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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

#241

Post by kdoherty »

ricardobeat wrote: post #228
kdoherty wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's great seeing that more and more data is being collected about this all the time. I'm a huge proponent of this tech. What I wonder when I see these statistics, though, is whether all miles are really equal? For example, are Tesla drivers more comfortable using Autopilot in "easy" driving situations? Is there really a one-to-one correspondence in the distribution of the kinds of miles driven with Autopilot on vs.…

Isn't that easily countered by comparing Tesla Model S' overall rate of accidents vs another similar vehicle, with similar safety rating, including all self-driven and human-driven miles? There should be a proportional reduction.

Yeah, I think so! That's exactly why I mentioned the accident rate reduction cited in the Wikipedia article shared above.

I'd love to see official work that explores that angle (rather than a claim from an interview, which is what the Wikipedia article refers to), I just haven't seen any document/study about it yet.

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

#242

Post by contingencies »

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…

Wiener's Eighth and Final Law: You can never be too careful about what you put into a digital flight-guidance system. - Earl Wiener, Professor of Engineering, University of Miami (1980)

It seems that we are locked into a spiral in which poor human performance begets automation, which worsens human performance, which begets increasing automation. The pattern is common to our time but is acute in aviation. Air France 447 was a case in point. - William Langewiesche, 'The Human Factor: Should Airplanes be Flying Themselves?', Vanity Fair, October 2014

Eventually mean/median system performance deteriorates as more and more pure slack and redundancy needs to be built in at all levels to make up for the irreversibly fragile nature of the system. The business cycle is an oscillation between efficient fragility and robust inefficiency. Over the course of successive cycles, both poles of this oscillation get worse which leads to median/mean system performance falling rapidly at the same time that the tails deteriorate due to the increased illegibility of the automated system to the human operator. - Ashwin Parameswaran (2012)

... from my fortune clone @ http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

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

#243

Post by speakingmachine »

georgemcbay wrote: post #126
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…

> 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 autopilot accidents have produced no such reaction. Perhaps assumptions around public perceptions of technology need revisiting. Have there been any Tesla autopilot fatalities with the right conditions to spark outrage? That's a sincere question as maybe I've missed some whi…

I'm surprised you believe this. Drivers run people down every day and nobody even investigates the cause. Motorists kill about a dozen pedestrians every month in New York City and historically only half of those people get even a failure-to-yield ticket. Meat-puppets are demonstrably unfit to operate vehicles in crowded urban environments, everybody knows this, and nobody is outraged when the people die.

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

#244

Post by kevmo314 »

ghaff wrote: post #219
kevmo314 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could argue that in the "oh shit" scenarios for a car, the proper action is to always stop. Most human drivers will instinctively stomp on the brakes if they see anything they're not expecting, and this is pretty much what today's autonomous software does. Recovering from the "oh shit" scenario is the difficult part, but human pilots often can't recover, after all it makes little sense to try and fix an engine on…

>the proper action is to always stop It's not. But it's a reasonable first reaction which is why we end up doing it. (That or swerving.) But as soon as we realize the thing that made us twitch is a squirrel or a plastic bag, our forebrain takes the foot off the brake or straightens the wheel.

So why is it unreasonable to think that a computer can do this? This, being take a reasonable first reaction to a situation, namely stop, then follow up with a proper action once more data is available.

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

#245

Post by anindha »

abalone wrote: post #178
Shivetya wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

I don't see how you'd draw that conclusion. It seems possible to have a workable, purely optical solution. Our workable solution today relies purely on optical (human drivers).

Cameras don't have the same dynamic range of the human eye. A more fair test would be giving someone remote control of a Tesla with only access to the video footage.

I think cameras will hit parity with the human eye, but the question is will it happen before or after Lidar becomes more affordable and compact.

