Rollfast

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2...icle-dark-skin

So now autonomous cars are also 'racially biased'? Not in a conventional sense, but they have trouble seeing dark skinned pedestrians.

But they can see dark cars?

A bit crazy.

mr_bill

Wonder how we do? Well, that isn’t good.

-mr. bill

Maelochs

Well .... one solution would be to make pedestrians wear clothes.

Maelochs

"The report, “Predictive Inequity in Object Detection,” should be taken with a grain of salt. It hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed. It didn’t test any object-detection models actually being used by self-driving cars, nor did it leverage any training datasets actually being used by autonomous vehicle manufacturers."

Basically they made up their own detection device. it didn't work, so they decided no one else's did either.

mr_bill

Hoopdriver

Another "newsy" announcement about a hobbled non-peer reviewed study based on iffy data. If the intent was to stir things up - mission accomplished.

BobbyG

Reminds me off this:

MoAlpha

And whom does this surprise?

The designers have to get that ~2:1 passing ratio right. Dangerous to put vehicles that behave atypically out there.

indyfabz

This sucks:

https://6abc.com/tesla-driver-appears...eeway/5171927/

Maelochs

"Tesla says the autopilot function is intended to increase safety on the roads." and also makes it easier to plow into parked fire trucks.

Leisesturm

Autopilots in aircraft at cruising altitude in monitored airspace are one thing, autopilots in autonomous vehicles operating on public roads ... ... oh the hubris! What were they smoking? Countless people are paralyzed from the neck down because they took their eyes off the prize for less time than it takes to say "pardonez moi, do you have any WHAP ... things happen fast out among the heathen and as good as cybernetic neural nets are in the lab they have proven to have blindspots (swidt?) when turned loose in full autonomous mode. Surely, for many years to come, the successful implementation of AI guidance of ground based motor vehicles will be as 'driver assist' systems using the effective sensor suites of the full autonomous systems to augment human intelligence? There are presently drowsy driver detection systems, blindspot monitoring systems, and close vehicle collision warning systems in place in regular production automobiles and these are being expanded upon with out of lane warnings and other semi-automatic guidance systems. Full on AI is NOT intended to keep cyclists safe! Full on AI is intended to replace fleet operators (including taxi and limousine operators) so that owners of trucking and rideshare concerns can reduce their labor costs just that of mechanics and administrative personnel. AV is an answer to a question no rational person asked. We should probably fight their adoption.

Maelochs

You know why I hate "studies" like this one? because this is what they are Really all about: Self-Driving Cars Are More Likely To Run You Over If You Are Black, Study Suggests (https://www.iflscience.com/technolog...PHSONtemHGaTWI)

I see this all day long, everyday. Scientists looking to get publicity to help get future funding release some lame, half-baked "study" with a questionable conclusion and then some publicist rights a click-bait headline which totally obscure the fact that the study didn't actually test any of the systems in use, not any explanation of Why the data seemed to show what it did. Some headline writing editor whose Job is the Create Click-Bait headlines, not to tell the truth, then warps the message even further, suggesting a programmed-in bias against people of color.

Now there will be millions of people saying "AVs are designed to kill blacks and Hispanics."

My question is still----since almost everyone is Clothed when out in public, how is this working or not working exactly (of course, no one knows whether the current systems even do this, but .... ) Does the color of the clothes makes a difference? Do people wearing gloves and hats get noticed more or less? What exactly leads to this outcome? No one knows. But .... the publicist for this group made sure the headline was sensational, and now that sensationalized headline is used to get clicks on websites---while glossing over the fact that no one knows if the systems being used by the big AV manufacturers share the same problems.

mr_bill

indyfabz

That would be a stupid thing to stage since it creates negative publicity. But you keep up the good work, dude. Get any new bikes this week?

Skipjacks

This is EXACTLY what I thought of too when I saw the OP!!! HAHAHAHA

Better Off Ted was a short lives single season comedy. It was okay...but that one episode was one of the funniest half hours of comedy in television history.

mr_bill

BTW, how stuff like this goes viral in the popular press, see what happened to BDD100K.

Still want to blindly attribute malice to geeks?

Oh, besides that backstory, note "Our dataset is crowd-sourced, and covers a very large area and diverse visual phenomena (indeed significantly more diverse than previous efforts, in our view), but it is very clearly limited to monocular RGB image data and associated mobile device metadata."

-mr. bill

bakerjw

Why does this make me thing of National Lampoon's vacation where Clark fell asleep at the wheel.

Road Fan

Just to be clear, this study did not say that vehicles will show this biased behavior. It shows (IMO) that biased behavior is possible.

The question for vehicles is, will cars accurately detect all objects actually located in the field of traffic, classify all the pedestrians as such without errors, and determine the relevant aspects of the absolute and relative motion of the pedestrians to determine if they are placed at hazard by the motion of the host vehicle. I don't think this can be assessed with accuracy when the test did not involve any actual prototype or production vehicle sensors, did not involve any vehicle-based vision-processing and object detection/classification algorithms, and did not use any actual automotive object processing.

The car does not need to identify whom has been detected (Congress person versus convict). It does need to determine if it is a person, if it is in-path or when it will be in-path, and how the risk of collision changes with relative vehicle-to-object motion. That's not the problem these researchers set for themselves.

Other vision systems in cars look at the driver (for SAE automation levels 4 and below) to determine alertness, direction of gaze, and other characteristics that could assess safety of driver actions. While these look at the face, they also do not need to recognize who the driver is nor the race, gender or size. Race, gender, size, clothing, hairstyle, cleanliness, cosmetics, health, morphology variations natural or not, eyewear and possibly other points affect these determinations, but the basic requirements are that the head pose, eyelid status, possible gaze direction, and eye motion be detected. Not identity.

