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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

#261

Post by StephenMelon »

cletus wrote: post #39

What befuddles me is that in all these discussions about self-driving cars seemingly no one refers to the massive body of knowledge in this area that comes from the aviation world. I've posted variants of this same comment several times and I'm starting to feel like a broken record. Look at studies of efforts to make planes safer by removing the human element. While efforts like autopilot have made things safer it re…

I agree, the devil is going to be in the almost infinite edge cases, the visual negotiation that goes on between drivers at box junctions, dealing with bad or aggressive drivers who ignore right of way or tailgate, ethical decisions in all the “Kobiashi Maru” no-win situations (extreme weather, black ice, highway pile up, mechanical failures).

An advanced AI may well be able to identify whether an object coming towards the windscreen is a bird, bat, leaf or a rock, but what will its intuition be about how much of a problem it is likely to be? Should it swerve to avoid a raccoon and risk whiplash for passengers? Should it aim to avoid large insects if the owner is vegan?

Also, people are very used to mild lawbreaking. We expect a cab driver to double park and let us out the car if there are no available parking spaces, but would an AI be authorised to bend the law or would it have to find the nearest parking space, which may be 5 blocks away and could be taken by the time it gets there?

I suspect we will get autonomous drone-like flying cars long before we get full autonomy in city centres or rural areas, because flying through a mostly obstacle-free space with an ability to avoid collisions on 3 axis seems much more reachable?

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

#262

Post by sxates »

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…

This feature exists in my Jaguar XF. Similar to the cruise control, you can set a 'max speed' and the car will simply not accelerate past that speed. I don't think I've tried flooring it to see if it would let me exceed it in that case though.

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

#263

Post by stevep98 »

ghaff wrote: post #208
anarazel wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Personally, I stopped using cruise control years ago. Cruise control seems fairly harmless - you still have to keep lanes, and keeping your foot on the gas isn't particularly demanding either. I largely use cruise control because I am able to save on gas that way, by avoiding unnecessary acceleration/deceleration. Combination with lane following and holding of distance is more problematic imo.

It's mostly that I tend to drive on roads with at least a moderate amount of traffic. It tempts me to not optimally mix with other vehicles. I just got out of the habit of using it.

The traffic aware cruise control in the Tesla is very good in traffic. Especially stop-and go traffic. My passengers always tell me to switch it on because it gives a smoother ride than me. It's also much more relaxing.

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

#264

Post by robotresearcher »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #93
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.

Humans also learn how to drive using several orders of magnitude less training data than self-driving car efforts are using. Do you think that means we should strip down the training data sets to human-equivalent levels? People and machines behave and understand the world differently. Just because it works for people doesn't mean it'll work for computers.

How on earth do you reach that conclusion? Every person has at least 16 years of high bandwidth sensor data experience before getting behind a wheel, plus millions of years of evolutionary training built into the structure of their brain.

A vast amount of data has produced every driver.

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

#265

Post by ghaff »

kevmo314 wrote: post #260
ghaff wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 decis…

The point is that all presumably happens "instantaneously" from a human perspective. Hence the claims that autonomous vehicles have no lag in responding to events.

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

#266

Post by jamiek88 »

dmix wrote: post #75
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…

Indeed, it's probably best not to measure the utility of this tech based on preemptive predictions of how an emotional public will react or the reactions of outrage-driven media with terribly short attention spans. The actual performance of these machines will be the ultimate test. If it does consistently improve safety then I don't really see much barriers existing here, the current unknowns and semantics surroundin…

Exactly. This will be decided by insurance underwriters and actuaries ultimately.

The safest option will be the way the market will be incentivised, despite all the noise around it this is the ultimate rational market.

Insurance is so boring it is interesting to me.

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

#267

Post by redler »

archagon wrote: post #172
redler wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The easy part is relatively easy, but it's hard to conceive how the hard part will be solved. Just driving around New York City for a while makes me think that generalized autonomous driving, as a problem, is essentially "solving" strong AI. Consider the case of approaching a complex intersection during rush hour. There's a traffic cop in the intersection waving his hands around. You reach the intersection, the light…

Even worse: I've been on several mountain roads with stretches of one-way traffic, where either an officer has to signal a switch in lane direction every few minutes (which might not be clear otherwise, especially around a bend), or cars have to occasionally reverse to let opposing traffic through . Don't think I'll ever be letting an AI do that!

I was in a small bus on a switchback mountain road in Peru. The bus stopped at a low lying turn, and we could see that a muddy stream was racing across the road at its low point, pouring away into the valley off the the downhill edge it was eroding. The pavement under the stream was gone. The driver got out and found a couple of what looked like 2-by-8 pieces of lumber, and placed them across the stream, adding some rocks and rubble underneath like track ballast. He then slowly tiptoed the bus across these creaking muddy boards, leaning out the window to stay on track. We were not swept over the edge, as far as I recall.

Needless to say, not a situation for "auto-steer".

I'm sure this has been thought through, and I imagine the solution involves zones requiring different levels of autonomy and capability, some means of zone discovery or classification for unmarked areas, and self-driving cars refusing to continue automatically when overmatched.

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

#268

Post by vlasev »

calvinbhai wrote: post #247
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 on…

I've definitely seen people drive manual AND talk on their phones by holding them between their head and shoulder.

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

#269

Post by briandear »

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…

It’s almost always standard in new European cars. I use it when I am in a speed-camera infested area.

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

#270

Post by boznz »

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.

A lot of people move jobs especially in LA. Is there a first-hand link to one of these engineers critisizing the systems (not trolling just cannot get past WSJ paywall)
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