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Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

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Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#81

Post by crocal »

The only industry to have produced truly driverless public transportation systems is the rail industry. Not aeronautics. Rail systems happens to be my business and what I read here makes me very worried.

I don't think the majority understands what safety means in mass transportation. It's not about running miles and miles without accidents and basically saying "see"? It's about demonstrating /by design/ that the /complete/ system over its /complete/ lifetime will not kill anyone. In terms of probability of failure it translates in demonstrated hazard rates of less than 1E-9 /including the control systems/. This take very special techniques and if that could've been done using only vehicle sensors, it would have been adopted by us long ago. I am also sorry to report that doubling cameras and sensor fusion will not get you an acceptable safety level. We've tried that too, rookies.

Is it "fair", to use Elon's argument? After all, isn't additional safety enough compared to existing situation. Ah but we have been there too! For driver assistance it is indeed better. Similar systems were deployed during the second half of 20th century (e.g. KVB, ASFA, etc). But the limit is clear. It only /improves/ driver's failure rate. It does not substitute for the driver. If you substitute, you have to do much much much better. Nobody will ride a driverless vehicle provided the explanation that it is, you know, "already an improvement when compared to a typical driver". Is it fair? Maybe not, but that's the whole point for entrusting lives to a machine.

Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#82

Post by RonanTheGrey »

manyoso wrote: post #19

Biggest news buried at the end. It says that several engineers have quit since October 2016 (including the head of autopilot) when Tesla started selling "fully autonomous driving" hardware upgrade packages. Says the engineers don't agree the hardware is capable of supporting this and that it was ultimately a marketing decision.

If I were one of those engineers, and didn't believe in the claims being made, I'd personally be quite worried of being held personally liable if the company gets sued in the case of accidental death. Last thing I'd want is my bug being responsible for someone dying.

E.g. I would quit too.

Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#83

Post by tyrw »

Animats wrote: post #78

Tesla's system doesn't have enough sensors. Musk forced his engineers to try to do this almost entirely with vision processing, and that was a terrible decision. Vision processing isn't that good yet. Everybody else uses LIDAR. I've been saying for years that the right approach was to take the technology from Advanced Scientific Concepts' flash LIDAR and get the cost down. I first saw that demonstrated in 2004 on an…

It depends on what you're optimizing for. Others using LIDAR are optimizing for speed to market, while potentially sacrificing ability to solve the problem as fully. Musk's argument is that we know for certain that the entire road system can be navigated by visual cues, because that's how humans do it. We do not know for certain that this is possible with LIDAR.

Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#84

Post by tyrw »

crocal wrote: post #81

The only industry to have produced truly driverless public transportation systems is the rail industry. Not aeronautics. Rail systems happens to be my business and what I read here makes me very worried. I don't think the majority understands what safety means in mass transportation. It's not about running miles and miles without accidents and basically saying "see"? It's about demonstrating /by design/ that the /com…

It seems like you're taking your own opinion as a universal truth. There are many people (myself included) who will happily ride in a well-tested autonomous vehicle, particularly if the alternative is a taxi, uber, or bus driver who is just going through the motions. 5x safer is still an improvement in my eyes, even if it's still short of the gold standard for aviation.

Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#85

Post by sbierwagen »

tyrw wrote: post #83
Animats wrote: post #78

Tesla's system doesn't have enough sensors. Musk forced his engineers to try to do this almost entirely with vision processing, and that was a terrible decision. Vision processing isn't that good yet. Everybody else uses LIDAR. I've been saying for years that the right approach was to take the technology from Advanced Scientific Concepts' flash LIDAR and get the cost down. I first saw that demonstrated in 2004 on an…

It depends on what you're optimizing for. Others using LIDAR are optimizing for speed to market, while potentially sacrificing ability to solve the problem as fully. Musk's argument is that we know for certain that the entire road system can be navigated by visual cues, because that's how humans do it. We do not know for certain that this is possible with LIDAR.

  Musk's argument is that we know for certain that the 
  entire road system can be navigated by visual cues
We know for certain that human brains can be assembled out of regular atoms, but raising funds for a company that manufactures brains would be getting rather ahead of our current level of technology. The same might be true of computer vision and autonomous vehicles.

Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#86

Post by tyrw »

sbierwagen wrote: post #85
tyrw wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on what you're optimizing for. Others using LIDAR are optimizing for speed to market, while potentially sacrificing ability to solve the problem as fully. Musk's argument is that we know for certain that the entire road system can be navigated by visual cues, because that's how humans do it. We do not know for certain that this is possible with LIDAR.

Musk's argument is that we know for certain that the entire road system can be navigated by visual cues We know for certain that human brains can be assembled out of regular atoms, but raising funds for a company that manufactures brains would be getting rather ahead of our current level of technology. The same might be true of computer vision and autonomous vehicles.

So you believe the technology gap for assembling a human brain out of regular atoms is similar to that for navigating a road using cameras?

Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#87

Post by bobsil1 »

bdamm wrote: post #63
tmalsburg2 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the aim is to have a technology that's 100% fail-safe, we can stop pursuing self-driving cars now. We can in fact stop pursuing any kind of technology because the economic cost of making anything completely fail-safe are usually prohibitive. Also, isn't history ripe with counter examples to your argument? Planes have crashed, people died, tabloid headlines were written about it, and people still fly, probably beca…

Also, demonstrably safer than driving, by time or by distance.

After a long history of fatalities and fixes.

Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#88

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

revelation wrote: post #38
abalone wrote: post #6

> In May 2015, Eric Meadows, then a Tesla engineer, engaged Autopilot on a drive in a Model S from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Cruising along Highway 1, the car jerked left toward oncoming traffic. He yelped and steered back on course, according to his account and a video of the incident. Is this video online?

This isn't exactly an isolated incident, YouTube has lots of videos of autopilot steering wildly off course. The biggest problem is that Tesla allows turning on autopilot on roads that are not a highway and feature significant turns and hills obscuring "perfect lane vision", and the system is not prepared to handle that at all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBaolsFyD9I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOnuKrzCLYc

I'd like to point out that the first video you linked is nearly 2 years old.

Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#89

Post by abalone »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #60
barrkel wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what the concern is based on. It's rooted in what we've learned about autopilot on planes and dead men's switches in trains. Systems that do stuff automatically most of the time and only require human input occasionally are riskier than systems that require continuous human attention, even if the automated portion is better on average than a human would be. There's a cost to regaining situational awareness…

> It's rooted in what we've learned about autopilot on planes and dead men's switches in trains Pilots and conductors are trained professionals. The bar is lower for the drunk-driving, Facebooking and texting masses. > Systems that do stuff automatically most of the time and only require human input occasionally are riskier than systems that require continuous human attention, even if the automated portion is better…

You're misunderstanding the data and the concern. Currently, Tesla Autopilot frequently disengages as part of its expected operation, handing control back to the driver. Thus, the human driver remains an attentive and competent partner to the autopilot system. That data is based on today's effective partnership between human and computer.

The concern is that as level 2 autopilot gets better and disengagements go down, the human's attentiveness will degrade, making the remaining disengagement scenarios more dangerous.

Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#90

Post by Animats »

empath75 wrote: post #8

The level-2 driving that Tesla is pushing seems like a worst case scenario to me. Requiring the driver to be awake and alert while not requiring them to actually do anything for long stretches of time is a recipe for disaster. Neither the driver nor the car manufacturer will have clear responsibility when there is an accident. The driver will blame the system for failing and the manufacturer will blame the driver for…

Requiring the driver to be awake and alert while not requiring them to actually do anything for long stretches of time is a recipe for disaster.

Everybody who's looked at this seriously agrees. The aviation industry has looked hard at that issue for a long time. Watch "Children of the Magenta".[1] This is a chief pilot of American Airlines talking to pilots about automation dependency in 1997. Watch this if you have anything to do with a safety-related system.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN41LvuSz10

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