Sometimes the real problem is easier than what the researchers have available to them.

But, it is necessary to impose design and compliance/verification/validation testing requirements for such systems to direct the designer (including his/her company) to ensure no loss of relevant sensor performance exists, and to verify that the performance is effectively equal across the population. In the United States the only regulatory agency that is able to constrain automotive design is NHTSA, and their Congressional mandate only permits them to act reactively. The US structure of liability law values that safety-related design must follow state-of-the-art practices to ensure safety, or due diligence might not have been followed. This usually motivates companies within the US auto industry to "do the right thing," but ... it's not a regulation. Europe mandates following state-of-the-art practices and verifying that such has in fact been done, achieving firm regulation to their standards.

Ensuring equality across the population of design teams does not necessarily solve the problem (how do you make sure that all design teams have a member who has had significant facial injuries, for just one example requirement?), because all industrial technical professionals are subject to pressure from the corporate structure. An engineer from India, one from Africa, one from USA, and one from Asia are all subjected to cost and timing pressure when performing product design. And all are capable of eliminating biases from their thinking in their work, if they actually have any biases. And being human, imperfections can creep in despite best efforts of all involved.

This paper shows a potential for biased behavior and that training methodology may help to remove it, but it is not directly applicable for vehicles as it is.

scott967

I've seen a few critiques lately of training sets used for AI resulting in AI "learning" the wrong things.

scott s.
.

greatscott

What they're not telling you is that these systems can't see black cars either, but why would fake news want you to know about that? they want you think there is a conspiracy against black people by big corporations ran by rich white folk who run around with the KKK hanging black people at night, so some genius KKK techy came up with a way to kill black people and not make it look like a hanging, but I seriously doubt it's some sort of racist conspiracy that our fake news wants us to believe. By the way, I have yet to meet an intelligent KKK member, even the leader of the klan is as dumb as a box of rocks!

https://www.popularmechanics.com/car...rs-less-black/

Maelochs

Interesting.

Well, hey, if AVs reduce accidents by 5/6 I will be happy. I don't own any black jerseys or blacked-out bikes.

greatscott

The obvious leap of thought with that knowledge of black is like you said, you don't want to be wearing black clothing anymore while riding. Personally I don't understand why they are rushing this autonomous technology into the market place, it isn't ready for prime time, nor do I think it will be ready for at least 15 years, yet they're rushing it out, I personally don't want to be a Guinea Pig on the street for their testing of this product; and then there is the murky world of liability, who is going to get sued if a autonomous car hits a person and kills them or severely injuries them? The driver? The driver will blame the technology, the company that made the tech? they'll blame the driver, this is going to be a weird legal issue that's for sure. I will never buy a car that has that technology in it, and if I have to because I can't find a car without it then I will disengage it, I've been driving for almost 50 years and I have yet to hit a black person!! More to the point, I have never had an at fault accident, so I think I can trust my driving abilities over that of some technology system.

Of course with todays idiots driving and texting a car with a stopping system is a good idea, but why should WE pay to have that stopping system or autonomous systems in our cars when all they really have to do, and it's a heck of a lot cheaper, is to make all cell phones shut off automatically at speeds greater than 15 mph, and actually the technology to do that is already in the phone! And the only number you could enter into the phone and have it work at speeds over 15 is 911. We pay far too much for cars now, and these damn autonomous systems are making them even more expensive, all so we can yak and text on a phone...it's not worth it, we all got a long just fine driving our cars without the need of wanting to be on the phone the whole time driving, I'm sure we could get along fine without them again.

By the way, this autonomous system was also having troubles "seeing" cyclists...I can assume the rich corporate types that created this system hate cyclists as well.

Digital_Cowboy

I know someone who swears up and down that fully autonomous self-driving cars are not only the "wave of the future," BUT that they'll be here LONG before the actual experts have predicted that they'll be here. Not only that but he thinks that they'll "replace" public/mass transit, and that they'll be a boon to both cyclist, but pedestrian safety.

About the only thing that I agree with him with regards to fully autonomous self-driving cars, is that we as cyclists and pedestrians shouldn't have to wear any sort of transponder so that they'll know where we are.

He is also very surprised that people are still talking about the failures from companies like Tesla and Uber instead of all of the successes.

greatscott

Let's see, the Tesla and the Uber are not suppose to be fully autonomous, in fact the 3 out of 4 deaths were by Tesla, and Tesla blamed the driver for not paying attention to their driving! The one was an Uber car that hit a pedestrian that the system never saw but there was no driver in the car but rather a backup driver? Uber paid out damages to the family, but now the backup driver is in huge legal trouble because she was watching a show on her phone, and why not? she was told she was just the backup driver and that the car did the driving and she wouldn't have too. Uber gets blamed for experimenting with what is called potentially deadly technology in public. But this example shows that not only are these systems not ready but it also shows that a person who is suppose to be observing what is going on around them like they would if they were driving is lulled into a false sense of security. The exact same lulled into a false sense of security happened to all the Tesla car drivers as well. It's too easy to be fooled by the car supposedly driving itself.

I-Like-To-Bike

Incorrect, the system hardware "saw" the pedestrian approximately six seconds before impact but the system software did not interpret and/or react as a driver would/should respond by initiating any braking and steering accident avoidance maneuvers. The system just maintained its velocity and direction without change until impact.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/24/uber...cials-say.html