Humans can drive cars

It seems interesting that people are just barely competent enough to drive. Maybe it's just that they drive as fast as they can. If we were more competent, we'd drive fast enough that we'd crash if we were drunk. If we were less competent, we'd drive slow enough that we wouldn't crash unless we were drunk.

Here's an interesting contrast: When I first moved from a small town to a big city I was fascinated by the fact that people cannot perform the simple task of walking down the street. Their attention is constantly being drawn to other things, they apparently have no awareness of or concern for other people, etc. They're constantly stopping dead in front of you, even though they're certainly aware they're on a busy street. They talk on their phones, text, play games, they even walk along reading novels. If they meet someone they know, they'll stop and have a conversation without moving out of the way. When somebody approaches a bus stop, they'll simply stop dead and won't move to the side, even if they're blocking the only way through. To be sure, people can navigate around other people, but as soon as they do something else (stop, answer their phone, meet someone they know, etc), the fact that they're on a busy street apparently disappears from their consciousness. There's a complete absence of vigilance (and courtesy).

If people drove cars the same way they walk on a busy street there'd be dozens of accidents per mile. I guess the lesson is that human beings are capable of being careful when they need to be but most of the time they don't need to be.

Most things are easier than they look, but writing software that's free of bugs seems to be an exception: people are terrible at it. So I don't share your hope.

Car crash is the first death cause among some demographics (15-25 years old). It's almost half of total accidental death. It's almost 2% of total death. And many more are badly wounded, often crippled for life.

So I would hardly say that humans can drive cars. At least, they can't do it safely.

I got about the opposite change; when I was a 12 years old, driving looked normal to me. Something everyone does. And then I tried to do it, and realized how a split second of inattention can wreak your life or someone's else. And I looked at statistics, of cars crash being a very significant cause of death or crippling injuries. Of people having more chance to die in a car accident between home and airport than flying in the plane. And I realized humans can't drive safely - it's just something we pretend because car crash being a daily occurrence, they don't make it to the news.

Humans can walk. Pretty crazy huh? Constantly balancing tens of kilograms on top of constantly shifting upside-down pendulums, one (or okay, a few) misstep(s) from death (depending on where you are walking). We can even learn to do so on stilts, or ride bikes, or pilot aircraft, or ride a surfboard.

We are very complex adaptive learning systems that can internalize and automate a huge range of activities that would result in disaster if the feedbacks fall out of range. it's a generalizeable ability.

I've always felt similarly, and found myself thinking about how plastic we are with our own body sense - we seem to be very capable of remapping our motor functions into completely new devices, cars, video game characters, etc, and gaining a sense of body with them. This seem to be supported by how tied driving is to which part of your body performs the control - for me, going from a hand clutch on a motorcycle to a foot clutch completely failed to translate the skill. I have no idea if this is neurologically correct.

On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science by prof. dr. Edsger W. Dijkstra:

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036.html

I think the issue is that driving is a process of tiny course corrections, where if you're slightly off course you don't die. But, programs are fragile. One bit wrong and you die.

I just learned to ride a bicycle two months ago, and some part of my brain still refuses to believe it's physically possible at all.

Here is my understanding of the issue.

Traffic works well because driving is one of the activities that is relatively easy to internalize and perform as a matter of habit, like walking or riding a bicycle. System 1 thinking is usually fast, predictable and reliable. You don't need to "focus intently". It is true that you cannot take your eyes off the road (or, more accurately, shift your passive attention (see http://www.cdl.org/resource-library/articles/attention2.php) away) for longer than a brief instant, otherwise the subconscious feedback loop which includes visual and auditory inputs, your brain, your extremities and the vehicle breaks down, not because you have to consciously "focus intently". The "magnets in the road" are built into the area of your brain that controls your reflexes. That's why learning safe driving habits is so important.

Not everyone is equally capable of internalizing the driving process, or put in enough time to do so. These people white-knuckle it, constantly engaging their full slow and unsuitable System 2 in the loop, and consequently they find the normal driving activity exhausting, rather than relaxing. It is often easy to notice these drivers by their slow reaction to traffic lights, overly careful driving style and by generally overcompensating for road hazards. After all, System 2 is taxing, slow and unreliable. Ironically, these people may be safer drivers overall, since they never let their attention wander.

This passive attention escalates to active when something unusual happens, like when you hear emergency vehicles and have to make decisions which are not internalized. Or when some other car wanders into your lane, or if the traffic stops unexpectedly. Anything that either breaks the passive attention loop or causes this escalation from passive to active attention to slip is dangerous: texting, arguing, listening to a child fussing in the back, concentrating on a phone call.

In contrast, there are activities which do not naturally lend themselves to internalizing. Programming is one of them. Even after doing it for decades, people are still as consciously engaged in it as they did in the beginning. Thus your hope for a safe AGI "by analogy with safe driving", seems misplaced to me.

Maybe creating a safe AGI isn't as impossible as it looks to me. Maybe it isn't beyond human capabilities. Maybe.

Or, maybe creating any AGI (which isn't an uploaded human mind) is beyond human capabilities.

Yes, humans can drive, and that fact is literally remarkable. You have remarked upon it, I am remarking now upon it.

