i dunno…the car seems to be pretty good at detecting exactly where the pedestrians are.
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Well, in this case it appears the driver came out of it just fine. The peds, not so much.
Uh, was the driver high on bath salts and carpet cleaner while simultaneously attempting fellatio on a stuffed likeness of Hugh Grant that was wielding a blunderbuss? So no, clearly not.
Gawd. Internet trollies these days, itellya.
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[quote=“milliefink, post:33, topic:58345, full:true”] When that girl’s hot dog turned into a troll doll
[/quote]
I’ve got the weirdest Boehner right now.
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The vehicle was not guiding itself. There was a human holding onto the steering wheel and pushing on the accelerator pedal. What didn’t happen was that the vehicle didn’t override the drivers input and stop while the driver was deliberately accelerating towards a human.
Fortunately, that isn’t what happened here.
Now I think that pedestrian avoidance should probably be mandatory on any vehicle with crash avoidance (i.e., the ability to detect when the car in front of you stops suddenly and brake to avoid them), and that it should especially work when someone jams on the gas and there is an obstruction, but try telling that to the anti-automation crowd. But regardless, what you have here is a bunch of stupid people acting stupid and thankfully only receiving minor injuries.
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From eating hot dogs, I assume.
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The very moment that you attempt to parallel park in any urban environment, nearby pedestrians will suddenly transform to mere bicyclists or motor vehicle enthusiasts and physically hurl themselves between your bumper and the bumper of any adjacent car at rest. It is as if your brake lights had somehow illuminated a heretofore unseen crosswalk beneath your wheels. I can’t imagine any automated vehicle not being fitted to deal with this quirk of pedestrian behavior.
I would not expect such a system to work 100% of the time. There’s a lot of noise in the camera and radar signal - a lot to process. Computers are amazingly good at that now, but nowhere near as good as we are.
The system is clearly intended to be a backup to the driver, who most of the time is looking forward and is able to react and hit the brakes if something like a pedestrian is suddenly in the way. Maybe not fast enough in some cases, but better than nothing. And while I don’t know, I expect cases where people are actually hit are a small fraction of cases where drivers are forced to suddenly stop because of a dumb pedestrian - that kind of thing happens thousands of times daily in every city and not that many people are actually hit.
If the software were tuned so that the threshold for activating the system and applying the brakes was 100% effective against pedestrians, false positives would be stopping Volvos constantly. On busy city streets, that’d be extremely dangerous.
Perhaps they could improve the balance - I’m sure the engineers are working on it, in fact. But IMO false-positive stopping of the car is way more dangerous than sometimes letting the car hit something if it isn’t sure if there’s something there or not and the driver hasn’t reacted.
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The protocol was properly activated. The AI must have been pain-tested by someone wearing a pink shirt.
so then is the subtext continuing the argument that the Volvo’s radar technology is fine for making sure cars don’t hit other cars; but with people safety, that technology is more expensive than the number of projected affected lives pencil out to be worth…?
I think the point is that the system doesn’t really work sufficiently reliably to be fielded and to be marketed in the way it is. No system can be 100% perfect. However, in this case, the setup is fairly unpredictable and it seems to work in a very narrow set of conditions - which are not published by the manufacturer (because it would hurt sales, obviously).
Unfortunately, in such case it is actually worse than having no system at all - if you don’t have any machine watching over your back, you know you must pay attention 100% of the time. On the other hand, when you are told not to worry, there is a smart machine watching over your driving and will save your bacon should something happen, you will grow complacent. Then sooner or later the system fails and someone will get hurt - especially with the Volvo, where the system isn’t designed to “fail safe” (i.e. stop when in doubt), because they are careful to not advertise it as a safety critical system.
This is, unfortunately, a way too common occurrence - youtube is full of videos of people relying on the lane assist systems as “autopilots” (despite explicit warnings not to do that), people blindly obeying satnavs and driving into ditches and ravines, airline pilots being unable to fly otherwise perfectly good airplanes when the automation conks out because of lack of manual flying skills and causing crashes (Air France crash in Atlantic, the Asiana crash in LA and the Polish government plane in Russia come to mind), etc.
I am not against assistive technology as such (e.g. ESP or antilock brakes are great), but it must be both reliable and predictable/consistent. Otherwise it will do more harm than good - you could never rely on how the vehicle is going to behave in certain situations otherwise.
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Brits poking fun at German engineering. Now that’s funny.
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Hålla min öl och titta på detta.
(“Hold my beer and watch this,” in Swedish - according to Google Translate.)
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I own one. The standard “City Safety” package, enabled by default, uses a camera as you say. It’s for slowing or stopping the vehicle within a confined range of speeds, prior to rear-ending another recognized vehicle. The ped/bike avoidance system is the optional, expensive add-on and is evident by a radar antenna on the left of the grille. Obviously there’s added image analysis too. The Volvo in the original video seemed to be lacking the radar, though. I hope this helps.
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Have they ruled out that this is Christine, reborn?
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The whole “self parking” car thing to me seems to be a solution without a real problem. I mean, while a perfectly functional system (which most of these things have proven not to be), would be convenient, can any of you who would describe yourself as a competent driver need this function? I’d argue that I’d much rather park myself than turn the controls of a giant, expensive, and dangerous machine over to software. I’m pretty confident that the human brain is currently at least still a lot more flexible and able to deal with variables than any pre-programmed machine.
I’d argue that if you feel like you really need this function, then perhaps you shouldn’t be driving…
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I love that video. Funny how the video getting out was sternly objected to by the police, and also contradicted first-hand “witness” accounts of the event:
When it comes to police, video is the safest thing.
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I believe that the proper conjugation is “RTFM’d”.
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“It puts a lot of undercover agents in jeopardy if their faces are
videotaped,” a masked agent told Local 6 News. “His identity is burned.
His identity is known as a police officer and its a potential personal
safety hazard to himself as well as his family members.”
But appearing in public wearing a T-shirt with “DEA” in big yellow letters across it – that’s keeping in deep cover, is it?
a potential personal safety hazard to himself
Snerk.
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