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George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

electrek.co

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Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#401

Post by stale2002 »

saosebastiao wrote: post #346
stale2002 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true. Lots of accidents happen in "good" conditions because humans suck at driving. The way you compare, is you give a self driving car to a person, and compare actually usage for that person, and see if owning a self driving car increases or reduces accidents for that person. Being perfect only half the time is still revolutionary.

I have a 100% perfect safety record over probably hundreds of thousands of miles of driving a class B truck with my knees instead of my hands, using cruise control, on straight empty highways in Nevada, Idaho, and Utah, with perfect weather and good road conditions. There's nothing revolutionary about my ability to perfectly drive with my knees...I just very carefully selected the conditions where I was willing to do…

You may have that perfect safety record, but other people don't.

People still crash every day in good conditions. That's thousands of lives that could be saved with our imperfect, sunny weather on the highway only self driving car.

You underestimate how bad human drivers are even in perfect conditions.

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#402

Post by azinman2 »

strathmeyer wrote: post #382
thfuran wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and humans require certification before they are permitted to drive vehicles on public roadways.

To get that certification, do they test you first, or do they wait for you to screw up and then take it away from you??

We know, being humans, and that we have the ability to process lots of complex information in a way that's very difficult for computers to replicate. Hard AI doesn't actually exist (yet). We also have a 100 years of humans driving cars worldwide so we understand well what they're good at and what they're not, so laws & safety designs take all of this into consideration.

Each computer system will be encountering new, diverse things in the real world without a good understanding of how they'll perform. There are lots of crazy hard problems here that no one has solved yet. So to suggest we just automatically trust it because humans make mistakes is foolish when the consequences are so high. If someone came out with a surgery "autopilot" tomorrow, would you suggest it start giving triple bypass surgeries right away without FDA approval because humans make errors too?

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#403

Post by pnathan »

forgottenpass wrote: post #125
pnathan wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is not the rap but the ride that you can't beat. I think that's the reason he's bailing - he doesn't have the lawyer crew, he doesn't want to play the law game - he just wants to create things.

Risk analysis is not a "law game," it is engineering , and a fundamental part of building safety critical products. Software development has historically gotten away with ignoring risk because - outside of specialized domains - the worst of the worst case scenarios were broadly acceptable. But when a developer moves into those domains, the worst case changes from "oh no the website is down" to bodily harm. They shoul…

You're conflating law and risk. One turns out to be a reified political thing reflecting the powers that be of times now and past, the other thing is an engineering concern. I'm quite personally familiar with the specialized domains of which you speak. I would say that our personal ethic of engineering quality totally dominated any legal questions. I'd guess we could have smokescreened any legal paperwork if we really wanted (cough, BMW emissions scandal cough). But, we didn't! We cared, as a company.

Re comma.io - having to play the legal game is a substantial existential risk, only mitigateable with very well paid lawyers and a decent PR crew. That's very different than providing an engineering report. I would guess that if they get rolling in China, they will come back and have the funding and will to hire lawyers to sort the problems.

If you want to contemplate the difficulty of doing engineering vs. surviving the law, consider Tesla's issues selling its car.

It's not the rap - it's the ride.

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#404

Post by gwbas1c »

The attitude in the tech industry is to ship buggy products before they are complete. I'm so tired of wasting my time with buggy crap.

I think it's awesome that a government agency said that this practice is not acceptable when someone's life is at stake.

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#405

Post by komali2 »

sangnoir wrote: post #235
komali2 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>inherently a danger Can you expand on how they are an inherent danger, rather than a possible danger? I only challenge you because Tesla has published several occasions where Autopilot has possibly saved lives by auto-braking.

> Can you expand on how they are an inherent danger, rather than a possible danger? I do not believe those words ( inherent & possible ) are in any way mutually exclusive. They might even mean the same thing when describing a latent danger. So I do not quite understand the basis of your challenge. Also, I'm not parent poster.

