[HN Gopher] An autonomous car in SF blocked a fire truck respond...
___________________________________________________________________
An autonomous car in SF blocked a fire truck responding to an
emergency
Author : liellesch
Score : 118 points
Date : 2022-05-27 18:56 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wired.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com)
| tpmx wrote:
| > According to Cruise, which collects camera and sensor data from
| its testing vehicles, the fire truck was able to move forward
| approximately 25 seconds after it first encountered the
| autonomous vehicle.
| SllX wrote:
| Half a minute is a long time when you're responding to an
| emergency.
| tpmx wrote:
| Stating the obvious, but: 25 secs < half a minute.
|
| I agree that the difference (5 secs) _most_ of the time isn
| 't all that important. I just don't see the need to round up
| for no particular reason.
| qsdf38100 wrote:
| Needless nitpicking.
| jsight wrote:
| An average pilot takes ~4 seconds from noticing an engine
| failure to when they respond. I don't know how long getting
| out of the way would take an average driver in this
| situation, but I'm guessing that its at least 15 seconds.
|
| People are nitpicking your nitpick, but the distinction
| really does matter in this kind of scenario where the
| argument is that "seconds count".
| capitainenemo wrote:
| Only because the garbage truck moved out of the way.
| google234123 wrote:
| Which was double parked... Anyway, I dont think most
| human drivers would have driven in reverse in this
| situation either.
| capitainenemo wrote:
| Double parking is extremely common for a garbage truck in
| that situation (picking up along a crowded road).
|
| And yes, I absolutely would have checked my rear view
| mirror, then reversed (slowly).
|
| Or tried to move over as much as possible to the right.
|
| Or depending on the road and my position, U-turned and
| pulled in front of the garbage truck. Lots of options,
| blocking the firetruck not being high on the list.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| You claim this, but have you ever been in that situation
| before? Backing up on a road with traffic is extremely
| dangerous, and I'm not sure I could do it while under the
| stress of an emergency vehicle situation. There was no
| room to U-turn (if there was, the fire truck would have
| been able to get through), and I'm guessing parked cars
| on the side of the road prevented any kind of "moving
| further to the right".
| capitainenemo wrote:
| Yes, I have backed up for emergency vehicles in the past.
| (and gone through red lights if necessary and pulled all
| the way off on shoulder and crossed double yellow line...
| - all of things an bot might not have done). I've been
| driving for 3 decades, most of it in an extremely
| congested area, so it happens.
|
| There might have been room to U-turn for the automated
| vehicle. Bit of ascii art here
|
| ===DUMPTRUCK==
|
| BOT===FIRETRUCK
|
| Bot, in that situation can U-Turn. Perhaps maybe back up
| a metre or two first (let's pretend there was another car
| or two there but there was a metre or two to backup -
| although if bot slowly backed with hazard lights on and
| honking a car behind them hopefully would have too -
| maybe no U-Turn necessary). Yet there would be absolutely
| no way for a (large) firetruck to get through. Point is,
| require's a human's full awareness of world and flexible
| thinking and when it is appropriate to break the rules
| (rule of arriving at destination, rules of road conduct).
| These bots still don't have the neural complexity of a
| crow, much less a human (probably not even that of a
| goldfish really). They are ok at the predictable but
| that's it.
|
| I have no doubt they'll get there eventually, at which
| point we might be having another ethical conversation
| about what a AGI should be allowed to do with its life,
| but they aren't there yet...
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| It is a two lane road constricted with packed street
| parking on both sides of the road. This being SF, even in
| the best situation where there isn't a garbage truck
| double parked in the other lane, I'm sure a U turn isn't
| feasible, or even a 3 point turn around. Backing up was
| the only option, yet the road is two lane, so more
| traffic than a residential one lane coming from behind is
| also a concern.
| zinekeller wrote:
| Does your point appreciably change the meaning of the
| argument? Definietely not, even a 10-second delay is too
| long for emergencies. There are times where that five-
| second difference matters but I feel this falls into a bad-
| faith argument.
| jsight wrote:
| I'd bet that 10 seconds is still less than the human
| reaction time.
| [deleted]
| google234123 wrote:
| A 10 or 30 second delay is the probably the difference
| between an emergency driver that likes to speed and one
| that does not.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| "Bad Faith" is when someone is consciously trying to
| deceive you. It's not a superlative like 'really' or
| 'very'.
|
| If the point someone is trying to make is bad,
| inaccurate, or unconvincing that doesn't mean it's made
| in bad faith. It's actually less likely to be in bad
| faith.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| In a similar situation (where having to back up is the only
| option), I don't think a human driver would have responded
| much faster. Of course, this was with human intervention
| also.
|
| Odd that we are focusing on the autonomous car that had no
| choice but to back up and not the double parked garbage truck
| that induced the need to backup in the first place.
| ssivark wrote:
| Only because the garbage truck driver responded promptly.
| Otherwise the situation would likely have continued arbitrarily
| long.
| ripper1138 wrote:
| Thanks to the garbage truck driver.
| bagacrap wrote:
| the blockage was thanks to the garbage truck driver
| rwbhn wrote:
| Literally doing the job they are paid to do (by the city I
| presume), in the expected manner.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| That's just what garbage trucks do, pick up garbage.
| Typically, they need to stop in order to achieve that.
| Thankfully, there are two lanes, so with some negotiation,
| humans can work around that fact...
| nmstoker wrote:
| Isn't the dilemma here that these experiments are being done on
| far too big a scale for the low skill level the cars currently
| exhibit, and yet if you take that to the companies behind them
| they would all argue they need more cars to gain more ML
| experience in order to have a better outcome.
|
| The driving capabilities are impressive from a tech perspective
| but they're pretty poor in comparison with average or even fairly
| poor drivers. Given these limited capabilities, the cars are
| obviously still in an early R&D stage and thus the companies
| running them ought to be giving far more priority to making the
| outward impact much less. How do they do that? Staff the human
| "take over" driver pools at far higher levels, so the take over
| is always smooth and rapid. Right now it's like those useless
| chat boxes on websites where they ask you to chat and then find
| they've got no human to engage with you, as they multiplexed
| excessively.
|
| Bringing the number of humans down once the systems are good
| enough is fine and that's how they'll get their commercial
| rewards but doing it now is premature.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| >While a human might have reversed to clear the lane, the Cruise
| car stayed put.
|
| They give the theoretical human too much credit. I've seen much
| worse things happen, such as not stopping at all.
| user3939382 wrote:
| It's funny reading "autonomous car" and "self-driving car". We
| can be certain that will eventually sound as silly as the old
| name for cars "horseless carriage".
| docfort wrote:
| I don't know. "Car" is short for carriage. Arguably, horse-
| drawn carriages had certain levels of autonomy. An "automobile"
| focuses on the automated, or mechanical, nature of the
| conveyance. These days, "auto" is usually focused on mechanical
| thought. I imagine that we might just collectively redefine one
| of our existing terms once it is not so ambiguous anymore.
| anyfactor wrote:
| The trend of autonomous cars is one of the things that I believe
| is not practical. Even the most sophisticated machine learning
| algorithm requires repetition and constant input to be optimized.
| But there is infinitely many variables when it comes to driving
| on a street level.
|
| Driving is intuitive on a city street. The scope of autonomous
| vehicles should be limited to places where there is clarity of
| transit and very few variables. I would be comfortable if a fleet
| of autonomous vehicles driving 200 miles/hour on a a dedicated
| side on a highway but not in a city or even an empty suburban
| neighborhood. I think for those intuitive situations the vehicles
| could even be driven remotely by a real person in a data center.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >could even be driven remotely by a real person in a data
| center.
|
| doesn't this totally defeat the purpose of driverless cars? a
| remotely operated car is not the same thing as driverless. the
| company operating the car would still have to pay for a human
| to do work. also, as cool as remotely operated sounds, there
| are so many ways that is worse than a human in the car. for
| starters, peripheral vision is lost in remote.
| piperswe wrote:
| "Places where there is clarity of transit and very few
| variables" sounds like railroads. High-speed rail is, in my
| opinion, a much more equitable and efficient use of
| infrastructure than letting private vehicles only owned by
| those who can afford to buy them fill up a private lane.
| ben174 wrote:
| This seems to warrant repeating every time this is brought up:
|
| It just needs to be 1% better than human drivers. If the net
| result is 1% less tragedies - sign me up. If it's better than
| the alternative, I'm in.
| Spoom wrote:
| That's the engineering argument. The societal expectation,
| however, is that it's 100% better than human drivers, as in,
| it must not cause harm, ever. The reality is that the vast
| majority of folks won't accept autonomous vehicles if they
| don't meet this high bar.
|
| Opinions my own.
| simion314 wrote:
| >It just needs to be 1% better than human drivers. If the net
| result is 1% less tragedies - sign me up.
|
| Say you have a child and want to send him to school, would
| you chose
|
| 1 drive him yourself, knowing you have 10 years of experience
| with zero accidents and you are responsible and care for your
| child
|
| 2 use a lottery that will give you a random driver, could be
| a 16 years old teen with 1 day experience, could be a 80
| years old elder or a drunk or tired dude or a super driver
|
| 3 use an AI , is better then the drunk dude , 1% better then
| the teen but worse then you and much worse then a
| professional driver
|
| I am curious why would chose 2 or 3 if 1 is an option. 3
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Not everyone has option 1 available to them. It's why
| school buses exist.
| simion314 wrote:
| >Not everyone has option 1 available to them. It's why
| school buses exist.
|
| - Not everyone has access to school bus options
|
| - not everyone can drive
|
| - not everyone owns a self driving car
|
| ....
|
| I would prefer if we stay on topic and answer at in
| Hypothetical question.
|
| Or if you have a bias, let use a different domain
|
| Your child is ill and you call for a doctor, but in this
| universe doctors are a lot of time drunk or are allowed
| to practice with zero experience, whyat do you chose
|
| 1 you call your family doctor that you trust and is not a
| drunk
|
| 2 you call the AI doctor that is terrible compared to a
| normal doctor but is better then the drunk doctors
|
| 3 you realize that it would be so much cheaper then
| creating an army of AI robot doctors to just fix the
| problem with drunk doctors, and maybe the fact you are an
| AI enthusiast won't prevent you think that comparing an
| AI with a drunk doctor is stupid, that we should have
| better stats then is better then the worse.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Chill out. I never said I was an AI enthusiast. Maybe
| don't assume things because someone made a small critique
| about your comment? I was simply responding to your
| question of why people choose 2 or 3 when 1 is an option.
| Because it's _not_ always an option. You even admit that
| at the top of your comment. Which leads me to ask: what
| are you trying to prove here?
| yupper32 wrote:
| Most people (including me) think they're better drivers than
| average. I think I'm probably in the top 10%, at least.
| Whether or not that's actually true doesn't matter for my
| argument.
|
| All that considered, I need autonomous vehicles to be MUCH
| better than average human drivers to consider riding in them.
| They need to be better than I think I am, so maybe top 5% or
| so of talent on the road.
|
| 1% better than the average human is still an awful driver
| IMO.
| axg11 wrote:
| This is an unrealistic take. There are many other differences
| that you need to consider. For example, what is the nature of
| that 1% difference in tragedies? Perhaps there's a 1%
| improvement in overall fatalities but also an increase in
| very gruesome accidents. Technologies that are rapidly
| adopted often need to be 10x better than existing solutions,
| otherwise adoption is a slower uphill battle.
| mtoner23 wrote:
| if you want 1% fewer driving tragedies, we should all just
| drive less
| kergonath wrote:
| Better regulations and fewer huge SUVs or trucks with massive
| blind spots would result in more than a 1% drop. Better
| public transport would, as well. Sure, it's not shiny new
| technologies...
| krisoft wrote:
| > Even the most sophisticated machine learning algorithm
| requires repetition and constant input to be optimized.
|
| Self driving cars are not machine learning algorithms. They
| have machine learning parts in their programing but nobody
| reputable would hook up a neural network to the pedals and the
| steering and just let it rip.
|
| You simply have a bad mental model of how these machines are
| built and it shows.
|
| There are three big questions every self driving car has to
| answer: Where I am? What is around me? What to do next?
|
| To reliably answer the "where" question you don't just trust
| one sensor. You use multiple sensors. Yes, that includes a gps,
| but also cameras and a lidar and a radar too. It is not machine
| learning. If you are interested how this is done you need to
| look up topics like iterative closest point matching, multi-
| view geometry, kalman-filtering, bag-of-visual-words
| representation, and bayesian reasoning.
|
| To reliably answer what is around the car you likewise use all
| of your sensors. Yes, this has bits of machine learning in it,
| but it is not only machine learning. You can and do a lot of
| model-free perception. For example if your laser is bouncing
| back from somewhere then there is something there. There is a
| lot of published literature on sensor fusion and tracking and
| prediction. These algorithms are not magic, and they are not
| machine learning. They are just what you also would come up
| with if you would think about the problem hard for 8 hours a
| day for tens of years.
|
| Then there is the planning. These are not machine learning
| based algorithms. They usually generate a bunch of different
| plans, then cull the unsafe ones (for example the ones which
| would collide with a tracked object) and then you rate the
| plans according to some heuristic and choose the best, then
| repeat. It is not magic. There is a serious craft and
| engineering to it. You can read a good introduction to
| different approaches in Lavalle's Planning Algorithms book if
| you are so interested.
| bsder wrote:
| > Driving is intuitive on a city street.
|
| Driving on a city street is _habitual_ --not intuitive. Humans
| memorize their driving area and then act within that.
|
| Put a new stop sign onto a road and watch the circus.
| gojomo wrote:
| Given that often human-driven, or human-parked, cars create
| similar temporary obstacles, the most important question here is:
| does this happen more-often, or for longer-periods, with
| autonomous cars?
|
| I don't see the article, or quoted sources, even trying to make
| that comparison - so this is really only a half-story, compared
| to what's relevant.
|
| Further, given the remote-guidance possibilities with autonomous
| cars, it's plausible to think they'll eventually be far, far
| _better_ than human-driven cars at making-way for higher-priority
| traffic.