Can we drive well? Compared to what would be the interesting question. By all reports, self-driving cars will be much safer than human driven cars. By contrast, self-walking machines do not generally outperform humans or animals, machines for image recognition or voice recognition do not outperform humans. Perhaps it is going to be harder for us to beat, or even equal, with machines what we have spent millions of years evolving, while it may be much easier for us to beat with machines things we were not evolved to do. Presumably in self-driving cars, many aspects of other-vehicle and road situational awareness are hard to beat a human at, but the overall decision making algorithm of how to drive turns out to be easy to beat humans at, so that even early attempts are much safer than humans manage.

Note parenthetically that safer really does mean better if the cars are going the same speed as humans. Automated car system designers will have a tradeoff to make as time goes on between increasing the speed of automated car traffic at the expense of higher accident rates. There will be some optimum based on some implicit, or perhaps by then we will have matured enough to make it explicit, estimate of the value of a human life.

SO yeah, we can drive, but because we did not evolve to drive we do it poorly enough that even the earliest driving machines will be much better at it than us.

Somewhat off topic, but I feel the need to point out that traffic doesn't really work all that well when you consider the space of possible transportation systems we could realistically implement.

First Google result says that "by car insurance industry estimates, you will file a claim for a collision about once every 17.9 years".

Poisoning, Accidental Falls, and Car Accidents each make up about a quarter of all accidental deaths. Breaking down by age, driving is also the leading cause of death for ages 18-24 (and the risk of driving does fall a bit with increasing age - but not by that much. Mostly its severity is just eclipsed by other, health related things)

So... falls are presumably related to aging , but a good way to prevent large number of deaths among youth would be to create small-but-accident-preventing barriers to self-administration of potentially lethal substances, and replacing driving with something else.

I suspect that we'd all be much more wary of driving and painkillers (particularly for young people), if we rationally evaluated risk.

Yes, I have noticed this as well.

And also -- evolution built us to deal with speeds of, say, 10 km/h; and not 100 km/h.

Also, evolution built us with a kinesiological sense to know where every part of our human body is at any moment; and not to know where a huge hunk of metal is at any moment. Yet we can park centimeters away from another car, and even drive 100 km/h only decimeters away from another car.

A related observation I have made as a youth was:

How does it come that nobody (me included) seems to make any small missteps bringing certain death or injury?

I mean its just one small step to fall before a car, a train, down a bridge, out of a window, ... Its just one wrong grip and you gulp acid, poison, wrong medicine.

Sure it happens sometimes (when?). But it doesn't seem to happen for me or most persons.

And the answer: There are lots of safety measures and control feedback cycles in the human brain for reducing the chance of exactly this to almost zero.

Obviously selected massively for by evolution. But the exact meachnism is nonetheless somewhat elusive.

But what amazed me as a child was that people can drive cars.

Still amazes me. And I live up in the Pacific Northwest, where people drive in a sane fashion. But people are bat shit crazy on the NJ Turnpike, or LA freeways, on how closely they'll tailgate at 70mph+.

Funny that this has occurred to a lot of us. I wonder if that's another LW peculiarity, or if it's generally widespread.

I'm occasionally still amazed that traffic works as well as it does. I must say I'm hesitant at using this example to claim that people are more capable than you might think. Driving is just something humans happen to be competent at. There are plenty of things roughly as complicated as driving a car that people aren't surprisingly good at.

This also reminded my of something people said at the latest meetup. At least two people told me they had deliberately tried to get more scared of driving, because they had noticed they had less fear in a car than on a plane despite planes being safer.

Good post - this has struck me too. By the way, this is a good example showing that social life and human behaviour in general is much more "law-like" and indeed predictable than many "anti-positivists" in the social sciences would have it. Car drivers' behaviour is remarkably regular and predictable, even though it is, as you say, in no way trivial to drive a car.

Still many mistakes which end up causing accidents are made, and thus I'm sure automatized or semi-automatized cars could decrease the number of accidents hugely.

People can drive cars - but only just barely. You can't do it safely even while only mildly inebriated.

How are our speed limits determined? Is it reasonable to assume that they're set such that it's just within our abilities to drive that fast (plus some margin, of course)?

I've thought about the same thing. Automobiles are relatively unsafe compared to other modes of tranportation, but it is amazing to me how commutes in major metro areas seem so free of major accidents on the majority of days.

However, though I'm pretty ignorant of programming, I'm not sure your analogy works.

Driving is hard. But there are lots of mechanisms in play that make it easy enough. Traffic signals and road markings, for instance. Plus, even if there is a crash, damage is limited in scope based on the nature of the situation.

From what I can gather in regard to LW's views of theoretical AI, there are no helpful lanes or traffic lights. And bad code that leads to UFAI doesn't just cause an isolated incident... it spawns a revolution of hyper-powerful agents with ends in direct conflict to humans.

A fender bender can become the end of existence.

Maybe creating a safe AGI isn't as impossible as it looks to me. Maybe it isn't beyond human capabilities. Maybe.

Maybe humans are not safe AGI. Maybe both the idea of "safety" and the idea of "general intelligence" are ill-defined.

3. Well, this does not really check out. We do take our eyes off the road, for a second. Sometimes. There are somewhat safe moments to do this and less safe ones. When several hundred meters of highway ahead are empty, the road we will travel in those seconds + some safety-cushion, and it is straight, it is somewhat safe.     You are just exxagerating a bit. On a long boring ride or drive, the mind is not really occupied by the task, the eyes can still safely look at the road, ready to react with exactly one single thing to anything unforeseen: appyling the brakes. 

math mistake, ignore

You seem to say that the difficult part of driving is staying in the lane. That's by far the easiest part of driving, both for humans and computers.