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

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

#251

Post by abalone » Thu, Aug 24, 2017, 11:14 PM UTC

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…

Achieved. Tesla autopilot can change lanes. It also has collision avoidance on all the time.

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

#252

Post by kevmo314 » Thu, Aug 24, 2017, 11:15 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #248

kevmo314 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think that presumption is true, it's a high bar that doesn't really provide much benefit to achieve. If a computer decides to tap the brakes because it thinks an "oh shit" scenario is coming up, why is that suddenly a huge transgression?

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

#253

Post by jpatokal » Thu, Aug 24, 2017, 11:18 PM UTC

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…

"Lane change assist" is already increasingly common in high-end cars.

https://www.autobytel.com/car-buying-guides/features/10-cars...

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

#254

Post by MBCook » Thu, Aug 24, 2017, 11:19 PM UTC

chc wrote: post #194

abalone wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like your creative thinking, but that wouldn't work. An immediate problem is it would only train the driver to pay attention when they hear a disengagement chime. L2 depends on the driver to monitor the autopilot continuously. More productively, Tesla currently senses hands on the wheel. Perhaps they could extend that with an interior camera that visually analyzes the driver's face to ensure their eyes are on the t…

They actually have a driver-facing camera in the Model 3, which is presumably coming to their other cars in a future refresh.

Recent Honda CRVs can have a attention monitoring system in them. I'm not sure how it works but it does seem to detect when the driver isn't looking around.

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

#255

Post by aetherson » Thu, Aug 24, 2017, 11:19 PM UTC

speakingmachine wrote: post #232

aetherson wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About six years ago, I would drive from San Mateo to Oakland at least twice a week, after work, to meet my then-girlfriend. So that's down 92, across the bridge, and up to Oakland. It's about 30 miles, all on freeway, and at that time of day all in heavy (though not all stop-and-go) traffic. I don't think I ever saw three separate rear-ends in a single drive. I can't say for certain that I ever saw two. I didn't driv…

You drove 30 miles up 880 twice a week and never saw a rear-end accident? You should play the lottery. I don't know if I see three every day, but I do see one every week. This week's was some clown in the #2 lane, _staring_ down at his phone, rear-end into a stopped car at ~20 MPH. His car was completely totaled with one of the wheels spinning off to the shoulder. A few months ago I saw a guy, face-down in his phone,…

I didn't say I never saw a rear-end accident, I said I never saw three in a single commute and am not sure whether I saw two in a single commute.

The guy I was replying to said that he saw at least 2 every commute, often more. (Edit: Actually, sorry, 2 every day, not every commute).

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

#256

Post by robotresearcher » Thu, Aug 24, 2017, 11:21 PM UTC

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).

Optical plus audio, haptic and inertial sensing. And smell, but maybe we can ignore that one.

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

#257

Post by aetherson » Thu, Aug 24, 2017, 11:21 PM UTC

snark42 wrote: post #236

aetherson wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About six years ago, I would drive from San Mateo to Oakland at least twice a week, after work, to meet my then-girlfriend. So that's down 92, across the bridge, and up to Oakland. It's about 30 miles, all on freeway, and at that time of day all in heavy (though not all stop-and-go) traffic. I don't think I ever saw three separate rear-ends in a single drive. I can't say for certain that I ever saw two. I didn't driv…

>I don't think I ever saw three separate rear-ends in a single drive. I can't say for certain that I ever saw two. I didn't drive it every day, but I probably did 100 such commutes. I drive 30 miles through Chicago traffic on the Interstate everyday. I see at least 3-4 accidents per week (people pulled over to the side of the road, out of the way, or at the accident investigation sites.) Most of these are minor fende…

The guy I was talking to said he saw 10 a week minimum.

Yeah, if you spend 4-6 hours a day in traffic, you'd see a lot of accidents. That... seems uncontroversial.

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

#258

Post by tonfa » Thu, Aug 24, 2017, 11:21 PM UTC

dantillberg wrote: post #226

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…

There was a cruise control ish system I heard about on a car (a Mercedes, iirc) in Germany when I was a kid: instead of a target speed, you set a maximum speed, such that pressing normally down on the gas allowed the car to accelerate up to that speed. It trims down the excess gas to avoid exceeding the maximum speed. If you released the gas, the car would coast; and if you pushed the pedal down close to the floor (i…

That matches the behavior of the speed control I've seen in Renault cars.

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

#259

Post by ghaff » Thu, Aug 24, 2017, 11:22 PM UTC

kevmo314 wrote: post #252

ghaff wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think that presumption is true, it's a high bar that doesn't really provide much benefit to achieve. If a computer decides to tap the brakes because it thinks an "oh shit" scenario is coming up, why is that suddenly a huge transgression?

The point is that computers don't really have the same type of reflexes that humans have. The theory is that everything is pretty fast. (OK, they can run a background analysis in the cloud but that's presumably too slow to be useful.) Computers are generally not going to respond with "reflexes" and then change they're minds once they've had time to think about it for half a second.

Computers could possibly be designed with these sorts of decision making patterns if there were a need to but I'm not aware of that being done today.

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

#260

Post by kevmo314 » Thu, Aug 24, 2017, 11:25 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #259

kevmo314 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that presumption is true, it's a high bar that doesn't really provide much benefit to achieve. If a computer decides to tap the brakes because it thinks an "oh shit" scenario is coming up, why is that suddenly a huge transgression?

The point is that computers don't really have the same type of reflexes that humans have. The theory is that everything is pretty fast. (OK, they can run a background analysis in the cloud but that's presumably too slow to be useful.) Computers are generally not going to respond with "reflexes" and then change they're minds once they've had time to think about it for half a second. Computers could possibly be designe…

> Computers are generally not going to respond with "reflexes" and then change they're minds once they've had time to think about it for half a second.

Well I disagree on this point, as that's essentially how regressions work, so indirectly how neural networks work. The data the car gets isn't available immediately, all that information it takes in in half a second is useful data that aids in classification and decision making.

Just as a quick example, take https://tenso.rs/demos/rock-paper-scissors/ and think of the classifier as "making a decision", and it switches its decision based on the most recent information.