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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

#601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I doubt it. Vertical integration only works so far. I think the manufactures will sell cars to those want to run a taxi company. This is, and will remain a race to the bottom because competition is fierce: people buy price and first to get to them. They will also sell cars to normal people. Most people don't think about how convenient it is to have the storage of their personal car. If parking is free or cheap (which…

> I think the manufactures will sell cars to those want to run a taxi company.

A self-driving car is software and hardware... you can sell hardware but software only gets licensed. Software is really where the value is, and that won’t be owned by anyone but the company that made it.

Look at the history of mobile phones, which were originally sold to consumers only by the carriers. As the phones got better and better software, the business model attached more and more to the manufacturer.

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

#602

Tesla says autopilot works but that driver should be ready to intervene. This is terrifying - like having a kid riding shotgun that might just reach out and turn the wheel while you are on the highway. Anyone who has driven with autopilot, how quickly might it react to a perceived obstacle? Would it take a hard turn into a median faster than a person could reasonably react if it thought there was something in the roa…

> how quickly might it react to a perceived obstacle?

Very quickly, you have a split second to avoid whatever it decides to steer towards. The problem becomes even worse after you factor in that autopilot only works in easy to drive conditions (i.e. highways with high speeds). To make things even worse, you get less attentive when you are passive for a long period. I.e. if the autopilot fails in your first 20 seconds of driving you may very well be able to react, but if it has been driving perfectly for 20 minutes, you're probably already lulled into a passive state, and way to slow to react.

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

#603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As well as bundling it prices have been bumped up, to me that is not giving it away for free.

Sorry I misunderstood your previous comment. I assumed you meant that they should include safety features for no extra cost, which they do, not that they shouldn't charge anything at all for safety features, which is such a weird and extreme take that I'm not sure what to even say...

my original comment was around the point of mixing morality and business.

> I assumed you meant that they should include safety features for no extra cost, which they do

I could buy a car without it for 37500 and now I can't but I can now buy a car with it for 39500 and you would still consider this is no extra cost?

I must be misunderstanding what you are saying

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

#604
I use the radio in my car probably less than 1 percent of the time Im driving. Most of the time I'm listening to streaming media podcasts, soundcloud etc so why do all the accident reports stress DATA streaming on the phone like that isn't pretty normal these days? Clearly doesn't mean texting and driving although even texting can be done purely hands on wheel eyes straight ahead just using voice - its like the press is still living in 2002 not 2020.

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

#605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a religion, nothing "faux" about it. It fills the same needs, and uses the same mechanisms within the human mind as more traditional religion. It is also completely bonkers, as it makes bold assertions about the real world, with which reality will eventually disagree, whereas older religions tended to keep their most dogmatic positions unfalsifiable (the afterlife, the soul, vague prophecies, ...)

Calling it a religion makes about as much sense as calling efforts to cure AIDS or vaccinate Polio prior to the success of Salk a religion. There is a clear and obvious good to achieve, one which is theoretically implementatable and has predecessors for success. Reality can only disagree if it is outright proven impossible due to something - say in this counterfactual Polio has a 5% of turning any unique adjacent mol…

There is zero proof that autonomous vehicles can be safer than human drivers.

There’s lots of proof that autonomous vehicles are technically possible, but the leap to “definitely better than humans” is a very big one and it’s really being taken on faith right now.

In contrast, treating disease directly affect the incidence of that disease.

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

#606
post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually one of the biggest obstacles to Level 5 is expectation of Zero Deaths for Level 5 autonomous operations. The standard should be fewer deaths than human-operated (or even auto assisted ) cars. When you have thousands of machines traveling in close proximity at speeds exceeding 50mph there will be deaths, this is unavoidable. We need to reduce those as much as possible but to demand ZERO before the technology…

> The standard should be fewer deaths than human-operated (or even auto assisted ) cars. How do we go about testing this? By tallying up autonomous deaths until there are fewer per year than human drivers? > We need to reduce those as much as possible but to demand ZERO before the technology can be used is just unrealistic Human driver skill varies immensely by person. The idea that anyone who is (or even considers t…

The goal is always zero, but we all know that will never happen. Nothing is perfect. And assistance technologies may be more dangerous than level 5 because we physically cannot maintain concentration when few actions or decisions ar required from us. Some studies even indicate manual tranamissions make us safer, possibly for that reason. When level 5 is available, and it will be, because forever is a long time, good drivers shouldn't have to buy those cars. Assuming money is still a thing. Insurance comapnies may start forcing people financially towards sel drive only cars by hiking rates on humans, but if you give up your privacy with a driving monitor and they asses that you are safer, they would probably rather you drive and waive the hike.

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

#607
post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think autonomous driving advocates would do well to look at the history of computer handwriting recognition, an easier technical problem with lower consequences that received significant investment over decades. But it has never gotten good enough to succeed in the marketplace against alternatives. Why? It never exceeded consumer expectations, which are extremely high for automated systems. Even a correctness rate…

Handwriting recognition works very well if you can capture the actual strokes used while writing and not just the end result.

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

#608
post #274
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do people sleep or play on their phones then? Are the warnings not frequent and prominent enough? Are people hacking it and disabling it? What's the deal here?

The car detects your hand on the steering wheel. So technically speaking, as long as you keep one hand on the wheel, you can use your phone with the other hand :p. There are also devices avialable for purchase, which convince the car that there is a hand on the wheel. What I forgot to mention in the previous post: the autopilot does not only complain about hands off the wheel, but if you ignore the complaints long en…

> So people can't drive for long with their hands completely off the steering wheel, until they use some kind of defeating device.

Is that what happened in this case then? Serious question; never driven a Tesla. https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2018/11/30/los-altos-pla...

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

#609
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…

Count me guilty then, because I am also hoping to one day take a nap while the car drives me around. Until then, I found the next best thing is booking an Uber. They'll even use venture capital to subsidize my ride :) But wait, isn't that exactly why they are now in such a rush and cannot accept anything less than full autonomy? From what I heard, Uber has been burning billions of VC money to capture market share. An…

There is this other technology called "chauffeur"

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

#610
post #570
post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but speaking as someone kinda on the other side there are things like this 'actual Level 4' delivering stuff for real in Wuhan https://kr-asia.com/jd-com-uses-l4-autonomous-driving-soluti... Fair enough it's not very good - that one just went 600m - but it's hard to argue it won't exist for decades when it exists now. And historically going form sorta works but is rubbish in info tech eg. early cellphones, inter…

The issue is that there are so, so many edge cases to worry about. Simple example: someone decides to troll you in your self-driving car and steps out in front of it. You don't have controls in the car, so you can't go around them - you have to wait for them to move. In reality, it seems like it would resolve quickly - you get out and yell at them, call the police if that doesn't work, etc. But it can get more sinist…

Re robbers, car jackers and the like in some ways you may be better with a self driving car as they seem to be covered with cameras and report back to base the whole time so the crooks would be photographed and the cops called. Already the Tesla cameras have caught a few https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqBWt9rRx-U

Re all the edge cases - yeah that'll take a while.

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