Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident • Hacker News Board

Re: Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident

#101

Post by icc97 » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 6:22 AM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #41

icc97 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell there is no way to resolve this that will be effective. Google spoke about this problem publicly and why they directly targeted level 4. Train drivers are the closest thing and they have a lot of equipment that forces them to stay alert. Personally I think that autopilot should only take over when the driver is unwell or that it thinks there will be a crash. Even when driving full time drivers ge…

Maybe force users back in either speeds above 30, crowded places, complex topologies.

According to these videos, auto-pilot should be turning itself off if it detects bright sunlight obscuring it's vision.

Re: Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident

#102

Post by toomuchtodo » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 6:23 AM UTC

danso wrote: post #99

toomuchtodo wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1.3 million people a year die in car crashes. Humans are woefully unqualified to pilot heavy machinery on a daily basis. Tesla’s Autopilot reduces crashes by 40% according to the NHTSA, so I can’t agree with your binary argument. Whether you trust others is immaterial; statistics will be the final arbitor. If Autopilot still causes fatal accidents, but fewer fatal accidents than humans alone, how could you argue agai…

> Tesla’s Autopilot reduces crashes by 40% according to the NHTSA This claim was immediately called into suspicion when it was first published, and the NHTSA is currently facing a FOIA lawsuit for refusing to release data to independent researchers. http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/quality-control-... https://jalopnik.com/feds-cant-say-why-they-claim-teslas-aut...

As noted in your citation, Tesla requested the data they provided to be confidential (which is not an uncommon request), and the NHTSA granted the request. Whether the statement from the regulatory agency can be independently verified is immaterial.

Re: Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident

#103

Post by TAForObvReasons » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 6:23 AM UTC

njarboe wrote: post #53

ChuckMcM wrote: post #17

I have now talked with two people who have autopilot in their model S's and both said the problem with autopilot is that it is "too good". Specifically it works completely correctly like 80 - 90% of the time and as a result, if you use it a lot, you start to expect it to be working and not fail. If it beeps then to tell you to take over, you have to mentally get back into the situational awareness of the road and the…

And in the current climate of "all new things must be super extra safe to be used, even if it displaces much worse technology", I think machine driving cars will have a hard time being accepted. Imagine the autopilot is 100 times safer than human drivers. Full implementation would mean about a fatality a day in the US. It does not seem this would be acceptable by the public even though 30,000 annual human car fatalit…

> current climate of "all new things must be super extra safe to be used, even if it displaces much worse technology"

The "current climate" is a backlash to the cavalier "move fast and break things" externality-disregarding culture of the last 10 years or so. We should be extremely conservative when it comes to tools that can potentially maim or kill other people. Not valuing human life should be an aberration.

Re: Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident

#104

Post by mirimir » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 6:23 AM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #85

mdorazio wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's mostly due to limited sensors and immature algorithms. If you think about a sharp left turn with a wall on the right side of the road, there is a "stationary object" (the wall) in front of the vehicle throughout the turn that will be detected by radar and cameras. In order to navigate a situation like this, an autonomous vehicle has to have additional decision-making in place to effectively override "stationary…

> But once you do that, it gets tricky to determine when you should ignore the "stationary object" and when you shouldn't. That's not tricky. You never ignore it. A stationary object means that you will have to either stop or turn. You don't know which one yet, but you definitely know you'll have to take an action. If you haven't decided by some close point, you just pick one.

As I understand it, what's hard is determining whether that stationary object is directly in front, or off to the side. Cars are always passing stationary objects on the sides.

Re: Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident

#105

Post by Jasper_ » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 6:25 AM UTC

njarboe wrote: post #72

jackvalentine wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine the autopilot is 100 times safer than human drivers. Is it? Can it be proved controlling for all variables?

No it is not. But might be someday. Will that be good enough? My dad would spend 100k on a car that was 10 times less safe, if it let him keep using a car. I'm sure others would as well.

The proper way to prove "it's 100 times more safe" isn't to let it cause some number of deaths and then go "welp, we tried our best but we were wrong, turns out it's less safe. Shucks". But that's exactly what Tesla, Uber, etc. all seem to be doing. "We'll compare our statistics once the death tallies are in and we'll see which is safer".

The most we have to go on for a rough approximation of safety is the nebulous and ill-defined "disengagements" in the public CA reports. From what I can tell, there's no strong algorithmic or safety analysis of these self-driving systems at all.

