Self-Driving Shuttle Involved In Crash Two Hours After Debut (www.cbc.ca) 204
New submitter Northern Pike writes: Las Vegas roll out of new driver-less shuttle spoiled by human error. It sounds like the shuttle did what it was designed to do but the human semi driver wasn't as careful. "The shuttle did what it was supposed to do, in that it's (sic) sensors registered the truck and the shuttle stopped to avoid the accident," the city said in a statement. "Unfortunately the delivery truck did not stop and grazed the front fender of the shuttle. Had the truck had the same sensing equipment that the shuttle has the accident would have been avoided." The self-driving shuttle can transport up to 12 people and has a attendant and computer monitor, but no steering wheel and no brake pedals. It relies heavily on GPS, electronic curb sensors and other technology to make its way.
Human reaction vs machine reaction (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder if the shuttle doing the right thing was what the human driver expected.... maybe their algorithms are incompatible.
Re:Human reaction vs machine reaction (Score:5, Informative)
The AI switched from human emulation mode to the Deer in Headlights program...
Re:Human reaction vs machine reaction (Score:4, Interesting)
The story says it stopped moving and the truck backed into it. I wonder if there was a horn option in the software.
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From the story...
NASCAR driver Danica Patrick and magic duo Penn and Teller were among the first passengers.
Penn Jillette has a podcast where he said he wanted to be one the the first to ride on it, It's almost certain he'll be talking about it there on Sunday. It's called Penn's Sunday School.
Re:Human reaction vs machine reaction (Score:5, Funny)
From the story...
NASCAR driver Danica Patrick and magic duo Penn and Teller were among the first passengers.
Penn Jillette has a podcast where he said he wanted to be one the the first to ride on it, It's almost certain he'll be talking about it there on Sunday. It's called Penn's Sunday School.
Conversely, I doubt Teller will have much to say on the matter.
Re:Human reaction vs machine reaction (Score:4, Funny)
I wonder if there was a horn option in the software.
This is the USA. We have "stand your ground" laws. If another motor vehicle is trying to run you over or back into you, you are permitted to engage with licensed firearms.
Obviously, the Autonomous Defense systems of the new vehicle are not working correctly, or the Self-Driving Shuttle would have flattened the tires of the truck that was attempting to ram it.
More field tests, and plenty of ammo are obviously still needed.
Re:Human reaction vs machine reaction (Score:4, Informative)
Exactly sounds like the shuttle just stopped, when a human might have steered to the edge of the lane or onto the shoulder to avoid being "grazed"
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A sad day, as that I just bought a new FUN driving car yesterday.....I hope that I'll be long dead and gone before the scenario above plays out, but I see it coming.
[goes and throws on Red Barchetta....]
Re:Human reaction vs machine reaction (Score:5, Insightful)
Trouble is....I can see it coming....there will be movement to get human driving of cars made illegal and then ONLY AI vehicles will be able to run on the public roads.
This will be a GOOD THING. Once we get the humans off the road, we can make lanes narrower, traffic will flow more smoothly, cars can be made lighter, and traffic lights can be eliminated.
A sad day, as that I just bought a new FUN driving car yesterday.
Why should my tax dollars subsidize your hobby? If you want to drive, do it on a private track.
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All of this seems to assume that bicycles and pedestrians never have to share the road with cars. Sure it could be designed, but it's prohibitively expensive.
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Why should my tax dollars subsidize your hobby? If you want to drive, do it on a private track.
Er, robot cars will still drive on publicly funded roads won't they? So why should my tax dollars subsidize your hobby?
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FWIW the biggest subsidisation of road users is for vehicles heavier than a couple of tons.
Roadbed damage is proportional to the 5th power of axle pressure(weight) and the 2nd power of speed. 18 wheelers pay less than 1% of the maintenance costs they incur.
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Why should my tax dollars subsidize your hobby? If you want to drive, do it on a private track.
