Tesla crash victim had complained about auto-pilot in same location • Hacker News Board

Re: Tesla crash victim had complained about auto-pilot in same location

#241

Post by eanzenberg » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 5:12 AM UTC

MBCook wrote: post #27

ucaetano wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but let's not blame the victim.

I honestly worried about that when writing the comment. The car should have avoided it (based on Tesla’s usual claims). But Tesla and everyone else says the owner is still ultimately responsible because AutoPilot isn’t a 100% situation. If my car did something funky like randomly accelerate or turn hard at a given intersection and the manufacturer refused to fix it I’d stop driving through there. Why push your luck?…

If your car randomly accelerated you would "stop driving through there"? What does that mean? You wouldn't file a class-action lawsuit like Toyota was hit with a few years back? That's faulty engineering. That's manufacturers defect. That's why we have regulations to protect the "huddled masses" such as yourself.

Re: Tesla crash victim had complained about auto-pilot in same location

#242

Post by kss238 » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 5:19 AM UTC

mozumder wrote: post #223

brfox wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From their blog: "In the US, there is one automotive fatality every 86 million miles across all vehicles from all manufacturers. For Tesla, there is one fatality, including known pedestrian fatalities, every 320 million miles in vehicles equipped with Autopilot hardware. If you are driving a Tesla equipped with Autopilot hardware, you are 3.7 times less likely to be involved in a fatal accident." Notice it says one f…

> In the US, there is one automotive fatality every 86 million miles across all vehicles from all manufacturers. Also note that this includes trucks and motorcycles, which have much, much higher fatality rates than passenger cars. Motorcycles are around 10x-50x higher fatality rate than cars! So already Tesla's blog is doing a misleading comparison to more deadly vehicle classes. Additionally, there could be all sort…

And don't forget to only compare against 2012+ luxury sedans. The median age of U.S. passenger cars is nearly 12 years. There are exactly 0 autopilot equipped 12 year old cars. As vehicles have become significantly safer in the past 12 years, I wouldn't be surprised if the fatality rate of 2012 and newer luxury sedans was a third of the U.S. median.

Re: Tesla crash victim had complained about auto-pilot in same location

#243

Post by chaboud » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 5:30 AM UTC

joshuamorton wrote: post #152

baddox wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by probabilistic? If you mean that the models takes input and outputs one or more labeled probabilities (e.g. “90% confidence the input photo is a dog, 10% confidence the input photo is a cat), then yes, I believe that many AI systems work this way. If you mean random , in the sense that the system may return different results given the exact same inputs, then in not sure if there are AI systems that…

There are. Monte Carlo methods is the keyword you're looking for. AlphaGo (Monte Carlo Tree Search) is an example of one such AI. Obviously you can set the RNG seed to be the same every time too, but even that only works if your system is wholly synchronous, which a car probably isn't. Note that I doubt Monte Carlo methods are common in the autonomous vehicle space.

I'd expect Monte Carlo methods to be used in a number of cases that have deterministic time envelopes for evaluation. Randomized selection and evaluation can be incredibly effective. They also resist degenerate structured input vulnerabilities.

I'm not in the automotive space, but I'd be surprised if there were a viable self-driving car team not using Monte Carlo methods somewhere in the vehicle stack.

Re: Tesla crash victim had complained about auto-pilot in same location

#244

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 5:44 AM UTC

kss238 wrote: post #242

mozumder wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the US, there is one automotive fatality every 86 million miles across all vehicles from all manufacturers. Also note that this includes trucks and motorcycles, which have much, much higher fatality rates than passenger cars. Motorcycles are around 10x-50x higher fatality rate than cars! So already Tesla's blog is doing a misleading comparison to more deadly vehicle classes. Additionally, there could be all sort…

And don't forget to only compare against 2012+ luxury sedans. The median age of U.S. passenger cars is nearly 12 years. There are exactly 0 autopilot equipped 12 year old cars. As vehicles have become significantly safer in the past 12 years, I wouldn't be surprised if the fatality rate of 2012 and newer luxury sedans was a third of the U.S. median.

[deleted]

Re: Tesla crash victim had complained about auto-pilot in same location

#245

Post by joshuamorton » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 6:00 AM UTC

chaboud wrote: post #243

joshuamorton wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are. Monte Carlo methods is the keyword you're looking for. AlphaGo (Monte Carlo Tree Search) is an example of one such AI. Obviously you can set the RNG seed to be the same every time too, but even that only works if your system is wholly synchronous, which a car probably isn't. Note that I doubt Monte Carlo methods are common in the autonomous vehicle space.

