Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot • Hacker News Board

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

#781

Post by jskrablin » Wed, Feb 12, 2020, 6:02 PM UTC

bdamm wrote: post #749

UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>...without a single brain-byte spent on ... This is a glorious Gibson-esq turn of phrase that I hope goes down in history and is picked up in common vernacular. Back on topic: The more I know about technology the less I want it or trust it to work. I assume this is similar to Pilots not wanting somebody else to fly, or surgeons not wanting to go under the knife. We know, that we don't know enough about autonomous dr…

We know that, but also we ought to know that pushing through the hard problems by rolling out systems operating world-wide and interacting with real people is the only way forward toward improved safety, reduced mental slavery to the menial task of driving, and the time and relationship freedom that comes with it. So yep, I let my Tesla do lots of driving. And I do it knowing that the brake pedal and the steering whe…

I wouldn't feel comfortable in a vehicle that may, or may not react to some situation on the road ahead. Because one day it will decide to do $something_really_stupid and you won't be able to react in time/correctly because you'll be too busy singing karaoke. With some extra bad luck, you'll die/kill someone else because of that.

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

#782

Post by scoot » Wed, Feb 12, 2020, 6:03 PM UTC

This was mention in the article discussed here when the family first sued:

Tesla issued a statement placing the blame on Huang and denying moral or legal liability for the crash.

“According to the family, Mr. Huang was well aware that Autopilot was not perfect and, specifically, he told them it was not reliable in that exact location, yet he nonetheless engaged Autopilot at that location."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19802284

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

#783

Post by saalweachter » Wed, Feb 12, 2020, 6:15 PM UTC

Balanceinfinity wrote: post #778

saalweachter wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's like fifty caveats that go along with this statement, but this is the internet so I'm just going to skip all that. Something like half your human brain is devoted to visual processing. There's a tendency to think that things like language is what makes the human brain special, or our ability to plan or think abstractly, and we talk about things like "eagle eyes", but the truth is humans are seeing machines wi…

citation for "half your human brain is devoted to visual processing"?

Since the internet places no weight on things like "common knowledge to anyone in the field" or "I took a bunch of classes on the brain in college", here's a random quote from someone at MIT: http://news.mit.edu/1996/visualprocessing

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

#784

Post by sitkack » Wed, Feb 12, 2020, 6:17 PM UTC

jerkstate wrote: post #734

jhallenworld wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe he was fulfilling Apple's demands: either attend a meeting on the phone while driving, or wake up earlier. (Definitely not singling out Apple here.. at IBM I had a coworker who was in an accident during a phone meeting- luckily non-fatal).

I have coworkers who regularly take meetings or text chat/email while driving. It makes me uncomfortable. I have tried hinting that it's a bad idea, but don't feel comfortable telling them directly (don't think it would do anything except harm our relationship due to me questioning their judgement) or reporting to HR (fear of retaliation, some of the coworkers are senior to me in the management chain). On the other h…

We had this PM who ran our meetings, when people phoned in from the road she would say, "please take your calls while your aren't driving" and boot them from the meeting. Now I do the same thing and you should to.

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

#785

Post by jbtule » Wed, Feb 12, 2020, 6:19 PM UTC

frankus wrote: post #725

I can’t help but think that our culture-wide experiment in the normalization of deviance when it comes to speed limits (both how they are set and how they are observed) has something to do with this. A crash at 55 mph would have 40% less energy than at 71 mph.

The NTSB report information is public, from the NTSB docket, https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/Pages/HWY18FH011.aspx, he wasn't traveling at 71 miles per hour.

"At 3 seconds prior to the crash and up to the time of impact with the crash attenuator, the Tesla’s speed increased from 62 to 70.8 mph, with no precrash braking or evasive steering movement detected."

The autopilot accelerated into the barrier.

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

#786

Post by LeifCarrotson » Wed, Feb 12, 2020, 6:21 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #432

sam_goody wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, flying cars will eventually arrive. Perhaps it will be limited to specific "lanes" (it will be much more palatable to the masses if it must (like cars) keep to a limited area). But it will not need to recognize pedestrians and bikers and human driven cars, and some standard will be introduced to allow all them self driving cars to talk to each other. At that point, Level 5 will be much easier, even obvious. All…

> 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…

The question is whether the problem is one of insufficient engineering optimization or whether it requires a step-function in technology that does not exist now. It appears to me that self-driving cars are of the former type, while flying cars are the latter.

Current-resolution lidar, cameras, and radar seem to provide sufficient sensor input. The costs are too high by a long shot, but that may just be a question of getting economies of scale established. Current PC graphics hardware has sufficient bandwidth to process those sensors. I don't think you can just throw current neural net training at the problem and get Type 5 autonomy out of it - there will be lots and lots of engineering hours in figuring out what to do with that sensor data - but that's just a problem of doing many man-years of straightforward work.

Flying cars don't have adequate power from a current-gen internal combustion engine running on petroleum, and especially not enough power from lithium-ion batteries and electric motors. If you could get a power source that provided an order of magnitude or two greater power density than the best of those technologies, flying cars would be viable. Until then, no amount of engineering hours will make it work.

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

#787

Post by brailsafe » Wed, Feb 12, 2020, 6:23 PM UTC

tiborsaas wrote: post #669

hugh-avherald wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Humans are terrible at safe driving I'd dispute this. I'd say humans are excellent at many aspects of it. The high mortality is simply because driving is inherently dangerous and we do a lot of it. I imagine the solution is basically what has happened over the last 60 years: gradual changes to improve safe driving.

"Nearly 1.25 million people die in road crashes each year, on average 3,287 deaths a day. An additional 20-50 million are injured or disabled." https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/

Seems like we're proportionally better at the seemingly more complex task of driving, than we are at maintaining our health. Heart disease in the U.S alone apparently kills about as much as half the number of worldwide car related fatalities each year.

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

#788

Post by u801e » Wed, Feb 12, 2020, 6:26 PM UTC

I've always thought that having a person take over from a computer when driving is a fundamentally flawed premise. People, by nature, are not going to devote enough attention to a task they're not actively involved in and they won't be able to take action fast enough to avoid an incident because of the time it takes to context switch from whatever they were doing to handling the situation that just came up.

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

#789

Post by pier25 » Wed, Feb 12, 2020, 6:26 PM UTC

dahdum wrote: post #712

dkonofalski wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I don't understand the sad conclusion of the story in the article. The driver knew that AutoPilot had issues with that stretch of the freeway and was able to repeat the issues on several occasions but still thought it best to be on his phone, while driving 71 mph, at the mercy of AutoPilot? Especially considering that he was an engineer who had expressed concern over this, it seems silly to me that he wou…

His phone was using data, that’s not proof he was using it and distracted. Spotify streaming a new playlist could be responsible for that.

Maybe he wasn't using his phone but he was distracted or maybe even asleep. Otherwise why let the car crash?

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

#790

Post by Reason077 » Wed, Feb 12, 2020, 6:26 PM UTC

snowwrestler wrote: post #586

xkemp wrote: 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... has never gotten good enough to succeed in the marketplace against alternatives."

There is little market demand for handwriting recognition, and thus little active research goes into it. Not because it is a difficult or problematic technology, but because better alternatives exist that make it irrelevant.

Even if someone were to come up with an absolutely perfect handwriting recognition system, most people wouldn't use it. