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20th October 2016, 05:42 | #31 | ||
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| Re: Reality Check: Fully autonomous cars are a l-o-n-g time away Quote:
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Last edited by ecenandu : 20th October 2016 at 05:44. | ||
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20th October 2016, 10:56 | #32 | |||||||||
Distinguished - BHPian | Re: Reality Check: Fully autonomous cars are a l-o-n-g time away Interesting thread! Quote:
You drive through your typical town urban type of street. Cars parked on both sides of the road and a sidewalk between the cars and the houses. Suddenly a tennis ball rolls into the road. Most drivers would brake or at least come of the accelerator. Not because the tennis ball is dangerous, but due to the fact that most of us are expecting a child to run into to road following the tennis ball. For a human we call this behaviour common sense. A computer just needs a good enough sensor to pick up that tennis ball and some logic to come to the same conclusion. Once that has been put together it will react much better and with a unbelievable high degree of accuracy and consistency to such a scenario. Much better than any human. A human could “miss” the tennis ball, or ignore the tennis ball. Quote:
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For me the only criteria is actually whether from a statistical point of view an autonomous cars is much safer than the average human driver. The minute that comes true, putting autonomous cars on the roads will reduce road fatalities. That is just how it, statistically, works. Of course, the moral dilemma is relevant for other reasons, such a (legal) responsibility. But if autonomous cars are positioned as being more safe, the moral dilemma don’t come into play as such. Quote:
Humans need considerable time to understand a particular situation and then again time to proces and to start physically responding to the situation by taking appropriate action. So the idea that humans oversee a computer process and step in when the computer gets it wrong is actually not a very robust way of dealing with such a situation. I wrote about this when I visited Stanford University some time ago. See http://www.team-bhp.com/forum/intern...omous-car.html Took the average driver 3-5 seconds to respond when he/she had to take over from the computer. Even at a sedate 40 km/h a car would have travelled 30-50 meters before the human would start responding. Where does that put this so called “common sense” which some believe puts us apart from computers. The solution? More automation, more computers, less human interference, not more. Quote:
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Also, again not wanting to raise your anxiety about automation taking over the world any further, autopilots don’t have automatic collision avoidance built in. It always takes pilot intervention! Not a single commercial plane out there, in that very density populated air space moves away from a potential collision autonomously! Commercial planes are kept separated thought Air Traffic Control and they use very sophisticated computers to track and monitor planes, weather, to forecast scenario’s etc. That is then communicated by ATC (humans) to pilots (humans). That is where it breaks down. Very few cases where the computers on the ground got it wrong. Plenty of cases where ATC-human gets it wrong, communication goes wrong or the pilot gets it wrong. Remember aviation safety record has increased over the last couple of decades significantly to an almost unbelievable level. But the weakest link is still the pilots and even today in the vast majority of cases it is pilot error that causes (fatal) accidents. Quote:
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Again, to me the debate needs to concentrate on what makes a safer car, not necessarily a better car, or a car with a better or equal moral compass as an average human. That is why automation was introduced into process automation and the cockpit of planes. Yes, there are trade off, but the fact remains that overall safety increased significantly. Everybody in those industries is acutely aware that the weakest link actually is the human. The fact that the autonomous car debate still centres around whether humans are better at driving then computers shows we still have a long way to go. Jeroen | |||||||||
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20th October 2016, 11:36 | #33 |
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| Re: Reality Check: Fully autonomous cars are a l-o-n-g time away
Looks like Tesla desperately wants to refute that! From Tesla Press Release yesterday (19th Oct)- "We are excited to announce that, as of today, all Tesla vehicles produced in our factory – including Model 3 – will have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver. " To do this, Tesla is using - 1. Eight surround cameras provide 360 degree visibility around the car at up to 250 meters of range. 2. Twelve updated ultrasonic sensors complement this vision, allowing for detection of both hard and soft objects at nearly twice the distance of the prior system. 3. A forward-facing radar with enhanced processing provides additional data about the world on a redundant wavelength, capable of seeing through heavy rain, fog, dust and even the car ahead. 4. And finally, a new onboard computer with more than 40 times the computing power of the previous generation that runs the new Tesla-developed neural net for vision, sonar and radar processing software. Tesla claims that "this system provides a view of the world that a driver alone cannot access, seeing in every direction simultaneously and on wavelengths that go far beyond the human senses." Looks like the technology is already here, just that we weren't prepared for it! Last edited by nishsingh : 20th October 2016 at 11:38. |
