Robocars - Autonomous Drive, Self-driving, Driver-less cars

“The odd thing is,” wrote the cyclist, “I felt safer dealing with a self-driving car than a human-operated one.”

No Shit Sherlock.

Autonomous systems rely upon action prediction. The general idea in these systems is to not just determine what is in images but how they might unfold. Pretty trivial issues endemic to the paradigm and not really a problem as data gets fed into the net (typically R-CNNs). Since the network was not trained to "identify" track stands it drew some wrong conclusions. The future has reinforced and unsupervised learning in the cards but right now it's all tagged (ground truth)... The race these days given the curent approach is in data collection (and what, for example, Alphabet/Google is keeping closed lips on).. But even with "data".. the unexpected leads to the unexpected.. people making the judgements or machines.. Where people are different from machines is in their pychology and cognition.. Where is it going? Josh Tenenbaum and the CogSci group at MIT http://web.mit.edu/cocosci/josh.html are, I think, good trend markers..

Loads of good reading on that page, thanks.

Be nice if an AI could just summarise it all for me.. .

... tldr...

Track stands are hard to sustain: riders often wobble, rock and move a centimetre or five as they fight to stay still.
fiiiiiiiiiight

Be nice if an AI could just summarise it all for me..

:-)

"In conclusion... "

Has Edward just outed himself as an AI? :)

http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/18/9352101/google-austin-self-driving-cars-test

https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/mercedes-benz/innovation/research-vehicle-f-015-luxury-in-motion/

Bring it. Cycling is going to be so much better.

Can you make it say "FUCK OFF"?

http://www.wired.com/2015/10/chinas-self-driving-bus-shows-autonomous-techs-real-potential/

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/oct/21/tesla-car-autopilot-self-driving-car

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrwxEX8qOxA

^ Maybe that will work better when the oncoming car cooperates by swerving off the road into the trees?

Still looks like a better driver than most people around here...

Still looks like a better driver than most people around here...

Which is not hard.. and why ultimately driver cars will be literally driven off the road, replaced by, for the most part, autonomous taxis in urban centres. Lacking parking possibilities--- self-driving cars don't need parking spaces--- and with high insurrance rates for drivers, I think the private motorcar as we know it will be limited to deep pocket collectors. Even Formula racing, I think, will undergo a great change. We already have Formula-E. Why not pit autonomous e-cars against one another?

Bring on autonomous forum posters.

Why Self-Driving Cars Must Be Programmed to Kill - http://www.technologyreview.com/view/542626/why-self-driving-cars-must-be-programmed-to-kill/

How should the car be programmed to act in the event of an unavoidable accident? Should it minimize the loss of life, even if it means sacrificing the occupants, or should it protect the occupants at all costs? Should it choose between these extremes at random?

This situation is so fucking contrived. Not one of the talking heads that brings this up is able to adequately explain how a robocar would get into a situation like this in the first place. They all go "OMG EVER HEARD OF BRAKE FAILURE?! Q.E.D" and it's absurd. A car traveling along autonomously in a built-up area, obeying the speed limit of 30km/h (or 20mph, here's hoping), and then suddenly! Its brakes fail and it trundles to a stop. Big whoop.

The people who flail their arms about over this particular concern-trolling conundrum don't seem able to comprehend that cars go out of control in the first place because their drivers are driving like incompetent morons. A car will only be in a situation where it's careening towards 30 people because the dipshit driver put it there.

Just stick some kind of random number generating thing in the software and have the computer figure out who to kill based on chance, people accept things that are supposedly random more easily.
I guess the main way things like this could occur will be with non robocars or non robopeople jumping in their way or driving at them, they should kill those guys rather than swerve at an unsuspecting bystander. Other robocars will be communicating with the defective braked car and can avoid or help it.

Or kill the poor, that's pretty trendy.