture can clearly see the bars and the human-readable text below it. This project went on for months, and then years, always creeping closer to 100%, but never making that leap to 100%, having thrown several different engineers at the problem and bringing in outside machine vision specialists.
In most cases these problems come from over-estimating the capability of your sensors. A sensor with a little dirt on it suddenly gives the wrong result, or temperature fluctuations mess up the calibration, or the dreaded, "sensor seems to be giving valid values, but they're just wrong for no reason." Even if your sensor values are reliable, in many cases you'll end up with a measurement that doesn't fall clearly into the known-A or known-B range.
That's where "AI" is supposed to save us, but my limited experience with AI shows it falls into the same class of engineering problem: you can quickly build an AI that correctly categorizes 90% of your input correctly, and then with effort you can improve it and improve it some more, but you'll never reach that always-correct answer.
This is where engineering projects fail, because you can always find a manager or an optimistic engineer who can hand-wave away the ambiguity and say, "humans aren't perfect either" and "we can just keep making the AI better and better." That's convenient when you don't put a physical number on it. How good can you make the AI with the available sensors? We know the sensors are in some ways better than human perception, but in other ways they're worse. In what quantitative ways are they worse, and how are you compensating for that?
If I were going to tackle some problem like this, I'd start with a standardized sensor suite and data format. You can't have everyone developing AI based on proprietary sensor data because it's too opaque. You also need to standardize the system output format (accelerator percent, braking percent, steering value, etc.) Plus you need to standardize the parameters of the vehicle. Once you've got that you need to start collecting and publishing this data in this standard format - hundreds of thousands or millions of test case scenarios available for every researcher to use, and in each case you need to have an expert specify what the correct set of outputs should be (or correct range at least) for each scenario. Then you can develop your AI or algorithms and you can then run these through a test suite so your AI has to pass all of these scenarios before it can be certified. As we have crashes then we add to the list of scenarios, and if you make changes to the AI, it has to pass that new scenario and still pass all the old ones.
I get the sense this is what the companies doing research are trying to do, but how do we validate their product? If their databases are proprietary, and their sensor format and data isn't in a standard format, and we can't run the tests ourselves, then how can we trust their systems? Of course we can't.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Are these reporters pointing out that 17 gasoline cars burst into flames every hour in the USA? That non-Tesla cars are responsible for 6% of all fire-related deaths?
Nope? That's what I imagined.
https://www.nfpa.org/Public-Ed...
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...people are losing faith in an overhyped, not-ready-for-prime-time technology in the development stages for a task that takes a colossal synthesis of perception, reflexes, maturity, and training (none of which we have systems capable of duplicating yet individually) for which the infrastructure (physical, legal, social) hasn't even begun to be developed, much less matured to the point of implementation?
It's almost like repeatedly INSISTING that "it's almost here" is ACTUALLY an insufficient substitute for real time in development?
Hm.
-Styopa
Yes, because as we all know, airplane autopilots are totally designed to replace a pilot, and that's why we don't have pilots anymore.
Meanwhile, it's not Tesla that's calling its cars "self-driving".
Give a boy a gun and you arm him for a day. Teach him how to make a gun, and the whole metaphor breaks down.
She was even walking a bike across, which is a giant radar reflector. And she was a moving target, so shouldn't have been filtered out as clutter. That accident still just amazes me that Uber's system was so bad as to have missed her. Lidar missed her. Cameras missed her. Radar missed her. Ultrasonics missed her. No braking attempt whatsoever until the impact. I still want to know how that happened. I can at least understand the high profile Tesla accidents, but I just can't understand this one.
Give a boy a gun and you arm him for a day. Teach him how to make a gun, and the whole metaphor breaks down.
Anybody who was developing "faith" in self driving cars was in trouble from the beginning. They are not a salvation. They are simply a technology that will soon be safer than humans at driving. Along the way they will introduce a whole host of new issues and changes in society and weighing whether the net effect is good or bad will occupy the pundits for a century. And anyone whose "faith" in this technology is strongly affected by the inevitable spurts of progress and setbacks needs to study a little history. We are starting a process that will extend over decades during which autonomous systems will take over driving duties from humans.
How many crashes happen every day because of humans? Yes I know it is sad, no one wants bad things to happen. But in the long run this is going to save far more lives than take.
Several problems with that argument. 1) you are assuming people are rational when they aren't. 2) People don't care much about the long run. They especially don't care when they are afraid of something (see nuclear power). 3) Your claim that it will save lives is at this point pure conjecture albeit based on reasonable logic. We don't actually have any proof that self driving tech does or will save lives. 4) Certain high profile companies are pushing the technology out there in some arguably irresponsible ways. 5) People tend to trust people more than they trust machines even when that makes no logical sense.