If a self-driving car costs several thousand dollars more and furthermore requires cheaper cars to be outlawed for full safety functionality, wouldn't it be the self-driving car that is actually being subsidized (through laws that prohibit cheaper cars)?
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If a self-driving car costs several thousand dollars more
Very unlikely. Sensors are cheap. Actuators cost less than a steering column. Once you add in the insurance, SDCs will almost certainly be less expensive once they are mass produced.
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......once they are mass produced.
Do you have visions of Minority Report where all of the autonomous cars are the same?
Who is going to manufacture the cars? Are all but one of the manufacturers going to go out of business? Will there be a global mandate to have one template against which all manufacturers will work or will each country/state have their own template?
You can impose standards but not personalization.
If we do get to a future that looks like Minority Report (which was optimistically set in 2054) the same individualizati
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If a self-driving car costs several thousand dollars more
Very unlikely. Sensors are cheap. Actuators cost less than a steering column. Once you add in the insurance, SDCs will almost certainly be less expensive once they are mass produced.
No, Lidar is not cheap. Compute is not cheap. We're talking thousands that might hopefully come down to around a thousand or so with extreme volumes, but maybe not. Self-driving cars will never be as cheap as the apples-to-apples comparison to the equivalent manual car (similar to how hybrid cars will never come close to the equivalent non-hybrid car).
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Trouble is....I can see it coming....there will be movement to get human driving of cars made illegal and then ONLY AI vehicles will be able to run on the public roads.
This will be a GOOD THING. Once we get the humans off the road, we can make lanes narrower, traffic will flow more smoothly, cars can be made lighter, and traffic lights can be eliminated.
Ooooh and Unicorns. Because out of what you said and Unicorns, Unicorns are more realistic.
90% of the Highway Code is based on physics, not human response times. Physics wont change, you wont have autonomous cars going bumper to bumper at Eleventy Billion AU's an hour because physics doesn't change.
A sad day, as that I just bought a new FUN driving car yesterday.
Why should my tax dollars subsidize your hobby? If you want to drive, do it on a private track.
You've got that backwards boy, our fun cars are subsidising your crappy ones. If not for us who drive sports cars
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Why should my tax dollars subsidize your hobby?
I think forcing self-driving cars on people is infringing on their right to travel. If I'm not in control of the car - if the company that made it, or the government, or hackers or whatever, can make it take me somewhere other than my intended destination - then you've effectively turned travel into a privilege instead of a right.
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Your tax dollars arent subsidizing my hobby you collosal asshat
I think the point is that we taxpayers are providing you with a free racetrack. Which would be a valid argument if no one used the roads except for boy-racers, and there were no commuters, people shopping, trucks delivering goods etc.
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Your tax dollars arent subsidizing my hobby you collosal asshat
Doesn't he pay road tax (or call it whatever else you like) in your country? in the UK I am paying through my VED (Vehicle Excise Duty) about 1 pound for every 10 miles I drive. That is in addition to the tax on fuel.
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No need for a law.
Insurance companies will do it anyway - as soon as self driving vehicles are shown to be safer drivers they'll attract discounts - or human drivers will attract higher premiums, which amounts to the same thing.
Very quickly, only those who can afford the insurance will still be driving themselves.
There may be exemptions carved into the rules, such as a ridiculously low speed limit for manual driving in order to handle tricky manouvering that the computer can't do, but in reality such situat
Re: Human reaction vs machine reaction (Score:2)
A few years ago Bush got a bunch of old cars off the road and got all those poor people to buy SUVs. The government spends enough on military to give every person a car and still have a standing military force.
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Cash for Clunkers was an Obama-era program.
Re:Human reaction vs machine reaction (Score:4, Funny)
the 75% of the world who actually like driving manually (or at least like having the option)
You can't argue against solid statistics like that!
Re:Human reaction vs machine reaction (Score:5, Informative)
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So the shuttle had a very predictable response while the human on the other hand could have done any number of things.
