Blog – Page 6045

A new “common-sense” approach to computer vision enables artificial intelligence that interprets scenes more accurately than other systems do.

Computer vision systems sometimes make inferences about a scene that fly in the face of common sense. For example, if a robot were processing a scene of a dinner table, it might completely ignore a bowl that is visible to any human observer, estimate that a plate is floating above the table, or misperceive a fork to be penetrating a bowl rather than leaning against it.

Move that computer vision system to a self-driving car and the stakes become much higher — for example, such systems have failed to detect emergency vehicles and pedestrians crossing the street.

Tesla is allowing drivers — yes, the person behind the wheel who is ideally preoccupied with tasks such as “steering” — to play video games on its vehicles’ massive console touchscreens while driving.

“I only did it for like five seconds and then turned it off,” Tesla owner Vince Patton told The New York Times. “I’m astonished. To me, it just seems inherently dangerous.”

The feature has reportedly been available for some time. Given that the company is already facing fierce scrutiny for rolling out its still unfinished Full Self-Driving beta to customers, it’s not exactly a good look.