• IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Yes. A human brain can handle edge cases it’s never encountered before. Can a self driving car?

    • Ever stop at a red light only to have a police officer wave you through?

    • Ever encounter a car driving the wrong way down a one way street?

    • Ever come across a flooded out stretch of road? (if the road has no lines and the water is still it can be very deceptive looking)

    These are a tiny number of things I’ve encountered over the past few years. I’m sure plenty of other drivers can provide other good examples. I’d want to know how a self driving car would handle itself in situations like these.

    • merc@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Those are pretty basic conditions that I hope are already in the training data.

      What about a wildfire evacuation? Police might have people driving on the wrong side of the highway to make use of all the lanes. Smoke might be obscuring everything. A human driver would know not to pay attention to any of the road signs in that situation without ever having been trained on it, but would a self-driving car?

      Or, how about any situation where a police officer has to have a driver roll down the window to give them instructions for dealing with some unusual situation, like a chemical spill or a landslide.

      Or, what about highway signs that have been shot by a shotgun so that it’s hard to read? Or, what about novelty highway signs that a business might put up as a joke?

      Self-driving cars definitely need to be tested against a much bigger range of situations than a human driver. Much as we might be baffled by their lack of common sense, the common sense of an average 16-year-old is still off the charts compared to an AI. Having said that, I know how bad many drivers are, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the competent self-driving car organizations (Cruize, Waymo, etc.) are already better than an average driver under 99.9% of common scenarios.