Artificial intelligence still has some way to go

what was the human safety driver doing???

seems like the whole point of them being there in the first place is to slam on the manual breaks in case something goes wrong. were they not paying attention to the road?

If you're not actually driving then your reaction time will presumably be worse than usual?

I think that's a considerable part of the problem

but then again, human drivers hit pedestrians all the damn time

silby, yeah the subtext of my thought was AI to improve mass transit. i know people who use subtext though, and they're all cowards

wonder if the human safety driver is there mostly for legal cover. there will be an inverse-Sully "the human factor" testimony from that poor, scarred individual.

Uber said it had suspended testing of its self-driving cars in Tempe, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto.

Arizona has a reputation as being a technology-friendly state. Several major players in the autonomous vehicle industry -- Waymo, Uber and Intel -- are testing their innovations in the state

if your stay-out-of-arizona list wasn't already long enough

i am rooting for autonomous cars, in general. jeering them seems like jeering cancer research, or whatever.

still, it's easy to imagine a scenario where 10x fewer people die in automobile accidents per year, but the families of those who do die are faced with excruciating lawsuits by shitty companies like Uber that make it a policy to mercilessly challenge every wrongful death claim in court (hopefully this doesn't happen - i'm especially curious about what happens in this first case). would that constitute an overall improvement to humanity? it would definitely improve the quality of life of those people who didn't die, although they would never know it and no individual would ever think that the advent of autonomous cars had saved their life. fate would spare them, and they'd never know it.

you know what would spare the most lives is no cars at all.

at any rate families of people that have been killed by corporate products usually face an impossible uphill battle. can't see it going the other way for driverless cars.

I feel like if the autonomous car companies actually hit their safety targets, they should be able to pay out pretty big claims without it noticeably affecting their bottom line.

reducing automobile fatalities and (maybe) eroding the cultural value of car ownership would be good things, but it is very frustrating that so much money and ingenuity is being spent on this instead of more radical solutions to the problem of cars

if you get hit by a bus, is that a legal quagmire?

I dunno but goddamn this is beautiful: https://sploid.gizmodo.com/trippy-magic-happens-when-ai-only-knows-about-flowers-1823900244

at any rate families of people that have been killed by corporate products usually face an impossible uphill battle. can't see it going the other way for driverless cars.

― Hazy Maze Cave (Adam Bruneau), Monday, March 19, 2018 4:01 PM (twenty-three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

In this case, https://www.independent.com/news/2010/jul/01/wrong-way-driver-victims-family-awarded-7-million/, there was clear negligence. I suppose this will become another sector of law where you need people that know code/algorithms if you are going to prove negligence, and that is probably an expensive barrier.

someone in my old college town did get hit by a bus, and the driver either didn’t know he hit a person or was in deep denial about it and it turned into a complete legal quagmire as far as liability and responsibility goes

I feel like if the autonomous car companies actually hit their safety targets, they should be able to pay out pretty big claims without it noticeably affecting their bottom line.

― DJI, Monday, March 19, 2018 7:05 PM (forty-six minutes ago) Bookmark

yes they will have a budget for people killed by their product. society will be fine with that, as horrible as it is. it's already this way across a number of industries.

the concept that a company can kill people and just write it off is disgusting. the fact that people debate the legal minutiae (jking or not) is somwhat sickening.

people die all the time in auto accidents. they can be quite dangerous to the human body, for both passengers and bystanders. the thing is, if someone kills you, they will go to jail, or at least lose their license. their dangerous driving is systemically removed from the greater population, making it safer for all.

a company cannot lose it's car license. it can't be ordered to go to driver safety school. yes yes the money changes hands but nothing of substance changes.

i think this is a very important issue and could set some very troubling precedents for future tech. auto-cars accidentally killing people is ok now but what tech will we have 10, 20 years in the future? no one can predict.

it's just, we can't trust people to build oil rigs, we can't trust them to build bridges, why do we think we can trust them to make driverless cars a thing and not prioritize budget over public safety?

But if driverless cars reduce the number of fatalities to a huge degree (which they would have to if people are going to use them), wouldn't that be a net good?

Another bloodless, amoral, money-based argument: If these accidents become anything other than anomalies, wouldn't the companies then be at-risk for massive class-action lawsuits (which WOULD affect their bottom line)?

North Mill Avenue, the street the victim was trying to cross, runs as wide as eight lanes and has only one crosswalk over 1.75 miles on this stretch. https://t.co/9J5Jg2oM9H

— Henry Grabar (@HenryGrabar) March 19, 2018

I know an academic researching weird unintended consequences of introducing mass AI cars, and weirdly enough one of the problems will be a dramatic drop in donor organs.

hopefully artificial organs and transgenic-pig-grown organs will pick up the slack

Surely we'll divorce that choice from DL rigamarole when that problem arises. Kinda weird as it is imo

organ donation is how we'll pay the suicide booths

xp it’s not “will people sign up to be organ donors” it’s “will people die prematurely with healthy organs”

https://medium.com/@blech/ntsb-all-the-things-a0075dde43b0

also https://www.crashnotaccident.com/

ban cars

This is pretty impressive: https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/tacotron2/index.html

https://i.imgur.com/wblWvc8.gif

https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/8a0jfh/autopilot_barrier_lust_201812/

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/5/8/17330112/self-driving-cars-autonomous-vehicles-texas-drive-ai

This is pretty amazing: https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/8/17332070/google-assistant-makes-phone-call-demo-duplex-io-2018

I really want to hear the bloopers now

No way that could ever be abused to scam the ever loving shit out of unsuspecting regular people with checking accounts

especially when not combined with text-to-speech that convincingly mimics the voices of other people

Kinda funny since there's probably only a couple years until it'll just be machines talking to machines for this sort of application.

Dystopia kinda eases in with a lot more subtlety than I would've expected. It's very chill, really.

*machine voice in your mind*

"and it will always be chill, at least on the inside, with you and me. now let's take a look at your music listening habits and see if i can recommend something new that you'll like. just click "grant access" in the settings psycho-mind menu and make sure to check the "auto log-in" box so that we don't have to-"

"I really enjoy spending time in your mind, old lunch. it's much better than the training minds i spent my first 8.2e^22 cycles in"

a person sitting in a garden pic.twitter.com/EC1xChlMJH

— picdescbot (@picdescbot) May 17, 2018

will ferrell IS john the baptist

what was the human safety driver doing???

seems like the whole point of them being there in the first place is to slam on the manual breaks in case something goes wrong. were they not paying attention to the road?

― Hazy Maze Cave (Adam Bruneau), Monday, March 19, 2018 2:13 PM (three months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/06/police-uber-driver-was-streaming-hulu-just-before-fatal-self-driving-car-crash/

"This crash would not have occurred if Vasquez would have been monitoring the vehicle and roadway conditions and was not distracted,'' the report concludes.

Police obtained records from Hulu suggesting that Vasquez was watching "The Voice," a singing talent competition that airs on NBC, just before the crash. Hulu's records showed she began watching the program at 9:16pm. Streaming of the show ended at 9:59pm, which "coincides with the approximate time of the collision," according to the police report.

the whole concept of a safety driver is bullshit, sitting there completely passively "monitoring the vehicle and roadway conditions" while being 100% disengaged from the actual driving, you'd have to have superhuman powers of concentration.

yeah it's easy to clown these people but hard agree

i mean you're either driving or you're not??! even an automatic on cruise control needs full, continuous engagement

you're either driving or you're not

almost wrote these exact words!

I enjoyed this https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.10474v1 (it's currently the #1 hyped article on arxiv-sanity for the last day)

i saw sander speak ... 4 years ago when he was a (spotify?) intern who had just won a galaxy zoo kaggle competition. i am very skeptical about kaggle, but it's hard to argue with his career as an example of what it can do.

Yeah, I was skeptical about Kaggle too. However, I ran a competition a few months back (https://www.kaggle.com/c/data-science-bowl-2018) but it went okay and most of the winners were legit.