[HN Gopher] For Tesla, Facebook and Others, AI's Flaws Are Getti...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       For Tesla, Facebook and Others, AI's Flaws Are Getting Harder to
       Ignore
        
       Author : mjohn
       Score  : 111 points
       Date   : 2021-10-04 10:49 UTC (12 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
        
       | nikkinana wrote:
       | It's pretty easy to ignore Bloomberg, they're a bunch of dopes.
        
       | machinelearning wrote:
       | Question for people here: Is it justifiable to accept these flaws
       | in the short-term if it results in a car that has a lower-error
       | rate than human drivers in the medium/long-term?
        
         | gameswithgo wrote:
         | There is no need for us to accept the flaws in the short term.
         | People can keep developing this tech without us mass adopting
         | it first.
        
           | machinelearning wrote:
           | I considered this before posting, but I think that human
           | disengagements are an important supervisory signal for the
           | model. You can't hire enough safety drivers to scale this
           | process and releasing it is the fastest way to get there.
           | Simulations are not going to get you all the way because you
           | can't simulate the real world perfectly. Do you have any
           | thoughts on how to develop this without releasing it?
        
             | DoingIsLearning wrote:
             | > You can't hire enough safety drivers to scale this
             | process and releasing it is the fastest way to get there.
             | 
             | I am sorry but I sincerely hope you are never made
             | responsible for the release of anything remotely safety-
             | critical.
             | 
             | Please re-read what you wrote. You are saying that because
             | a business does not have enough money/resources to scale a
             | process in real-world conditions that the solution is to
             | release something and verifying in the real-world, on a
             | public road, risking real human lifes?
             | 
             | If you don't have enough money to test it then you don't
             | have an actual product/business.
        
               | whimsicalism wrote:
               | > I am sorry but I sincerely hope you are never made
               | responsible for the release of anything remotely safety-
               | critical.
               | 
               | Wild to infer that from someone asking a hypothetical
               | ethical question.
               | 
               | Why are so many on this site so aggro?
        
               | DoingIsLearning wrote:
               | Had to google aggro, no aggression intended at all, but I
               | frankly found the severity of GP question too scary to be
               | considered.
               | 
               | > I considered this before posting ...
               | 
               | To me this is not someone asking a hypothetical but
               | someone who is aware that what they are about to write is
               | controversial yet are still considering it to be the best
               | way forward. I happened to strongly disagree with that.
        
               | whimsicalism wrote:
               | If there is clear evidence that these cars would have
               | lower fatality rates than human drivers (I don't think
               | this evidence currently exists), then holding off release
               | to continue development is potentially a moral bad, for
               | the same reason that we end clinical trials early when
               | they demonstrate clear life-saving potential that would
               | save lives in the control group.
               | 
               | I don't think it is morally reprehensible to ask what
               | other people's intuition around this problem is.
        
               | sharkjacobs wrote:
               | > Is it worth killing n random people, for a uncalculated
               | and unknowable chance of saving n+m lives in the future.
               | The pool of people randomly selected to die have not
               | volunteered or consented to be part of this project.
               | There are ways to achieve the same lifesaving endgoal
               | without the upfront sacrifice of lives.
               | 
               | The part which really strikes me as morally reprehensible
               | is where the companies are saving money on test drivers
               | and controlled test environments and externalizing those
               | costs onto every other driver sharing the road with their
               | training data collectors
        
               | whimsicalism wrote:
               | > Is it worth killing n random people, for a uncalculated
               | and unknowable chance of saving n+m lives in the future.
               | The pool of people randomly selected to die have not
               | volunteered or consented to be part of this project.
               | 
               | This reasoning renders any governmental policy change of
               | any sort impermissible.
               | 
               | It isn't coherent to apply these forms of deontological
               | ethics to state action - a random set of people will die
               | with both state action and omission of action, I see no
               | reason why not to pick the option with the smaller
               | expected number of deaths.
               | 
               | But this is all besides my original point: this is a
               | legitimate moral debate to have and the rhetoric used by
               | the above commentator was entirely uncalled for.
        
             | kevingadd wrote:
             | Waymo appears to disagree with you, they ran tests with
             | safety drivers and in controlled conditions for a very long
             | time, and they eventually got to the point where there are
             | customers riding in unmanned taxis. Tesla is just applying
             | a "move fast and break things" approach to pedestrians'
             | lives in order to satisfy shareholder interests and
             | executive egos. They're not the only ones, as we saw from
             | Uber's absolutely shameful performance that eventually lead
             | to a death (safety driver involved but not solely
             | responsible, of course)
        
               | KallDrexx wrote:
               | I was under the impression that while Waymo did some
               | tests unsupervised, most of the rides that non-employees
               | can hail still have a supervisor. Is that not true?
        
         | lvl100 wrote:
         | This comparison gets me the most. People bringing up human
         | error rate vs machine error rate. They're not comparable at
         | all. And it will be evident when you have majority autonomous
         | cars on the road. Human errors are more or less RANDOM. Machine
         | errors are NOT.
        
           | grlass wrote:
           | also, human failure modes are better understood, and can be
           | better anticipated by e.g. you can still have a somewhat
           | predictive mental model of how a swerving drunk drive might
           | behave.
           | 
           | We don't have a good frame of reference for how machines
           | might behave with their failures, which means that accidents
           | could be worse than they would be otherwise.
        
             | machinelearning wrote:
             | The severity of the accident is an interesting point.
             | Though it intuitively feels like there are ways for
             | software to mitigate the severity of an accident when it
             | realizes it is about to crash than a human who might be
             | asleep, intoxicated or otherwise have a slower reaction
             | time.
        
               | kevingadd wrote:
               | The machine's ability to recognize that it's about to
               | crash may actually be one of the issues here, since often
               | the self-driving/driving-assist car crashes are cases
               | where the AI just completely misinterpreted the
               | environment and made bad choices.
               | 
               | A human driver is somewhat likely to eventually realize
               | what situation they've gotten themselves into (oh no, i
               | can't stop in time) because of the multiple different
               | feedback loops and information sources they're working
               | with combined with their experience as a driver. For
               | example, a drunk or very tired driver is operating with
               | impaired decision making and response time, but they may
               | eventually notice and respond - while an AI
               | misclassifying a fire truck as a stop sign may very well
               | continue misclassifying it until impact.
               | 
               | One way to mitigate this would be via sensor fusion -
               | even if your vision or radar sensing fail, you can rely
               | on data from other sensors to do things like apply
               | emergency braking.
               | 
               | Unfortunately at least one vendor has decided to ditch
               | radar, lidar, etc and just go with vision!
        
           | machinelearning wrote:
           | 1. I'd challenge the premise that human errors are random.
           | There are a ton of patterns that cause accidents including
           | intoxication, low visibility conditions and tiredness. I
           | haven't done a statistical analysis but I'd hazard a guess
           | that only a minority of human accidents are truly random. 2.
           | Why does the randomness matter if the error rate is lower?
           | Certainly if the errors are predictable, they can be
           | discovered and fixed or avoided?
        
           | mainframed wrote:
           | What do you mean with that, and why does the error
           | type/"randomness" matter?
           | 
           | If I can reduce the error rate by 90%, but the remaining 10%
           | are "random" (whatever that means), is that worse than not
           | reducing the error rate?
        
           | bluGill wrote:
           | The only part that is random is if it gets you this time.
           | People follow too close almost constantly, if that would
           | cause an crash every time only in the most rural areas would
           | people be able to drive even one mile without a crash. Note
           | that the cause is pervasive: following too close.
           | 
           | Others are bring up tired, drunk, texting... All real
           | problems, but following too close is universal to nearly all
           | drivers.
        
