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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

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 'problem' doesn't even exist; non-autonomous cars work fine in America. Autonomy is a luxury product.

Aside from those massive numbers of dead pedestrians. (Edit: not that I think autonomous cars is the answer - but it's clear that regular cars are a problem)

I hear you about pedestrian deaths, but the numbers aren't actually that bad (accepting some level of accidental deaths will occur no matter what we do).

Cyclists coming in at 857 in 2019 and people on foot coming in at 6,283[1].

That's not too trivialize those deaths... but from what we've seen so far, I'm not convinced self-driving cars are going to do any better.

[1] https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2019-10-22/pedestria...

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

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know where you got these papers but you clearly got an awful sampling and I don't think you're giving computer vision a fair evaluation. Granted, we're not quite ready for self driving, but there's no question that the neural network subfield of ML has absolutely exploded in the last 5-10 years and is bursting with productionizable, application ready architectures that are already solving real world problems.

> Granted, we're not quite ready for self driving if it was the case self driving cars wouldn't be on the road, I don't think we should aim for perfection, perfection will come. We should be looking for cars that make less errors on average than humans, once you have that you can start putting cars on the road and use data from the fleet to correct remaining errors.

Humans have an average of 1 fatality per 100 million miles driven. No one is anywhere close to 100 million miles without intervention.

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

#363

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 iss…

Papers code is probably optimized for "first to publish". Also overfit in a non-traditional sense since ppl wanta to beat SOTA by as much as possible. Also the heuristic tips an tricks and autotuning you'd want in a production models would exceed paper lenth 10x. Also the author is motivated to NOT provide a bug free easy to put in production version of the code since that would lower the $ value of their expertise. A cocktail of all the wrong incentives!

Probably the production versions of those models are suboptimal in different ways but work better in practice...

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

#364
post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are being downvoted because your reply is basically an unnecessarily long "nuh-uh!" - a dismissal without any counterargument. Wrapping that in a string of fancy words does not change the fact that you are not providing any argument at all.

As far as I can tell, the previous commenter was in agreement with the sentence he quoted, going so far as to say that the “on a dime” stipulation isn’t even necessary to consider the idea that we “must always be prepared for it to do something unexpected” an absurd reality

Hm, after reading and re-reading the post half a dozen times, I realized it can indeed be interpreted that way. Now I'm confused. :)

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

#365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Current self-driving might be safer than the avarage driver, So far there isn't any evidence for this assumption.

If you compare the number of accident per km, I'm pretty sure the numbers for self-driving are much lower than human drivers. When a self-driving car is involved in an accident, it's in the news all over the world. Human drivers kill or get killed every day, in every country.

Humans have 1 fatality per 100 million miles, self driving is nowhere close to this.

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

#366
post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LIDAR would have picked that up dead easily. Just like LIDAR would have picked up https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/297901-ntsb-autopilot-de... And just like LIDAR would have picked up https://youtu.be/-2ml6sjk_8c?t=17 And just like LIDAR would have picked up https://youtu.be/fKyUqZDYwrU And just like LIDAR would have picked up https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50713716 These accidents are 100% due to the decis…

"Brad Templeton, who provided consulting for autonomous driving competitor Waymo, noted the car was equipped with advanced sensors, including radar and LiDAR, which would not have been affected by the darkness." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg The car had LIDAR.

It had lidar and ignored an unknown object it was tracking. If that's not damning for the whole field, I don't know what is.

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

#367
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk, you and I know what people think auto-pilot on a car does. I really wish these were not on the road. Pilots engage autopilot and then let the computer do the work. They are not sitting ready at the stick to jump in at the slightest issue in case the system thinks the sun is another plane or some other odd error. My understanding is that the plane flies on it's own for hours. Is that incorrect? Yes for special p…

While I am not a pilot I have been on the flight deck of a 747. Can confirm that the pilots do not touch anything for hours at a time. IIRC they mostly checked the weather, fuel, engines, altitude and heading infrequently. The aircraft flew itself all the way to the Heathrow pattern. I asked what would happen if they did nothing. They claimed the aircraft would circle above the airport until it ran out of fuel. The p…

And it'll fly happily into a mountain or other plane, if unmonitored. Now the problem is streets are a little more crowded.

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

#368
post #353
post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absolutely a fail, a woman died. The question is whether or not this incident is an example of "fails harder than most average drivers" or a hard fail. With the sensor array available to it the car should have done better, no question. But to make the claim "fails harder" I would be looking for a clear cut situation where a human would almost definitely have outperformed the AI. Human eyes do have miraculous…

Can we say with 90% certainty that a human would have saved the situation? Yes, given the misleading nature of the dashcam video I think we can. This was not a pitch dark road lit only by headlights where an obstacle "appeared out of no-where". This was a well-lit main street, with good visibility in all directions. An ordinary human driver would have had no problem identifying Elaine as a hazard and taking the appro…

Based on the evidence you have put forth your conclusion is logical and reasonable. You have convinced me that my statement was in error.

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

#369
post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Granted, we're not quite ready for self driving And yet it's literally in cars on the road. I'm not saying you're wrong because of that. I just wonder how far from "ready" we are, and how much of a gamble manufacturers are taking, and how much risk that presents for not just their customers, but everyone else their customers may drive near.

Based on tesla's safety report [1] it's already less dangerous than letting humans drive (alone). The error rate of human drivers tends to be downplayed, while the perceived risks of automated driving is exaggerated, distorting the picture. Yes, it's a hard problem, yes we are not nearly there and there is a lot of development/research to do. Yes, accidents will happen during the process. But humans suck at driving a…

The gross human fatal accident rate is ~7 accidents per billion miles in the US, including fatalities caused by incompetent or irresponsible drivers, and substantially lower in Europe. But humans drive a lot of miles

Based on Tesla's safety report, 'more than 1 billion' miles have been driven using autopilot. Given the small data sample and the fatalities already attributed to autopilot, I think we're some way from proving it's safer than letting drivers drive alone, never mind close to being a driver substitute.

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

#370
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they truly believe that the autopilot driving is safer than unassisted, they might reasonably consider it an immoral act not to ship it. Then Tesla should be given it away, not charging extra for it. To do otherwise would be immoral.

That’s an absurd suggestion. Every car company charges more for advanced safety features

that's exactly my point, morality has nothing to do with it
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