I'd expect Monte Carlo methods to be used in a number of cases that have deterministic time envelopes for evaluation. Randomized selection and evaluation can be incredibly effective. They also resist degenerate structured input vulnerabilities. I'm not in the automotive space, but I'd be surprised if there were a viable self-driving car team not using Monte Carlo methods somewhere in the vehicle stack.

Yeah, this was unfortunately worded. There are subproblems for which MC/randomized methods fit well, but in general those circumstances are well understood.

Re: Tesla crash victim had complained about auto-pilot in same location

#246

Post by sjg007 » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 6:02 AM UTC

Certainly CalTrans is responsible for not replacing the barrier. Expect a lawsuit/settlement. Tesla will be found liable too, that’ll be a jury trial civil suit. Why? Despite reporting that AP failed at that interchange and despite still using it, drivers and juries expect safety features to work as advertised.

Re: Tesla crash victim had complained about auto-pilot in same location

#247

Post by pacificmint » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 6:06 AM UTC

DrScump wrote: post #222

rrdharan wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have confirmed the autopilot was on: https://www.tesla.com/blog/update-last-week’s-accident

But does "autopilot on" mean that "autopilot has exclusive control and driver inputs are ignored"?

No, of course driver inputs will not be ignored. They will override the autopilot. But none were given. From the blog:

>In the moments before the collision, which occurred at 9:27 a.m. on Friday, March 23rd, Autopilot was engaged with the adaptive cruise control follow-distance set to minimum. The driver had received several visual and one audible hands-on warning earlier in the drive and the driver’s hands were not detected on the wheel for six seconds prior to the collision. The driver had about five seconds and 150 meters of unobstructed view of the concrete divider with the crushed crash attenuator, but the vehicle logs show that no action was taken.

Re: Tesla crash victim had complained about auto-pilot in same location

#248

Post by smallnamespace » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 6:11 AM UTC

azinman2 wrote: post #209

baddox wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think that humans are not just even more accurate versions of the same types of classifiers?

Because we integrate, learn, plan, abstract, create, have way more senses, complex memory, societal and cultural embeddings, and a whole host of things that make us human. A text box on hacker news is not the place for such a reply. Go take some cognitive science, neuroscience, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and philosophy classes and you’ll see why. “AI” as we know it is a joke, particularly as media has hyped…

> Because we integrate, learn, plan, abstract, create, have way more senses, complex memory, societal and cultural embeddings, and a whole host of things that make us human.

And yet all this complexity and purpose may potentially be simply the product of putting a large collection of matter in a heat bath for a few billion years.

Who says that this process can't be repeated via brute force simulation? That the emergence of complexity and life under thermal disequilibrium + sufficient number of degrees of freedom is actually a basic fact of the universe?

I don't see any rule saying why, with sufficient brute force computational power, we won't be able to set up better and better simulations that will allow for the arise of true artificial intelligences.

Re: Tesla crash victim had complained about auto-pilot in same location

#249

Post by sveme » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 6:17 AM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #171

bri3d wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As many of the comments (but none of the top-level answers) in that Stack Exchange thread note, most of the code in critical control systems like ECUs isn't written, it's generated from verifiable models. While this doesn't lend complete confidence by any means, I think it can be expected that the defects/SLOC will be much lower and of a very different variety in this type of code than code that's written.

>> most of the code in critical control systems like ECUs isn't written, it's generated from verifiable models. I'm not sure what "verifiable models" means here. There are a bunch of people using Simulink to "auto-generate" code for some ECUs. I've used it with great results, and I've seen others do that as well. And yet some people still create horrible things with it just like regular code. But not once did I see a…

Isn‘t it possible to formally check Simulink autogenerated code using Polyspace? Or are you thinking of something else?

Re: Tesla crash victim had complained about auto-pilot in same location

#250

Post by pacificmint » Sat, Mar 31, 2018, 6:18 AM UTC

cesarb wrote: post #210

dixie_land wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

looks like that would trick a human driver under certain lighting conditions. between Seattle and Bellevue a stretch of freeway looks just like that and trips me over every time

Either the same place or a nearby one (same pair of highways) did trick a human driver two years ago: https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/... "[...] when it entered and traveled in an unmarked gore area, rather than the intended high-occupancy-vehicle (HOV) lane, and collided with a crash attenuator. The 990-foot-long gore, with an unmarked inside area, separates the left exit HOV lane for Sta…

Not the same place nor nearby. From the picture on page 24 it's clear that this is the 85/101 interchange in south San Jose, about 20 miles away from the other 85/101 junction where the Tesla accident happened.

The type of accident does seems comparable though.