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Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]

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Re: Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]

#221
post #140

It still strikes me why so many people are still against a future with self driving cars. Sure, people throughout history are scared of change & new tech. But if you look at this video and compare the amount of stuff the camera catches AND processes, with the things you are seeing & processing, it's really hard for me to see me being better at it than a computer. The reality of driving (as a human) is that most of it…

I've only seen autopilot examples in places with uniformed and fairly good infrastructure. Self driving even in the near future will be a toy for the rich and geographically privileged. That should trickle down during time, but the fact that a self driving car is still a car won't. We need better and efficient trasport and self driving cars won't chage that very much.

Traditional public transit only works for the geographically privileged. If you don't live along one of the few transit routes in a city, it doesn't work, and even when it does it can be quite inefficient.

In contrast, self-driving cars scale quite well especially to rural areas. They are point-to-point and on-demand. Low cost to operate compared to traditional public transit means that even rural cities could have a self-driving car based public transit option.

Re: Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]

#222
post #140

It still strikes me why so many people are still against a future with self driving cars. Sure, people throughout history are scared of change & new tech. But if you look at this video and compare the amount of stuff the camera catches AND processes, with the things you are seeing & processing, it's really hard for me to see me being better at it than a computer. The reality of driving (as a human) is that most of it…

> it's really hard for me to see me being better at it than a computer

There's a big difference between seeing and interpreting. The car sees literally everything and can maybe identify most things, but a pedestrian window shopping across the street isn't really that interesting and neither is a bollard. As humans, we filter out the unimportant stuff to focus on the important stuff. We can also pickup on subtle clues in posture, through eye contact and even through the driving style of another person. The car will see all this, even in people across the street, but it won't be able to interpret it.

Humans are still way ahead of anything close to autonomy in most situations and it will take years for anyone to get close to covering 95% of situations. Removing the steering wheel needs way more than 95% covered.

Re: Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]

#223
post #70

Awesome! Now do it again and when it passes one set of parked cars on the side, have someone roll a soccer ball in front of the Tesla. Will the car assume a child will follow from in between the cars or not?

A neural network needs to be taught this and then all cars with that training will respond correctly forever. Every individual human would need to learn this separately from experience, which would require far more soccer balls (and children).

As you have implied in your example, humans cannot make observations about the present and reason about the near future. As a result, they must learn the consequences of any action by experiencing it.

So the situation is really much worse than you describe. Even if we invested in demonstrating the "soccer ball and child" scenario for all driving students, they wouldn't be able to apply the experience to tennis balls and dogs, or a child entering the road without any sort of ball. Teaching people to drive would require an exhaustive course in every conceivable scenario that might arise while driving. You can see why it's an intractable problem.

Re: Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]

#224
post #140

It still strikes me why so many people are still against a future with self driving cars. Sure, people throughout history are scared of change & new tech. But if you look at this video and compare the amount of stuff the camera catches AND processes, with the things you are seeing & processing, it's really hard for me to see me being better at it than a computer. The reality of driving (as a human) is that most of it…

I'd suggest reading the NTSB report on the pedestrian killed by Uber's "self-driving" vehicle [0]. The vehicle misclassified Elaine Herzberg so many times in the seconds leading up to taking her out at 40 mph - its clear to me that none of this is ready for public use. We are so normalised to vehicular violence. This would never be allowed in any other sector, say healthcare for instance. [0] https://www.ntsb.gov/new…

Medical errors and omissions kill way more people than vehicles every year [1].

There's no evidence a human driver wouldn't have killed Elaine. An intoxicated one probably would have and we have direct evidence that a distracted one would have. On average two bicyclists get killed every day in the US. [2]

[1] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/study_su...

[2] https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/bicyc...

Re: Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]

#225

Is someone else worried that the vision is not 180 view in the front ? At 22 seconds at the stop sign, after the first car drives past what if theres a car that breaks the stop sign and ends up ramming into the tesla (as a human sometimes you anticipate this by seeing that the car is not decelerating as it is approaching the stop sign)

I assume that's just one of the forward cameras, the car has quite a few more to build a 360° panorama. https://www.tesla.com/autopilot

Re: Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]

#226
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not announce to investors and the public ever more grandiose targets after each miss. Those poor investors are really taking it on the chin today because of those overly optimistic software projections!

A massive short-squeeze/bitcoin-like retail bubble is certainly not indicative of the strength of the company. Look at the last earnings report, it wasn't impressive for a growth company.

More capital volume happened on TSLA today than SPY. Do you think that's a retail bubble? Only the top 1% of global asset controllers have the ability to do that.

Re: Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Braking is slowed by the limitations of nerve conduction down to the legs. You can swerve away from danger with faster reaction time.

The same nerve conduction latency exists for your arms. The computer will beat you every time.

Perhaps a humorous example of this: a robot that always wins at rock paper scissors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nxjjztQKtY

There's a fun parlor trick which takes advantage of human reaction time too: place a hundred dollar bill on the table, let the other party place their hand a few inches away, start your hand a foot above theirs; the first person to place their hand on the money wins, and the other party can start moving as soon as you start moving. Turns out you can easily go around their hand and grab the bill before they're able to react.

Re: Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]

#229
post #140

It still strikes me why so many people are still against a future with self driving cars. Sure, people throughout history are scared of change & new tech. But if you look at this video and compare the amount of stuff the camera catches AND processes, with the things you are seeing & processing, it's really hard for me to see me being better at it than a computer. The reality of driving (as a human) is that most of it…

I would much rather we invest billions into existing public transit solutions as a community. A light weight electric train doesn't need advanced LIDAR + AI to navigate, it can transport 100x people than a single car.

Re: Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]

#230
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t there already a mounting amount of statistics of accidents of self driving cars vs manual ones and the difference is night and day that the self driving ones are statistically safer?

Not at all. Self-driving cars cannot yet safely navigate complex or unusual scenarios. The human backups in test cars still have to take over with good regularity. That's not something you'd see if it were anywhere close to ready. Even with all their data, there aren't enough training examples of every situation. Deep learning models also have a tendency to be pathologically wrong in rare but completely unpredictable…

> Not at all. Self-driving cars cannot yet safely navigate complex or unusual scenarios.

That's assuming accidents are caused by complex and unusual scenarios instead of humans being inattentive during routine tasks. If machines fail at complex tasks but fail safely then that's not an argument against self-driving cars being safe, it's only one about their limited usefulness.

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