Well, “First driverless shuttle in Las Vegas is crashed into while stationary under circumstances where a human driver would have likely prevented the crash on first day while shuttling passengers.”
But I think was this incident demonstrates is that we should expect that while AI might end up being better than humans drivers, it is going to be different than human drivers. There will be scenarios that the vast majority of human drivers succeed in that for some reason AIs fail in. Like those adversarial perturbations of visuals; we might not even see what was done but they cause an AI to totally misinterpret the data.
Driverless cars could reduce accidents by 50% or 90%, but some of accidents they do get into will seems inexplicable, like a human driver would never be in that situation.
What concerns me about this situation is that apparently the algorithm really doesn’t account for someone else driving aggressively and badly. The AI didn’t think that a vehicle would just slowly back into it. In driving, like in pretty much everything else, some people are aggressive assholes who just assume that other people will get out of their way (often figuratively, but in driving sometimes literally). Maybe we’d be a better society in the long run if we didn’t so consistently get out of the way for these people, but in the short run it would cause enough strife (or car accidents) that we keep rewarding a certain amount of belligerence. If, instead, we program the AIs to give way the same way the human drivers do, that rewards bad driver further by making it more predictable how much leeway you’ll be given.
Right now there is a balance of power between an aggressive asshole driver and a person who accommodates them. Being more willing to get into a confrontation (or accident) gives you a certain amount of room to shove another person around, but that room does have its limits, and both parties are constantly gauging those limits.
In order drive on the roads as they are, you need to make social judgments about power, and I think that’s probably way out of scope for the AI. That means that other people’s guesses about how an AI will act will be wrong. It’s the sort of thing that in the short run could increase accidents. So I think it’s too simple to say that the AI isn’t at fault because a human driver in the same situation wouldn’t have been at fault. I think it’s too simple to say that AIs are better drivers than many humans. There is going to be a transition from not having AIs on the road to having many or mostly AIs. I think that pointing out that humans are also bad drivers is papering over how painful that might be.
Some of the worst, dangerous drivers largely think they are very good drivers. We may be headed for a future where the only cars on the road are well behaved AIs and crazy aggressive assholes.
Just last night I pulled up to an intersection, the car in front of me hadn’t stopped in time and was half over the stop line, therefore when I stopped I gave them a length an a half of buffer so they’d have room to back up.
It’s defensive driving, we constantly encounter situations where we recognize the potential for a collision and take action to avoid it.
This is one of the toughest things for self-driving cars to pull off. It doesn’t mean it’s unsolvable, this shuttle might just have been a particularly poor AI, but it is a problem they need to solve.
Even before cell phones it was a thing. I personally witnessed a lethal incidence of it, when I was just a teenager. But smartphones have made it worse.
Something similar happened to me, honking didn’t help in my case. It might have here, it might have not.
From the time I realized that the other driver hadn’t noticed I was there to when he bumped into me, I only had a couple of seconds, I actually lost time by honking.
Now that’s just silly. If the truck driver is able to see you (Not that he will, just that he can), then you are in a place where the truck is not likely to back into.
NJ is not quite as far as CA, where (as I understand it) if you step off the curb anywhere you have the right of way. But as I described, pedestrians DO have right of way in NJ. Getting that right of way is another story.
I’m foreseeing AI’s in cities having as much problems with aggressive pedestrians as cars. There’s MANY NYC intersections where regardless of the green light a car needs to be aggressive to get pedestrians to stop crossing. An AI waiting for the road to be completely clear will never move.
Well, we are united in our distrust of our own government. And we drive on the correct side of the road. (Except in a couple of places, but those are technically not states, so, like, shut up.)
First Law: A robot can not harm a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Seems like the record is still a little spotty on the “inaction” part.
A number of good suggestions here. Giving the AI the programming to sound the horn is a good idea and is probably something the programmers will implement. Still, the key take away is that a stationary self driving vehicle was struck by a vehicle operated by a human driver. The error falls squarely on the human operator who should have had the situational awareness to not strike a stationary vehicle. Had the truck been self driving then the accident would likely not have occurred. The headline is misleading, a driverless shuttle did not “crash”. But I guess that “Driverless shuttle yields right of way to human operated vehicle and is struck by that vehicle” is not sensational enough.