         | SuoDuanDao wrote:
         | Hm. I find this very analogous to the MRNA vaccine debate: how
         | high an error rate of a new technology do we accept, and to
         | what degree does that choice have to be made at a community
         | rather than an individual level?
         | 
         | I'd feel best if that decision was made at the smallest
         | community level possible, so ideally county by county rather
         | than federally. That lightens the burden of politicians making
         | the wrong choice or being a citizen who disagrees with the
         | right choice.
        
           | whimsicalism wrote:
           | You get far more localized really shitty situations if you
           | devolve to that level. Sometimes central decision making is
           | good.
           | 
           | Having to switch the mode of operation of your car depending
           | on what side of various county lines you are on seems like an
           | obvious regulatory failure.
        
             | SuoDuanDao wrote:
             | The error rate would certainly go up at first due to the
             | additional complexity, but the cost of each error goes
             | down. Besides, I have to switch the speed at which I'm
             | driving far more granularly than at county lines, and no
             | one's worried about a car's ability to handle that.
             | 
             | I don't disagree that sometimes central decision making is
             | good, but in a complicated situation where any decision
             | will have some negative consequences depending on the
             | specific context seems like a textbook case of not being
             | one of them.
        
         | ClumsyPilot wrote:
         | The same argument would justifies human medical experiments,
         | and we know they actually work, and result in faster access to
         | improved drugs and vaccines.
         | 
         | Unlike autopilot which could still be crappy after 10 years
         | 
         | Yet we have made them illegal after some rather nasty
         | precedents. Seems like hsitory repeats itself
        
           | RandallBrown wrote:
           | I think the difference is that human medical experiments
           | immediately cause suffering at a higher rate than whatever
           | disease they're trying to fix.
           | 
           | I believe that there have been studies showing that today's
           | "self driving" cars are already statistically safer than
           | regular cars.
        
         | Forge36 wrote:
         | It's about risk trade off. If it's 2x better than humans is it
         | worth it? 10x? 100x?
         | 
         | 36,096 deaths in 2019 in U.S. ~1.3 million worldwide (I
         | couldn't find injury statistics this morning)
         | 
         | If the flaw is found before someone dies from it I'm not
         | concerned. If 1 person dies instead of 10 I'm all for it. (I'd
         | take 2x better than humans any day)
        
           | mplewis wrote:
           | We can't ignore core usability and basic safety issues by
           | saying "on average, this is better." End users can't be
           | expected to know that they'll probably be fine, but an edge
           | case they don't understand will kill them one evening when
           | they drive past a stopped ambulance.
        
             | Forge36 wrote:
             | Why not? If it saves 30,000 lives per year is that not a
             | meaningful improvement? I suspect my
             | understanding/acceptance of "unknown risk while driving" is
             | flawed in some way, or at least very different from the
             | general populace.
        
           | tragomaskhalos wrote:
           | The problem is, it's not a level playing field. 100 incidents
           | of a person ploughing into a bus queue and killing a child,
           | each is news for a day, everyone accepts the tragedy and
           | moves on. A self-driving car does it once though, and the mob
           | will be at the factory gates with torches and pitchforks.
        
             | Forge36 wrote:
             | That's an interesting problem. I wonder what social
             | discussions need to take to reach acceptance for "AI
             | assisted driving". Mandatory AI breaking to prevent driving
             | into a bus queue?
             | 
             | I'm also curious how to find the people who do object vs
             | theory-crafting all possible concerns people could have.
        
         | tdrdt wrote:
         | It depends on what kind of error it produces.
         | 
         | If the error rate is only 0.5% but the death rate of those
         | errors is 100% I am not sure it will be justifiable.
        
           | aspaceman wrote:
           | Even if the death rate is low but the _perceived_ impact is
           | high.
           | 
           | Ex: Imagine a week where self-driving cars have a bug that
           | only mis-identifies grandmas. Only a few grandmas die but the
           | perceptual impact is massive.
        
       | 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
       | I am starting to wonder if we're pretending to live a little
       | further into the future than we realistically can right now.
       | Modern Silicon Valley is built around businesses with software
       | margins. If you can scale via software, it's huge. If we actually
       | saddled these companies with their externalities or with doing
       | what they say they do, would they still have been able to have
       | software margins, or would they have had to wait until the
       | tech/science was better?
       | 
       | It gives me a wary feeling when people talk about tech regulation
       | and warn that it would change the internet as we know it. Like,
       | if putting the externalities on the company means the company
       | can't exist as it does today, is that really so bad?
        
       | amelius wrote:
       | What will happen if a deep-learning bug is found in Tesla
       | autopilot where it misclassifies a fire truck for a bridge?
       | 
       | Will they ground all the Tesla cars remotely? Or disable
       | autopilot remotely? Until they have gathered new training data
       | and updated the software?
        
         | leesec wrote:
         | Misclassification issues don't really matter in driving.
         | Sometimes I mis-classify the things I see, all that matters is
         | if I keep driving safely.
        
         | fksadfji12 wrote:
         | They have the ability to do so, if they want.
         | 
         | I don't think they will need to as those types of bugs are
         | exceedingly rare.
        
         | play2computers wrote:
         | I think that should very much depend on the severity and the
         | statistical impact of the bug. As long as the long doesn't
         | raise the deaths-per-mile-driven number above what humans would
         | be doing, I would say it would be ok to just leave it running
         | and just update once it is fixed. The goal is to get cars
         | driving better than humans (which btw they already do by a huge
         | margin, even with the fsd beta). so disabling the autopilot
         | because of a potential bug would be condemning a lot more
         | people to death than leaving it in. Interesting variation of
         | the trolley problem i guess
        
         | Iolaum wrote:
         | To add context. In Aviation, if they do find a bug in the
         | software running an airplane's engine they do ground planes
         | until they know more about impact and mitigation.
         | 
         | Not saying cars should do the same, just that it's not absurd
         | to consider it.
        
           | hef19898 wrote:
           | Well, to be honest something like Tesla's Autopilot would
           | never have been certified in Aerospace anyway. And yes, the
           | question of what authorities would do in such a case is a
           | valid one. It seems like authorities are struggling with
           | functions like that, would it be simply hardware, e.g. faulty
           | airbag sensors, recalls would have been already be issued.
        
             | ClumsyPilot wrote:
             | " It seems like authorities are struggling"
             | 
             | I would rather describe it as sleeping at the wheel, passed
             | out drunk and having pissed their pants after vomiting a
             | bottle of hard liquir.
             | 
             | Okay, maybe i got carried away with the metaphor, but you
             | get the idea
        
               | leesec wrote:
               | It's funny how super pro regulation people never consider
               | the lives lost caused by slow regulation. If Tesla solves
               | driving it will lead to tens of thousands of lives saved
               | a year. Since 2015 there have been 20 deaths in 16
               | accidents related to autopilot, globally. Doesn't sound
               | like a lot in comparison to highway death numbers, over 6
               | years.
        
               | 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
               | > If Tesla solves driving it will lead to tens of
               | thousands of lives saved a year.
               | 
               | That's a big if. If we solved aging, we'd save nearly all
               | lives, so please don't regulate my medical practice. I
               | expect to have aging solved and millions of treatments
               | rolled out by 2020.
        
               | jcranmer wrote:
               | On a per-mile-driven basis, Tesla's self-driving accident
               | rate is somewhere in the region of 5-10x that of human
               | drivers, IIRC. And keep in mind that the self-driving
               | here is already in a state of selection bias where it's
               | more likely to be used in safer conditions (i.e., fully-
               | grade-separated highway driving in clear conditions,
               | rather than dense urban environments in inclement
               | weather).
        
               | Domenic_S wrote:
               | Maybe you were thinking the autopilot accident rate being
               | 5-10x _less_ than human drivers?
               | 
               | > _In the 2nd quarter, we recorded one crash for every
               | 4.41 million miles driven in which drivers were using
               | Autopilot technology (Autosteer and active safety
               | features). For drivers who were not using Autopilot
               | technology (no Autosteer and active safety features), we
               | recorded one crash for every 1.2 million miles driven. By
               | comparison, NHTSA's most recent data shows that in the
               | United States there is an automobile crash every 484,000
               | miles._
               | 
               | Tesla publishes these safety reports; the accident rate
               | has held fairly steady quarter over quarter:
               | https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport
        
               | 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
               | You really can't compare the average mile with the
               | average autopilot mile. The best analogy I've heard is
               | comparing human aircraft pilots (takeoffs, landings,
               | weird old planes, all kinds of pilots) against aircraft
               | autopilots only cruising at 30,000ft.
        
               | jcranmer wrote:
               | I know there are several wildly different statistics for
               | Tesla's crash rate. Some of these statistics suffer from
               | poor data quality, and the first big study saying "Tesla
               | is safer than average drivers!" was _really_ affected by
               | this (I don 't recall the exact details, but the
               | consensus of pretty much everyone not Tesla was the
               | statistics were complete garbage).
        
               | Domenic_S wrote:
               | I mean if you have data feel free to present it like I
               | did.
        
               | TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
               | One immediately obvious issue is comparing _Tesla_
               | vehicles, which are all relatively new vehicles typically
               | owned by relatively older drivers to _all other passenger
               | vehicle_.
               | 
               | The other immediately obvious issue is that the self
               | driving features of a Tesla probably work best in ideal
               | conditions, where human drivers also do.
        
               | BurningFrog wrote:
               | If new technology X saves 100 lives for each person it
               | kills, it _will_ be banned.
               | 
               | Because the dead person has a name, a tragic story, and
               | grieving relatives, which will make the news.
               | 
               | The 100 saved people are anonymous, don't know they were
               | saved by X, and this will be unreported outside of
               | obscure research journals.
        
               | ClumsyPilot wrote:
               | If you save a child from drowning you don't get a 'a kill
               | coupon' you can retrieve next time you are accused of
               | murder.
        
               | Sodman wrote:
               | Certainly not, but if we invent a life-saving medicine
               | that 1 in 1 million people have a fatal reaction to,
               | we'll still consider it enough of an overall positive for
               | humanity to celebrate it as a technological win for
               | society.
               | 
               | The ratio isn't 1:1 or even 1:10, but there is a line
               | somewhere where X deaths <caused by new tech> is
               | acceptable because of the X^Y lives saved <by new tech>.
               | 
               | See also: Most modes of transport, most medicines and
               | surgical procedures.
        
               | ClumsyPilot wrote:
               | Are in favour of medical experiments on random strangers?
               | 
               | The same argument applies - sorry you died, but the data
               | might save someone else's life down the line.
               | 
               | A lot of unique medical data was produced by Nazis doing
               | cruel experiments on people.
               | 
               | https://www.bu.edu/articles/2019/learn-from-nazi-medical-
               | res...
        
               | hef19898 wrote:
               | It's funny how people ignoring regulation, that developed
               | during decades for very valid reasons, usually do so to
               | further businesses and projects that benefit greatly by
               | doing so. Tesla is one example when it comes to self-
               | driving, Uber another one when it come to the Taxi
               | business. All for the greater good of course.
        
               | leesec wrote:
               | You think Uber doesn't provide a good service to the
               | world? You are in favor of Taxi/Medallion monopolies?
        
               | ClumsyPilot wrote:
               | "You don't like you country being occupied by Soviet
               | Union? Would you prefer Nazi Germany instead?"
        
               | hef19898 wrote:
               | Not necessarily, just the a huge portion of Ubers
               | competitive advantage comes from ignoring existing rules.
               | Rules incumbents do follow.
        
               | Apocryphon wrote:
               | Perhaps it can be simultaneously true that Uber is
               | providing a good service to customers against an outdated
               | and badly-run industry, while they are doing many bad
               | things.
        
               | hef19898 wrote:
               | Funny how someone on the internet can translate my
               | understanding of "struggling" into plain English!
               | Appreciate it!
               | 
               | Disclaimer: I _really_ try to work on my ability to word
               | stuff more diplomatically. HN is a good training ground
               | for that!
        
           | taneq wrote:
           | That's the theory but the recent issues with Boeing show that
           | practice doesn't always follow.
        
             | hef19898 wrote:
             | Boeing lobbied the FAA for way too long to avoid grounding
             | of the fleet. It did happen so, after it turned out
             | Boeing's SW fixes didn't work.
             | 
             | Also, just how that part of the 737MAX was certified is the
             | real scandal, if you ask me. This is the literal example
             | proofing the rule, so.
        
           | zibzab wrote:
           | I can already see Elons angry tweets if MVA ever even thinks
           | about that. Remember the Corona tweets?
           | 
           | What we need is a big fat lawsuit, since the government will
           | not do anything to anger the only profitable US automaker.
        
           | Consultant32452 wrote:
           | I'll be happy if "AI" cars are safer than human drivers on
           | average. Zero accidents/deaths can come later.
           | 
           | If everyone was flying their personal planes around and
           | constantly banging into each other a minor software bug would
           | not ground any planes. It would be more like a malfunctioning
           | airbag recall.
        
         | gameswithgo wrote:
         | This has already been happening but self driving enthusiasts
         | just keep thinking it is great. And regulators have done very
         | little and otherwise smart people like Sandy Munro get
         | extremely mad at what little regulators have hinted at. It is
         | wild times.
        
           | dreamcompiler wrote:
           | Munro sat down with Musk and enthusiastically praised FSD but
           | complained about how roads were often improperly painted.
           | Musk--to his credit--said the car needed to work safely even
           | in the presence of paint errors. (Video is on Munro's YT
           | channel.) Munro is very critical of many aspects of car
           | design; I cannot understand why he's such a fan of FSD.
           | 
           | I tried FSD on the $200/month plan and dropped it: It makes
           | the car unsafe. To command a lane change you hold down the
           | turn signal stalk. If you fail to hold it down long enough
           | the car suddenly swerves back to the lane it was in. This is
           | (to say the least) disconcerting at 80 mph.
           | 
           | FSD can also suddenly decide to do weird things that are
           | difficult to correct even when you're paying close attention.
           | It's unnerving. Ordinary autosteer (which is included with
           | every Tesla at no extra charge) works well enough for me and
           | it fails in more predictable ways; it's easy for me to build
           | a mental model of its limitations. I'll stick with that.
        
             | moduspol wrote:
             | > I tried FSD on the $200/month plan and dropped it: It
             | makes the car unsafe. To command a lane change you hold
             | down the turn signal stalk. If you fail to hold it down
             | long enough the car suddenly swerves back to the lane it
             | was in. This is (to say the least) disconcerting at 80 mph.
             | 
             | That's not quite accurate. Unrelated to autopilot / FSD,
             | you can do a small press on the turn signal and it will
             | signal three times and then stop signaling. You can also
             | push all the way down and it will signal until you turn it
             | off. You don't have to hold it down.
             | 
             | FSD will only continue switching lanes while the turn
             | signal is on, so if you do a small press down, you may see
             | the behavior you described.
        
               | dreamcompiler wrote:
               | To clarify I'm talking about a lane change initiated by
               | me rather than merely allowing one recommended by the
               | car. The latter only requires a brief flick of the turn
               | signal stalk.
               | 
               | But the former required me to actively hold it down for
               | several seconds--much longer than a full turn signal
               | would require. I had to hold it down until the car was
               | completely within the stripes of the adjacent lane or the
               | car would immediately swerve back into the original lane.
               | I tested it many times on a traffic-free road. Might have
               | been a setting; I don't know.
        