My understanding of inherent might not be right, then. I think of it as "it is definitely a danger, and thus can only be described as dangerous," which I would argue is not mutually exclusive with possible but is mutually exclusive with "not always dangerous and maybe even anti-dangerous."

So what I mean is, the autopilot could turn out to be safer than manual, in my mind, so how is it "inherently" dangerous.

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#406

Post by komali2 »

sangnoir wrote: post #235
komali2 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>inherently a danger Can you expand on how they are an inherent danger, rather than a possible danger? I only challenge you because Tesla has published several occasions where Autopilot has possibly saved lives by auto-braking.

> Can you expand on how they are an inherent danger, rather than a possible danger? I do not believe those words ( inherent & possible ) are in any way mutually exclusive. They might even mean the same thing when describing a latent danger. So I do not quite understand the basis of your challenge. Also, I'm not parent poster.

My understanding of inherent might not be right, then. I think of it as "it is definitely a danger, and thus can only be described as dangerous," which I would argue is not mutually exclusive with possible but is mutually exclusive with "not always dangerous and maybe even anti-dangerous."

So what I mean is, the autopilot could turn out to be safer than manual, in my mind, so how is it "inherently" dangerous.

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#407

Post by david-given »

DanBC wrote: post #369
david-given wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to dispute your point, which I agree with, but --- argon metering? How can that be a safety or environmental hazard? You don't want to lose it overboard because it's expensive, but it's a noble gas, so it should be inert, right? What am I missing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inert_gas_asphyxiation It can displace air, causing death. Here's one example of a death, although here they deliberately put the argon in there: http://maritimeaccident.org/2014/08/safespace-argoninert-gas...

True, but so can nitrogen, propane, neon, carbon dioxide, hydrogen and flourine (although you'd need to be pretty unlucky to survive long enough breathing flourine to asphyxiate).

I know argon is denser than air at STP, and so tends to accumulate in enclosed spaces --- but propane is even denser. (Leading cause of catastrophic accident in yachts: gas explosion. It's not like you can have a hole in the bottom to let the gas out in the event of a leak.) And any plant which deals with liquid gasses is going to prioritise ventilation anyway, which should easily deal with any gas buildup.

The parent sounded like there was something specific to do with argon which made the regulators tetchy, and I wouldn't have thought that asphyxiation risk would be enough. Am I wrong?

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#408

Post by bradjohnson »

jdonaldson wrote: post #150
BurningFrog wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the letter, it's a lot more than "answering a few questions". He gets two weeks to provide an enormous amount of detailed information about the product, I assume under threat of legal consequences if any of it contains an error, interspersed with lots of reminders that they can and will close down his business if they feel like it.

Yeah, the extremely short timeline here combined with excessive fines puts this squarely in "F-You" territory.

They specifically state in the instructions "If you are unable to respond because you do not have all or any of the precise information needed to respond, provide an estimate." This would imply that they are willing to postpone the fine given that he is actually putting together the required documentation. The required documentation is not even excessive, he should know most of that stuff off hand and should definitely have documentation for it if he's planning a release this year.

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#409

Post by macspoofing »

hangonhn wrote: post #25

Wow. If he really moves his project to China to take advantage of a lax regulatory environment even though he couldn't pass the scrutiny in the US, he's being very immoral and cavalier about people's lives in China. I don't understand how a startup like Cruise can get past this regulatory hurlde in the US but Hotz can't.

They may turn a blind eye in certain cases but China doesn't screw around if something goes wrong. You do hard time or worse.

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#410

Post by macspoofing »

antirez wrote: post #243

Given how reasonable the NHTSA request looks, to give up so quickly is a bit suspicious. In products like that it is likely that the first 50% looks much more approachable, and then as you try to reach something that can actually be shipped to customers, you have to solve huge problems incrementally, and it is very hard. So looks like a bit of an excuse to stop it: if you have the working thing you try harder before…

I agree. I think he hit a wall with his tech, realized it and was looking for an out.
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