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

#481

Post by Robotbeat » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 4:08 PM UTC

brandmeyer wrote: post #11

z6 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No real excuse for Tesla, but seriously why are our roads so bad. This is one of the wealthiest areas in the world and a busy stretch of road.

> but seriously why are our roads so bad. Degraded paint does not a bad road make. Roads are optimized for human drivers that can leverage additional context to make their decisions. Many countries don't even bother to stripe their roads at all.

Human drivers made the same mistake, though. That's why the crash attenuator had been destroyed and why the Tesla driver died: a human had made the same mistake and used up the crash attenuator, thus making the Tesla accident fatal.

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

#482

Post by jakobegger » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 4:10 PM UTC

quotemstr wrote: post #403

ldesegur wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The low sunlight is hard to deal with by humans and computer vision isn't better. In the meantime, Tesla's CEO doesn't believe Lidar is necessary ( https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/7/16988628/elon-musk-lidar-s... ). My advice to the company BOD & shareholders: have him take the Udacity's self driving car online course and after the first project, he'll clearly understand how limited detecting lanes by CV only can be.…

Musk's central point is that if humans can drive with two cameras, so can a machine. And he's right . Why wouldn't we do just as well as the visual cortex?

our eyes are a lot better than cameras in a lot of ways. Eyes have better dynamic range, better sensitivity in low light, extremely high resolution in the center, and an extremely wide field of view. The nerve cells in our retina are also wired up to do a lot of processing in real time at extremely high resolution, eg. things like motion/zoom/edge detection.

And that‘s not even taking into account that we actually understand what we see and can reason about unexpected input and react accordingly.

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

#483

Post by jijojv » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 4:12 PM UTC

delroth wrote: post #347

bobsil1 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo’s approach is also brittle, e.g. to changes in the road since the last map pass. Tesla also uses radar and ultrasonic. Lidar isn’t necessary, just makes depth measurement easier. It’s lower res than cameras, low range, power-inefficient, conflicts with other lidar. Humans drive fine in sunlight, without a coherent IR scanning beam.

How do you know how much Waymo's approach rely on maps vs. vision? My expectation would be that maps are really only used for "macro" navigation but anything beyond that (lanes, avoiding obstacles, etc.) would be done on the spot. Do you have any public source detailing this or do you just make this claim based on your own assumptions? (Disclaimer: I work at Google but have no idea how our self-driving cars work.)

That makes more logical sense.

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

#484

Post by quotemstr » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 4:13 PM UTC

jonknee wrote: post #471

quotemstr wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say people are actually pretty good drivers. I'm more interested in autonomous for the time savings than I am for the potential safety improvements.

Tens of thousands of people are killed every year[1] in just the United States, humans are awful at driving. If autonomous vehicles are able to make driving as safe as flying it will be like curing breast cancer in terms of lives saved. [1] http://www.nsc.org/NewsDocuments/2017/Fatality-estimates-Jun...

There are hundreds of millions of people in the US. Most of them drive. Is a few tens of thousands fatalities that bad in an absolute sense?

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

#485

Post by PhasmaFelis » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 4:14 PM UTC

base698 wrote: post #351

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source?

Anyone driving with it for an hour will probably encounter a situation they have to take over. Seems pretty obvious. It's a cool tech demo with bugs that can kill you.

That proves that a Tesla is dangerous if you enable the autopilot and then take a nap. It doesn't demonstrate that it's more dangerous if used as intended.

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

#486

Post by icc97 » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 4:17 PM UTC

philbarr wrote: post #230

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…

> Train drivers are the closest thing and they have a lot of equipment that forces them to stay alert. Except they sometimes fall asleep: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-39457148

Yeah - that's the best you can hope for. So regular drivers will be much worse.

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

#487

Post by gsnedders » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 4:19 PM UTC

EnderMB wrote: post #344

namelost wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's illegal to cross through a red light, even if there is an emergency vehicle behind you that wants to get through.

