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Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

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Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#181

Post by histriosum »

scarejunba wrote: post #118
salgernon wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a Subaru with some sort of "Eye Sight" feature. It is quite handy in maintaining a constant distance from a car in front of you in moderate traffic - but you have to always be ready for someone to cut you off. It tracks the lane markers and rumbles the steering wheel. If a car stops short ahead of you, it beeps and flashes an indicator - I'm usually on the ball enough to hit the brakes myself though, so I don'…

I like Eyesight. It's pretty cool and I like the emergency braking feature. The warning triggers before the emergency brake quite often spuriously but it's nice. I like it. I think the difference between me and the rest of these guys is that I see it as just an assistive technology and they're trying not to drive. I still have my eyes on the road and everything. It's just there to help, just like I still use my mirro…

I own a 2019 Forrester with EyeSight. While I dont hate it, and I like the adaptive cruise, I'm curious..

How exactly do you easily override the crash detection logic? I've had it slam on the brakes spuriously due to steam from manhole vents, and short of disabling the feature (which cant be done in a way that sticks between starts) I dont know how I would avoid this behavior, particularly easily.

Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#182

Post by revscat »

spookthesunset wrote: post #163
revscat wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People already do the things you listed, though. Hell, when my kids were in car seats I frequently had to reach around behind me to soothe them via touch. AutoPilot would have been a godsend, because I wouldn’t have had to stress out so much about juggling two things at once. This is the part where you call me irresponsible, right? It seems like every discussion on this topic follows that pattern. The fact remains, t…

Not much of a leap between that and playing a video game with your phone, honestly.

You know, it’s almost like we’d benefit from having an autopilot system. I mean, think about it: people drive drunk, or tired, or get in fights with their mom on the phone, or have a crying baby demanding attention, or any number of other things like that.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if we had something to help with that? Like, it doesn’t even have to do everything, just most of it, and keep you from running into shit.

That would be awesome, wouldn’t it?

Yeah, that exists. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than what we had before, which was nothing.

Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#183

Post by mettamage »

crca wrote: post #172

Tesla publishes their safety numbers in terms of accidents per x millions of miles driven. If you believe their numbers then Autopilot in its current configuration is clearly safer than a purely human operated vehicle. Having driven on Autopilot for about 85% of the total time I’ve spent in a Tesla, its been a life changer. But obviously YMMV. It really sucks that this specific interchange has cost so many lives - an…

> If you take your hands off the wheel and look at your phone for 6 seconds in any other car you’re going to have a bad time.

Which is why you don't do it in any other car. I don't know much about autopilot, but because we as humans don't know when it can go wrong, it's easier to get it into situations it wasn't designed for. This is not true for the 6 seconds any other car scenario as we will be predicting what the steering wheel and traffic in front of us might do.

Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#184

Post by platz »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #166

There are going to be Autopilot crashes and people should disable it if they uncomfortable with putting their lives in the hands of Tesla's software. I would be. But I see no reason to not believe to not believe what they have on https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport It shows Teslas have much fewer accidents than the average car, and that Teslas with autopilot enabled are substantially safe per mile than with aut…

assuming those numbers hold when scaled up, you are compressing the actual distribution into a single number (an average). Overall that high-level number may be correct.

But at the same time, the kinds of people that get into accidents will be a different distribution.

How you drive factors a lot into how likely you are into getting in an accident, even allowing for the other drivers.

If the distribution becomes essentially random then you might actually have a higher chance of getting into an accident than before, if you were a very careful driver.

(Obviously those that benefit the most are the bad drivers since they'll no longer be bad)

Just remember that whenever you summarize a distribution into a single number like an average, you loose a lot of information in the process.

Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#185

Post by ce4 »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #166

There are going to be Autopilot crashes and people should disable it if they uncomfortable with putting their lives in the hands of Tesla's software. I would be. But I see no reason to not believe to not believe what they have on https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport It shows Teslas have much fewer accidents than the average car, and that Teslas with autopilot enabled are substantially safe per mile than with aut…

I'd be careful to compare those numbers - some sort of confirmation bias. AP is only used in "AP-easy situations" the harder to drive parts are steered by the human driver.

Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#186

Post by kkhire »

PopeRigby wrote: post #146
salimmadjd wrote: post #12

This is sad and tragic. I remember going with a friend on a Tesla test drive. He was eager to try the Autopilot system. And within a few minutes we got freaked out with what seem to us as unpredictable action and we turned it off. I think the engineer should have never relied on it. Especially if he had concerns with the system. At the same time, "Autopilot" is misleading and Tesla does own responsibility here. Even…

I think self driving cars are a ridiculous solution to a problem we created and doesn't need to exist. The US building out the country for cars wasn't a good way to do transportation. If we just had trains going from city to city and subways in the cities, we wouldn't even need self driving cars.

it's becoming more and more clear. self driving technology will only put more 2000 lb machines on highways clogging up space. USA NEEDS TRAINS!

Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#187

Post by fxtentacle »

I avoid new technology, exactly because I'm an engineer.

I wonder if that is just me, but when new technology is introduced and hyped, I usually take a quick look at implementations, research, and talks just to get an idea of what the state of the art really is like.

As a result, I have become the late adopter among my group of friends because the first iteration of any new technology usually just isn't worth the issues.

You know this effect when you open a new book and immediately spot a typo? I felt that way looking at state of the art AI vision papers.

The first paper would crash, despite me using the same GPU as the authors. Turns out they got incredibly lucky not to trigger a driver bug causing random calculation errors.

The second paper converted float to bool and then tried to use the gradient for training. That's just plain mathematically wrong, a step function doesn't have a non-zero gradient.

The third paper only used a 3x3 pixel neighborhood for learning long-distance moves. Doesn't work, I cannot learn about New York by waking around in my bathroom.

That gave me the gut feeling that most people doing the research were lacking the necessary mathematical background. AI is stochastical gradient descent optimization, after all.

Thanks to TensorFlow, it is nowadays easy to try out other people's AI. So I took some photos of my road and put them through the state of the art computer visible AIs trained with KITTY, a self-driving car dataset of German roads. All of them couldn't even track the wall of the house correctly.

So now I'm afraid to use anything self-driving ^_^

Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#188

Post by dmix »

stiglitz wrote: post #171
throwaway5752 wrote: post #166

There are going to be Autopilot crashes and people should disable it if they uncomfortable with putting their lives in the hands of Tesla's software. I would be. But I see no reason to not believe to not believe what they have on https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport It shows Teslas have much fewer accidents than the average car, and that Teslas with autopilot enabled are substantially safe per mile than with aut…

Teslas are more expensive than the average car (hence might be driven more carefully), and autopilot is more likely to be enabled in predictable driving environments like highways.

> more likely to be enabled in predictable driving environments like highways.

Which is what it was designed for and which is a much easier problem to solve than inner-city driving.

Which IMO I feel like more self-driving companies should have focused on first to perfect their systems. We used feature phones before smartphones for a reason, hardware/software is best developed incrementally.

Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#189

Post by benzor »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #166

There are going to be Autopilot crashes and people should disable it if they uncomfortable with putting their lives in the hands of Tesla's software. I would be. But I see no reason to not believe to not believe what they have on https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport It shows Teslas have much fewer accidents than the average car, and that Teslas with autopilot enabled are substantially safe per mile than with aut…

Your claim relies entirely on the veracity of Tesla's safety report. Unfortunately I am inclined to mistrust any such vehicle safety claims directly from Tesla's own website. There is a conflict of interest in that they are incentivized to publish the most favorable numbers. We should be rightly cynical and rely only on numbers from an independent third party, as we would normally do for other companies with a less favorable reputation. Until we have such independently verified stats, we can't take those claims at face value.

I agree that anyone who feels uncomfortable with Tesla's ADAS should simply turn it off. But don't you think it's unfair for the company to place an unfinished product in the hands of a consumer and pass off the risk-management responsibility to them? Tesla's cavalier attitude towards autonomous vehicle safety is concerning to me. They seem to adopt the "move fast and break things" approach, whereas teams like Waymo and Cruise are releasing things in a slower and more controlled manner. And not coincidentally, they've have far less accidents that way.

Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#190

Post by adaisadais »

Tesla has some blame in this for sure but Caltrans (maintainers of the 101) are equally if not more to blame.

California is rich in capital but so poor infrastructure. Moving here from South Carolina(where taxes are much lower and roads are paltry) I was shocked at how dismal a state many of the roads are and at the sheer amount of time it takes to complete.

Patrick Collison of Stripe actually wrote a blog piece(1) condemning SF for their lack of speed when it comes to road maintenance.

There is no end in sight. Until we we a nation hold our governments accountable for road maintenance and proper engineering we will never have any great resolution.

(1) https://patrickcollison.com/fast

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