My aunt would wish she had this self driving car in front of her. If both had hit the brake there would have been a fender bender. Instead she got someone who didn't know the difference between the brake and accelerator and when both attempted to stop the other proceeded to take off hit 3 parked cars force a car in the oncoming lane onto the footpath and came to a rest inside a convenience s
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"I as a human driver would have made "differently" from the shuttle AI"
You, as an _experienced_ human driver would do that.
I've seen a lot of drivers make the same errors (failure to anticipate) and I'll bet that programmers are now looking at exactly these kinds of changes.
The fact remains that as the stopped vehicle, the shuttle was in the right as far as insurance goes and the truck driver wasn't paying full attention to what was going on around him.
A huge chunk of what self-driving vehicles have to deal
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The AI switched from human emulation mode to the Deer in Headlights program...
Once again, human stupidity trumps artificial intelligence.
Can't wait until they make machines as stupid as humans, then humans will truly be obsolete.
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Also, maybe if the shuttle had a human driver, he would have been more careful near a semi truck and stopped further from it. I assume that the visibility from a big truck is quite poor and keep my distance.
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I wouldn't know how easy or difficult it is to program, but when I drive, I assume that the other drivers may make a mistake (just like I sometimes make a mistake) and I use caution, even if I have the priority. Doubly so around big vehicles, like trucks and buses, since they may need more time to stop.
For example:
1.I am at an uncontrolled intersection, planning to turn right. I see a car from my left, it has its right turn signal on. That would mean that the other driver will turn to the street I am curren
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At lower speeds, or while stopped, the software should be using a larger following distance than what might otherwise be considered normal and safe while behind a vehicle that is physically larger than the automated one, to accommodate for decreased visibility that the truck driver is likely to have of the automated vehicle.
The shuttle came to a stop immediately as soon as it saw that the truck was backing up, which was fine, but I think that it's also likely that it was using a general rule about traili
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This is Las Vegas, that it went two hours without a fender bender is already doing better than human drivers.
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Also, maybe if the shuttle had a human driver, he would have been more careful near a semi truck and stopped further from it. I assume that the visibility from a big truck is quite poor and keep my distance.
Yes this same thing happened to my mom some time ago, and she said she would have stopped further back if she had seen it coming (dump truck); then she got pinched in by other construction vehicles, and an asshat tailgating behind-and still the flagger didn't shout to the damn truck. Luckily it was quickly settled, and my mom was physically unhurt, though shook up!
And my mother too. All the people on the street were yelling at the asshat reversing into my mother's car that was pinched between two commercial vehicles, but the asshat continued reversing.
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In any case, unless this was a freaky situation, I'm gonna guess a human driver of the shuttle would've not gotten into the accident. So maybe hitting the brakes and stopping isn't enough of an algorithm to let this thing loose in the real world. Calling this human error is giving the algorithm a bit too much benefit of the doubt.
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Probably a human would have been more aggressive, beeped the horn a few times, rolled down the window, shouted various expletives relating to the future afterlife, the cognitive abilities of the driver, as well as the functional capabilities of his visual system.
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Smaller things too. Always watch out for the dog running out in front of you.
Re:Human reaction vs machine reaction (Score:5, Informative)
Not what the pictures show.
The shuttle bus drove right up to the side of a backing semi then stopped right behind the angled front wheel. You wouldn't have done that, because you could understand the truck drivers plan at a glance (and presumably aren't an asshole). Also because you would understand that the fastest way past was to let the truck finish backing up.
The trucker should have stopped and waited for the shuttle to back away. But the shuttle shouldn't have said 'my right of way' until it achieved gridlock. A human that did what the shuttle did is an asshole.
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And yet the truck driver got the traffic ticket. Next phase of AI is realizing that humans routinely ignore the traffic laws.
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I would fight the ticket.
If for no other reason than to protect the driver's CDL and job. You get a ticket as a CDL holder and it's off to purgatory for you. Many places won't hire you, some will fire you if you have a ticket on your record, especially an accident that's your fault.
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CPU's can't anticipate? Did anyone tell Deep Blue or the Table Tennis robots?