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

#246

Post by notahacker »

cletus wrote: post #100
mdekkers wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call it the uncanny valley of automation safety. I am not disputing your assessment, but please don't discount liability. Planes can pretty much fly themselves today - there are no significant technology issues with the idea of "taxi away, take off, fly to destination, land, taxi to gate". all of this happens in what is perhaps the most regulated traffic environment on the planet. The issue is with creating the code…

> Planes can pretty much fly themselves today but > The issue is with creating the code that deals with "oh shit" scenarios. So they fly themselves except they don't? That's kind of my point: what makes anyone think truly driverless cars are going to happen anytime soon when a human is required to deal with these "oh shit" scenarios? What's more, I think the "oh shit" scenarios for cars are FAR more complicated. With…

> We humans seem to have a weird tolerance humans negligently killing other humans.

Really? If anything I'd have said it was the other way round. Humans get jailed for negligently killing other humans with vehicles, and they sometimes get jailed or banned from driving for negligently driving in a way that might have endangered another human. On the other hand, the prevailing opinion in this thread seems to be that whilst it's entirely appropriate to punish bad driving by humans, similarly egregious errors made by software should be tolerated provided their average accident rate is lower than the humans'

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

#247

Post by calvinbhai »

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…

I agree, but it's really difficult to draw the line.

I believe Auto transmission (AT) car drivers are more easily distracted than those driving stick shift or manual transmission (MT)).

But AT makes life easy for so many people, that no one even considers if AT is making drivers less attentive.

A classic example of this, the worst case scenario I have seen in person, is that of a woman talking on a mobile phone in one hand while switching lanes and taking a left turn at a traffic signal. Things like this just wouldn't be possible if that woman was driving a stick shift.

In that driver's case, probably a Tesla like Level 3-5 driving system would be ideal, making it much safer for drivers around.

So, should we go back to MT for everyone or nothing? Just to be under the impression that it's much safer? Or should every vehicle be a level 3 to level 5 autonomous vehicle?

I think people choosing any of the above options will have valid points and research to prove their points. Only time will tell when and how any of those research results continue to hold true.

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

#248

Post by ghaff »

kevmo314 wrote: post #244
ghaff wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the proper action is to always stop It's not. But it's a reasonable first reaction which is why we end up doing it. (That or swerving.) But as soon as we realize the thing that made us twitch is a squirrel or a plastic bag, our forebrain takes the foot off the brake or straightens the wheel.

So why is it unreasonable to think that a computer can do this? This, being take a reasonable first reaction to a situation, namely stop, then follow up with a proper action once more data is available.

You don't stop though. You start to put your foot on the brake and then you take it off. Presumably, for a computer which doesn't really have different classes of reaction times in the same way, should never brake in the first place.

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

#249

Post by tamal »

speakingmachine wrote: post #240
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…

If we're going to borrow from aviation, why don't automakers develop some rudimentary automation (not autonomy) that would help avoid the most common kinds of crashes? For example something that might be automated in a modern aircraft is change flight level. The pilot can command a change to a given flight level and the automation takes care of it. Why don't we have a "change lanes" command for cars? Changing lanes i…

Tesla offers this in their current Autopilot solution. Turn on the turn indicator and the car changes lanes if it is safe to do so.

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

#250

Post by MBCook »

kbenson wrote: post #116
ghaff wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The 2018 model year (I believe) has full stop-and-go support. The previous two model years would cut out somewhere around 25 mph (this is what I have). It really is only for freeway driving outside of heavy traffic. I've used a 2018 CRV that has stop-and-go support and it's quite nice.

The lane tracking isn't that great, but I don't mind it that much. I don't use it much for normal driving, but I found it it's pretty fantastic in heavy crosswinds. The car does a pretty good job of keeping the lanes (assuming you can see them well enough) so you basically drive like normal instead of having to constantly fight wind gusts.

Under normal conditions it doesn't do enough to be terribly useful and less you're not paying enough attention… at which point you shouldn't be using it anyway.

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