               | johnsimer wrote:
               | Interesting. Either way I only have to tap the stalk
               | down.
        
             | texasbigdata wrote:
             | Had the opposite experience on a testdrive purposely
             | (within reason) trying to see if it would merge into a lane
             | that subsequently had a merging onramp with a car resulting
             | in the blindspot likely needing to move in.
             | 
             | Was super impressed it seemed to over correct and be
             | thoughtful about consequences a few seconds down the road.
             | 
             | Anecdote though.
        
             | lastofthemojito wrote:
             | > Munro is very critical of many aspects of car design; I
             | cannot understand why he's such a fan of FSD.
             | 
             | Maybe due to personal profit?
             | 
             | https://old.reddit.com/r/RealTesla/comments/kxj0or/twitter_
             | s...
        
               | gamblor956 wrote:
               | TLDR: Munro admits to owning a bunch of Tesla stock, and
               | there is a drastic change in his opinions of Tesla before
               | he owned Tesla stock vs after.
        
               | nomel wrote:
               | Or, perhaps there is a drastic change in his stock
               | ownership after his opinions changed.
        
               | mikestew wrote:
               | _there is a drastic change in his opinions of Tesla
               | before he owned Tesla stock vs after._
               | 
               | I'm confident that this would apply to just about anyone
               | that has ever bought, and then sold, Tesla stock.
               | Because, and I don't mean to overstate the obvious, if
               | one's opinion didn't change then why sell the stock?
        
             | leesec wrote:
             | >I tried FSD on the $200/month plan and dropped it: It
             | makes the car unsafe. To command a lane change you hold
             | down the turn signal stalk. If you fail to hold it down
             | long enough the car suddenly swerves back to the lane it
             | was in. This is (to say the least) disconcerting at 80 mph.
             | 
             | This isn't true. You just tap the stalk down until it
             | clicks. Sometimes if it detects issues in the other lane it
             | will not complete the lane change and go back into your
             | existing lane. But you do not have to hold it down the
             | whole time.
        
             | justapassenger wrote:
             | > Munro is very critical of many aspects of car design; I
             | cannot understand why he's such a fan of FSD.
             | 
             | Because he doesn't understand it and thinks it's magic. He
             | has not much clue about modern tech and is just buying into
             | the hype.
        
           | virtue3 wrote:
           | We didn't get the FAA regulations we have now until after a
           | ton of people died in aviation accidents and the aviation
           | industry figured they need to get their image together.
           | 
           | So... yeah it's gonna take a lot of deaths for this to get
           | regulated. It's a shame cuz we already basically know how to
           | regulate this.
        
           | revscat wrote:
           | It is great. I own a Model S with autopilot, and have since
           | early 2018. I have driven it across some dozen states, and
           | two Canadian provinces. It is far perfect, but it is very,
           | very good, and makes long drives much less stressful and
           | tiresome.
           | 
           | And there have been at least two incidences that I can recall
           | where Autopilot saved me from a wreck.
           | 
           | I would not choose to go back, and would buy it again without
           | hesitation.
        
         | londons_explore wrote:
         | Even when a critical problem is found, I can't think of any
         | example of cars being disabled remotely - either through
         | technical means or laws saying 'you may not drive this car'.
        
           | amelius wrote:
           | Another option is that they recall the cars.
           | 
           | It's not uncommon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%9
           | 32011_Toyota_vehic...
        
         | drcode wrote:
         | The same thing that happens to a human that is at risk of
         | misclassifying a fire truck for a bridge: Once the odds of this
         | happening are low enough (say 0.00001%) they can pass a
         | driver's test and we give them a drivers license.
        
           | tguedes wrote:
           | The problem is that's 1 person. For Tesla's autopilot, that's
           | the hundreds of thousands of cars running that broken model.
           | The scale of the problem is much larger.
        
         | 3dfan wrote:
         | By the time people are allowed to let their cars drive
         | unsupervised, the crash rate of AI versus human will probably
         | be 1:10 or so.
         | 
         | So even when those cars ram into fire trucks from time to time,
         | it would be better to let them do their thing. Otherwise people
         | will grab the steering wheel, drive drunk, sleepy, angry etc
         | and ram into all kinds of things again.
         | 
         | Currently, there are 6 million car accidents per year in the
         | USA. Almost 100 people die in car accidents every day. So there
         | is a ton of data to make the decision.
        
           | moralestapia wrote:
           | >By the time people are allowed to let their cars drive
           | unsupervised, the crash rate of AI versus human will probably
           | be 1:10 or so.
           | 
           | This sort of statement keeps being parroted over and over
           | again. As Linus would say, _talk is cheap, show me the code_
           | ; then we can speak.
           | 
           | >So even when those cars ram into fire trucks from time to
           | time [...]
           | 
           | This is just insane, honestly, and if this is the premise
           | that guides the development of these sort of systems I'll be
           | glad to never set foot on one.
        
             | shkkmo wrote:
             | The entire way we approach driver liability in general is
             | insane.
             | 
             | The Attorney General of South Dakota was looking at his
             | phone, swerved into the shoulder, killed man and then left
             | the scene. He claimed he thought he hit a deer, even though
             | the victim's head went through the windshield and the
             | victims glasses were later found inside the car.
             | 
             | What consequences did the Attorney General face? Was his
             | licence revoked or suspended? Did he serve any jail time?
             | Did he resign? The answer to all of these is "No." The only
             | result was two misdemeanors and a 500 dollar fine.
             | 
             | So yes, accepting occaisonal inhuman errors from a system
             | that is 10x safer (hypothetical, no current systems have
             | this record) than human drivers may also be insane but it
             | would still be far more sane than the current approach to
             | human drivers.
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | kevinventullo wrote:
               | That seems more like plain old political corruption than
               | a problem with the way driver liability is handled. If
               | you or I did that we'd almost certainly be facing prison
               | time.
        
               | moralestapia wrote:
               | The problem with this is you're using the worst possible
               | examples of driving as a benchmark, and that is quite a
               | low standard to have.
               | 
               | Take a look at the best possible examples, instead, and
               | try to improve over that, then we're talking.
               | 
               | You cannot be a shitty doctor and bring out an excuse
               | like "Oh, but wait, this guy has lost more patients than
               | me, so I'm fine".
               | 
               | You really don't want to have a race to the bottom where
               | human lives are at stake.
        
               | shkkmo wrote:
               | I'm not using it as a benchmark at all.
               | 
               | I'm using a high profile example to point out clear
               | issues with how we handle human driver responsibility. If
               | your negligence directly results in you killing someone,
               | you should lose your license to drive.
               | 
               | If we someday reach the point where autonomous driving
               | systems are actually 10x safer than human drivers and
               | those systems still have issues with hitting emergency
               | vehicles, we should absolutely hold those companies
               | responsible for those accidents.
               | 
               | My point is that not holding those companies responsible
               | would be less insane than our current practice of letting
               | clearly negligent drivers continue to drive with minimal
               | consequences after they kill someone.
               | 
               | So instead of being outraged about this hypothetical
               | future, why not be outraged about the insane lack of
               | consequences that drivers face currently?
        
             | pfortuny wrote:
             | There is no code, that is the problem.
             | 
             | You (or the Transport Administration) do not have access to
             | the training data, the training parameters or anything at
             | all.
             | 
             | It is just a black-box which we are all to trust because
             | "it works, mostly".
             | 
             | In my book, that goes against any notion of admissibility
             | by a government agency.
        
