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A Tragic Loss

teslamotors.com

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Re: A Tragic Loss

#411

Post by UnoriginalGuy »

vlad wrote: post #284
daveguy wrote: post #203

A direct reply from Elon Musk on twitter about why radar did not recognize the white side of a trailer across the road when the camera missed it: "Radar tunes out what looks like an overhead road sign to avoid false braking events" https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/748620607105839104 EDIT: When the "overhead sign" comes down below overhead clearance of the vehicle the signal should not be masked. There should have…

A reply to that tweet: "our new Prius applied the brakes while driving under an overpass. I'm glad no one was following too close"

The Prius uses cameras not radar, and I've driven under hundreds of overpasses without incident.

More likely someone confusing the brake warning with the auto-braking shutdown warning. Because it uses optical cameras, driving into bright sunlight or into deep shadows can cause the system to shut down momentarily, and it beeps to let you know.

Even best case scenario that tweet has nothing to do with this incident because the technology and systems are different. Worst case it never applied the brakes at all, and the driver got confused.

Re: A Tragic Loss

#412

Post by protomyth »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #229
xiphias wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having the same fatality statistic was not enough for Google to bring autonomous driving into production. Many people think that it should be at least an order of magnitude safer than manual driving

Sure. The problem with this is statistics: you need to have your autonomous cars travel at least 100 billion miles before you can confidently say they're an order of magnitude safer. A normal car drives about 100 000 miles in 10 years. You then need one million autonomous cars driving around for a decade before you even know whether they're safer!

> A normal car drives about 100 000 miles in 10 years.

Can you give a source for that number as it seems a bit low given warranty numbers.

Re: A Tragic Loss

#413

Post by Kalium »

imh wrote: post #403
Kalium wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every life is special. Every life is sacred. Every life has rights and hopes and dreams and its own special contribution to humanity. Yet, losses have to be weighed against the alternatives. Would you think it ethical to not put out seat belts, because they don't save lives in all cases? Or may even be harmful in some circumstances? "Acceptable losses" is certainly a distasteful and dehumanizing perspective. Yet how…

Would we let a doctor murder a random healthy person to harvest organs to save ten lives? When we talk about weighing alternatives, it's like you say: It won't save lives in all cases, but it will decrease the loss of innocent lives overall.

That introduces an imminent death that wasn't there before. Doing so with a deliberate decision changes the whole thing.

This is more like vaccines. They protect a great many lives from events not deliberately introduced at the cost of a small number of bad reactions. Is that number more than zero? Yes. Does it feel small if it's someone you love? No. Is humanity as a whole better off for polio vaccines? Yes, absolutely.

When we talk about weighing alternatives, we're talking about considering the status quo as an option that might be actively chosen rather than a privileged position.

Re: A Tragic Loss

#415

Post by taneq »

jacquesm wrote: post #94

This is why driving AI is 'all or nothing' for me. Assisted systems will lead to drivers paying less attention as the systems get better. The figures quoted by Tesla seem impressive but you have to assume the majority of the drivers is still paying attention all the time . As auto-pilots get better you'll see them paying attention less and then the accident rate will go up, not down for a while at least until the bug…

Precisely. This half-way 'self driving but if something goes wrong it's the human's fault' is a terrible idea, because the more reliable it gets (while still being a 'driver assist' rather than committing to actually being a fully autonomous control system) the more likely the human is to not be paying attention when the shit hits the fan.

Re: A Tragic Loss

#416

Post by protomyth »

brokenmachine wrote: post #393
Nadya wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not who you are questioning. There are already videos of assisted-driving cars avoiding accidents which likely would have been fatal. We already know they can potentially save lives. It's something we already accept for flying. Autopilot in planes has resulted in deaths of crew and passengers. So we have precedent in at least one mode of transportation. Drivers get T-boned or rear end other people all the time. Those…

Planes don't have to deal with semi-trailers or wildlife appearing suddenly in their path regularly either. Autopilot in a plane doesn't have to deal with obstacles besides the odd mountain here and there. So I'd say that in many (most?) ways it's easier and safer to autopilot a plane than a car, and as you say, even planes with autopilot have failed.

> Planes don't have to deal with semi-trailers or wildlife appearing suddenly in their path regularly either

Planes most certainly do have to deal with wildlife (e.g. birds) appearing suddenly in their path regularly.

Re: A Tragic Loss

#418

Post by protomyth »

Twirrim wrote: post #289
stcredzero wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

assuming every Ford is just as safe as a Tesla, you quite literally get thousands of fatalities a year. Which is about right.

According to wikipedia there were 32,675 fatalities in 2014. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i... , around 10 fatalities per 100,000 population.

The CDC data with comparison to other ways people die in the US is at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm

Table 28 of http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/hus15.pdf#019 is relevant to this discussion

Re: A Tragic Loss

#419

Post by taneq »

archagon wrote: post #221

This is on the road to being off topic, but still relevant given some of the commentary in this thread: It makes me a bit sad that the political zeitgeist in the tech community is leaning towards "acceptable losses" when it comes to accidents in automated cars, to the point of pre-emptively expressing disdain at ordinary people reacting negatively to such news. I sense it's going to become harder and harder for us to…

> We're perfectly happy to let technology (literally) throw anonymous individuals under the bus as long as less people die overall, but what if it's you that gets hit by an auto?

If it's me that gets hit by a car, what do I care whether it was driven by squishy grey matter or solid silicon? It's not like AI-driven vehicles hurt more. I'm dead either way.

So assuming it IS going to be me that gets hit, I'd prefer we use whichever driving mechanism is less likely to be checking Facebook or texting its friends while in control of a ton of metal moving at 100km/h.

Re: A Tragic Loss

#420

Post by JTenerife »

The reason why most other manufacturers haven't released their autonomous driving is not that their systems aren't as sophisticated as Tesla's, but that all systems out there aren't ready yet. Tesla is stellar in many ways but to release their autopilot was way to risky.
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