An interesting article on the problem of autonomous cars sharing the roads with human drivers:
“It’s going to be really hard for an autonomous vehicle, even if it hears the honk, to figure out what that honk means,” Kalra said.
Yup.
5 thoughts on “Driving “Dialects””
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Why will this be difficult? The self driving car will likely have MUCH better situational awareness than the human driver honking and will already have recognised the problem.
The problem is we will begin to adapt the road to automation until human drivers are illegal/
Actually it’s worse then that. The day is approaching where all our movements will be tracked, both physical and financial followed closely by the requirement to be authorized. When that day comes most people will think, “how could it be any other way? That would be anarchy!”
Freedom will then be redefined to “having the authorization to do stuff.”
It’s difficult for humans, too. I would estimate it takes me at least 2-3 seconds to grok what a given honk means. If I ever do. In the meantime I’m not concentrating on the rest of the road. And then there is probably 2-5 minutes where I am distracted by it. I honestly can’t imagine how a competent machine learning team could do worse than me after hearing a honk.
It’s difficult for humans, too. I would estimate it takes me at least 2-3 seconds to grok what a given honk means.
Takes me less than a second to raise the one finger salute but several minutes of rumination about why someone was honking. Then when I stop someplace, will inspect the car and if nothing is wrong, mutter mean things under my breath.
This could really be abused by normals messing with robots. Honk the horn and gesture like they have something wrong with the car. The robot pulls over so the human can inspect for something the sensors missed.