Loved that show.

But you have to hire equally so some may get darker skinned buddies. Who will then need buddies.

Not necessarily worse than humans, no, just worse than it can detect light skinned and tall people.

Ah yes, because all humans are equally bad drivers.

A self-driving car shouldn’t compete with the average human because the average human is a fucking idiot. A self-driving car should drive better than a good driver, or else you’re just putting more idiots on the road.

Any black people or children in your ‘study’?

2020 was lockdown year, how on earth have accidents increased in the US?

Night Sight is a beast of a feature

The trains in California are trash. I’d love to see good ones, but this isn’t even a thought in the heads of those who run things.

Dreaming is nice… But reality sucks, and we need to deal with it. Self driving cars are a wonderful answer, but Tesla, is fucking it up for everyone.

That works in a city, it’s not viable to have mass transit in every place, you still need cars for total areas

Yes, but also improve kid and dark skin people detection tools, they don’t work just for driving cars. Efficient, fast and accurate people detection and tracking tools can be used in other myriad of stuff.

Imagine a system that tracks the amount of people in different sections of the store, a system that checks the amount of people going in and out of stores to control how many are inside… There’s a lot of tools that already do this, but and they works somewhat reliably, but they can be improved, and the models being developed for cars will then be reused. I+D is a good thing.

If you say the cars are racist you might get the car right to buy into them…

Sue the road builders for building racist roads!

/s

1. No it’s because they train AI with pictures of white adults.

2. It literally wouldn’t matter for lidar, but Tesla uses visual cameras to save money and that weighs down everyone else’s metrics.

Lumping lidar cars with Tesla makes no sense

Visible light is racist.

If the computer vision model can’t detect edges around a human-shaped object, that’s usually a dataset issue or a sensor (data collection) issue… And it sure as hell isn’t a sensor issue because humans do the task just fine.

It’s amazing Elon hasn’t figured this out. Then again, Steve Jobs said no iPhone would ever have an OLED screen.

We should just assume CEO’s are stupid at this point. Seriously. It’s a very common trend we all keep seeing. If they prove otherwise, then that’s great! But let’s start them at “dumbass” and move forward from there.

Im guessing it can’t detect them as objects at all, not that it can’t classify them as humans.

Conant and Ashby’s good regulator theorem in cybernetics says, “Every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system.”

The AI needs an accurate model of a human to predict how humans move. Predicting the path of a human is different than predicting the path of other objects. Humans can stand totally motionless, pivot, run across the street at a red light, suddenly stop, fall over from a heart attack, be curled up or splayed out drunk, slip backwards on some ice, etc. And it would be computationally costly, inaccurate, and pointless to model non-humans in these ways.

I also think trolley problem considerations come into play, but more like normativity in general. The consequences of driving quickly amongst humans is higher than amongst human height trees. I don’t mind if a car drives at a normal speed on a tree lined street, but it should slow down on a street lined with playing children who could jump out at anytime.

Cameras and image recognition are cheaper than LIDAR/RADAR, so Tesla uses it exclusively.

They need to safely ignore shadows, oil stains on the road, just because there’s contrast on an image doesn’t mean it’s an object.

Ya hear that Elno?

LiDAR, radar and infra-red may still perform worse on children due to children being smaller and therefore there would be fewer contact points from the LiDAR reflection.

I work in a self driving R&D lab.

That’s a fair observation! LiDAR, radar, and infra-red systems might not directly detect skin color or age, but the point being made in the article is that there are challenges when it comes to accurately detecting darker-skinned pedestrians and children. It seems that the bias could stem from the data used to train these AI systems, which may not have enough diverse representation.

Do lidar and infrared work equally on white and black people? Both are still optical systems, and I don’t know how well black people reflect infrared light.

You’re just decribing Tesla. It’s not even most self driving car companies, it’s just Tesla. If there are others cutting corners, I’ve never heard of them.

Part of the children problem is distinguishing between ‘small’ and ‘far away’. Humans seem reasonably good at it, but from what I’ve seen AIs aren’t there yet.

Yeah This probably accounts for 90% of the issue.

Built by them, inherited their biases.

They just want to do abortions on the road. Just a few years after birth.

.

What? No. They’d need to recognise them better - otherwise how can they swerve to make sure they hit them?

In this case it’s likely partly a signal to noise problem that can’t be mitigated easily. Both children and dark skinned people produce less signal to a camera because they reflect less light. children because they’re smaller, and dark skinned people because their skin tones are darker. This will cause issues in the stereo vision algorithms that are finding objects and getting distance to them. Lidar would solve the issue, but companies don’t want to use it because lidars with a fast enough update rate and high enough resolution for safe highway driving are prohibitively expensive for a passenger vehicle (60k+ for just the sensor)

Darker toned people are harder to detect because they reflect less light. The tiny cheap sensors on cameras do not have enough aperture for lower light detections. It’s not training that’s the problem it’s hardware.

Yes, the issue is the data used to teach the systems that people look like are biased towards white men most likely.

I think many driverless car companies insist on only using cameras. I guess lidars/radars are expensive.

Tesla removed the LiDAR from their cars, a step backwards if you ask me.

Edit: Sorry RADAR not LiDAR.

I think you’re misunderstanding what the article is saying.

You’re correct that it isn’t the job of a system to detect someone’s skin color, and judge those people by it.

But the fact that AVs detect dark skinned people and short people at a lower effectiveness is a reflection of the lack of diversity in the tech staff designing and testing these systems as a whole.

They staff are designing the AVs to safely navigate in a world of people like them, but when the staff are overwhelmingly male, light skinned, young and single, and urban, and in the United States, a lot of considerations don’t even cross their minds.

Will the AVs recognize female pedestrians?

Do the sensors sense light spectrum wide enough to detect dark skinned people?

Will the AVs recognize someone with a walker or in a wheelchair, or some other mobility device?

Toddlers are small and unpredictable.

Bicyclists can fall over at any moment.

Are all these AVs being tested in cities being exposed to all the animals they might encounter in rural areas like sheep, llamas, otters, alligators and other animals who might be in the road?

How well will AVs tested in urban areas fare on twisty mountain roads that suddenly change from multi lane asphalt to narrow twisty dirt roads?

Will they recognize tractors and other farm or industrial vehicles on the road?

Will they recognize something you only encounter in a foreign country like an elephant or an orangutan or a rickshaw? Or what’s it going to do if it comes across that tomato festival in Spain?

Engineering isn’t magical: It’s the result of centuries of experimentation and recorded knowledge of what works and doesn’t work.

Releasing AVs on the entire world without testing them on every little thing they might encounter is just asking for trouble.

What’s required for safe driving without human intelligence is more mind boggling the more you think about it.

The media has become ridiculously racist, they go out of their way to make every incident appear to be racial now

Racist lighting!

There’s still a huge racial disparity in tech work forces. For one example, at Google according to their diversity report (page 66), their tech workforce is 4% Black versus 43% White and 50% Asian. Over the past 9 years (since 2014), that’s an increase from 1.5% to 4% for Black tech workers at Google.

There’s also plenty of news and research illuminating bias in trained models, from commercial facial recognition sets trained with >80% White faces to Timnit Gebru being fired from Google’s AI Ethics group for insisting on admitting bias and many more.

I also think it overlooks serious aspects of racial bias to say it’s hard. Certainly, photographic representation of a Black face is going to provide less contrast within the face than for lighter skin. But that’s also ingrained bias. The thing is people (including software engineers) solve tough problems constantly, have to choose which details to focus on, rely on our experiences, and our experience is centered around outselves. Of course racist outcomes and stereotypes are natural, but we can identify the likely harmful outcomes and work to counter them.

I could make a warm water balloon in the shape of a human and it would stop the car then. Maybe a combination of all various types of technologies? You’d still have to train the model on all various kinds of humans though.