             | amelius wrote:
             | Yes anything or anyone outside of the norm becomes a
             | target.
             | 
             | E.g. wear your hair in a funny way that's never been
             | trained on? You're a target!
        
           | kevingadd wrote:
           | People already let their Teslas drive unsupervised, they're
           | just "not supposed to". That will be increasingly permitted
           | over time, either implicitly or explicitly. It's not a switch
           | that will be flipped nationwide once the data hits a
           | threshold.
        
           | croon wrote:
           | In aggregate, humans have a lot of failure modes when
           | driving, but it's also difficult to compare aggregate data
           | with specific AI failure modes.
           | 
           | I have been driving for almost two decades with 0 accidents.
           | I'm not saying I can't have a lapse of judgement or do
           | something stupid going forward, but I certainly won't mis-
           | class an object, nor kill myself over it.
           | 
           | I hypothetically want bad drivers to be replaced by AI
           | because it's likely already better. But replacing everyone
           | with AI (at the current generation of AI, which isn't the
           | first, nor the last) will undoubtedly lead to tons of
           | avoidable deaths, and I'm not keen on drawing a lottery
           | ticket for it.
        
             | jacobr1 wrote:
             | I'm more interested in replacing _other_ drivers, more than
             | myself. Really if we could replace the bottom 10% of
             | drivers with AI, even at the level we have today, I imagine
             | that would be a net improvement. But that isn't really a
             | feasible program. As for future, improved AI, I would trade
             | my own driving for the more efficient and safer system.
        
               | Domenic_S wrote:
               | That's really the move, having another class of driver
               | license that lets you manually drive. Anyone can get an
               | in ai self-driving car, but if you want to manually drive
               | you have to pass a difficult skills test to prove you
               | could outperform the ai.
        
           | notsureaboutpg wrote:
           | Everyone on this site posts this comment, and they all ignore
           | the fact that human beings crash because of their own issues
           | (e.g. driving drunk) but Autopiloting cars that crash because
           | of some engineering issue are a whole different can of worms.
           | 
           | Who is liable from an insurance perspective in that case? How
           | can the issue be rectified (what the initial comment asked,
           | we can't seriously just let people randomly die while the bug
           | is fixed)? Will wrongful death suits crush Tesla (as they'll
           | be trivial to win if such a bug does exist)?
           | 
           | Grapple with the actual questions, stop deflecting by saying
           | "it's better than human driving". Sure it is. But what do we
           | do moving forward? Modern medicine is better than leech
           | therapy too but that doesn't answer how we deal with poorly
           | developed medicines with harmful side effects.
        
         | username_my1 wrote:
         | The idea is to have self driving safer than our average driver
         | who's always texting and driving, sometimes driving under the
         | influence and sometimes just too stressed to pay attention to
         | the road.
         | 
         | Self driving cars will make fatal mistakes but I have no doubt
         | that tesla very soon will be able to be safer than the average
         | driver.
         | 
         | Plus the more autonomous vehicles on the road the more safer it
         | is.
         | 
         | Finally currently traffic accidents are the leading cause of
         | death for 30yo so we aren't exactly replacing a perfect system
        
           | revscat wrote:
           | This seems to be a reasonable take to me. Systems like
           | Autopilot make driving safer. I'm worried that the
           | conventional wisdom on HN is (a) that systems like
           | Autopilotmust be perfect, which will never be attained, and
           | (b) extremely loathe to recognize the times Autopilot has
           | saved lives.
        
           | mplewis wrote:
           | Ok. But this idealism doesn't work when Tesla has clear
           | failure modes that simply shouldn't happen during normal
           | driving.
           | 
           | Humans generally do not give their cars haircuts by slamming
           | them under a stopped cargo truck. They do not generally smash
           | straight into stationary emergency vehicles.
           | 
           | We can't handwave basic safety issues away by saying "in
           | aggregate, they perform better than humans in most
           | conditions." The basic safety issues get people killed.
           | Leaning on some "average driver" fallacy is a way to ignore
           | issues core to the tech stack.
        
             | username_my1 wrote:
             | why doesn't it work? isn't all our society always
             | abstracting away the individual stories behind statistics?
             | (crime is down by 10% ! GDP is up by 0.2%, birthrate is
             | down by xx).
             | 
             | we're used to it and we're happy about it and we use it to
             | make decisions (buy house now, move to a new city ...).
             | 
             | Plus in those rare cases that you mentioned at least the
             | same system will be feedback the incident to make sure that
             | this won't happen again in the future... so in a morbid way
             | there is a way to learn from such fatal incidents ... you
             | can't really say that about such incident if the driver was
             | a human.
        
             | dreamcompiler wrote:
             | Slight quibble: I very much agree with your overall point
             | but human-driven cars slam straight into rescue vehicles
             | all the time. They're often intoxicated but not always.
             | There's just something about flashing red lights that
             | attracts driver attention and all too often the car
             | follows.
             | 
             | This is why we put the BRT (big red truck) behind the
             | rescue scene and park it at a 45 degree angle. It weighs
             | 15x as much as a car so it won't move much when a car hits
             | it, and we want the car to bounce off sideways and away
             | from the rescuers (us) when it happens.
        
             | spywaregorilla wrote:
             | Assuming that in aggregate they do kill fewer humans, then
             | this is a rare instance of an actual trolley problem. Do
             | you want to kill fewer people by changing the norms and
             | reasons?
        
               | kevingadd wrote:
               | Big assumption to make if it turns out the numbers and
               | data don't scale up once you do large-scale deployment!
        
               | spywaregorilla wrote:
               | You're not wrong. This should be done with great care.
        
             | enchiridion wrote:
             | It's not a fallacy, it's a risk analysis that will save
             | lives.
        
       | gwern wrote:
       | > Businesses are also shifting their focus away from "AI-as-a-
       | service" vendors who promise to carry out tasks straight out of
       | the box, like magic. Instead, they are spending more money on
       | data-preparation software, according to Brendan Burke, a senior
       | analyst at PitchBook. He says that pure-play AI companies like
       | Palantir Technologies Inc. and C3.ai Inc. "have achieved less-
       | than-outstanding outcomes," while data science companies like
       | Databricks Inc. "are achieving higher valuations and superior
       | outcomes."
       | 
       | Palantir is now a "pure-play AI company"? (And, for that matter,
       | a market cap of $50b is 'less than outstanding'?)
        
         | gipp wrote:
         | > And, for that matter, a market cap of $50b is 'less than
         | outstanding'?
         | 
         | Less than outstanding _outcomes_
         | 
         | Market cap is _their_ outcome, not their _clients '_ outcomes.
         | The two are decidedly different things, especially in our weird
         | distorted market.
        
           | gwern wrote:
           | Burke specifies "valuations" as well as outcomes, so the
           | observation stands. (Not that Palantir is any kind of
           | monopoly... If you will recall, the usual criticism is that
           | it's just a consulting shop with zero moat or monopoly.)
        
       | gumby wrote:
       | "AI" is just a buzzword name for "software" these days
        
       | rootusrootus wrote:
       | I've lost count of the number of people I've talked to who think
       | that neural nets means we've created brains that will just
       | magically learn how to do new tasks. So we just need more
       | training and then automated <whatever> is just around the corner.
       | 
       | Tesla, et al do not have the luxury of ignorance to explain that
       | away however, they know what the technology is and is not
       | currently capable of, but they don't want to admit it.
        
