{"id":178792,"date":"2018-08-18T19:26:00","date_gmt":"2018-08-19T00:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/08\/18\/clearly-self-driving-cars-are-just-around-the-corner-2\/"},"modified":"2018-08-18T19:26:00","modified_gmt":"2018-08-19T00:26:00","slug":"clearly-self-driving-cars-are-just-around-the-corner-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/08\/18\/clearly-self-driving-cars-are-just-around-the-corner-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Clearly, Self Driving Cars are Just Around the Corner"},"content":{"rendered":"
It appears that the latest break-through for self driving cars is a proposal to outlaw pedestrians<\/a>:<\/div>\n

You\u2019re crossing the street wrong.<\/p>\n

That is essentially the argument some self-driving car boosters have fallen back on in the months after the first pedestrian death attributed to an autonomous vehicle and amid growing concerns that artificial intelligence capable of real-world driving is further away than many predicted just a few years ago.<\/p>\n

In a line reminiscent of Steve Jobs\u2019s famous defense of the iPhone 4\u2019s flawed antennae\u2014\u201cDon’t hold it like that\u201d\u2014these technologists say the problem isn\u2019t that self-driving cars don\u2019t work, it\u2019s that people act unpredictably.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we tell people is, \u2018Please be lawful and please be considerate,\u2019\u201d says Andrew Ng, a well-known machine learning researcher who runs a venture fund that invests in AI-enabled companies, including self-driving startup Drive.AI. In other words: no jaywalking.<\/p>\n

Whether self-driving cars can correctly identify and avoid pedestrians crossing streets has become a burning issue since March after an Uber self-driving car killed a woman in Arizona<\/a> who was walking a bicycle across the street at night outside a designated crosswalk. The incident is still under investigation, but a preliminary report from federal safety regulators said the car\u2019s sensors had detected the woman but its decision-making software discounted the sensor data, concluding it was likely a false positive.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

With these timelines slipping, driverless proponents like Ng say there\u2019s one surefire shortcut to getting self-driving cars on the streets sooner: persuade pedestrians to behave less erratically. If they use crosswalks, where there are contextual clues\u2014pavement markings and stop lights\u2014the software is more likely to identify them.<\/p>\n

But to others the very fact that Ng is suggesting such a thing is a sign that today\u2019s technology simply can\u2019t deliver self-driving cars as originally envisioned. \u201cThe AI we would really need hasn’t yet arrived,\u201d says Gary Marcus, a New York University professor of psychology who researches both human and artificial intelligence. He says Ng is \u201cjust redefining the goalposts to make the job easier,\u201d and that if the only way we can achieve safe self-driving cars is to completely segregate them from human drivers and pedestrians, we already had such technology: trains.<\/p>\n

Rodney Brooks, a well-known robotics researcher and an emeritus professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote in a blog post critical of Ng\u2019s sentiments that \u201cthe great promise of self-driving cars has been that they will eliminate traffic deaths. Now [Ng] is saying that they will eliminate traffic deaths as long as all humans are trained to change their behavior? What just happened?\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We can now add hypocrisy to the other short comings of self driving car advocates.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It appears that the latest break-through for self driving cars is a proposal to outlaw pedestrians: You\u2019re crossing the street wrong. That is essentially the argument some self-driving car boosters have fallen back on in the months after the first pedestrian death attributed to an autonomous vehicle and amid growing concerns that artificial intelligence capable …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[618,588,387,437,471],"class_list":["post-178792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-fail","tag-hypocrisy","tag-regulation","tag-transportation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178792"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178792"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178792\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}