<story><title>Tesla Autopilot</title><url>https://www.tesla.com/autopilot</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>willvarfar</author><text>&amp;gt; It terrifies me to think of relying on image recognition software to correctly determine (... snip)&lt;p&gt;Do you not drive using only your eyes?  If you are not terrified of the sensors, then software?  Turing&amp;#x27;s central belief was that the human brain was &amp;#x27;just&amp;#x27; a computer.&lt;p&gt;Regards doing things like embedding reflectors in roads and other ways to simplify lane holding, completely agree.  But we can&amp;#x27;t forego the cameras etc that deal with situations that don&amp;#x27;t contain reflectors.</text></item><item><author>the_rosentotter</author><text>It terrifies me to think of relying on image recognition software to correctly determine an upcoming crossing road (with cars zipping across) so it can properly slow down, rather than get broadsided at full speed. Or a number of other life-and-death situations (which are common during driving). It just seems fragile (what if the &amp;#x27;vision&amp;#x27; is somehow impaired, f.ex. blinded by sunlight, or the road markings are wrong or obscured) when the failure mode is so catastrophic.&lt;p&gt;I suppose once statistics start to prove that these cars are safer than human-driven ones, we can chalk it up to an irrational fear, but for now it seems crazy to me to put my life in the hands of an AI, when a mistake means that I die or kill someone, rather than play the wrong song on Spotify.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t fully understand why more effort is not put into a hardware solution, where roads are simply marked up for self-driving vehicles, e.g. magnets lining the lanes or something like that. Of course a more expensive solution, but seems like it would make the vehicles themselves a whole lot simpler and safer. Begin with inner cities, where the area is limited and traffic is most complex.</text></item><item><author>Animats</author><text>Watch this at 0.25x speed or slower to see what&amp;#x27;s going on. This is a carefully chosen environment. Every place it drives has very clear highway centerline markings. It seems to be highly dependent on those for guidance.  Sometimes it can&amp;#x27;t quite identify the road edge, but the centerline provides a position reference.&lt;p&gt;The inputs seem to be road line recognition, optical flow for the road, and solid object recognition, all vision-driven.  Object recognition is limited. It doesn&amp;#x27;t recognize traffic cones as obstacles, either on the road centerline or on the road edge.  Nor does it seem to be aware of guard rails or bridge railings just outside the road edge.  It probably can&amp;#x27;t drive around an obstacle; we never see it do that in the video.&lt;p&gt;This looks like lane following plus smart cruise control plus GPS-based route guidance. That&amp;#x27;s nice, but it&amp;#x27;s not good enough that you can go to sleep while it&amp;#x27;s driving.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TeMPOraL</author><text>The thing is, human &amp;quot;machine vision&amp;quot; has graceful failure modes. You don&amp;#x27;t switch from seeing cars to seeing nothing to seeing an elephant just because the input got a little noisy. The same cannot be said about current ML demonstrations - because they operate on &lt;i&gt;just&lt;/i&gt; vision. Humans continuously reconcile visual input with their model of the world and with other inputs, to the point of overriding visual data if needed.&lt;p&gt;I suppose you could make ML avoid sharp changes in recognition, but I don&amp;#x27;t trust the current neural-network models to do so reliably.</text></comment>
<story><title>Tesla Autopilot</title><url>https://www.tesla.com/autopilot</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>willvarfar</author><text>&amp;gt; It terrifies me to think of relying on image recognition software to correctly determine (... snip)&lt;p&gt;Do you not drive using only your eyes?  If you are not terrified of the sensors, then software?  Turing&amp;#x27;s central belief was that the human brain was &amp;#x27;just&amp;#x27; a computer.&lt;p&gt;Regards doing things like embedding reflectors in roads and other ways to simplify lane holding, completely agree.  But we can&amp;#x27;t forego the cameras etc that deal with situations that don&amp;#x27;t contain reflectors.</text></item><item><author>the_rosentotter</author><text>It terrifies me to think of relying on image recognition software to correctly determine an upcoming crossing road (with cars zipping across) so it can properly slow down, rather than get broadsided at full speed. Or a number of other life-and-death situations (which are common during driving). It just seems fragile (what if the &amp;#x27;vision&amp;#x27; is somehow impaired, f.ex. blinded by sunlight, or the road markings are wrong or obscured) when the failure mode is so catastrophic.&lt;p&gt;I suppose once statistics start to prove that these cars are safer than human-driven ones, we can chalk it up to an irrational fear, but for now it seems crazy to me to put my life in the hands of an AI, when a mistake means that I die or kill someone, rather than play the wrong song on Spotify.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t fully understand why more effort is not put into a hardware solution, where roads are simply marked up for self-driving vehicles, e.g. magnets lining the lanes or something like that. Of course a more expensive solution, but seems like it would make the vehicles themselves a whole lot simpler and safer. Begin with inner cities, where the area is limited and traffic is most complex.</text></item><item><author>Animats</author><text>Watch this at 0.25x speed or slower to see what&amp;#x27;s going on. This is a carefully chosen environment. Every place it drives has very clear highway centerline markings. It seems to be highly dependent on those for guidance.  Sometimes it can&amp;#x27;t quite identify the road edge, but the centerline provides a position reference.&lt;p&gt;The inputs seem to be road line recognition, optical flow for the road, and solid object recognition, all vision-driven.  Object recognition is limited. It doesn&amp;#x27;t recognize traffic cones as obstacles, either on the road centerline or on the road edge.  Nor does it seem to be aware of guard rails or bridge railings just outside the road edge.  It probably can&amp;#x27;t drive around an obstacle; we never see it do that in the video.&lt;p&gt;This looks like lane following plus smart cruise control plus GPS-based route guidance. That&amp;#x27;s nice, but it&amp;#x27;s not good enough that you can go to sleep while it&amp;#x27;s driving.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Cybiote</author><text>We don&amp;#x27;t drive with just our eyes. We fuse vision, sound, touch and proprioception. We self-locate easily. Most important though, is we do sophisticated visual, theory of mind and physics based inference.&lt;p&gt;If you take the example of Chess, humans and machines play very different styles. Computers replace predictive understanding with excellent memory and fast search.&lt;p&gt;Similarly for cars, we want to replace the lack of a powerful predictive model with some compensatory mechanism, such as sophisticated sensors. The problem is that, even with faster reaction times, better sensors and fuller awareness, these cars&amp;#x27; compensatory abilities against a lack of powerful predictive models are still far from sufficient.&lt;p&gt;At this point in time, a car with more sensors and failsafes to augment the human against collision is safer than a self-driving car that depends on a lack of lapses of attention. That depends on proper behavior in the customer. Even dividing tasks, with the human controlling the steering (but allowing the car to takeover when highly certain of danger) and the car controlling acceleration would be safer. This set up acknowledges the human propensity to mind wander when attention is not engaged.&lt;p&gt;Until self-driving cars no longer require human rescue in difficult situations, one can&amp;#x27;t rightly say that self-driving software are better drivers than humans.</text></comment>