[hannahstrawbrry]

"Something unexpected where the machine drove like a machine rather than a person..." is nonsense. There were over 1500 reports of humans driving the wrong way on Arizona roads last year. Humans drive that way all the time.

[munk-a]

Do we think it's acceptable to target a level of driving proficiency for automation that could be featured in dashcam footage that gets uploaded to youtube because it's so extremely inept or are we aiming for a higher target that might be a middling amount of driving proficiency?

[potato3732842]

Most autonomous failures aren't failures in a way that make good video though. It's like your grandma or 16yo daughter that gets stuck at a yield for no good reason. Nobody is gonna watch that so nobody uploads it.

A robotaxi that has a "low enough to be acceptable" frequency of the above failure mode is likely to have enough occasional "full send" failure modes to make for Youtube fodder when deployed at scale even if they're comparatively rare compared to humans or the other failure type, or some other standard.

[deepspace]

That is a very disingenuous take on the comment. We should of course target a higher level of proficiency than that, but the point is that many humans make stupid driving decisions every day. We can hold machines to a higher standard, but perfection is an unrealistic standard.

[prewett]

I don't generally have to entrust myself to humans doing crazy things, though. An actual person driving a taxi is familiar enough with the roads that they are unlikely to do something like that. Probably also Uber/Lyft drivers. And there is usually an option to rent a car and drive yourself, in which case any craziness the driver suffers from is at least my own fault.

[kgwxd]

Driving yourself onto tracks is natural selection. AI driving a person onto tracks is artificial selection.

[puttycat]

> Humans drive that way all the time.

Why do we hold calculators to such high bars? Humans make calculation mistakes all the time.

Why do we hold banking software to such high bars? People forget where they put their change all the time. Etc etc.

[CamperBob2]

Tens of thousands of humans kill each other every year on the roads in the US alone. So these analogies are completely bankrupt.

[lopifjun]

This is such a terribly ineffectual comparison, but okay... and I'd jump out of their car if I was a passenger and they were ignoring my pleading with them to stop.

[drob518]

But how many humans drove on train tracks? Yes, humans make scads of mistakes, but they don’t typically make this one.

[eightysixfour]

> But how many humans drove on train tracks?

I have seen this twice in my life. One person who freaked out because they stopped in the tracks and then turned onto them, the second I still have no idea how they got there.

I think there are two really big issues with the roll out of self-driving cars that are going to be hard for us to overcome:

1. Their mistakes are going to be highly publicized, but no one is publicizing the infinite number of dumbass things human drivers do every day to compare it to.

2. They're going to make mistakes that are extremely obvious in hindsight or from a third party perspective, that most humans will say no human would have ever done. It is likely that a human has and would have made similar and worse mistakes, and makes them at a higher rate, and we will have to accept these as a reality in a complex world.

[nwallin]

These are light rail/tram tracks, not railroad tracks. The road is the same type of road that you normally drive up, they just have train tracks embedded in the road surface, signs telling you not to drive there, and every now and then a tram drives along it.

Functionally, they're no different than bus lanes or a wide shoulder. Humans drive on them all the time, because there's no traffic on them and they can get to where they're going faster. They shouldn't, it's illegal, and they can get ticketed for it, but they do it anyway. If you load up google street view in Phoenix/Tempe/Gilbert you can see a few people driving on them.

[yibg]

I don't know if there are stats for this but it wouldn't surprise me if there were non zero incidents of it. Drivers that are high / drunk, mentally impaired etc. More broadly, lots of cars driven by humans collide with trains, which is the at least one of the core issues here.

EDIT: anecdotally at least for this type of ground level light rail, I've seen people drive on similar streetcar tracks (that are not shared with cars) in Toronto more than one time.

[hannahstrawbrry]

Seen this exact thing happen a handful of times myself lol (I live in Phoenix)

[thunfischbrot]

Spending 2 minutes on google news or youtube equipped with keywords such as "car", "train tracks" and "stuck" will show you otherwise.

[gretch]

I’ve seen it personally in San Jose. Guy turned left but instead of continuing onto the crossing road, he turned onto the VTA rails in the middle of the road. Then proceeded to get stuck on the concrete partition once the intersection was over, and work crews had to come out to fix the mess.

[nickff]

There are many pictures of cars driving in bike lanes in my city (and yes, the bike lanes are very small and well-signed).

[arcfour]

I absolutely believe that humans would drive on train tracks. There is no shortage of terrible, insane, ignorant, and purely self-interested drivers on the road. Just look at any dashcam video compilation!

The difference, of course, is that when a human does it we just say "what an idiot!" But when a machine does it, some people say "well, obviously machines can't drive and can never drive as well as a human can," which is silly.

[shputil]

1500 out of a lot. It's probably more accurate to say that those 1500 didn't drive like humans either.

[Bjartr]

By definition, they did. Humans do weird, irrational things sometimes. It's part of being human.

[kazinator]

Do they continue to drive that way if they have a passenger yelling, "we are on train tracks?" to the point that said passenger has to bail out?

(Sure, within the wide boundaries of mental health, it is not impossible.)

[duskwuff]

Bingo. Humans can make mistakes, but they can also recognize that something's gone wrong and change tactics to recover from it. Current self-driving systems can't do that effectively; they'll just keep going, even when they probably shouldn't.

[potato3732842]

>Do they continue to drive that way if they have a passenger yelling, "we are on train tracks?"

On a non-separated rail like in the video where you can just turn off at any time I can see a lot of people continuing to do it just to spite their spouse for screeching about the obvious.

Or on the other side of the coin I can see a lot of people just say nothing because it's probably fine and they'd rather not have the argument.

[kyleee]

That would open up some very fun avenues for mischief if you could start yelling at the Waymo and pleading for it to change course

[comrade1234]

lol. I knew someone was going to come in with this reasoning for dismissing it. hn has become a parody of itself.

[lopifjun]

If the "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it" and "notice me senpai" memes had a baby raised by an automaton nanny it would be the majority HN user.