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

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

  • stopthatgirl7OP
    10•10 months ago

    I’m sure that will be of great comfort to any dark-skinned person or child that gets hit.

    If those are known, expected issues? Then they had better program around it before putting driverless cars out on the road where dark-skinned people and children are not theoreticals but realities.

    • @lefixxx@lemmy.world
      18•10 months ago

      In order to make the software detect the same you have to make it detect white adult less.

      Comparing the performance between races says nothing about how safe a driverless car is. I am sure that the chances of a human hitting a dark skinned person dwarfs the chances of a driverless car. Trying to convince people driverless cars are racist only delays development, adoption and lawmaking which means more flawed meatbags behind the wheel which means more car accident deaths.

    • @theneverfox@pawb.socialEnglish
      2•10 months ago

      What he’s saying is these aren’t issues, they’re like saying a masculine voice can be heard from further away. Deeper voices just carry better

      Part of it is bias/training data - we can fix that. But then you’re still left with the fact children are smaller and dark skinned people are darker - if you use the human visible range of light (which most cameras do), they’re always going to be harder to detect than larger more reflective people.

      Our eyes and brains have an insane ability to focus and deal with varying levels of light, literally each cell adapts individually to each wavelength. We don’t have much issue picking out anyone until it becomes extremely dark or extremely far away - it’s not because the problem is easy, it’s because humans are incredible at it

      • @PetDinosaurs@lemmy.world
        1•10 months ago

        Thank you.

        You seem to be one of the people who understand this better.

        And even humans are not incredible at it. It’s just inherently harder to identify the areas where there are less signal. I’d love to see a study, but see my edit and actually quantifying the equality we’re after.

        Reality/physics/science/PDEs (whatever) work on “differences”. The less difference, the harder.