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20th October 2016, 12:03 | #34 |
Distinguished - BHPian | Re: Reality Check: Fully autonomous cars are a l-o-n-g time away |
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20th October 2016, 19:51 | #35 | |
Team-BHP Support | Re: Reality Check: Fully autonomous cars are a l-o-n-g time away Those looking at Tesla should remember that they are burning cash by billions. $4 billion in revenues and $890 million losses in 2015. What this means is - if they want just break even, they need to increase prices by 25% atleast. Also, progress made by Tesla in autonomous driving can be easily explained -> When you throw enough money behind something, you can achieve wondrous things. A good automotive example is Bugatti Veyron. Anyway, Impressive demonstration video by Tesla - but Jalopnik is quite critical about this achievement http://jalopnik.com/teslas-proof-vid...ver-1788018454 Tesla's Proof Video For Its Self-Driving Tech Is Some Fantasy Land Bullshit Quote:
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21st October 2016, 14:49 | #36 |
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| Re: Reality Check: Fully autonomous cars are a l-o-n-g time away Electronics in todays modern cars continue to remain one of the top reasons for vehicle breakdown. ECU failure is not very uncommon, we heard the story of Q7 breakdown during Leh climb thanks to advance electronics. With this background, how many of us are willing leave our lives in the hands of few sensors and computers, which can always malfunction outside their ideal conditions. Even the airplanes, which are using auto pilot for decades, provide manual override option, as computers cannot react to uncertainties of life better than humans. Thinking about cars without steering/pedals is just that - 'wishful thinking'. |
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21st October 2016, 15:32 | #37 | |
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| Re: Reality Check: Fully autonomous cars are a l-o-n-g time away Quote:
Nobody is saying that autonomous cars are impossible, they are just far away to become a mass reality. More than the technological evolution, it is the moral, legal and behavioral changes that will take time. The mention of most flight accidents happening due to pilot error is interesting. Here is my take to it - with so much advancements in technology to assist pilots, they are still trained to fly without any help from on-board computers, just in case the electronics fail. But pilots, over a period of their flying career, become so much reliant on electronics, avionics and controls, they forget to act as learnt when the need arise, and hence commit errors in judgement. In most of the cases, pilot error is preceded by, or accompanied by computer error. in post-crash investigations (throughout the history) an error in construction, a faulty control switch or failure of sensors does not cause news (it is a mere stepping stone in further evolution of better designs and technologies), but a pilot error is followed by moral and legal outcomes. A whole new set of laws and legislation has to be made to enable autonomous cars on road. Who will face the court in case two autonomous cars are involved in a crash? More pertinent scenario - A lot of accidents usually happen when the driver, in order to avoid hitting a stray pedestrian/biker on road, swerves sideways, lose control and crash, many a time fatal to the car occupants. How will a car be programmed to "judge" whether to hit the pedestrian/biker to avoid injuries to the car occupants or vice versa? It is not the speed of judgement, it is the morality involved in judgement that is a hard nut to crack. Last edited by Nav-i-gator : 21st October 2016 at 15:41. | |
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21st October 2016, 17:58 | #38 | |
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| Re: Reality Check: Fully autonomous cars are a l-o-n-g time away Quote:
We don't judge the morality of the driver in those situations right, that is why we call them accidents. Anyway, I clearly understand your point of view about the morality in case of autonomous cars. Here is my solution for that, every car should have a blackbox equivalent data recording system and fatal crashes should be investigated like air crashes. This is mainly to find bugs/faults in the software or hardware of the autonomous car. I don't understand the reservation of people in trusting 'few sensors or computers'. In fact, most of the modern cars have plenty of them for engine management, airbags, ESP, ABS etc. The technology involved in autonomous driving wasn't a quantum jump actually. Cruise control -> Adaptive cruise control -> Lane keep assist -> Tesla auto pilot 1. See, you get the picture right, you can see gradual increase in the sophistication of the technology involved in the above systems. The autonomous driving software is totally different from the traditional softwares we currently have, mostly they are not rule based at least the system from comma ai isn't. They are trying to mimic the way in which a human drive. I have posted few videos about comma ai in another thread, quite informative. Last edited by ecenandu : 21st October 2016 at 18:04. Reason: typos | |
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24th October 2016, 13:03 | #39 | |
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| Re: Reality Check: Fully autonomous cars are a l-o-n-g time away Quote:
Maybe the drivers react to any accident in a "knee jerk" reaction. But programmed cars can't do that. An autonomous car will react as per the algorithm, and it is very difficult to program an algorithm for ethical choices when there are lives at stake. It reminds me of the movie I-robot where the AI robot rescued the drowning will smith and let his daughter die (as the chances of survival were more for will smith than his daughter - calculated by the programmed robot). The hero (or in reality, if encountering such situation) a man would invariably try to rescue his daughter, even if he know he wont be able to, or he may also die doing so. Some real life situations, and the way humans react to them instantly, may seem to be knee-jerk, but probably are well calculated in our sub-conscious mind. | |
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24th October 2016, 15:11 | #40 |
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| Re: Reality Check: Fully autonomous cars are a l-o-n-g time away it is the moral and ethical environment that need to be developed first before the autonomous cars are allowed to ply on roads We should have legislations which make sure that level 5 autonomous driving will be done only if we have sufficient data to prove the safety. Similar to what we have in aviation industry. That is the main reason why I said we should have black box equivalent data logger on every autonomous cars. Since there are no perfect technologies, there will be always room for improvement. Maybe the drivers react to any accident in a "knee jerk" reaction. But programmed cars can't do that. An autonomous car will react as per the algorithm, and it is very difficult to program an algorithm for ethical choices when there are lives at stake.' Don't underestimate these algorithms, there has been a lot of development in this field like fuzzy logic, neural networks etc. So, we cannot say it is impossible to program software for ethical choices. The hero (or in reality, if encountering such situation) a man would invariably try to rescue his daughter, even if he know he wont be able to, or he may also die doing so. Not every person could do that right. Some real life situations, and the way humans react to them instantly, may seem to be knee-jerk, but probably are well calculated in our sub-conscious mind. The biggest advantage I can see with autonomous driving is that these systems won't text, sleep or be intoxicated while driving. And in those real life situations, where a human has a split second to decide, the system will have far more data, like 360 degree view of its surroundings, radar data etc to make a well calculated decision than a human. Incase the system make an irrational choice in certain situations we can improve the software, right. |
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24th October 2016, 15:50 | #41 | |
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| Re: Reality Check: Fully autonomous cars are a l-o-n-g time away Quote:
As of now, the most advanced autonomous technologies are used in space travel, where satellites and probes are programmed to run certain parameters and autonomously perform when it become difficult to control them in real time owing to their vast distance and time taken to communicate. But they are also programmed only for "known variables", not the unknown ones. a probe can autonomously carry out a slingshot fly-by based on pre-fed instructions of speed, trajectory and precise engine burns (all known variables) but as of now, we are way behind the day when we can just blast off a probe with all the known tech like fuzzy logic, neural network etc from a rocket with an instruction to just "go and find your way to pluto yourself". Such time is "l-o-n-g time away". Coming to the isuue of moral/ethical dilemma - to put it as simple as possible: I would rather make my own informed choice in a life-and-death situation and agonize over it if it turns out to be wrong than allowing someone else to decide my fate (much less to a program) and spending my life with remorse as to maybe I would have done that in a different way had I done it myself. The day machines become so advanced and sentient, we can think about that then. | |
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24th October 2016, 16:00 | #42 | ||
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| Re: Reality Check: Fully autonomous cars are a l-o-n-g time away Quote:
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Last edited by ecenandu : 24th October 2016 at 16:04. | ||
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24th October 2016, 16:16 | #43 | |
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| Re: Reality Check: Fully autonomous cars are a l-o-n-g time away Quote:
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24th October 2016, 19:15 | #44 |
Senior - BHPian | Re: Reality Check: Fully autonomous cars are a l-o-n-g time away Fully autonomous cars are a long time away - From being commonly used. Fully autonomous cars will at some point become common on roads, though I don't think they will come to india. I feel the technology can be used in many urban scenarios such as bumper to bumper traffic even in our road conditions. Autonomous cars if limited to slow speeds ( below 10kph ), can reduce a lot of stress from driver in many situations. Since the speed is slow the risk involved would be low.( Assume cost will also be lower ) So if we get a car which can drive autonomously in bumper to bumper traffic and costs 10-15 % more, it will be a boon to use. |
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26th October 2016, 00:10 | #45 |
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