The climate about these things is sour because the self-driving car technology companies seem to want to spin the narrative and blame anybody but themselves for the deaths they were causing, and just praying they'll cause less of them once this tech goes global.

Re: Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident

#106

Post by bra-ket » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 6:26 AM UTC

this AI is dumb

Re: Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident

#107

Post by akira2501 » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 6:26 AM UTC

njarboe wrote: post #53

ChuckMcM wrote: post #17

I have now talked with two people who have autopilot in their model S's and both said the problem with autopilot is that it is "too good". Specifically it works completely correctly like 80 - 90% of the time and as a result, if you use it a lot, you start to expect it to be working and not fail. If it beeps then to tell you to take over, you have to mentally get back into the situational awareness of the road and the…

And in the current climate of "all new things must be super extra safe to be used, even if it displaces much worse technology", I think machine driving cars will have a hard time being accepted. Imagine the autopilot is 100 times safer than human drivers. Full implementation would mean about a fatality a day in the US. It does not seem this would be acceptable by the public even though 30,000 annual human car fatalit…

> It does not seem this would be acceptable by the public even though 30,000 annual human car fatalities could be avoided.

The flawed assumption behind this thinking is that all accidents have "accidental" factors. Alcohol and drugs and the poor decisions of young men are _huge_ components of that statistic. You also have to consider that motorcycles make up a not insignificant portion (12%) of those numbers.

It also completely ignores the pedestrian component (16%) which is due to a huge number of factors, of which, driver attentiveness is only one. So many pedestrians die, at night, on the sides class B highways that it's silly.

EDIT: To add, Texas has more fatalities on the roadway than California. Not per capita, _total_. This is clearly a multi-component problem.

Re: Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident

#108

Post by buvanshak » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 6:27 AM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #85

mdorazio wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's mostly due to limited sensors and immature algorithms. If you think about a sharp left turn with a wall on the right side of the road, there is a "stationary object" (the wall) in front of the vehicle throughout the turn that will be detected by radar and cameras. In order to navigate a situation like this, an autonomous vehicle has to have additional decision-making in place to effectively override "stationary…

> But once you do that, it gets tricky to determine when you should ignore the "stationary object" and when you shouldn't. That's not tricky. You never ignore it. A stationary object means that you will have to either stop or turn. You don't know which one yet, but you definitely know you'll have to take an action. If you haven't decided by some close point, you just pick one.

But then the car will have a lot of false positives and it will stop now and then for every mundane thing that flies before the sensors. Every one of your customers ll be pissed, because the car cannot differentiate between debris on the road and a wall..Showing the true limitation the thing they call "Autopilot"...

Tesla seems to have figured that, It is better to kill some of your customers then pissing every single one of them off...

Re: Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident

#109

Post by worldsayshi » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 6:29 AM UTC

carlivar wrote: post #44

doe88 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I don't know I feel ambivalent about autopilot right now, as most on HN I always crave for new technologies, but the fact that something very dangerous can be very good most of the time and very bad occasionally make me weary of using it altogether. I know that's irrational because most often then not it probably saves you from your own mistakes. Also, if Tesla intends to shield itself behind a beta status for…

It's not irrational at all. I drive our family 2018 Honda Odyssey, and it's already "saving me from my own mistakes" by beeping angrily when I signal for a lane change and there's someone in my blind spot. Works really well. It also has a notification light on each side of the car to indicate blind spot object presence, so I have to miss that first. The question seems to be which is better: 1) A car very intelligentl…

I think that 1 and 2 still can entail the same problems though. If it helps you check your blind spot you might occasionally stop checking yourself and rely on it to check for you. Then you implicitly start relying on that feature to work. It's different degrees of handing over control though.

Re: Tesla crash in September showed similarities to fatal Mountain View accident

#110

Post by cjhopman » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 6:30 AM UTC

m_mueller wrote: post #61

njarboe wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in the current climate of "all new things must be super extra safe to be used, even if it displaces much worse technology", I think machine driving cars will have a hard time being accepted. Imagine the autopilot is 100 times safer than human drivers. Full implementation would mean about a fatality a day in the US. It does not seem this would be acceptable by the public even though 30,000 annual human car fatalit…

Does it currently really reduce fatalities if you control for car cost, age group and area driven? I‘m unconvinced of the current statistics.

Considering that tesla w/ autopilot enabled is less safe than tesla w/ autopilot disabled, I'm going to go with "no, if you control for those factors it doesn't reduce fatalities".