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Re: Human reaction vs machine reaction (Score:2)
Trucks are some of the few non-living things so you should be able to.
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Ticket the person who turned the AI on, or write the ticket you would write if the vehicle was known as offending, but the driver fled before police arrived.
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The ticket was for illegally reversing.
The next questions are if this is a common restriction in US cities and if it's selectively enforced.
Re:Human reaction vs machine reaction (Score:5, Insightful)
Based on the picture; the shuttle should have been cited for pulling up too close to a vehicle moving in conflicting direction to cause a crash, not the truck driver --- sometimes the officer at the scene gets it wrong.
You DON'T pull up to obstruct the passage of the FRONT of a vehicle that is backing up, as the driver will clearly be looking at the path behind their vehicle, not at their front tire section, and you will get hit.
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because you could understand the truck drivers plan at a glance
In this case, yes. However not understanding people's plan actually is what causes a large portion of road accidents.
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Not what the pictures show.
The shuttle bus drove right up to the side of a backing semi then stopped right behind the angled front wheel. You wouldn't have done that, because you could understand the truck drivers plan at a glance (and presumably aren't an asshole). Also because you would understand that the fastest way past was to let the truck finish backing up.
The trucker should have stopped and waited for the shuttle to back away. But the shuttle shouldn't have said 'my right of way' until it achieved gridlock. A human that did what the shuttle did is an asshole.
This is why autonomous cars are nowhere near ready for Prime Time.
Technically the autonomous car was in the right but a human driver would have spotted a reversing truck and waited. That is what we call common courtesy or road craft. You plan ahead, be aware of your surroundings and react accordingly. Lorries and articulated trucks have huge blind spots (and our nations depend on fleets of these vehicles to run day to day), sometimes they need to bend the rules to do the jobs.
OK some drivers cant plan
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The scenario that HornWumpus posed is plausible. I don't know that any of us have enough info to say definitively.
However, I have a concern for the truck driver in any event. This is not a typical fender-bender. It's a political situation. The police work for the city. The city approved the shuttle. There's a corporation running that shuttle. And there's a truck driver.
Which one do think is going to be on the losing end of this?
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Expected behaviour is a thing. I noticed something just today as I was driving, a woman and child ran quickly across a busy street with a trajectory straight in front of my fast moving car. I saw them, they saw me and I knew that their intention was to stop on the small median island between lanes so carried on at full speed. The event resulted as expected, they stopped on the island, I kept going uninterrupted.
With AI how does it know they intend
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The only reason the autonomous vehicle should 'stop anyway' is because it completely lacks judgement, which is an absolutely key part of driving. There is no such thing as risk-free driving. Even a stop when others are not expecting it can cause an accident, and you can't just hand-wave that away and say 'well that is their fault' - it is reality.
So in this case, the driver used his judgement - eye contact with the other party means something. If the child appeared to be chased by the mother the driver w
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Re:Human reaction vs machine reaction (Score:4, Insightful)
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Obviously self driving cars aren't going to work unless they can drive with humans.
Which part of that is obvious? If anything self driving cars have been shown over the past several years to get by with humans just fine.
What is really obvious is that humans can't drive with humans.
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You are commenting under an article about a self driving car not anticipating a human's actions, so.. fail.
And yet this is one of a possibly infinite number of scenarios most of which self driving cars have shown to handle better than human drivers when it comes to avoiding accidents.
So... unfail.
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A very small percentage of scenarios have been tested
If you think you can clock well over a million miles travelling in suburbia and only test a small number of scenarios, then I guess I was wrong, we only have a small number of scenarios to deal with.
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Not ready yet. (Score:5, Insightful)
Had the truck had the same sensing equipment that the shuttle has the accident would have been avoided.
If the shuttle had the same sensing equipment as the truck has the accident would have been avoided (ftfy). A human would have laid into the horn as the truck got closer to alert him hes about to hit someone. A human would also have seen the truck backing in and yielded a larger room for error. An alert human may also see the situation that they could quickly back up a bit before the truck hit them. (per article trucker was cited for illegal backing (up?). This isn't ready in my opinion, but a nice alpha test though.