         | pyinstallwoes wrote:
         | Your certainty in it not existing to a level of alarm is just
         | as ridiculous as your argument that "Tesla, et al" are lying of
         | the capabilities of AI.
         | 
         | Yes, most people do not know what the difference between ML,
         | AI, neural nets, and computation is - nonetheless we've reached
         | the point in humanity where there is no question a pandora's
         | box has been opened. There is very real reason why there would
         | even be gag orders on public information given an entity
         | achieved some level of strong AI.
         | 
         | And to your point of it just requiring more training, yeah, it
         | kinda is that simple for the majority of tasks which is also
         | enough to offer serious contemplation. A very wide depth of
         | weak AI solutions that fake "strong ai" will probably be more
         | dangerous long-term than a true "strong ai" solution due to the
         | fine-tuning problems it would naturally have.
         | 
         | Big discussion, overall we need to be less certain on the state
         | of things because there is very good reason why such an event
         | would _not even be obvious when it happened_. A time of uncanny
         | valley at the most and then you realize oh shit, AI has been
         | running the world since... APT and DDoS patterns.
        
         | gibsonf1 wrote:
         | Its all artificial but no Intelligence. Statistical pattern
         | matching, no matter how sophisticated, does not understand
         | "why" from conceptually thinking about a space/time model of
         | the world as we humans do.
        
           | esalman wrote:
           | Proposition to change the term "artificial intelligence" to
           | "learned habits".
           | 
           | There are a lot of tasks that we humans do the same way as a
           | machine does- repeating a set of mental and/or physical
           | patterns until it becomes second nature to us. Those are
           | called "habits" and those are precisely what machines are
           | good at doing.
        
           | ajja wrote:
           | or even not that -
           | 
           | Microsoft's Kate Crawford: 'AI is neither artificial nor
           | intelligent' (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun
           | /06/microsoft...)
        
           | robrenaud wrote:
           | Does Magnus Carlsen understand why chess moves are good? Does
           | high depth stockfish or AlphaZero understand why moves are
           | good? Why is Carlsen so relatively bad at chess with his
           | understanding of the why?
        
             | caditinpiscinam wrote:
             | > Why is Carlsen so relatively bad at chess with his
             | understanding of the why?
             | 
             | I think you have it backwards. Stockfish probably could
             | tell you which specific 30-depth line changed its
             | evaluation, while a human player is much more likely to
             | play based on feel and intuition
        
           | caditinpiscinam wrote:
           | Even if our ML systems were meaningfully intelligent, there's
           | still the issue of proper training. You can't teach humans to
           | be a safe drivers by showing them a huge slideshow of dash-
           | cam images. Why do we expect ML to do any better?
        
             | wolverine876 wrote:
             | > Even if our ML systems were meaningfully intelligent,
             | there's still the issue of proper training. You can't teach
             | humans to be a safe drivers by showing them a huge
             | slideshow of dash-cam images.
             | 
             | That's an interesting concept to explore:
             | 
             | I would _guess_ that videos could improve people 's
             | driving: Imagine new drivers; showing them videos of
             | different situations, actions, and their outcomes, may
             | help. The same videos might not help an experienced driver,
             | but they might be helped by videos of more complex
             | situations or by videos tailored to a specific driving
             | skill.
             | 
             | But I'd be interested in research: When does such training
             | help people and when does it not? What aspects of the
             | training are effective or not?
             | 
             | And can that be applied to ML? It may be the old fallacy of
             | conceiving of computers as 'thinking' like people, which
             | Dijkstra compared to conceiving of submarines swimming like
             | us.
        
               | caditinpiscinam wrote:
               | I could see videos being effective. When I was younger I
               | watched a lot of those "near miss" / "driving fails"
               | youtube compilations, and I think they gave me a better
               | intuition for how things tend to go wrong on the road. It
               | would be interesting to see a drivers ed program that
               | included material like that.
               | 
               | On the other hand, when I watch a dash-cam video, I'm
               | already have an understanding of how drivers think, how
               | pedestrians behave, how weather conditions affect
               | driving, etc. I could watch a video and tell you "the
               | driver ran the stop-sign because it was hidden behind the
               | tree branch, and hit the other car because the road was
               | wet and they couldn't brake effectively". I don't know if
               | I could learn to recognize those subtleties from watching
               | video alone, which is what it seems like we're trying to
               | achieve with ML.
        
           | ChefboyOG wrote:
           | Even if this is the case, why does it matter?
           | 
           | If the explicit goal is to create a human intellect, then
           | sure, there's a really interesting conversation there--one
           | that is happening constantly in the DL/AI research community,
           | in which virtually no one believes that we're close to AGI or
           | that current deep learning is going to achieve it.
           | 
           | But that's explicitly not the goal that 99.9% of neural
           | networks are designed with. Their traditional use case is
           | where they excel: programmatically approximating functions
           | that are exceedingly hard to approximate manually.
           | 
           | This includes but is not limited to image recognition, speech
           | synthesis, recommendation (including search), fraud
           | detection, ETA prediction, even medicinal chemistry.
        
             | dragontamer wrote:
             | > Even if this is the case, why does it matter?
             | 
             | Because people are using Deep-learning over single-lens
             | cameras to replace depth-perception... and then wondering
             | why the cars that do this run into stationary objects with
             | flashing lights.
             | https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2021/INOA-PE21020-1893.PDF
             | 
             | No one really cares about where deep learning works. People
             | are complaining about all the areas where deep learning is
             | failing, with dramatic and deadly results.
        
               | timr wrote:
               | The semantic understanding problem, more generally, is
               | under-acknowledged in autonomous driving.
               | 
               | A human can tell the difference of a child standing by
               | the side of a road, about to throw a ball into the road;
               | vs a child standing at the side of a road, waiting for a
               | bus. A human will _slow down_ in anticipation of the
               | likely outcome. A robot without state awareness will be
               | extremely limited in available responses.
               | 
               | Without a useful state model of the universe (i.e.
               | concept awareness), you're limited to purely reactive
               | behaviors.
        
               | dragontamer wrote:
               | That's still ignoring the problem. "Self-driving" tech is
               | no where near that. You gotta set your expectations
               | correctly.
               | 
               | We're at the "Firetruck with flashing lights was hit at
               | full speed on FSD mode" stage of the problem. This means
               | that the depth-field mapping broke. The car was unable to
               | tell how far away the firetruck was, and plowed full
               | speed into the firetruck.
               | 
               | Its very telling that the other self-driving companies
               | are using LIDAR to build the depth map, instead of trying
               | to create depth-maps through deep learning.
        
             | buitreVirtual wrote:
             | Entirely agree. The problem is that most people don't
             | understand that and easily fall prey to thinking that AI is
             | a magical black box that can solve any problem you throw at
             | it. In no small part because of all the hype by salespeople
             | and the media. The reality is that NNs are great but only
             | for some types of problems AND where there is a high
             | tolerance to false positives and negatives. Clearly, this
             | does not include problems where safety is critical (unless
             | you can really demonstrate that AI does better at
             | safeguarding than humans AND you can convince the public to
             | not be scared).
        
             | skywhopper wrote:
             | The main problem is _human overconfidence_ in the resulting
             | functions, which are often measuring things humans didn 't
             | realize was embedded in the data (eg with tumor
             | recognition), or are utterly hopeless at representing the
             | infinite edge cases that the real world can present (eg
             | self-driving cars).
             | 
             | It's one thing to have hoped that these methods could solve
             | these problems when the improvements were coming rapidly,
             | but there will always be a limit to how well these systems
             | can perform. And the problem is that they fail in entirely
             | non-intuitive ways, making human oversight to correct for
             | errors very difficult or impossible as well.
        
