Self Driving is only safer than people in absolutely pristine road conditions with no inclement weather and no construction. As soon as anything disrupts “normal” road conditions, self driving becomes significantly more dangerous than a human driving.
Comment on We need to stop pretending AI is intelligent
scarabic@lemmy.world 1 day ago
My thing is that I don’t think most humans are much more than this. We too regurgitate what we have absorbed in the past. Our brains are not hard logic engines but “best guess” boxes and they base those guesses on past experience and probability of success. We make choices before we are aware of them and then apply rationalizations after the fact to back them up - is that true “reasoning?”
It’s similar to the debate about self driving cars. Are they perfectly safe? No, but have you seen human drivers???
AppleTea@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
MangoCats@feddit.it 1 day ago
Human drivers are only safe when they’re not distracted, emotionally disturbed, intoxicated, and physically challenged (vision, muscle control, etc.) 1% of the population has epilepsy, and a large number of them are in denial or simply don’t realize that they have periodic seizures - until they wake up after their crash.
So, yeah, AI isn’t perfect either - and it’s not as good as an “ideal” human driver, but at what point will AI be better than a typical/average human driver? Not today, I’d say, but soon…
jj4211@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
The thing about self driving is that it has been like 90-95% of the way there for a long time now. It made dramatic progress then plateaued, as approaches have failed to close the gap, with exponentially more and more input thrown at it for less and less incremental subjective improvement.
But your point is accurate, that humans have lapses and AI have lapses. The nature of those lapses is largely disjoint, so that makes an opportunity for AI systems to augment a human driver to get the best of both worlds. A constantly consistently vigilant computer driving monitoring and tending the steering, acceleration, and braking to be the ‘right’ thing in a neutral behavior, with the human looking for more anomolous situations that the AI tends to get confounded about, and making the calls on navigating certain intersections that the AI FSD still can’t figure out. At least for me the worst part of driving is the long haul monotony on freeway where nothing happens, and AI excels at not caring about how monotonous it is and just handling it, so I can pay a bit more attention to what other things on the freeway are doing that might cause me problems.
I don’t have a Tesla, but have a competitor system and have found it useful, though not trustworthy. It’s enough to greatly reduce the drain of driving, but I have to be always looking around, and have to assert control if there’s a traffic jam coming up (it might stop in time, but it certainly doesn’t slow down soon enough) or if I have to do a lane change in some traffic (if traffic conditions are light, it can change langes nicely, but without a whole lot of breathing room, it won’t do it, which is nice when I can afford to be stupidly cautious).
MangoCats@feddit.it 16 hours ago
The one “driving aid” that I find actually useful is the following distance maintenance cruise control. I set that to the maximum distance it can reliably handle and it removes that “dimension” of driving problem from needing my constant attention - giving me back that attention to focus on other things (also driving / safety related.) “Dumb” cruise control works similarly when there’s no traffic around at all, but having the following distance control makes it useful in traffic. Both kinds of cruise control have certain situations that you need to be aware of and ready to take control back at a moment’s notice - preferably anticipating the situation and disengaging cruise control before it has a problem - but those exceptions are pretty rare / easily handled in practice.
Things like lane keeping seem to be more trouble than they’re worth, to me in the situations I drive in.
Not “AI” but a driving tech that does help a lot is parking cameras. Having those additional perspectives from the camera(s) at different points on the vehicle is a big benefit during close-space maneuvers. Not too surprising that “AI” with access to those tools does better than normal drivers without.
Auli@lemmy.ca 18 hours ago
Not going to happen soon. It’s the 90 10 problem.
scarabic@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Yes of course edge and corner cases are going to take much longer to train on because they don’t occur as often. But as soon as one self-driving car learns how to handle one of them, they ALL know. Meanwhile humans continue to be born and must be trained up individually and they continue to make stupid mistakes like not using their signal and checking their mirrors.
