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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

#521

Post by fxtentacle »

emiliobumachar wrote: post #508
Alupis wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No they get criticism for calling the whole thing "autopilot" and presenting it as if paying attention was optional.

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

#522

Post by peteradio »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #480
skat20phys wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This "driver aid" model itself is starting to sound like a problem to me. You either have safe, autonomous driving or you don't. A model where a driver is assumed to disengage attention, etc but then be expected to rengage in a fraction of a second to respond to an anomalous event is fundamentally at its core flawed I think. It's like asking a human to drive and not drive at the same time. Most driving laws assume a…

It's only a problem if you believe in driverless cars, then it becomes a Hard Problem: "it works in situations where it's irrelevant", but so does plain old not holding the wheel: look, it's self-driving!* (in ideal conditions)

Reminds me of Bart Simpson engaging cruise control assuming its something like an autopilot. Goes good for a little while haha.

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

#524

Post by simias »

xkemp wrote: post #500
neuronic wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This whole self driving, fully autonomous thing has become some sort of strange faux-religion. What really bugs me, as someone working in consulting as a hands-on backend developer with a previous background in technical consulting at an accounting Big4 (student job), is the insane amount of PR, politics and marketing talk by people who have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA what they are talking about. I witnessed politicians an…

Predicting with All-Caps confidence that autonomous driving is "decades away" is at least as indefensible as overly optimistic predictions were.

I wouldn't bet on it but I also wouldn't call it indefensible. Fully autonomous driving is a very complex problem with a very long tail. Being able to drive semi-reliably on American highways doesn't mean that you're almost done, not even close.

An other handicap for self-driving cars is that the problem is effectively harder at the start when the majority of the traffic will still be operated by human drivers who are a lot harder to predict reliably than an other autonomous vehicles.

Beyond that, I strongly believe that software engineering is still ridiculously immature and unable to deliver safe, reliable solutions without strong hardware failovers. We have countless examples of this. We simply don't have the maturity yet, we're still figuring out what type of screwdrivers we should use and whether a hammer could do the trick.

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

#525

Post by TheAdamist »

keanzu wrote: post #483
Alupis wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

SAE Level 5 is completely transformative, it will utterly change the market and the use of cars. Once you can conveniently call up an automated Uber the need, at least in cities, to buy your own car will effectively vanish. This is Uber's endgame - get humans out of the loop. As long as cars still need human drivers this cost savings can't be realized. > Forget better braking systems that apply themselves automatical…

Uber has no relevance once level 5 exists. Vehicle manufacturers will run the vehicles directly if there is any profit to be made from a taxi service.

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

#526

Post by matwood »

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…

> This whole self driving, fully autonomous thing has become some sort of strange faux-religion.

Just follow the money. The near future financials of companies like Uber and Lyft (and to a lesses extent Tesla), rely on fully autonomous self driving.

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

#527

Post by coldtea »

azernik wrote: post #453
coldtea wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMO, flying cars will eventually arrive. Not so sure. I saw specific designs hyped in the 80s and 90s, and know of efforts hyped in the 70s as well. The reason they always fail is because constraints of designing a car to go on land and the constraints of designing a flying machine are different. You can sorta kinda build something that does both, and people have, time and again, but it will be good at neither of t…

Agreed on flying cars, but I wanted to point out a glaring inaccuracy in the opening that undercuts the author's broader argument: "By 2000 or so that curve had flattened out in the usual way as PV cells became a mature technology, and almost two decades of further experience with them has sorted out what they can do and what they can’t." In fact, PV prices have dropped DRAMATICALLY since 2000 ( https://www.sciencedi…

>In fact, PV prices have dropped DRAMATICALLY since 2000 (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014.... looks at the different trends 1986-2001 and 2001-2012), as have the prices/performance of the energy storage systems needed to make them practical.

Can't open this, but the abstract also shares this:

"Market-stimulating policies were responsible for a large share of PV's cost decline"

This part is artificial though (subsidies, etc).

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

#528

Post by emiliobumachar »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #498
dontreact wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The statistics for SDVs have an issue which might invalidate them: "fatality per miles driven" doesn't take disengagements into account: how do you even do that, meaningfully? "Fatality avoided because human driver stepped in - another triumph for autonomous driving"? That doesn't make much sense...

It makes sense in that, even in the real world, the real humans can be counted on to pay attention and intervene to some extent. That's an important counterpoint to the vivid thought experiment of "how could you possibly expect someone to pay attention after hundreds of hours of flawless machine operation?"

Unless you're talking about getting rid of the steering wheel and deploying the current system as Level 5. In that case, yes, interventions should count against it.

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

#529

Post by tsukurimashou »

brailsafe wrote: post #397
tsukurimashou wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Are there any fully autonomous cars on public roads with no driver that can intervene? Seems like only maybe in tightly constrained situations are we ready.

I don't think I mentioned FULLY autonomous cars, my point was: something doesn't have to be perfect before we have to use it, but I probably didn't express myself correctly

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

#530

Post by moooo99 »

stephenr wrote: post #515
moooo99 wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-d…

> There is no real self-driving on the road Emphasis on real . There is definitely something that most people would refer to as "self driving" in cars on the road. I'm not saying what is there is specifically good at what it does - I'm saying someone put it into use regardless of how fit for purpose it is. > but this future is probably not as close as Tesla PR makes us think Unless you're suggesting the PR team decid…

> Emphasis on real. There is definitely something that most people would refer to as "self-driving" in cars on the road.

Then you'd have to define what a self-driving car actually means. At least for me, self-driving means level 4 upwards. Everything below I'd consider assisted driving.

> Unless you're suggesting the PR team decided to make shit like "Summon" available to the public, then it's not just "PR spin". As I said, this Smart Summon feature also only works under very specific circumstances with multiple restrictions (and from what I've seen on Twitter it received mixed feedback)

Just because the car manages to navigate a parking lot with 5km/h relatively reliable, that doesn't mean that at the end of the year it'll be able to drive the car with 150 km/h on the Autobahn.

Edit: Fixed my formatting

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