Driverless Cars Are Worse at Spotting Kids and Dark-Skinned People, Study Says
Driverless Cars Are Worse at Spotting Kids and Dark-Skinned People, Study Says
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.
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.
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
This seems like a big deal.