             | gibsonf1 wrote:
             | The issue is that people think that neural net technology
             | is AI when, in fact, there is 0 Intelligence there. Which
             | is fine, except when you have people like Elon Musk, Google
             | and others thinking that there is I there, just need to
             | throw more processors and data at it, and I will magically
             | emerge. We now face a growing number of non-I cars on the
             | road starting to kill people, so it's a real urgent problem
             | that all who use neural nets need to, at minimum,
             | understand that that tech will never give I and to
             | communicate that fact to their customers and their goals
             | with using it.
        
             | clairity wrote:
             | the problem is the unboundedness of the failure modes of
             | (the current generation of) AI, not with how well it can
             | approximate hard functions within regions of interest
             | (which is essentially always a small subset of the range of
             | said hard functions).
        
             | nradov wrote:
             | All true. But due to the hype we often see people trying to
             | use overly complex ML models in problem domains where
             | simpler deterministic statistical techniques such as linear
             | regression analysis would be just as accurate with lower
             | costs and better testability.
        
             | seanp2k2 wrote:
             | While I agree that AI in current forms can be very useful,
             | I believe that the problem of e.g. driverless taxis
             | requires understanding of other humans and empathizing with
             | their intentions to be truly viable. Driving is a social
             | activity, and the current self-driving tech is about as
             | convincing as trying to carry on a conversation with Alexa
             | at a party. I do believe that we need AGI before self-
             | driving will be more than a better cruise control.
             | 
             | I think the better cruise control is very useful and I love
             | to see it, but Tesla's marketing of it as "full self-
             | driving" is disingenuous as best, and industry-chilling +
             | deadly (as we've seen) at worst.
        
           | candiodari wrote:
           | That's doesn't seem true. In the short term AI algorithms
           | clearly understand why they do things. Yes, the time horizon
           | is obviously shorter (not in games, but in the real world,
           | sure), but the same can often be said of humans.
           | 
           | If you see humans responding to animals that don't use eyes
           | (e.g. bats, insects) fuckups are a constant. We are _very_
           | bad at interacting with anything that doesn 't have something
           | similar to our eyes to observe the world.
           | 
           | And third, the world has almost entirely been rebuilt to
           | compensate for human observation flaws. It's not just
           | staircases having a step height that works well with humans,
           | but for example highway intersections have been changed 100
           | times _until_ we found one that humans respond to in a manner
           | different from slamming into the split. The same is true for
           | many intersections (I first started realizing this when
           | reading an article that an intersection with a bridge was
           | modified because 5 people died when a car crushed them
           | against the side of the bridge. It was redesigned. Now we
           | find that an algorithm with an entirely different set of
           | observations makes different mistakes ... not really that
           | strange. Perhaps we should start modifying streets algorithms
           | misjudge).
           | 
           | For example the warning cones for when you have an accident
           | or road works or the like have also been adapted many times
           | because version X was "causing too many accidents".
           | 
           | So in a bunch of cases it's neither that humans don't have
           | big observational flaws or that algorithms have many more.
           | It's just that we largely eliminated the human ones. Not by
           | eliminating them from humans, but by eliminating them from
           | the world.
           | 
           | Same is true on the inside of buildings.
        
             | VRay wrote:
             | Hey man, if we're rebuilding roads for the sake of self
             | driving cars, let's just go back to ubiquitous light rail
             | instead, like we had before cars got popular. This whole
             | self-driving industry is so ridiculous when you consider
             | that this has been a solved problem for over a hundred
             | years..
        
               | Nasrudith wrote:
               | The problem is rail is horrible at traffic handling and
               | uses time multiplexing. One guilded age unethical
               | activity was deliberately creating "traffic jams" on
               | competitor's lines. While rail is good and could use
               | expansion it makes a dubious complete replacement. It
               | works wonderfully with shared routes but fails at
               | handling the "amalgamation" part.
               | 
               | Even Japan still uses trucks for the last mile and they
               | have embraced it enough to have "bullet train suburbs"
               | around stations.
        
             | rootusrootus wrote:
             | > And third, the world has almost entirely been rebuilt to
             | compensate for human observation flaws.
             | 
             | I don't entirely agree with what I think your point is.
             | Fundamentally, humans are pretty great at using context to
             | work their way through a variety of unfamiliar situations.
             | The work we do on intersections is about tuning. Even in a
             | bad intersection with horrible flaws, 99.9% or more of all
             | humans navigating it will be successful. The reason we keep
             | tuning them is because our tolerance for death is zero. 1
             | death for every 100M miles driven is pretty good, but many
             | people still find it completely intolerable. We're going to
             | keep tuning.
             | 
             | But I don't think that means that making roads safely
             | navigable by algorithms is going to be a simple matter of
             | tuning them.
        
         | nova22033 wrote:
         | _Tesla, et al do not have the luxury of ignorance to explain
         | that away however, they know what the technology is and is not
         | currently capable of_
         | 
         | Would help if Elon Musk didn't tweet out ridiculous claims
         | about FSD..
        
       | mjohn wrote:
       | https://archive.is/FFrU5
        
       | tdrdt wrote:
       | It seems the flaws are too binary. 90% of the results are great,
       | the other 10% absolute trash.
       | 
       | You can see this everywhere. For example those app that generate
       | a non existing person. A lot of times the results are great
       | except for that one spot which makes the overall result useless.
       | 
       | Another example is the OptiX denoiser (NVidia). You can get very
       | nice renders in a few seconds which speeds up the workflow. But
       | every time it has areas with a lot of flaws. This doesn't matter
       | when you are still working on something but for production it is
       | useless.
       | 
       | ML has it's use in a lot of areas where the outcome doesn't have
       | to be perfect. But I am still not convinced it is 'production
       | ready'.
        
         | michaelbuckbee wrote:
         | There's the notion that over time the flaws of the previous
         | generation of technology are held up as traditional artifacts.
         | 
         | Things like:
         | 
         | - the "warm" sound of vinyl records. - nostalgia for early
         | myspace, tumblr, geocities, web design - faux edison lightbulbs
         | - low vs high frame rate movies
         | 
         | I wonder if the flaws of all the current ML techniques will
         | eventually be thought of similarly.
        
       | danschumann wrote:
       | Harder to debug and harder to fix
        
       | amelius wrote:
       | Yes, would you trust a car with an error rate of 0.001%?
        
         | mplewis wrote:
         | Is the failure mode that I die in a lithium fire?
        
         | ClumsyPilot wrote:
         | Tesla's drives on a highway, encounters a difficult situation,
         | turns off autopilot, and voala, the error is now counted
         | against the human!
         | 
         | It does not even work in difficult situations and busy chaotic
         | streets, and that's when all the crashes happen.
         | 
         | It's like the statistics that says sharks only attack near
         | beaches - that where 99.99% of people are!
        
         | CJefferson wrote:
         | The question is, what do you mean by "trust"?
         | 
         | Would I be happy for it to be driving around on the road?
         | Probably.
         | 
         | Would I be happy for it to drive me, and it's 'my fault' if I
         | don't notice it's gone wrong and kill someone? No.
         | 
         | So far Tesla (for example) seems nowhere near the point where
         | they would accept responsibility for crashes -- they still
         | always blame the driver for not paying attention.
        
           | bsenftner wrote:
           | That's the key tell right there: Musk always blames the
           | customer and never takes responsibility.
        
         | rpadovani wrote:
         | Well, what's the baseline?
         | 
         | I'm all in for a way to reduce any accident.
        
           | LightG wrote:
           | But there's a choice involved. Reduce baseline accidents, but
           | increase being exposed to completely random events that will
           | kill you.
           | 
           | Nope. I won't be part of that statistic.
        
