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Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers
301–310 of 399 posts
Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Possible. Hence way more dangerous than autonomous systems
Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
"neighborhood"? Who commutes across a neighborhood as the full extent of their commute? I suspect it's within a rounding error. Driving across a city, however, I definitely see this. Daily. And "accident" I expect to mean everything from a light tap rear-ending to a full fledged crash. People rear-end each other in my city every day. On my commute, I'll come across two a day. Wet days, a few more. The other five dire…
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…
Driving and down 280 over a year's time, once a year, there can be a single day with three separate fender benders. Appearing to have happened within a 30-min window of passing by. But never witnessed 3 to happen --like happening as I was driving.
Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is called a speed limiter and I LOVE it in my Mercedes. I set the limiter to match the road's speed limit and I can just drive without worrying that I'll get caught speeding. No need to constantly look down at the speedo.
Except you should be checking your dashboard instruments every few seconds. Temperature, oil pressure, speed, fuel. I'm constantly doing this while driving. Road ahead. Mirrors. Instruments. Road ahead. over and over.
What are you driving that you need to check your temperature, oil pressure, and fuel every few seconds? If you don't, and you didn't have to check your speed, you could shorten your cycle to mirrors and road.
Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 4…
That said, aviation accident rates have been falling asymptotically while this "troubling trend" has been going on. In the US we've had no fatalities on domestic commercial flights since like 2009, and only the two at SFO a couple of years ago on international flights to the US. This is on a couple of billion flights with hundreds of billions of passenger departures.
Airliner pilot discipline is orders of magnitude better than your average driver.
Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So you believe the technology gap for assembling a human brain out of regular atoms is similar to that for navigating a road using cameras?
Obviously not, the former is far easier.
Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
That said, aviation accident rates have been falling asymptotically while this "troubling trend" has been going on. In the US we've had no fatalities on domestic commercial flights since like 2009, and only the two at SFO a couple of years ago on international flights to the US. This is on a couple of billion flights with hundreds of billions of passenger departures.
Airliner pilot discipline is orders of magnitude better than your average driver.
Not to mention the myriad of safety and control mechanisms in place on the aircraft (redundant systems etc) and away from it (air traffic control, IVR etc)
Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good thing it would be almost impossible to attach personal liability to an employee of a corporation unless they intentionally designed the system to be unsafe with malicious intent.
Frankly, I would be more worried about someone dying using a system that I had a hand in than whatever effect it might have on my career.
> Last thing I'd want is my bug being responsible for someone dying.
Is exactly what was written above.
Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers
#309What 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 towar…
> Should it aim to avoid large insects if the owner is vegan?
Only if the other cars on the road around it are also owned by vegans.
Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
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…
> after all it makes little sense to try and fix an engine on fire while flying
No, but you can ditch an engine that is on fire.
> instead opting to land.
That is supposed to be the outcome of any successful flight.
Autoland is possible with an engine out, even at low altitude (on final approach):
http://www.askcaptainlim.com/flying-on-the-boeing-777-flying...
So as far as the software goes that's business as usual and not even an 'oh shit' scenario.