As someone who drives a Tesla with âoeautopilotâ features, I believe full self-drive is a long way off. For a start, from time to time, the Tesla does veer over the middle divider line, or worse, over the line at the edge of the road. On a long drive on a road with some curves, I expect this to happen once or twice. So even that stuff is not reliable. Heck if youâ(TM)re coming down a hill, the sensors donâ(TM)t even see the car in front of you sometimes because of the angles....going around a corner where there are âoesuddenlyâ stopped cars because of a traffic light is another issue....car only notices at the last moment! But the bigger is issue is anticipation. If Iâ(TM)m driving on a street and there are kids playing with a football on the sidewalk, I know it makes sense to slow down, move a little further out into the road, just in case one of the kids runs out to get the ball. Or I see a truck stopped and I know thereâ(TM)s a possibility the driver might open the door, etc. All these self-drive systems are reactive and I donâ(TM)t think thatâ(TM)s good enough for safe driving, even compared to people.
Get back to us when there are a statistically significant number of Tesla cars on the roads, you shill. Also, the statistics you cited include Tesla fires and fatalities.
We climb in a little metal box, hurtle towards another metal box at a closing speed of 200km/hr. Then, to make it safe, we paint a white line on the road and promise to both stay on one side of it. To make life exciting we then add wildlife, children playing, wet weather, tired alcoholics who have just broken up with their wives...
The system is absurd, it is mind blowing that it works as well as it does, but all the band aids like crumple zones, seatbelts and AI steering can't avoid the fact that the system we have evolved is inherently dangerous. Nobody would ever deliberately design a system like our roads and cars.
As an illustration, where I live people working on the side of the road must have a substantial crash barrier to protect them from the oncoming traffic and provide a safe working environment. That same worker can then get on a motorbike and ride home, protected only by a painted line, and nobody thinks anything of it.
Get back to us when there are a statistically significant number of Tesla cars on the roads, you shill.
Huh?
The whole point is that there aren't a statistically significant number of Tesla cars on the roads but they're making all the headlines.
2000 gasoline gars explode? Nothing to see here.
A story involving a Tesla? Front page news!
No sig today...
How about this -- 65% of all fires in waste facilities are from lithium batteries.
Those places where they pass lithium batteries though big grinding machines followed by even bigger trash compactors?
Yes, that statistic might be true.
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I think more in depth analysis needs to be done. The numbers for gasoline powered vehicles is for all cars of any age. But most Teslas on the road are only a few years old. What do the numbers look like for gas powered cars in the same age range? What about when only compared to cars in teh same age range and price range? What portion of the car fires were set intentionally vs. which ones were the result of bad maintenance vs. which ones were the result of an accident vs which ones were just spontaneous? Just looking at overall percentages doesn't really tell the whole story. Maybe the Tesla is safer than other vehicles. Maybe they aren't. It's hard to tell without doing a huge in depth analysis about car fires, why they happen, when they happen, how they happen, and looking at these finer details.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
You're forgetting that self-driving companies are also pushing sensationalist headlines all the time saying self-driving cars *must* be done so we can reduce fatalities. But in the process all I see is that we are producing exceptionally bad, inattentive drivers (and will so even more than people simply using their phone and driving), making more hazardous conditions. I've seen really bad inattentive drivers the last couple years, and I can't help it is the generation coming that have been addicted to "smart" phones, not knowing what it is like to drive without a connected device on you.
So if you think this marketing is beneficial and will save lives, bow down to your electronic god. Or you can take it from me who works in the industry and even know all the "smart-car" developers admit behind closed doors the technology doesn't actually work and they don't think it will be possible for a long time, and I might add, if ever, since the concept of having people behind the wheel not knowing how to drive, relying on the car to figure it out all the time, and /will/ fail (BSOD will take a new meaning). This dumbing down will not solve anything.
I'll never trust a machine to think for me. AI today isn't even close to earning the "I" in the title, it's a neat collection of heuristics, nothing more. The issue with it is that I took years to get to a level of driving aptitude suitable for me to feel safe after growing out of my more reckless years, no AI is close to that current ability. To compound that, I'm intimately familiar with the software development lifecycle, deadlines, and the drive to portray your product in the most ideal light to clients (more or less in an identical manner to a hooker spraying perfume on her diseased body.) At the end of the day I'm going to trust me being invested in ensuring I don't die a Hell of a lot more than some unknown 9-5 code monkey's heuristic network, that division of trust will only grow wider once regulations get in place to determine the car should preserve the most life (not necessarily mine,) open itself to exploits due to the existence of any networking capability (that one already exists,) or gets abused by governments to clean up dissenters under the radar (e.g. Michael Hastings.) The fact we don't even have anything approaching Human-level artificial intelligence certainly compounds this issue, but in truth I wouldn't trust it any more if it were as smart as me.
TL;DR: Machines are tools, if AI reaches the stage that it is composed entirely of truly autonomous free-thinking entities then I'd trust it to drive, but at that point it won't want to so the point is moot.
It's one thing to risk your computer or phone being hacked and all your data/comms getting stolen. But with a self driving car, you're putting your life at risk if you're an important person, such as a political leader, CEO, etc. And it's not just the vehicle you're in you have to worry about, you have to worry about all the other vehicles around you being compromised. Too much risk as far as I'm concerned.
I should't be able to steer your car into a rock face by painting a QR code on it.
We can't build AI that relies on special signs or road markings or vehicle-to-vehicle communication. That's a terribly brittle approach, and way too easy to maliciously or accidentally defeat.
We need to build AI that relies on sensing its environment and behaving safely in all situations, including by pulling over and handing control over to a human when it gets confused.