Yep, that's what we were told. It doesn't matter if you're doing the right thing by getting out of someone's way, you'll get a fine/points if you cross the line. Although, if you are at a set of traffic lights and an emergency vehicle tries to get you to cross the line, what you should do is write down the registration plate and contact the relevant service to report the driver. The instructor on this course was ex-p…

AFAIK:

The only case that trumps a red traffic light is when given a signal by an authorised person (e.g., police officers, traffic officers, etc).

I think under a literal interpretation of the law you are obliged to commit an offence if you are beckoned on across a stop line at a red traffic light; you can either refuse the instruction to be beckoned on (an offence) or you can cross the stop line (an offence). That said, there's plenty of habit of the beckoning taking precedent over the lights.

Basically the only time you see any police officer instructing traffic from a vehicle is when on a motorbike, typically when they're part of an escort.

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

#488

Post by gsnedders » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 4:22 PM UTC

wastedhours wrote: post #345

namelost wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say that but people will happily drive at 50+ down a narrow country road. I think the "narrow = slower" only works for a limited period of time before people get normalised to it.

Had to thread a van through a temporary concrete width restriction the other day - when it's that narrow, even the Uber behind me wasn't giving me grief for going that slowly! The country roads one has always dumbfounded me though - why some of those have national speed limits I will never know.

> The country roads one has always dumbfounded me though - why some of those have national speed limits I will never know.

Why not? Even roads with lower speed limits you're required to drive at a speed appropriate for the road, the conditions, and your vehicle; the speed limit merely sets an upper-bound, and it's not really relevant whether it's achievable. Just look at the Isle of Man where there is no national speed limits: most roads outside of towns have no speed limit, regardless of whether they're a narrow single-lane road or one of the largest roads on the island.

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

#489

Post by imh » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 4:24 PM UTC

ajross wrote: post #380

antirez wrote: post #200

What is happening was clear to many since the start: Tesla incarnates the behavior of his founder, exaggerating the technology that is really available right now, and selling it as a product without the premise for it to be safe. A product that kinda drives your car but sometimes fails, and requires you to pay attention, is simply a crash that we are waiting to happen. And don't get trapped by the "data driven" analy…

> 1. Ethical. One thing is that you do a stupid thing and die. Another is that a technology fails in trivial circumstances that in theory are avoidable. A doctor can make also errors, but a medical device is required to be very safe and reliable in what it does. This needs elaboration or citation. You're one of the only folks I've seen come straight out and make this point: that somehow a technology or practice that…

>You're one of the only folks I've seen come straight out and make this point: that somehow a technology or practice that is objectively safer can still be "unethically safe"

There are plenty of people making that case. See for example this piece in The Atlantic the other day (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/03/got-9...) talking about the concept of moral luck in the context of self driving cars. It puts the point eloquently.

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

#490

Post by sokoloff » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 4:30 PM UTC

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #460

sokoloff wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s imagine that auto-driving tech saves 2001 gross lives per year and kills 1001 people who wouldn’t have died in an all human driving world, for a net of 1000 lives saved. I think that’s a win, even if I now have an even statistical chance to be in the 1001 and no chance to be in the 2001. Requiring that I be in 1001 is not ok, no more than requiring I donate all my organs tomorrow. Allowing that I might be in th…

>> Let’s imagine that auto-driving tech saves 2001 gross lives per year and kills 1001 people who wouldn’t have died in an all human driving world, for a net of 1000 lives saved. You're saying that auto-driving would save the lives of 1000 people who would have died without it, by causing the death of another 1001 that wouldn't have died if it wasn't for auto-driving? So you're basically exchanging the lives of the 1…

It saves 2001 (not 1000 as you said, or perhaps said differently, I'm exchanging the lives of 1001 to preserve the lives of the 2001).

It kills 1001.

Net lives saved = 1000.

> How is it that their opinion doesn't matter?

The 2001 who are saved by auto-driving were also most probably not interested in dying. How is it that their opinion doesn't matter?

It's a trolley problem[1]. Individual people have been killed by seatbelts, yet you probably think it's OK that we have seatbelts because many more people have been saved and/or had their injuries reduced. Individual people have been killed by airbags, yet you probably think it's OK that we have them. Many people have been killed by obesity-related mortality by shifting walkers and bikers into cars, yet you probably think it's OK that we have cars.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem