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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

#101

Post by JumpCrisscross »

abalone wrote: post #89
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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

A Level 2 autopilot should be able to better predict when it will need human intervention. If the autopilot keeps itself in situations where it does better than humans most (not all) of the time, the system will outperform.

My view isn't one of technological optimism. Its derived from the low bar set by humans.

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

#102

Post by pmoriarty »

otakucode wrote: post #79
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…

Yes, it is the worst case scenario. Also, it's the best you're gonna get. Toyota already got the nod from the courts to kill people via technology bugs in their cars (see the 'unintended acceleration' controversy that killed someone (maybe 2? I forget) a few years ago due to absolutely preventable bugs if they'd splashed out and spent a couple grand on static analysis tools), so if you think companies are going to br…

"People will be afraid of them as they are of flying."

This is a great analogy, because at the dawn of flight, many people were really, really really afraid of flying -- for very good reasons: the airplanes of the day were incredibly dangerous.

Yet people still flew, and flew more and more, despite many very public disasters in which hundreds of people died, and the airline industry grew and flourished.

Now most people don't think twice about flying, as long as they can get a ticket they can afford. Sure, some people are still afraid of flying, but most of even them fly anyway if they have to, and the majority aren't afraid at all or don't think about it.

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

#103

Post by ghaff »

frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #27

Since we're finally getting some refutations to Self-Driving Hype, let me drop some quotes here: “I tell adult audiences not to expect it in their lifetimes. And I say the same thing to students” "Merely dealing with lighting conditions, weather conditions, and traffic conditions is immensely complicated. The software requirements are extremely daunting. Nobody even has the ability to verify and validate the software…

There's quite a bit of research on the Duke site around, among other things, issues with inattentiveness when supervising automated systems.

https://hal.pratt.duke.edu/publications

I saw Cummings speak on a panel a couple years back. She talked about automation in aircraft (she's a former Navy fighter pilot) and she made the comment that humans don't handle boredom well.

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

#104

Post by Shivetya »

abalone wrote: post #21
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…

In fairness to Tesla that is probably why they are pushing for level 4/5 so hard. It's true that if level 2 drives perfectly for a month, yet a alone a year, the human backup system is going to degrade markedly. We're not there yet, but it's coming. That's got to open up some liability questions. You can bet when people die it will be tested in court. You could make a case that Tesla's going to be liable for many lev…

I have been under the impression that because TESLA dispensed with the idea of LIDAR that their solution would never be workable. I am still surprised at their ability to avoid liability for the incidents attributed to the "Autopilot"

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

#105

Post by Shivetya »

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.

just watching the current system navigate at night on poor lightly stripped streets is frightening enough to keep me away. search youtube for autopilot fails and there are some videos from just this year.

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

#106

Post by haberman »

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…

You seem to be assuming that the limiting factor is cost and parts. To me it appears the limiting factor is software. AIUI no one has the software to do level 4 autonomous driving, at any price. So why would a parts supplier end up "ruling" automatic driving?

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

#107

Post by revelation »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #88
revelation wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is software released to the public which doesn't pass a basic d(yaw rate)/dt sanity check and steers hard into oncoming traffic.

Not sure who cares about version here. Your airplane went down? Yeah, should be fixed now, no worry, try the new version!

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

#108

Post by ghaff »

Animats wrote: post #90
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…

This is a well-researched area, in addition to being pretty obvious to everyone. Personally, I stopped using cruise control years ago. If I have to pay attention, I'm better off driving.

This isn't just a matter for Tesla. The auto industry is rapidly heading for much better assistive driving systems. There's no way that the people heads-down in their cell phones are going to do this less once they realize they don't really need to pay attention.

Will accident rates get better overall anyway? Who knows? But systems that aren't intended for autonomous use are going to get used that way.

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

#109

Post by JumpCrisscross »

frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #76
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The level-2 driving that Tesla is pushing seems like a worst case scenario to me What are you measuring? The current autopilot already appears to be materially safer, in certain circumstances, than human drivers [1]. It seems probable Level 2 systems will be better still. A refrain I hear, and used to believe, is that machine accidents will cause public uproar in a way human-mediated accidents don't. Yet Tesla's au…

>What are you measuring? The current autopilot already appears to be materially safer, in certain circumstances, than human drivers [1]. Actually the study explicitly doesn't show that. First of all, in the study, it purely measures accident rate before and after installation, so miles driven by humans are in both buckets. Second of all the study is actually comparing Tesla before and after the installation of Auotst…

> Actually the study explicitly doesn't show that

You are correct. We do not have definitive data that the technology is safe. That said, we have preliminary data that hints it's safer and nothing similar to hint it's less safe.

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

#110

Post by btian »

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…

As a California driver, I always have to monitor motorcycles that are lane splitting and give them space when I see one.

So there is always something to do.

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