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Re:Not ready yet. - Um NO?!?! (Score:2)
Had the truck had the same sensing equipment that the shuttle has the accident would have been avoided.
If the shuttle had the same sensing equipment as the truck has the accident would have been avoided (ftfy). A human would have laid into the horn as the truck got closer to alert him hes about to hit someone. A human would also have seen the truck backing in and yielded a larger room for error. An alert human may also see the situation that they could quickly back up a bit before the truck hit them. (per article trucker was cited for illegal backing (up?). This isn't ready in my opinion, but a nice alpha test though.
Um maybe you don't know how to read. It's clearly ready. It just works in only this one highly specific scenario that requires a complete paradigm shift in how the world works to come true. That means ready.
Re:Not ready yet. (Score:5, Insightful)
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If fear would help, that can be added as a variable alongside all the others. Stop imagining that there is something unique about the human brain that means that computers can't replicate their tasks. The last 50 years has been a catalogue of people thinking that and being proved wrong.
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If fear would help, that can be added as a variable alongside all the others.
Cool.
So, how do you go about coding emotion?
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You train a neural net of course.
DIfference between a normal vehicle and victim (Score:3)
The victim self-driving shuttle bus didn't try to back away from being run over. According to reports, it couldn't for unspecified reasons. (I speculate that the autonomous logic or arrangement of sensors didn't adequately cover "going into reverse.")
Someone up-topic asked about sounding a horn. I haven't heard any press reporting that the autonomous vehicle tried.
Either case (if true) represent a difference between how the self-driving logic reacted and how a human driver would probably have. This tells me unless an autono-car can do everything a human driver can, at least as well as a human driver (admittedly a low bar), it shouldn't be on the streets. There will always be corner conditions; they have to be handled as well by the robot as they would be by a human.
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The self-driving AI works on matching the current configuration of external objects, matched with a database of "what should I do here" actions. It's really a case of not being trained correctly.
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> It's really a case of not being trained correctly.
Which kind of surprises me, because if I were working on a driverless car, I'd have it generating a map of the surroundings rating them by how available they were for the vehicle - even a sidewalk can be a place to drive in an emergency if there are no pedestrians. (The 'where could I go if nothing changes' map, which is different from the presumed 'where is the road' map).
I'd build a second map layer rating the probability of the vehicle occupying a g
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https://i.cbc.ca/1.4394567.151... [i.cbc.ca]
Would you stop in that spot if a semi truck was backing up there?
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No. But then if I was driving the semi, I wouldn't have kept on reversing till I hit the shuttle either.
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No. But then if I was driving the semi, I wouldn't have kept on reversing till I hit the shuttle either.
If I was the truck driver I would assume the shuttle would give way and let me complete my reversing manoeuvre, as that is what a (sane) human driver would have done.
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A robot driving the truck would also have prevented the accident. Clearly the solution is self-driving semis, not human-driven shuttles!
Two takeaways (Score:5, Funny)
1) Robotic vehicles need a horn - and additional logic to handle when to sound it.
2) Robotic vehicles would benefit from the addition of a mechanical arm with a mechanical middle finger - for these sorts of post-accident situations.
Re:Two takeaways (Score:4, Interesting)
2) Robotic vehicles would benefit from the addition of a mechanical arm with a mechanical middle finger
If you are an asshole and pull up to a truck in such a way that he cannot continue the maneuver he was trying to perform, which would have gotten him out of your way, then you deserve the finger, not the truck driver.
If a large truck is making a right turn and has moved into the left lane so he could accomplish that without running over the curb or other cars, it is an asshole who pulls up as far as he can go in the right lane to prevent the truck from completing the turn and causing a traffic jam, even if the car in the right lane technically has the right of way over the truck. Unfortunately, "asshole" is not a ticketable offense.
A human would have identified the situation and remained clear. The AI assumed it had the right of way and did not. It doesn't matter in the end if the AI did or did not have the right of way, proper defensive driving would have prevent the accident altogether. "Being right" isn't always better than "being safe".
