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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

#501

Post by Piskvorrr »

greatpatton wrote: post #411
pja wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The video released by Uber was extremely misleading. Here is a video on YouTube of the same stretch of road taken by someone with an ordinary phone camera shortly after Elaine’s death: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRW0q8i3u6E It’s clear that a) the road is well lit and b) visibility is far, far better than the Uber video would suggest. An ordinary human driver would have seen Elaine & taken evasive action. This de…

"May have seen" is more appropriate as every day pedestrian get killed on well lit road by human drivers.

Which is also true. This is perhaps the underlying issue: "we expect cars to be safe, while also expecting driving fast in inherently unsafe conditions." In other words, the actual driving risk appetite is atrocious, but nobody's willing to admit it when human drivers are in the equation. SDVs are disruptive to this open secret.

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

#502

Post by Cthulhu_ »

fxtentacle wrote: post #187

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…

> I avoid new technology, exactly because I'm an engineer. > I wonder if that is just me

Can't find it now but there was a poignant quote or anecdote I read the other day that expresses this exact sentiment - the more you know about technology, the less likely you are to use it. I think it was in the context of e.g. smart homes and voice assistants or online tracking - if you're aware of how much data they hoover up and what can be done with that, you'd be Very Afraid.

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

#503

Post by moooo99 »

stephenr wrote: post #237
allovernow wrote: post #217

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 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.

> And yet it's literally in cars on the road.

It is not. There is no real self-driving on the road, at least not in conventional vehicles. Teslas autopilot is basically a collection of conventional assistive systems that work under specific circumstances. Granted, the circumstances where it works are much broader than the ones defined by the competition, but for a practical use-case its still very restricted. Self-driving systems can be affected by very minor changes in lighting, weather and other circumstances. While Teslas stats on x Million miles driven under Autopilot are impressive, they do not show the real capabilities of the self-driving system. For example, you can only enable the Autopilot under specific circumstance for example while driving on an Autobahn with clear weather. Under circumstances with for example limited sight the Autopilot won't turn on or will hand over to the driver, simply because it would fail. Of course, this is for passenger security, but these are situations real self-driving vehicles need to handle. Other leading projects like Waymo also test the vehicles under ideal circumstances with clear weather etc.

We'll most likely see fully self-driving vehicles in the future, but this future is probably not as close as Tesla PR makes us think.

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

#504

Post by keanzu »

ben_bai wrote: post #465
keanzu wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no mountains at the cruise altitude of a 747. TCAS will provide a warning 30 seconds before collision and the Airbus A380 has an autopilot with integrated TCAS avoidance. So it will hit neither mountains (too low) nor other aircraft (automatic avoidance). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision_avoidance_sy...

I'm well aware that there are no mountains at 40k feet. Well airplane autopilots can avoid obstacles... about time after 100 years of development. (The first aircraft autopilot was developed by Sperry Corporation in 1912. The autopilot connected a gyroscopic heading indicator and attitude indicator to hydraulically operated elevators and rudder.)

> Well airplane autopilots can avoid obstacles

Technically speaking yes. But the obstacle does need to have a working TCAS transponder! An A380 won't be able to detect or avoid a military jet for example because they tend to not be too forthcoming about their locations. Some birds, most notably the Ruppell's griffon vulture, can fly into airliner airspace topping out at 37,000 ft.

However, by general agreement, only aircraft on IFR flight plans are allowed into the airliner zone and therefore pretty much all the obstacles (not military jets or birds) do have TCAS or ATC clearance.

Lastly while some aircraft do have TCAS integrated autopilot it is uncommon. Some airlines are still operating aircraft 40 years old.

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

#506

Post by fouc »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #502
fxtentacle wrote: post #187

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…

> I avoid new technology, exactly because I'm an engineer. > I wonder if that is just me Can't find it now but there was a poignant quote or anecdote I read the other day that expresses this exact sentiment - the more you know about technology, the less likely you are to use it. I think it was in the context of e.g. smart homes and voice assistants or online tracking - if you're aware of how much data they hoover up…

It would be nice if that sort of awareness was more prevalent on HN.

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

#507

Post by ReptileMan »

siljon wrote: post #311

He complained once before about this stretch, and yet he kept driving auto pilot at the same location? I would never dare to do that, and sounds suicidal. Also I would never dare to fully trust auto-pilot and I think they should change the official name to driver assistance instead, until auto-pilot is ready. Which is how Tesla want to treat it according to the article: "Tesla says Autopilot is intended to be used fo…

It is not suicidal, but probably worthy of a honorable mention in the annual Darwin Awards roundup since it was a very bad judgement on his part.

As an engineer - he should have known better than to continue to use the feature the moment it became unreliable for reasons unknown. Those kind of failure modes are extremely devious killers.

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

#508

Post by emiliobumachar »

Alupis wrote: post #388
fxtentacle wrote: post #187

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…

This whole self driving, fully autonomous thing has become some sort of strange faux-religion. It's followers see no other possible solution as acceptable. Instead of putting our heads together to make really good driver assistance technologies and being satisfied, the darn thing needs to also drive itself everywhere otherwise we're leaving something on the table! Untill we have zero deaths, we cannot stop demanding…

Would Tesla be a heretic in this religion you just modeled? They're all about boring driver assistance, and acceptance of a low number of deaths. They don't even try Level 5 for now, and get a lot of criticism for requiring that the human pays attention at all times.

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

#509

Post by davedx »

randycupertino wrote: post #276
vincentmarle wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So now I'm afraid to use anything self-driving ^_^ I'm in the same boat but unfortunately you have to share the road with these things so it's hard to completely avoid them. I do find myself avoiding Tesla's on the freeway more and more.

I started avoiding Teslas on the freeway after watching the video of this guy putting on his makeup and shooting a youtube video while on autopilot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT_rEa4X1nA

Just curious: do you also avoid Subarus, Seats, BMWs, Audis and the other cars with adaptive cruise control? Or is it only Tesla drivers you consider this dangerous?

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

#510

Post by michaelwilson »

scirocco wrote: post #409
fxtentacle wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sound like an NVIDIA salesperson trying to sell me on a $3000 Titan ;) There is no doubt in my mind that an AI with billions of parameters will be excellent at memorizing stuff. I also have no doubt that research activity has exploded, which might be related to the generous hardware grants being handed out... But all that research has produced surprisingly little progress over algorithms from 2004 in the field of…

I wonder how many solutions within the AI field could just be categorized as "Automation"

That's what caused the first "AI Winter": Rules-based "AI" engines became what we call "Business Rules". AI didn't go away - it just stopped being an over-valued set of if-then logic and slots (value-driven triggers) with a cool set of GUI tools to build rule networks.

Source: Used to work for an 80s-era "AI Company"

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