             | gitfan86 wrote:
             | Anytime you get on the road you are exposing yourself to
             | the possibility that a suicidal or drunk or elderly person
             | with dementia will kill you.
             | 
             | Personally, I would like to have very rigorous driving
             | tests for old people and remove licenses for people with
             | DUIs. The obvious question then is, how are old people and
             | drunks supposed to get around. Self driving cars seem like
             | an option eventually. It makes you safer compared to the
             | alternative, which is we generally wait until someone is
             | killed before we permanently remove someone's license.
        
               | LightG wrote:
               | I have some chance of controlling the outcome of the
               | suicidal/drunk/elderly driver situation.
               | 
               | I have no chance of controlling a buggy AI.
               | 
               | I like my chances better :-)
        
             | kemitche wrote:
             | We make those choices all the time.
             | 
             | Taking a plane instead of driving is similar. You lose
             | direct control, but it's orders of magnitude safer.
             | 
             | I'll take a 0.001% chance of death over a 0.1% chance every
             | time.
        
               | LightG wrote:
               | I'll take 0.1% chance of death which I (arguably) can
               | control, over a 0.001% chance of death which I absolutely
               | cannot control at all.
               | 
               | It's so clear to me. Yes, taking a plane is similar, but
               | I only take that risk a couple of times a year.
               | 
               | The 0.1% (to me) is a probability number as I have some
               | control over each event. The probability is so low that
               | it likely never will happen.
               | 
               | The 0.001% number is an eventual outcome number. "Run the
               | experiment X amount of times, and death will happen
               | 0.001% of the time". And it's more relevant than flying
               | as we drive so much more.
               | 
               | Nope! Thanks!
        
               | rpadovani wrote:
               | That's not how statistic works
        
             | spywaregorilla wrote:
             | I wonder how many people say this whose personal driving
             | habits make them much higher risk than the baseline.
        
               | LightG wrote:
               | Regardless.
               | 
               | Nothing short of 100% reliability will convince me that
               | handing over control to a closed-box AI is better.
               | 
               | And even then, one small "bug" could change that
               | conclusion. It just takes one weird, anomoly in the real
               | world to mess things up. And maybe handling those things
               | will eventually be perfected*. Maybe. But I don't intend
               | to be the beta tester for that.
               | 
               | *I know the default is to hand control back to the
               | driver, but then you may as well be driving (which I
               | enjoy). "Shut up and drive" is far more fun than being
               | your cars KPI manager.
        
         | grey-area wrote:
         | Average humans have a higher error rate.
        
           | amelius wrote:
           | If you classify an image 30 times per second, then 0.001% is
           | quite a large error rate.
        
             | OneTimePetes wrote:
             | Don't forget - the error might be reproduce-able. As in, it
             | will error rarely, but at that one obstacle, with that one
             | light config, it will error repeatedly and constantly.
             | 
             | AI related car accidents and deaths will have special
             | places and dates, were they will repeat annually.
        
             | maxerickson wrote:
             | You said car, not image classifier.
             | 
             | If errors in any subsystem surface out to the car, well
             | then okay. But it's not unlikely that the overall system
             | would deal with an error in the image classifier.
        
             | 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
             | Pay wall so I can't read the article. But can someone
             | comment on what 0.001% error means in real world scenarios?
             | 
             | To keep the maths easy, that's 18 wrong frames/10min. So
             | roughly 2/3 of a second.
             | 
             | If these images are spread out, maybe it's fine. If it's
             | failing on certain types of images, then those images could
             | be grouped and 2/3rds of a second is more than enough time
             | for a serious failure.
        
           | ars wrote:
           | No they don't, humans have a error rate of between 0.00001
           | and 0.000000001 depending on how you measure it.
        
           | gameswithgo wrote:
           | For me the question is how high is the error rate for a non
           | drunk non sleepy non elderly non reckless human, since that
           | is what my car would replace.
           | 
           | in my 20s you would need to bring the reckless back in.
        
             | rpadovani wrote:
             | Problem is, you are not alone on the road. And if somebody
             | else does something really stupid, you can die as a
             | consequence, without any chance to avoid it.
             | 
             | We are definitely not there yet, but I think of myself as a
             | decent driver, and some assistant tools on high-end models
             | are way better (just faster, probably) than me predicting
             | stuff. For the first year this summer, I've driven a car
             | that was quicker than I in an emergency break situation:
             | while I started breaking, it depressed the pedal, and I was
             | quite surprised, 'cause the car in front of me didn't begin
             | breaking yet.
        
             | taneq wrote:
             | Only if you're the only driver being replaced.
        
             | SuoDuanDao wrote:
             | There's also the fact though, that if you're elderly you
             | can't really avoid being a worse driver. I know
             | particularly in rural areas where there's no public
             | transportation, a lot of elderly people would accept an
             | error rate higher than what their own driving used to be.
             | It seems pretty tough for the rest of us to deny them
             | access to a technology like that while it's in the
             | interstitial stage.
        
           | LightG wrote:
           | But, I assume, a lower completely random error rate, which an
           | AI might produce.
        
       | DrNuke wrote:
       | Point is, we/they all knew the unavoidable AI's flaws way before
       | the s*it hit the fan, the underlying sci-fi assumptions
       | undermining the science... and the problem is, some states' wild
       | de-regulation allowing deployment in public, commonal spaces
       | (real and virtual) being managed like a gigantic theme park and
       | joe mcjoes becoming the guinea pigs for such, well-advised
       | experiments.
        
       | txbuck wrote:
       | "For Tesla, Facebook and Others, Misusing AI and Pretending It's
       | a Magic Bullet Is Getting Harder To Ignore"
        
       | amatix wrote:
       | And at the same time, the UK government is looking at reversing
       | the GDPR review right for automated decisions:
       | 
       |  _Article 22 guarantees that people can seek a human review of an
       | algorithmic decision, such as an online decision to award a loan,
       | or a recruitment aptitude test that uses algorithms to
       | automatically filter candidates._
       | 
       |  _In May, a government task force set up to look for deregulatory
       | dividends from Brexit, led by the leading Brexiter Iain Duncan
       | Smith, argued that Article 22 should be removed because it made
       | it "burdensome, costly and impractical" for organisations to use
       | AI to automate routine processes._
       | 
       |  _The idea is part of broad-based plans for a big overhaul of the
       | UK data regime after Brexit which ministers say will boost
       | innovation, and deliver what Oliver Dowden, the culture
       | secretary, has called a "data dividend" for the UK economy._
       | 
       | https://www.ft.com/content/519832b6-e22d-40bf-9971-1af3d3745...
       | 
       | (Edit: formatting/link)
        
         | te_chris wrote:
         | These people are such chumps. Automated hellscape for thee, but
         | not for me.
        
           | andrepd wrote:
           | Oh they are not chumps. They know exactly what they're doing.
        
         | flipbrad wrote:
         | I advise companies on GDPR compliance, and art 22 is usually
         | the least of their concerns. Why not offer a right to human
         | review, if your algorithm is producing "legal or similarly
         | significant effects"? If you're not 100% convinced in the
         | accuracy and fairness of your automated system (two entirely
         | separate GDPR rules), you can avoid issues down the line by
         | offering individuals the ability to flag a dodgy decision and
         | have a human look into it.
        
         | tomp wrote:
         | Is this another one of those GDPR articles that has no teeth? I
         | cannot imagine how Google can keep running it's spam filters,
         | Facebook it's automated bans, and Twitter its algorithmic feed,
         | while abiding by this.
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | londons_explore wrote:
           | Presumably it means a spammer can send a spam email, and then
           | when it goes into the spam folder, has the right to ask
           | google to review that decision.
           | 
           | Sounds fair enough, especially if the spammer either has to
           | pay the costs of the review (ie. a few dollars), or is
           | limited to being only allowed one review per month/year to
           | prevent abuse.
        
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