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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

#111

Post by nostrademons »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #101
abalone wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The problem is that in L2, the bar for the system as a whole is set by the low bar for humans, specifically their reactions in an emergency. If the computer safely drives itself 99% of the time but in that 1% when the human needs to take control, the human fucks up, the occupants of the vehicle are still dead. And what people are saying here is that L2 automation increases the risk that the human will fuck up in that 1%, by decreasing their situational awareness in the remainder of time.

That's why Google concluded that L5 was the only way to go. You only get the benefit of computers being smarter than humans if the computer is in charge 100% of the time, which requires that its performance in the 1% of situations where there is an emergency must be better than the human's performance. That is the low bar to meet, but you still have to meet it.

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

#112

Post by ethbro »

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…

Why not just mix in consensus-control, artificially generated disengagements?

Even if the system has high confidence in its ability to handle a situation, if sufficient time has passed, request the driver resume control.

Then fusion the driver's inputs w/ the system's for either additional training data or backseat safety driving (e.g. system monitoring human driver).

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

#113

Post by network_ops »

crocal wrote: post #98
tyrw wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No personal opinion here. It's just facts from the only ones around who have done this before. Your argument is flawed. We have also been there. Here is the catch. You are willing to take the risk, but society as a whole will not. As soon as you release /total/ control to a machine, public authorities having authorized this become responsible for your life and those your car may threaten. Requirements for said author…

facts? Do you have sources?

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

#114

Post by speakingmachine »

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.

What's your point? The second video is only a month old and in that video the car still drives in the way only a total jackass would drive, in the most favorable possible conditions for a self-driving car: clear and sunny with little traffic, clear road markings, and no pedestrians or bicycles.

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

#115

Post by Analemma_ »

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…

"In a gold rush, sell shovels"

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

#116

Post by kbenson »

ghaff wrote: post #108
Animats wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I recently drove an Accord with lane-following and speed adaptive cruise-control recently. It completely failed (but thankfully by refusing to try) in the one instance that I wanted to use it (stop-and-go traffic), but it was nerve wracking when it was on as it kept losing the lane. People naturally alter the throttle and speed when going around corners and up slight inclines. It feels alien when that doesn't happen.

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

#117

Post by tyrw »

nilkn wrote: post #97
sumeno wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans are pretty bad at driving though, so I'm not sure that basing self driving technology on us is a good idea.

Humans are bad at driving because they can get distracted and can only look in one direction at a time. A computer system based on visual processing shouldn't have either of those issues. I agree fundamentally though that it's a weak argument to say a certain approach should be taken just because it's how humans do it.

The argument is not that it's because how humans do it. The argument is that the entire system was designed to be consumed as visual cues.

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

#118

Post by johansch »

aerovistae wrote: post #56
tdees40 wrote: post #20

I just ordered a Model S with Autopilot, and as I've been reading the comments on the various Tesla forums, I'm not sure I'm ever going to use it. Some of the stories are honestly terrifying (sudden deceleration on the highway, swerving into other lanes, etc).

Absolutely do not use it. I am one of the biggest Tesla fans out there. I fucking love the company. But Autopilot in its current form is nothing short of dangerous. I took a test drive in a Model S a couple months ago and enabled Autopilot at the Tesla rep's encouragement while on a straight stretch of route 90 near Boston. We were going 70mph, a safe speed. The car came to a point where the highway curved, and a sli…

Elon's goal is to get humanity to another planet. The Tesla thing is just a way to get money to do that. I thought this stuff was commonly known?

I do agree with his goal. And maybe its worth some percentage of Tesla buyer's lives? Let's not talk too much about this, okay?

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

#119

Post by pitaj »

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.

Please don't quote with code blocks. It messes with formatting on both mobile and desktop.

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

#120

Post by timdorr »

aerovistae wrote: post #56
tdees40 wrote: post #20

I just ordered a Model S with Autopilot, and as I've been reading the comments on the various Tesla forums, I'm not sure I'm ever going to use it. Some of the stories are honestly terrifying (sudden deceleration on the highway, swerving into other lanes, etc).

Absolutely do not use it. I am one of the biggest Tesla fans out there. I fucking love the company. But Autopilot in its current form is nothing short of dangerous. I took a test drive in a Model S a couple months ago and enabled Autopilot at the Tesla rep's encouragement while on a straight stretch of route 90 near Boston. We were going 70mph, a safe speed. The car came to a point where the highway curved, and a sli…

That's not true at all. AP (at least HW2 AP in my car) does definitely slow down for curves. This is more apparent on surface roads, which have more extreme curves. My car will slow down ~15MPH on one curve, whereas I would only slow myself ~5MPH. It's definitely a part of the system.
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