this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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Thousands of accidents a year from human drivers. I sleep
90 accidents a year from autonomous vehicles. Lazer eyes
DARPA figures out how to safely drive cars using LIDAR. Musk asked for a self driving car. Engineers come back the LIDAR solution. Musk fires them, says if humans can drive with two eyes, then so can computers. Cameras are cheaper than LIDAR. Second group tries it with cameras, can't get it to work, asked why they can't use LIDAR. Second group of engineers is fired. Third group comes up with something that 'kind of works'. People die. Big companies avoid self driving altogether, even though we have a perfect solution with LIDAR, all because Musk wanted to save a buck and can't get out of the way of his engineers.
I’ve worked on serious projects involving LiDAR. The LiDAR you need at these speeds and with this resolution cost almost as much as an Electric Car - it’s too expensive to reach wide adoption. But video processing with CNNs/RNNs has proven you can build the same level of data with cameras. You don’t even need binocular cameras now - if objects are moving you can generate binocular data by combining IMU data with time-series imagery.
As I understand it, Tesla’s delays aren’t related to image capture (which is where LiDAR could help). They’re related to trying to find universal actions to take against an almost infinite number of possible scenarios (mostly actions by human drivers).
You make it sound like it's a 50/50 split between human drivers and autonomous vehicles, which is definitely not the case.
There are way more human drivers than autonomous vehicles. So, when an autonomous vehicle runs your child or pet over or whatever, who do you blame? The company? The programmers? The DMV for even allowing them on the road in the first place?
What's an autonomous vehicle do if it gets a flat? Park in the middle of the interstate like an idiot instead of pulling over and phone home for a mechanic?
You need to first ask yourself if it more important to put blame than to minimize risk.
"Autonomous vehicles could potentially reduce traffic fatalities by up to 90%."
"Autonomous vehicle accidents have been recorded at a slightly lower rate compared with conventional cars, at 4.7 accidents per million miles driven."
https://blog.gitnux.com/driverless-car-accident-statistics/
That opinion puts a lot of blind faith in the companies developing self driving and their infinitely altruistic motives.
What do you mean, I'm sure the industry whose standard practices include having the self-driving function turn itself off nanoseconds before a crash to avoid liability is totally motivated to spend the time and money it would take to fix the problem. After all, we live in a time of such advanced AI that all the news sites and magazines tell me we're on the verge of the Singularity, and they've never misled me before.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills because no on seems to know or give a shit that Tesla was caught red handed doing this. They effectively murdered those drivers.
That wasn't an opinion, it's a statistic.
No (large public) company ever has altruistic motives. They aren't inherently good or bad, just machines driven by profit.
You don't need to put faith into companies beyond the faith that is put into humans. Make companies just as financially liable as humans are, and you'll still see a decrease in accidents.
You mean those companies who will lobby and spend a fraction of their wealth to make those lawsuits disappear?
How is that different from the current system of large vehicular insurance companies spending a fraction of their wealth to make their lawsuits disappear?
It's no different at all. We should have stronger laws for such scenarios.
Ok, but in the context of letting computers drive, I feel like people want to enforce this perfect system of liability on automated systems where we already have an existing criminal and civil legal system as is that is designed to nowhere near the same standard for humans.
Why are we willing to say that it is unacceptable that no computer can kill people on the road when almost 43,000 die in the USA due to humans driving?
are there actual datasets to look at and info regarding how data was collected? all the sources on that page are just domain links but don't appear to point to the data making the claims?
4.7 accidents per million miles doesn't mean much if the cars are limited to specific roads or include test tracks that give them an advantage. the degree of variance in different environments would also need to be measured such as weather effects, road conditions and traffic patterns.
I'm all for autonomous driving, but its not like companies don't fudge numbers all the time for their benefit.
You know what has much smaller fatality rates? Walking, bikes, trains and buses
the real funny here is how the USA has the most lax driving test standards in the developed world resulting in crazy amounts of road traffic accidents and really high mortality rates, but instead of dealing with shitty driving at the source there's a billion dollar industry in autonomous driving.
Exploitation is the American way, bro. Create problems where there are none, offer a solution, profit.
Using the public as Guinea pigs for corporate profits: priceless
When a for profit company is deciding how much time/energy/funds they want to invest in pedestrian safety, you get LOUD and you stay that way forever.
Your comment is blind to the reality we live in and the broken, out of touch people deciding if human lives are a businesses priority, and at what percentages, as these types of vehicles scale.
When humans get in an accident, there were choices/mistakes made, but there are things we can understand in certain situations and find closure often. When elon's failed experiment decapitates your grandmother by driving her under a semi and sheering off the top off the car, you'll probably never settle with that image as long as you live - and you'll see elon in the news each day being a tool and never seeing justice for that moment.
There's a difference with distinction in this conversation.
That's a really good point.
Imagine your dog gets run over, you rush them to the vet but ultimately they die and your thousands out of pocket. You call the corporate helpdesk to log a claim because there isn't anyone else to contact, they offer you $300 in credit for immediate resolution or you can dispute. You become upset because your dog was more than a credit refund, the call centre drone says that you've become aggressive, that you can call back during business hours and hangs up.
What a hell scape.
I mean, there's probably millions of drivers performing more driving and less than that of autonomous vehicles.
I personally can't wait for autonomous vehicles to take over but the argument would be clearer with percentages and stuff.
Did you read the article? The protests are in favour of affordable public transit, instead of using 'surveillance pods' as a way to build even MORE roads. The accidents are probably the least of their concerns, although still on the list
90 accidents a year is a LOT, if you stop to think that there are like only a few dozens of them out there, versus more than a hundred million human drivers.
Comparing these two requires the number of cars with human drivers and the amount of time humans spend driving per year versus the number of autonomous vehicles and the amount of time they spend driving per year. I am not saying that you are wrong, I am just saying that comparing these numbers directly is like comparing apples with oranges.
I agree completely. My original post was just a stupid meme. I don't really think putting cones on the hoods of the cars is helping and that it's kind of dumb to do that and act smug about it. I'd rather people were sueing or something. I'm sure there is precedent for stopping manufacturers from making their vehicles more dangerous just to save a small percentage of money. I guess we do live in a capitalist utopia though so maybe I'm wrong but it seems like court might be more effective than trying to make these cars even more dangerous by adding a cone to the hood.
They stop for no reason, cause gridlocks that require a human to comd out to it and pilot it, they've run over fire hoses being used and don't always get out of the way for emergency service vehicles. Nice statistic though.
So are you talking about autonomous cars or...