New research shows driverless car software is significantly more accurate with adults and light skinned people than children and dark-skinned people.
Great, self-driving cars can be childfree and racist, just like some human drivers!
this is misleading. if you read the study, you’ll see the aggregate miss rate is much worse for dark skinned people and children, but that’s weighted by the models that haven’t been trained specifically for use with pedestrian detection. the pedestrian detection models, i.e. the ones people actually are going to use, were within 1% as accurate for skin tone, and were about 10% worse at detecting kids. since kids are already harder to see for human drivers, that seems much more similar to human performance.
the other thing it doesn’t mention is how bad they are at detecting people in general. the best one misses people roughly 5% of the time, which seems pretty high for something that’s supposed to be driving a car
Statistically there are going to be some things they will do worse at but is it significant?
Researchers ran more than 8,000 images through the software and found that the self-driving car systems were nearly 20% better at detecting adult pedestrians than kids, and more than 7.5% better at detecting light-skinned pedestrians over dark-skinned ones. The AI were even worse at spotting dark-skinned people in low light and low settings, making the tech even less safe at night.
I’d say a 20% difference is pretty significant.
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I would say that’s not actually at all a relevant question, but a form of whataboutism, since this is looking at just driverless programs and comparing how they are with themselves, and what problems with programming and training models could result in that difference.
The crucial point in autonomous car adaption ought to be whether they are better than humans or not. So if they hit fewer children than human drivers do, they’re better, even if they were a further 20% better at avoiding adults.
a form of whataboutism
Agreed. The argument of matching autonomous vehicle perceptions with human perception should be completely irrelevant. When an autonomous vehicle has that significant of a margin of error, who ends up being responsible for the accident? When humans are involved, the driver is responsible. Is a manufacturer liable in the event of all autonomous vehicle caused accidents? Guaranteed corporations will rally and lobby to make that not possible. The situations aren’t the same and a huge selling point of autonomous vehicles has always been that they should be the safest form of piloting a vehicle.
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This seems like a big deal.