As to the snarky comment by someone else that going a couple of hours in Las Vegas without a fender bender is better than humans can do, I'll just point out that I've driven for hundreds of hours in Las Vegas and have neither run into anyone else, nor have I had anyone run into me.
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If a large truck is making a right turn and has moved into the left lane so he could accomplish that without running over the curb or other cars, it is an asshole who pulls up as far as he can go in the right lane to prevent the truck from completing the turn and causing a traffic jam, even if the car in the right lane technically has the right of way over the truck. Unfortunately, "asshole" is not a ticketable offense.
A human would have identified the situation and remained clear. The AI assumed it had the right of way and did not. It doesn't matter in the end if the AI did or did not have the right of way, proper defensive driving would have prevent the accident altogether. "Being right" isn't always better than "being safe".
I'm not so sure that most drivers I have observed would consistently even identify the truck turning right from the left lane as being something to be aware of. Heck, I'm not confident that I would catch this 100% of the time. I'm not doing a lot of driving in areas of town with big rigs - and I'm getting old and stupid....
Edge cases (Score:3)
Re: Edge cases (Score:2)
Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
Had the truck had the same sensing equipment that the shuttle has the accident would have been avoided."
If the shuttle had a human driver the entire incident would never have happened because the half-assed excuse for 'AI' they keep trotting out can't actually THINK.
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Newsflash, trucks run into human-driven buses all the time, for example [syracuse.com].
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Newsflash, if it happened 'all the time' it wouldn't be news. The reason it is news is because it happens INFREQUENTLY. What actually happens 'all the time' is that buses and trucks encounter each other AND DON'T CRASH.
This is the big problem with a lot of self-driving proponents - they focus on the RARE events and say they could be prevented, but completely ignore the common, everyday realities of driving.
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Okay (Score:2)
Because if someone was injured in this accident, the no comms peopel would immediately shift into No True Scotsman mode.
So Trump's decision to remove the requirement is a death knell to the Autonomous driving initiative.
Flawed Shuttle Bus (Score:2)
> "The shuttle did what it was supposed to do, in that it's (sic) sensors registered the truck and the shuttle stopped to avoid the accident,"
Assuming the "goal" with driverless cars is to have a vehicle that can respond as a human might. To avoid the inevitable issues.
This bus failed miserably on two accounts.
First, if it were programmed more human like it would have blown its horn to warn the big rig. Failure #1.
Secondly, if it were programmed more human like it would have backed up to avoid the bi
Sounds like what I think would happen (Score:2)
AI doesn't understand people (Score:3)
A large part of the fact that I've managed to avoid accidents for so long is the fact that, as a human, I understand how other humans are likely to act and react.
The problem with AI drivers is that humans only loosely follow the rules of the road; their actions are driven multiple influences, and understanding what another human is likely to do in any given situation requires being a human being. For example, consider the following:
I'm sure there are dozens of other similar cases, but you get the point. AI might understand, in the nominal sense, how to drive a car. What it can't understand is what other drivers are likely to do.
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The self-driving car's version of "checking out" is coming to a stop as quickly as possible. While that's not always the optimal solution (as seen in this case), I don't see how it will lead to running people over.
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Re: Human Driver Collides With Self-Driving Shuttl (Score:2)
Iâ(TM)ve seen plenty of people do it. Whenever there is roadwork, accidents or people broken down or pulled over by cops, it seems people grind to a stop to see whatâ(TM)s going on. Also, deer, Iâ(TM)ve stopped plenty of times on highways for them.
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The rule of the road "the largest vehicle takes priority. So there's a pecking order of trucks >buses > Hackney Black Cab taxis > Mercedes > Mini Morris Minor > Reliant Robin > Motorcyclist > Cyclist > Pedstrian.
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under posted speed limits should not be on the lis (Score:2)
under posted speed limits should not be on the list! I can be unsafe to do the posted 55 on some roads.