Humans CAN handle cases that AI doesn’t know how to, yet, but humans often fail in inclement weather, around construction, etc etc.
witten@lemmy.world 1 day ago
With Teslas, Self Driving isn’t even safer in pristine road conditions: engadget.com/…/tesla-blows-past-stopped-school-bu…
jj4211@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
I think the self driving is likely to be safer in the most boring scenarios, the sort of situations where a human driver can get complacent because things have been going so well for the past hour of freeway driving. The self driving is kind of dumb, but it’s at least consistently paying attention, and literally has eyes in the back of it’s head.
However, there’s so much data about how it fails in stupidly obvious ways that it shouldn’t, so you still need the human attention to cover the more anomalous scenarios that foul self driving.
witten@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Anomalous scenarios like a giant flashing school bus? :D
Saledovil@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Ai models are trained on basically the entirety of the internet, and more. Humans learn to speak on much less info. So, there’s likely a huge difference in how human brains and LLMs work.
scarabic@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
It doesn’t take the entirety of the internet just for an LLM to respond in English. It could do so with far less. But it also has the entirety of the internet which arguably makes it superior to a human in breadth of information.
MangoCats@feddit.it 1 day ago
If an IQ of 100 is average, I’d rate AI at 80 and down for most tasks (and of course it’s more complex than that, but as a starting point…)
So, if you’re dealing with a filing clerk with a functional IQ of 75 in their role - AI might be a better experience for you.
Some of the crap that has been published on the internet in the past 20 years comes to an IQ level below 70 IMO - not saying I want more AI because it’s better, just that - relatively speaking - AI is better than some of the pay-for-clickbait garbage that came before it.
Puddinghelmet@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Humans are much more complex than a mirroring script xD
scarabic@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
I’m pretty sure an AI could throw out a lazy straw man and ad hominem as quickly as you did.
TangledHyphae@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The human brain contains roughly 86 billion neurons, while ChatGPT, a large language model, has 175 billion parameters (often referred to as “artificial neurons” in the context of neural networks). While ChatGPT has more “neurons” in this sense, it’s important to note that these are not the same as biological neurons, and the comparison is not straightforward.
86 billion neurons in the human brain isn’t that much compared to some of the larger 1.7 trillion neuron neural networks though.
AppleTea@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
It’s when you start including structures within cells that the complexity moves beyond anything we’re currently capable of computing.
Puddinghelmet@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Keep thinking the human brain is as stupid as AI hahaaha
jumping_redditor@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
have you seen the American Republican party recently? it brings a new perspective on how stupid humans can be.
MangoCats@feddit.it 1 day ago
But, are these 1.7 trillion neuron networks available to drive YOUR car? Or are they time-shared among thousands or millions of users?
Auli@lemmy.ca 18 hours ago
Get a self driven ng car to drive in a snow storm or a torrential downpour. People are really downplaying humans abilities.
outhouseperilous@lemmy.dbzer0.com 22 hours ago
Humans can be more than this. We do actively repress our most important intellectual capacuties.
fishos@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I’ve been thinking this for awhile. When people say “AI isn’t really that smart, it’s just doing pattern recognition” all I can help but think is “don’t you realize that is one of the most commonly brought up traits concerning the human mind?” Pareidolia is literally the tendency to see faces in things because the human mind is constantly looking for the “face pattern”. Humans are at least 90% regurgitating previous data. It’s literally why you’re supposed to read and interact with babies so much. It’s how you learn “red glowy thing is hot”. It’s every annoying person who has endless “did you know?” facts. Science is literally “look at previous data, iterate a little bit, look at new data”.
None of what AI is doing is truly novel or different. But we’ve placed the human mind on this pedestal despite all the evidence to the contrary. Eyewitness testimony, optical illusions, the hundreds of common fallacies we fall prey to… Our minds in credibly fallible and are really just a hodgepodge of processes masquerading as “intelligence”. We’re a bunch of instincts in a trenchcoat.
scarabic@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Yep we are on the same page. At our best, we can reach higher than regurgitating patterns. I’m talking about things like the scientific method and everything we’ve learned by it. But still, that’s a 5% minority, at best, of what’s going on between human ears.