|
| Human drivers sometimes fail-to-notice sirens or other high-
| priority demands on road capacity. But, an automated system could
| broadcast the planned-routes of dispatched priority vehicles to
| _every autonomous car in the city_ , allowing the autonomous cars
| to preemptively clear paths, before it even becomes an issue of
| local-reasoning about an exceptional-situation.
| flutas wrote:
| > Given that often human-driven, or human-parked, cars create
| similar temporary obstacles, the most important question here
| is: does this happen more-often, or for longer-periods, with
| autonomous cars?
|
| Honestly the article is pure tech-scare bait. It blames a car
| that stopped (while it was driving) when a truck was driving at
| it head on, but tries to glance over the fact that a (human
| driven) garbage truck is the reason the fire truck had to go
| into oncoming traffic in the first place.
|
| > a San Francisco Fire Department truck responding to a fire
| tried to pass a doubled-parked garbage truck by using the
| opposing lane.
| anonporridge wrote:
| God awful "journalism".
| mawise wrote:
| I wouldn't point the blame to the garbage truck, but I agree
| with your description of it as scare-bait. I would gladly
| accept random 25-second delays from the fire department in
| exchange for eliminating the 30~40k American deaths[1] each
| year due to traffic fatalities.
|
| [1]: https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-
| statistics/detail/state...
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| The garbage truck being double parked while it was collecting
| garbage is probably common. They probably are used to routing
| around them.
|
| I go around double parked cars in my city all the time.
| Sometimes drivers in both directions need to magically
| negotiate.
|
| The driverless car that doesn't understand it has to safely
| get out of the way of a fire truck is the new part of this
| situation.
| aetherson wrote:
| What's your suggestion here? That garbage trucks don't pick
| up on streets without two lanes in each direction?
|
| The reality of driving is that there are a lot of these messy
| situations, and driverless cars need to be able to handle
| them.
| flutas wrote:
| > What's your suggestion here? That garbage trucks don't
| pick up on streets without two lanes in each direction?
|
| Maybe they don't block the travel lane for extended
| periods, just like any regular person is expected to not
| do.
|
| The article is basically saying "it's ok for the human
| driven car to do, but not the self driving car."
| mint2 wrote:
| Not familiar with sf or cities? Cars, delivery trucks,
| garbages trucks often stop in traffic lane for
| loading/unloading because there is literally nowhere else
| to stop. It's annoying but expected and understandable.
|
| If they do that prior to sirens showing up there is no
| issue. They can't predict the future.
| anyfoo wrote:
| Garbage trucks (the article mentions the operator was
| working) and other service vehicles, including school
| busses, _are_ expected to block travel lanes for extended
| periods and time, and humans are usually able to
| understand the situation and react accordingly in
| emergency situations.
| rurp wrote:
| Suppose the travel lane had been blocked by any other
| obstacle, say some large object fell into the road. The
| Cruise car would have failed in the exact same way, there
| just wouldn't be an extra human in the loop to blame.
| rglullis wrote:
| This may seem an wild idea for those in North America, but
| how about just _eliminating car dependency in the first
| place_?
| throwaway92394 wrote:
| To put it mildly - this is unrealistic in the US except
| for major cities. Even then, depending on the city and
| where in the city, its going to be very difficult to
| convince and implement methods of cutting cars.
|
| While I think it's a good idea I just don't see this
| happening in the majority of the US other then major
| cities. In my state I just don't see how it would be
| possible given people commute 30+ miles regularly.
| rglullis wrote:
| Start with better zoning laws so that people are not
| pushed to live 15 miles away from the their work and
| general/light commerce areas.
|
| After that, just copy the playbook from the Netherlands.
| Amsterdam was very much like most big American cities
| until the 70s, their streets were steadily being
| redesigned for human scale and less car _dependency_.
|
| It can be done and it can be done easily if Americans
| stop believing in their Exceptionalism.
| google234123 wrote:
| We live in a democracy where people living in an area
| have some control over it. And they use this control to
| block zoning laws.
| piperswe wrote:
| They don't block zoning laws, rather they seem to ensure
| they are as strict as possible
| ripper1138 wrote:
| Are there no cars in Europe?
| [deleted]
| est31 wrote:
| No but there is way less dependence on cars, at least in
| medium cities and up. Many developments in america just
| build suburban deserts where there is just more single
| family homes around you, where you _have_ to drive to the
| next supermarket, both because it 's so far away, and
| because sometimes there literally isn't a way for
| pedestrians to walk on. There are a few good videos on
| the subject:
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajSEIdjkU8E
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnKIVX968PQ
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul_xzyCDT98
| rglullis wrote:
| There are, we are not as _dependent_ on it, and you can
| bet that the absolute majority of people could live on
| car-sharing and cab-hailing systems, which would mean
| that 99% of the "self-driving" problems would go away.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| While I agree with you that car dependency is a serious
| problem in North America and I am also very critical of
| the obsession with self-driving, I don't think they are
| necessarily correlated with each other. In fact, one
| could argue that car-sharing and car-hailing are _more_
| amenable to self-driving than a market in which each
| individual is expected to own a car.
|
| I think self-driving is more established in North America
| than in Europe due to less strict regulations, more
| availability of capital and technological investment, and
| particularly the greater predictability and homogeneity
| of the car-centric roads when compared to European
| countries. I'd like to see how a self-driving car handles
| Rome for example--if it can.
| rglullis wrote:
| The question that most people seem to forget to ask: what
| is the societal benefit of having self-driving cars that
| could not be had by _reducing car dependency in the first
| place_?
|
| "Roads will be safer"? Yes, they are safer already on
| cities with well-functioning public transit.
|
| "Less drunk-driving"? Same idea: if teenagers can live in
| areas where cars are not a necessity, they won't be
| behind the wheel and still be able to meet their friends,
| go to a party, etc.
|
| "Less space needed for parking slots if cars are FSD"?
| Also true if people are not car-dependent.
|
| To me, self-driving makes sense for _trucks_ on _highway
| roads_ , not for city traffic. And even then, we could
| also apply the same idea and think "why not improve the
| rail infrastructure"?
| anonporridge wrote:
| They need to be able to handle messy situations at least as
| good as human drivers, which isn't necessarily a high bar.
|
| And importantly, unlike human drivers, autonomous cars will
| only get persistently better at handling these kinds of
| situations as they encounter more of them.
| kergonath wrote:
| > They need to be able to handle messy situations at
| least as good as human drivers, which isn't necessarily a
| high bar.
|
| You might have an overly-optimistic opinion of what AI
| can do. Not to say that humans are not stupid quite
| often, but we are very far from having AIs that can be as
| good as a 4 years old child.
|
| AIs are good at what they know and what they can account
| for. So yes, they will get better at what they know, but
| they cannot, by design, get better at what they don't. So
| there will always be situations where they will be
| unbelievably stupid because their designers did not think
| it would happen. There is no solution to that at the
| moment.
| ganbatekudasai wrote:
| Yes it is an impossibly high bar, and no they will not
| persistently get better unlike humans until they develop
| fully generalized AI.
|
| It's so an easy to just say human drivers aren't as good,
| but it's not grounded in any reality.
|
| Just take voice controlled assistants for example. We've
| made pretty big strides on them, haven't we?
|
| And yet an entirely unmotivated teenager who's doing
| badly at school working a 7-Eleven outperforms voice
| assistants by several orders of magnitudes, through the
| sheer wonder of context clues and general intelligence,
| no matter how dim you want to assert that teenager to be.
|
| I am proud of my voice assistant when it properly
| understood that I wanted to indeed set a timer for 50
| minutes instead of 15 minutes, while any person would
| immediately understand what I mean even in a noisy
| environment just from _why_ I 'm setting the timer, and
| even fuzzily adjust their behavior based on what
| continues to happen.
|
| Anyone who claims automated cars can fully learn the
| arbitrarily complicated physical situations they have to
| navigate around is either disingenuous, or does not know
| how computers work.
| kazinator wrote:
| You're missing the angle that when a human blocks passage for
| an extended period of time with their vehicle, it's almost
| always because the human is away from the vehicle: the human
| has deliberately parked where they are not supposed to and then
| walked away.
|
| When the computer does this, it's always "sitting" in the
| vehicle, and is not acting on a selfish intent: it's just
| carrying buggy/incomplete requirements.
|
| A human sitting in the vehicle is generally capable of
| responding to "sir, can you move your car?", or a horn from the
| fire engine or whatever.
| gojomo wrote:
| But if the human-away-from-vehicle blocks things for minutes,
| while the temporarily-confused-AI has a remote-operator fix
| the issue in 30 seconds, or others in the area find another
| solution even faster than in the unattended-car scenario...
| isn't the advantage, given the actual weighted occurrences,
| still for the autonomous car?
| thr0wawayf00 wrote:
| > does this happen more-often, or for longer-periods, with
| autonomous cars?
|
| How would one go about finding that data? Is there an authority
| that tracks how often and for how long emergency vehicles are
| impeded by human drivers? You might get something along the
| lines of average time to first response on the scene.
|
| > Human drivers sometimes fail-to-notice sirens or other high-
| priority demands on road capacity. But, an automated system
| could broadcast the planned-routes of dispatched priority
| vehicles to every autonomous car in the city, allowing the
| autonomous cars to preemptively clear paths, before it even
| becomes an issue of local-reasoning about an exceptional-
| situation.
|
| This doesn't comfort me. We already live in a society whose
| leadership doesn't believe in net neutrality, I have a hard
| time believing that an automated driving system that
| programmatically prioritizes vehicles on the road won't be co-
| opted in the same manner to benefit those with capital at the
| expense of those that don't.
| gojomo wrote:
| > How would one go about finding that data?
|
| The autonomous car companies have a lot of the data, since
| they've run the same cars with drivers extensively. They can
| see the differences in rates-of-situations between cars-
| working-autonomously, and cars-with-drivers.
|
| Given the long periods of operating with autonomy-plus-
| backup-driver, they also have stats on how often an in-car
| driver overrides the car, and exactly why.
|
| Cities also can & should independently collect such data.
| Some big-city buses are already equipeend with a photo-
| ticketing mechanism for immediately recording, & citing, and
| cars illegally parked in their paths/pickup-area. Emergency
| vehicles should have the same.
|
| > This doesn't comfort me.
|
| Well, I can't make you comfortable if you've got free-
| floating paranoia about abuses by the powerful. There are
| many such abuses!
|
| But I can point out that the exact same rational comparative
| criteria should apply before making a tangible policy
| decision about the use of the shared roads. We shouldn't be
| ruled by imaginative worries extrapolated from other
| insecurities, but rather real measurements of how often a
| "send a request to clea roads for emergency vehicles" is
| broadcast, whether each use has a recorded & verified
| legitimate justification, whether such broadcasts save lives
| versus not-using-them, etc.
| klyrs wrote:
| There was a double-parked garbage truck in the opposing lane of
| traffic. What makes this _news_ is that the other party to the
| blockade was an autonomous car.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > the most important question here is: does this happen more-
| often, or for longer-periods, with autonomous cars?
|
| The nost important question is - how do you recover. With every
| autonomous system, when it does fail, it is often catastrophic
| because there is no recovery path.
|
| When a human clerk makes a mistake, you can talk to them, when
| a human driver stops in the middlw of the street, you can tall
| to them - when a computer crashes, you are tipically fucked.
| gojomo wrote:
| As far as I can tell, none of the reported incidents in SF
| involved a "computer crash". Further, none have been as
| 'catastrophic' as other very-common accidents with human
| drivers.
|
| So yes, the details of recovery are important - but only _in
| comparison_ to the human baseline. If incidents happen less
| often than with humans, and /or recovery happens as fast or
| faster than with humans, that's the relevant criteria.
|
| Also deserving weight: might autonomous cars avoid dangerous
| panics in some situations where humans sometimes panic &
| overreact? I've often seen human drivers _make things worse_
| by making an ill-advised impatient navigate-around. I 've
| seen people trying, earnestly, to avoid a block or prior
| accident who - distracted, anxious - do something else wrong,
| causing another collision.
|
| Weigh all the rates & severities. Don't set policy based on
| selective worst-cases, including many imaginary/theoretical
| contrived cases.
| gmfawcett wrote:
| Wouldn't the apples-to-apples comparison be: how many human
| drivers have been in the path of a honking fire truck, yet
| refused to move? Including parked cars and other "obstacle"
| cases is imbalanced.
| [deleted]
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > an automated system could broadcast the planned-routes of
| dispatched priority vehicles to every autonomous car in the
| city, allowing the autonomous cars to preemptively clear paths,
| before it even becomes an issue of local-reasoning about an
| exceptional-situation
|
| These cars can barely drive themselves with hyper-accurate maps
| on a sunny day without any surprises, and we want them to
| receive and evaluate emergency dispatches from some central
| system that doesn't yet exist, and respond accordingly? I think
| we're a ways away from that.
| mwint wrote:
| That central system is already far more real than you would
| think. I was amazed to download the PulsePoint app and
| immediately see all the fire/EMS events in real-time, with
| data on which units are responding/there/leaving. It's not a
| huge stretch.
| gojomo wrote:
| The cars relying on external routing guidance, from cloud
| services similar to 'Google Maps' driving directions. An
| alert from emergency services can simply... remove roads from
| consideration, the same as is already routinely done when
| other accidents/traffic cause dynamic routing updates.
|
| So, _you don 't even need to upgrade the autonomous
| vehicles_, you just change the other, existing, flexible,
| proven system for recommending routes.
| anyfoo wrote:
| The problem is that there are literally uncountably many
| situations that a human with "general intelligence" will
| understand and react to accordingly. Sometimes smoothly,
| sometimes less so. But a non-conscious automatic entity needs
| to have the required behavior programmed in explicitly.
|
| So yes, you might argue that for this particular situation, you
| "just" need to put in the proper programming and AI/ML training
| and then "maybe the car will notice more often than a human" as
| long as the situation is within very specific bounds. At least
| now that somebody made an article about it.
|
| But it does not change that the autonomous machine does not
| _understand_ the complex world it is driving in in the
| slightest, and that, for example, swerving into an unmanned
| fruit stand without being able to brake is much better than
| swerving into an unmanned gas pump.
| robbrown451 wrote:
| "But it does not change that the autonomous machine does not
| understand the complex world it is driving in in the
| slightest, and that, for example, swerving into an unmanned
| fruit stand without being able to brake is much better than
| swerving into an unmanned gas pump."
|
| It seems it would have a way of prioritizing such things.
| That doesn't seem particularly complicated, to be honest...
| weighted decision making is certainly within its capacity.
| E.g. shopping cart has fewer "avoid hitting" points than
| stroller.
|
| It's not like every scenario has to be explicitly programmed
| in, nor does the program need to run some analysis on a
| detailed backstory to justify that a baby is more valuable
| than groceries. In effect, somebody -- probably not a
| programmer either -- just needs to enter some numbers into a
| spreadsheet.
|
| (yes there is complex programming that allows that to be
| manifested in the car's decisions, but the idea that
| programmers are themselves constantly making "moral calls" in
| the code, rather than the control data, is fiction)
|
| And if it does have such prioritization in its logic, I'd say
| yeah, it "understands" the world in that respect. Unless you
| have defined the word "understand" in some mystical way that
| precludes non-biological machines by definition.
| 2fast4you wrote:
| You're asking the car to make moral decisions. Given the
| choice between hitting a child or and old woman, which will
| it choose? A bicyclist vs a pedestrian? A lemonade vendor
| vs a hotdog vendor?
|
| This is all assuming it can distinguish between all of
| these objects, and that a real person could assign relative
| moral values to hitting one over the other.
| anyfoo wrote:
| > It seems it would have a way of prioritizing such things.
|
| You are putting the cart before the horse. The problem is
| not in prioritization, the problem is in having the correct
| ontology to even get to the "prioritization" stage.
|
| Does the car know what a fruit stand is? Does it know what
| a gas pump is? Does it know how the fruit stand relates to
| the gas pump in "expected outcome when being hit by a car"?
|
| If you say "we can program that in", read my post again.
| robbrown451 wrote:
| I would imagine the car has ways of identifying things
| that are specific hazards, such as a gas pump. Fruit
| stand is probably categorized as "other."
|
| "the problem is in having the correct ontology to even
| get to the "prioritization" stage."
|
| That part isn't done by the program, it is done by
| whoever enters the prioritization numbers. That is,
| someone, possibly a committee, can dial up the "avoid gas
| pumps" weighting relative to the "avoid baby stroller"
| weighting if they are concerned that cars might swerve so
| widely to avoid coming near a stroller than they are
| risking hitting a different hazard. Or they can dial up
| the weight of grocery carts relative to dogs, since
| children might be in a grocery cart. Etc.
|
| Those are humans, who can do whatever ontological
| analysis they need when deciding on the the settings. The
| car doesn't need to access any of that, it just needs a
| general look up table that can help make optimal
| decisions based on the human-entered value system.
| dogecoinbase wrote:
| Sure, we'll just write down all the things there are in
| the world in order of how bad it is for a car to hit
| them.
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| We're really lucky we never see more than 1 thing at a
| time on the road.
| robbrown451 wrote:
| You don't think self driving cars categorize and
| prioritize things?
| dane-pgp wrote:
| I mean, you're right; someone making that list might not
| think to include "centaur", and maybe one Halloween a
| child is dressed up as one, and the computer vision
| system interprets the "centaur" as a horse instead of a
| child, and it makes the wrong decision, but how many
| centaur-related accidents do you think self-driving cars
| are going to be involved in each year?
|
| It's completely feasible to imagine writing a list of the
| top, say, 100 things in the world that a car needs to
| make morally-significant decisions about, and then deal
| with every other accident or near-miss after the fact.
| Interactions with unrecognised objects should be rare
| enough to be a rounding error when comparing accident
| rates between autonomous and human-driven miles.
| [deleted]
| acchow wrote:
| On the other hand, I've seen an enormous number of human-
| driven vehicles be absolutely assholes to emergency vehicles
| with lights blinking
| feoren wrote:
| > needs to have the required behavior programmed in
| explicitly
|
| This is missing the entire point of ML. ML is literally
| defined as not having to explicitly program responses in for
| every situation.
|
| Needing to pull over because a fire truck has told you it's
| coming your way in 2 minutes is pretty easy compared with
| some of those other "uncountably many" situations these cars
| need to deal with.
|
| > the autonomous machine does not understand the complex
| world it is driving in
|
| Daniel Dennett would like to have a word with you. It's
| perfectly possible for systems to "understand" things for any
| useful definition of the word "understand". A calculator
| absolutely "understands" arithmetic.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Do driverless cars use ML in the decision making procedure?
|
| > A calculator absolutely "understands" arithmetic.
|
| That is absurd and obviously false
| feoren wrote:
| > That is absurd and obviously false
|
| It is actually "obviously true" unless you believe that
| human brains have a special metaphysical magic that makes
| them "more than just a system". That's literally the only
| alternative: human brains are magic and only humans are
| ever capable of "understanding". It's a vacuous
| definition of the word. Systems can understand things,
| which is good, because the human brain is nothing more.
|
| See: Daniel Dennett's response to Searle's Chinese Room.
| anyfoo wrote:
| I did not claim it's about "metaphysical magic" that
| machines lack. But I do believe that humans usually have
| a very rich and multifaceted life outside of driving on a
| road, compared to cars, and are therefore able to
| integrate "training data" that cars are not. Unless your
| plan is to make them an active member of society.
| defen wrote:
| > This is missing the entire point of ML. ML is literally
| defined as not having to explicitly program responses in
| for every situation.
|
| So how do you know how the system will respond to an
| arbitrary situation? You could easily argue that we don't
| know how an arbitrary human will respond to an arbitrary
| situation, but we have systems in place to deal with the
| consequences if they handle it badly.
|
| For example, if a driver handles a situation badly enough,
| they could lose their license. If an autonomous car does
| something bad enough that a human would have lost their
| license, what happens? Do all of that company's cars get
| pulled off the road until the bug is fixed and validated?
| feoren wrote:
| > So how do you know how the system will respond to an
| arbitrary situation?
|
| You put them in that situation and see how they respond.
| If they respond badly, you keep training them until they
| respond better. I'm not saying it's easy, but I am saying
| it's exactly what autonomous-car developers been doing
| all this time.
| defen wrote:
| > If they respond badly, you keep training them until
| they respond better.
|
| Right, but what do you do with all the other cars on the
| road that presumably still have the bad behavior (while
| the fix is being developed)? Just assume that the
| situation is rare enough that you'll be able to fix it
| before it happens again?
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| You're basically saying test-driven development can find
| all problems with software, and it's well-known that that
| isn't the case. It's very dangerous to assume TDD is all
| that's needed when lives are at stake.
| anyfoo wrote:
| > This is missing the entire point of ML. ML is literally
| defined as not having to explicitly program responses in
| for every situation.
|
| I suggest you look up the free lunch theorem of supervised
| learning.
|
| > A calculator absolutely "understands" arithmetic.
|
| I'm not sure how that's anything else than proving my
| point. Let's say a calculator "understands" arithmetic. It
| does not understand _anything_ I would apply those
| calculations I make with it to. I cannot tell it
| "calculator, go do my taxes".
|
| Your particular example is not even true: A calculator is
| able to _perform_ calculations, it does not understand any
| of the axioms, theorems, and uses around it.
| feoren wrote:
| > A calculator is able to perform calculations, it does
| not understand any of the axioms, theorems, and uses
| around it.
|
| It understands the axioms because they've been literally
| built into its tiny brain. It doesn't understand the uses
| of arithmetic because nobody programmed it to.
|
| Can you provide me a non-vacuous definition of
| "understand" that doesn't rely on human consciousness
| being extra-special and magic?
| anyfoo wrote:
| > It understands the axioms because they've been
| literally built into its tiny brain.
|
| No it does not. Do you know what an axiom is? Do you know
| how a calculator is implemented?
|
| It's not about metaphysics, it's about the difference in
| the experience of a lifetime compared to a car on a road.
| ,,Training data", if you like.
| jstanley wrote:
| I don't think it's a question of knowing what an axiom is
| or how a calculator is implemented. I think it's a
| question of disagreeing on what "understanding" means.
|
| What does it _mean_ to understand something? Obviously
| (to me and I presume to you) a calculator doesn 't
| understand anything! It doesn't have the capacity for
| understanding. Obviously (according to, I presume, feoren
| and Dennett) "understanding" means something very
| different, and a calculator is perfectly capable of
| "understanding" arithmetic.
| hgomersall wrote:
| Yeah, you generally have to hope it effectively
| interpolates between stuff it has been trained on in ways
| that make sense.
| markdown wrote:
| HOWTO: Make a Tesla pull over with a fake siren.
| munk-a wrote:
| We've solved that as a society.
|
| People can affix fake sirens to their cars and if they
| blare them at you you should pull over... after the
| incident society then throws an incredibly harsh penalty at
| the offender.
|
| To make sure things run smoothly it benefits society to
| never doubt or question whether people who say they're
| police officers actually them - they might have something
| incredibly important to say (Like, hey, there's an active
| shootout ahead - please don't keep driving and get yourself
| injured).
|
| If you as an individual create some funny gag to fake out
| autonomous vehicles into thinking that you're a cop whether
| you cheekily do it with "TOTALLY NOT A COP CAR" written on
| the side to get a laugh or not... you're almost certainly
| going to be charged with a felony crime.
| gondolgames wrote:
| > [...] swerving into an unmanned fruit stand without being
| able to brake is much better than swerving into an unmanned
| gas pump.
|
| That's a great example.
|
| Not to mention triggering any Rube Goldberg-machine-like
| chain reaction (even with just a few steps) where a series of
| events would need to be predicted.
| ithkuil wrote:
| While I do agree that even a below average human intelligence
| can better cope with this kind of situations (also because it
| has access to many more opportunities to understand, for
| example we can understand what's going on by seeing at the
| face and the hand waving and/or yelling if the driver in the
| other vehicle; humans are quite good at understanding other
| humans), I don't think it follows that conscience is
| necessary to achieve that.
| gojomo wrote:
| There are _not_ uncountably many - we live in a finite world
| governed by understandable physical and civic laws.
|
| There's an actually measurable rate of humans blocking other
| traffic, and for how long before resolution, and an actually
| measurable rate of autonomous vehicles blocking other
| traffic, and for how long before resolved.
|
| If the rate for autonomous vehicles is already below that of
| humans, or rapidly headed there, that's far more important to
| note than to theorize about other corner-cases.
|
| (Also, as a San Francisco driver, I have serious doubts about
| the "general intelligence" of my fellow drivers. I don't see
| any reasons to hold autonomous cars to a higher standard -
| perhaps a _much_ higher standard? - than other cars.)
| InitialLastName wrote:
| > Human drivers sometimes fail-to-notice sirens or other high-
| priority demands on road capacity.
|
| In the lane directly in front of them, facing them, and
| honking?
| mirntyfirty wrote:
| Proof by strawman imaginary counter-example
| InitialLastName wrote:
| The first 2 sentences of the article we're discussing:
|
| > On an early April morning, around 4 am, a San Francisco
| Fire Department truck responding to a fire tried to pass a
| doubled-parked garbage truck by using the opposing lane.
| But a traveling autonomous vehicle, operated by the General
| Motors subsidiary Cruise without anyone inside, was
| blocking its path.
|
| I don't think it's intolerable to use a straw-man argument
| when discussing scarecrows.
| treesprite82 wrote:
| Autonomous car didn't seem to fail to notice the fire
| truck, just that it arguably took the wrong course of
| action by yielding to the right instead of reversing into
| the intersection.
| tadfisher wrote:
| This example is what we're discussing, e.g. the article.
| gojomo wrote:
| > In the lane directly in front of them, facing them, and
| honking?
|
| Yes! In SF and other big free-country cities at 4am, some
| human drivers are high!
|
| Sometimes human drivers are passed-out or suffering a health
| crisis. Sometimes they've left their vehicles blocking key
| rights-of-way as they go somewher else for many minutes.
|
| In San Francisco, I've seen human-driver-unattended cars
| block light-rail trains _many_ times. (I live not far from
| the N-Judah line, which also has a history of pedestrian
| bystanders _physically moving cars_ to clear the road:
| https://www.munidiaries.com/2014/02/10/muni-riders-lift-
| car-...)
|
| We need to judge autonomous car suboptimalities against _real
| human drivers_ , with all _their_ failures - not against
| idealized, unerring humans-at-their-best.
| california2077 wrote:
| 1. When autonomous cars are numerous enough to pose a
| statistically significant issue for first responders, the lives
| they will save by preventing traffic accidents will absolutely
| outnumber the possible damage from an odd edge case like this
| one.
|
| 2. If you're still worried about it, perhaps the solution is to
| require manufacturer to make some kind of override for autonomous
| vehicles, then give it to first responders like fire, medics and
| police.
| aeturnum wrote:
| I do think this is a little unfair, but I think it points to a
| real issue "around" driverless cars (that is not the cars' fault
| exactly): everyone is trained to deal only with human agents.
|
| It does seem like the car "acted reasonably" (so to speak) - but
| it still _did not act like a person which is what the emergency
| workers were trained for._ The challenge of integrating non-human
| actors into a previously human-only space is, I think, going to
| be more difficult and wide-ranging than we imagine. It will
| probably require a substantial commitment that goes beyond the
| self-driving car companies.
|
| It's worth saying that a lot of the critique of self-driving cars
| is that...they were sold on the premise that they would integrate
| into "existing infrastructure" without big changes and critics
| have always felt that would not really happen. We've had self
| driving cars in special environments for...50 years now?
| pas wrote:
| if a reckless driver would just abandon the car in the middle
| of the road the situation would be the same. (eg. double
| parking)
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > I do think this is a little unfair, but I think it points to
| a real issue "around" driverless cars (that is not the cars'
| fault exactly): everyone is trained to deal only with human
| agents.
|
| > It does seem like the car "acted reasonably" (so to speak) -
| but it still did not act like a person which is what the
| emergency workers were trained for.
|
| I understand where you're coming from, but I disagree.
|
| There's no reason to expect self-driving cars to play by a
| looser set of rules than human drivers in the same arena.
|
| If a self-driving car fails to behave properly on the road,
| that's a fault of the self-driving car.
|
| Blaming everyone else for expecting a car on the road to behave
| like any other car on the road feels like victim blaming. We
| shouldn't have to drive around guessing which cars are human-
| driven or self-driven and change our behavior accordingly.
| There's no way that's going to work.
| Imnimo wrote:
| I feel like part of the difficulty here is that if one Cruise car
| responds this way, it means that every Cruise car responds this
| way. So whereas you might have a few dumb human drivers who can't
| handle this situation and occasionally run into issues, if this
| particular Cruise car were mass deployed, you'd run into it
| frequently.
|
| On the other hand, it's possible that while the vehicle couldn't
| act correctly in this particular circumstance, it would act
| correctly in many similar circumstances, and thus the issue would
| still be rare.
| babl-yc wrote:
| There are many long-term risks with the rise of self driving
| cars, but this doesn't seem like one of them. It was particularly
| novel to the fire department because it was a self driving car,
| but practically no different than a double parked car that a
| driver isn't in (which I do see from time-to-time).
|
| Long-term this seems like a very solvable problem given the
| ability to remotely operate the car.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > given the ability to remotely operate the car.
|
| I think it's going to prove a challenge for these remote
| operators to connect to a car, with no situational awareness,
| and then quickly determine the correct course of action
| remotely.
|
| I wonder if these companies have tested these scenarios, and
| their remote drivers. Do they do any testing at all? Do they do
| "check rides" with these remote drivers? I'd really like to
| know what side of this entire operation actually looks like.
| treesprite82 wrote:
| Rough diagram of my understanding from information I can find:
| https://i.imgur.com/VOp8cWi.png
|
| Fire truck wants to use oncoming lane to overtake the double-
| parked garbage truck, autonomous car in that oncoming lane yields
| to the right to the extent allowed by more parked cars - but
| doesn't back up into the intersection to completely clear the
| lane.
| qgin wrote:
| Thank you, this helps quite a bit. The garbage truck really is
| the primary obstacle, which you wouldn't realize from the
| title.
| jonas21 wrote:
| Did I misread? Could've sworn it was "A Double-Parked Garbage
| Truck in SF Blocked a Fire Truck Responding to an Emergency"
| gkop wrote:
| Um so WHY was the Cruise car stopped in a travel lane to begin
| with? I skimmed 2x but don't see this explained..
| flutas wrote:
| From the article.
|
| > a San Francisco Fire Department truck responding to a fire
| tried to pass a doubled-parked garbage truck by using the
| opposing lane. a traveling autonomous vehicle (...) was
| blocking its path. While a human might have reversed to clear
| the lane, the Cruise car stayed put (......) Tiffany Testo, a
| spokesperson for Cruise, confirmed the incident. She said the
| driverless car had correctly yielded to the oncoming fire truck
| in the opposing lane and contacted the company's remote
| assistance workers,
|
| So it sounds like the car was driving perfectly fine, but
| stopped when a car was coming at it head on and it didn't
| reverse.
|
| I think the real issue here is a double parked garbage truck
| forcing the fire truck to go into oncoming traffic in the first
| place. Maybe there's a need for a loading only zone there so
| that the garbage truck doesn't have to block the travel lane.
| cozzyd wrote:
| the garbage truck might be double parked because another car
| was illegally parked, even if there's a loading zone...
|
| In practice, double parking is extremely common in all
| cities...
| bagacrap wrote:
| ban street parking
| godshatter wrote:
| It stopped because it recognized that it needed to stop to
| let an emergency vehicle get past it. Unfortunately, it
| stopped right next to a double-parked garbage truck in the
| next lane. No one had programmed in a set of contingencies
| for "stopped to let something pass, no room for it to pass".
| This is one of who knows how many contingencies it doesn't
| have a solution for which is why, in my opinion, this kind of
| thing will be quite common for a long time until enough
| events like these are found and software is changed to handle
| them. I'm hoping that none of these kinds of unanticipated
| events will cause fatalities, but I'm skeptical that will be
| the case.
| BeefWellington wrote:
| > I think the real issue here is a double parked garbage
| truck forcing the fire truck to go into oncoming traffic in
| the first place. Maybe there's a need for a loading only zone
| there so that the garbage truck doesn't have to block the
| travel lane.
|
| I disagree. Driverless vehicles _NEED_ to be able to handle
| these unexpected situations in an appropriate manner. That
| they don 't currently is in fact a "real issue" and in this
| case at least is evidence this tech may not be ready for
| primetime.
| flutas wrote:
| > Driverless vehicles NEED to be able to handle these
| unexpected situations in an appropriate manner. That they
| don't currently is in fact a "real issue" and in this case
| at least is evidence this tech may not be ready for
| primetime.
|
| Personal opinion here, but I think defaulting to "stop and
| contact support staff" is as good of a "fix" as we will
| have for a long time. According to Cruise (so potentially
| biased) it took 25s for the firetruck to be able to move
| after the scenario was encountered, though the article says
| the garbage truck moved.
| Volundr wrote:
| > Personal opinion here, but I think defaulting to "stop
| and contact support staff" is as good of a "fix" as we
| will have for a long time.
|
| I both agree, and see this as yet another reason
| driverless cars are on the road WAY too early.
| sroussey wrote:
| I mean, not backing up into cross traffic at the
| intersection is also a good thing. I've seen accidents
| where cars got out of the way of an emergency vehicle
| only to crash into another.
| tadfisher wrote:
| Then there will never be driverless cars on the road,
| because that's kind of a requirement to gather knowledge
| to build capable driverless vehicles.
| SllX wrote:
| > I think the real issue here is a double parked garbage
| truck forcing the fire truck to go into oncoming traffic in
| the first place. Maybe there's a need for a loading only zone
| there so that the garbage truck doesn't have to block the
| travel lane.
|
| If there's a discussion to be had here, it's not through the
| frame of the needs of driverless cars. Self-driving has to
| work in the driving environment that exists today to be
| viable, and double parked garbage trucks are part of the
| regular order of that driving environment.
| sokoloff wrote:
| When the emergency vehicle is delayed, what percentage of
| the delay is Cruise's fault and what percentage is the
| garbage truck's? I assign less than 50% to Cruise.
| SllX wrote:
| Let's be generous and say 50/50.
|
| But look at it this way: one was a vehicle with no driver
| present in the seat, and the other was a vehicle in which
| a driving agent is never _not_ present. A human driver in
| that situation should not spend longer than 5 seconds
| figuring out and implementing a way to safely let the
| fire truck pass. The Cruise car took longer.
|
| If a human were present with two working eyes and ears
| and armed with good judgement, they may never have been
| blocking the way in the first place because a fire truck
| in SF is blaring it's horns while it charges to the
| situation it was called in to answer so it is entirely
| possible that seeing the garbage truck parked up ahead,
| they would have opted to not even continue driving
| because that looks like an obvious choke point for an
| emergency vehicle trying to pass. Alas, I cannot
| reasonably expect that kind of situational awareness and
| judgement from an average human driver so maybe that's
| also too big an ask from Cruise.
|
| Also note this from the article:
|
| > The fire truck only passed the blockage when the
| garbage truck driver ran from their work to move their
| vehicle.
|
| So in the end, the Cruise vehicle was not the one which
| allowed the fire engine to pass but a hurried garbageman
| moving his truck after getting back in the driver's seat.
| 50/50 may actually be too generous to Cruise here.
| treesprite82 wrote:
| > A human driver in that situation should not spend
| longer than 5 seconds figuring out and implementing a way
| to safely let the fire truck pass. The Cruise car took
| longer.
|
| Impossible to say for certain, but I'd bet that a
| significant number of human drivers would yield to the
| right (as the autonomous car did), or take longer than 5
| seconds to reverse back into the intersection (as was
| desired of the autonomous car).
| SllX wrote:
| If there's no vehicles or people directly behind the car,
| no traffic close enough to pose a danger, and a quick
| spot check confirms this, why would it take you longer
| than 5 seconds to reverse out of the way? You don't need
| to back up into Canada or something, a short distance is
| enough to let another necessarily impatient vehicle pass.
| In the end the garbage truck moved, which is why the fire
| truck was "able to pass within 25 seconds of encountering
| the Cruise car".
| sokoloff wrote:
| 5 seconds is a very short amount of time. Humans are
| pretty bad at quickly solving for and safely executing an
| unusual response to a scenario they've never encountered.
| saulpw wrote:
| The real issue is that not every situation can be perfectly
| modeled, real human systems aren't (and can't be!) perfect,
| so sometimes you need to think outside of the box and with
| human priorities.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| Because you yield to oncoming fire trucks.
| gkop wrote:
| Is this mentioned in the article, or do you have inside
| knowledge, or are you guessing?
|
| Edit: you are correct, flutas explained in sibling comment
| that it was alluded to in article. Thanks you both!
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| I'm just stating a common traffic law. If you're driving,
| and an emergency vehicle is coming at you with it's lights
| on, you yield.
| gkop wrote:
| Ah, well for what it's worth that is the reason that
| Cruise provided that their vehicle stopped in the travel
| lane in this instance.
|
| I think it's important to know what the autonomous car
| was thinking.
| lolpython wrote:
| I've seen with my own eyes an Argo AI car not pulling to the side
| for a Pittsburgh police car in downtown Pittsburgh on Liberty
| Ave. The police car had its lights blaring and was forced to go
| around via the oncoming lane. It was awkward because every other
| car on the road made way for the officer, but Argo AI did not.
| tpmx wrote:
| Seems like a short-term solution would be for e.g. Cruise to give
| the SFFD a blanket permission to push their cars out of the way?
|
| And long-term work on avoiding this situation in software.
| quesera wrote:
| I don't think SFFD needs extra permission to destroy private
| property in a measured response to an emergency. They do it all
| the time.
|
| They might not have had the correct equipment or vehicle to
| move a car out of the way though.
| tpmx wrote:
| They could give SFFD a blanket permission to destroy their
| cars in an _unmeasured_ response to an emergency...
|
| > They might not have had the correct equipment or vehicle to
| move a car out of the way though.
|
| Or they they didn't feel it was "a measured response". Who
| knows.
| timwaagh wrote:
| Sounds more like nobody put this particular user story onto the
| backlog and marked it as required before going to test rather
| than an edge case a computer can't handle. The city should
| probably demand compensation.
| asdff wrote:
| Autonomous vehicles clogging traffic is going to increasingly be
| a need to be mitigated. Recently a food delivery robot delayed a
| train in LA:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/uvsfma/food_del...
| fortran77 wrote:
| The article (which I bother to read before commenting) indicated
| that the only way to clear the way would have been to drive in
| reverse. I don't know if a human driver could have been expected
| to do any better. The real problem was the double parked
| sanitation vehicle.
|
| I'm not a fan of tech companies doing their beta testing on
| public streets, but this doesn't seem like a egregious incident
| despite the delay it caused.
| progfix wrote:
| > I don't know if a human driver could have been expected to do
| any better.
|
| The problem is you can't communicate with an autonomous car.
| Even if the human driver doesn't know what to do you can
| indicate them to move in the right direction.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| I feel like indicating to a human driver would take about as
| long as the 25 seconds the autonomous car took.
| tyrfing wrote:
| According to the article, the autonomous car didn't move,
| the garbage truck did.
| [deleted]
| 1f60c wrote:
| SFFD and Cruise contradict each other on this point,
| which doesn't make it any less confusing.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| My mistake, it's so easy to forget something in the first
| paragraph by the fifth.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| Interesting. Emergency vehicles already interact with automation
| and have done so for a very long time. For example they have
| strobes that communicate with signal lights to make them turn
| green for the fire truck. It seems more like the ball was dropped
| here as the same automation could have been integrated into the
| autonomous vehicles to make them get out of the way. Not just the
| strobes but detecting emergency vehicle lights, sirens, etc.
| treesprite82 wrote:
| From what I can tell, it detected the emergency vehicle and
| yielded to the right. Just that it didn't reverse back into the
| intersection to clear the lane completely.
| onphonenow wrote:
| Doesn't excuse this at all but I've seen some pretty stupid human
| driver behaviors with emergency vehicles and blocking
| intersections in general. A rule that says don't pull into an
| intersection you will not be able to clear (!!) would solve a ton
| of issues.
| Xylakant wrote:
| We have that rule in Germany (SS 11(1) StVO). Believe me, it
| doesn't help. Everyone ignores it and blocks the crossings
| nonetheless. It doesn't get sanctioned anyways.
|
| SS11 (1) StVO: https://dejure.org/gesetze/StVO/11.html
| TillE wrote:
| German drivers generally do a good job of getting out of the
| way of emergency vehicles, but they're also incredibly
| aggressive drivers (rushing up to red lights, making turns
| within inches of pedestrians) who also routinely break the
| rules.
|
| Like I don't think I've ever seen people driving on the
| sidewalk in an American city, but it's a constant in Berlin.
| During a recent fair (Neukollner Maientage) we had tons of
| people driving _into the park_ and just parking on trails,
| including right in front of benches. Even coming from another
| country with an aggressive, entitled car culture, that was
| breathtaking behavior.
| quesera wrote:
| > A rule that says don't pull into an intersection you will not
| be able to clear (!!) would solve a ton of issues.
|
| This is not only a rule, but a law, in most US cities. Doesn't
| eliminate the behaviour, obviously!
| philip1209 wrote:
| Research shows that ambulance lights and sirens minimally impact
| response times. Perhaps the fire truck would have arrived faster
| if it had yielded to oncoming traffic, or if the garbage truck
| had itself been autonomous.
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10634288/
| hnburnsy wrote:
| Great now my day will be filled with...
|
| Select all images with EMERGENCY VEHICLES
| gamblor956 wrote:
| The important thing is that this autonomous car (operated by
| Cruise) was _able to stop_ for the emergency vehicle.
|
| Another brand's cars just plow right into emergency vehicles when
| self-driven.
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