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Driverless Cars Are Worse at Spotting Kids and Dark-Skinned People, Study Says

https://gizmodo.com.au/2023/08/driverless-cars-are-worse-at-spotting-kids-and-dark-skinned-people-study-says/

New research shows driverless car software is significantly more accurate with adults and light skinned people than children and dark-skinned people.

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Endomlik

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Seems this will be always the case. Small objects are harder to detect than larger objects. Higher contrast objects are easier to detect than lower contrast objects. Even if detection gets 1000x better, these cases will still be true. Do you introduce artificial error to make things fair?

Repeating the same comment from a crosspost.

kibiz0r

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All the more reason to take this seriously and not disregard it as an implementation detail.

When we, as a society, ask: Are autonomous vehicles safe enough yet?

That’s not the whole question.

…safe enough for whom?

Mac

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Also what is the safety target? Humans are extremely unsafe. Are we looking for any improvement or are we looking for perfection?

kibiz0r

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This is why it’s as much a question of philosophy as it is of engineering.

Because there are things we care about besides quantitative measures.

If you replace 100 pedestrian deaths due to drunk drivers with 99 pedestrian deaths due to unexplainable self-driving malfunctions… Is that, unambiguously, an improvement?

I don’t know. In the aggregate, I guess I would have to say yes..?

But when I imagine being that person in that moment, trying to make sense of the sudden loss of a loved one and having no explanation other than watershed segmentation and k-means clustering… I start to feel some existential vertigo.

I worry that we’re sleepwalking into treating rationalist utilitarianism as the empirically correct moral model — because that’s the future that Silicon Valley is building, almost as if it’s inevitable.

And it makes me wonder, like… How many of us are actually thinking it through and deliberately agreeing with them? Or are we all just boiled frogs here?

Duamerthrax

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Can everyone who feels the need to jog at twilight hours please wear bring colors? I get anxiety driving to my suburban friends.

Sconrad122

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They should. But also, good. You should absolutely feel anxiety operating a multi-ton piece of heavy machinery. Even if everybody was super diligent about making themselves visible, there would still be the off cases. Someone's boss held them late and they missed the last bus so now they need to walk home in the dark when they dressed expecting to ride home in the day. Someone is down on their luck and needs to get to the nearest homeless resource and doesn't have access to bright clothes. Drivers should never feel comfortable that obstacles will always be reflective and bright. Our transportation infrastructure should not be built to lull them into that false sense of comfort.

Duamerthrax

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The ones I'm talking about aren't homeless. These are well dressed yuppies in new hoodies jogging their suburban neighborhood. The cars are packed along the sidewalk at night because everyone is at home and they just jut out from between two of them with their hoodies up.

I'm not complaining that I have to drive causally. I'm complaining that I have an elevated hearth rate.

Sconrad122

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It wasn't meant to be an attack 🙂. Absolutely, those people should wear proper PPE (bright clothing) when running in the dark. But you have an elevated heart rate because your body is telling you you are in a dangerous situation. And it's right. Too many drivers (not an accusation at you) either ignore those signals (and mentally normalize driving recklessly) or blindly focus on removing the triggers for those signals at the expense of the safety of themselves and others (by buying larger vehicles or by voting for politicians that make our infrastructure even more hostile to pedestrians than it already is). At the end of the day, driving a car is dangerous. Especially on residential streets where pedestrian interactions are possible or even common). And that won't change as long as it is a residential street. Being aware of the danger is a positive, if inconvenient, reminder to drive cautiously.