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

Post by majewsky » Fri, Aug 25, 2017, 8:35 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #201

mulmen wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much more the average driver's skill can degrade. We never re-train so isn't there a natural degradation already? Will automation make that worse or will it not be significant?

For the typical (certainly US) driver, the initial training is just to get to a minimally viable set of skills so they can pass their driving test. The vast majority of people aren't taking performance driving courses to get their drivers licenses. I'd pretty much guarantee that almost every driver is more skilled 10 years after they get their license.

Post by majewsky » Fri, Aug 25, 2017, 9:07 PM UTC

robotresearcher wrote: post #264

TulliusCicero wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by Animats » Fri, Aug 25, 2017, 9:59 PM UTC

ccorda wrote: post #91

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…

Interesting research on Continental. FWIW, looks like Tesla started using Continental's radar to replace Bosch just this week: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/posts/2266769/ I suspect that if/when LIDAR is cheap enough, Tesla will use it. In the meantime they outfit every single car with the best hardware that is realistic from a cost standpoint today, instead of waiting til 2020.

Post by maxcan » Sat, Aug 26, 2017, 12:23 AM UTC

ricardobeat wrote: post #381

maxcan wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair point, I guess I was referring more to this comment: > I don't think the majority understands what safety means in mass transportation. And inferring that you meant that rail understands safety, generally, better than any other mode of transportation which I took issue with. I believe you 100% when you say that only one accident in 30 years ahas been attributed to driverless trains. What I find horrifying about…

You're again confirming the opposite: > the derailment was caused by the train's engineer (driver) becoming distracted by other radio transmissions and losing situational awareness, and said that it would have been prevented by positive train control, a computerized speed-limiting system

Post by pilif » Sat, Aug 26, 2017, 7:20 AM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #389

pilif wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would these circumstances be? I have never seen my car do this.

When the Tesla can not reliably detect lanes (for example, due to too dense traffic), it starts to just follow whatever vehicle is in front, and determines the lane from that vehicles movement. This can lead to major issues, as mentioned.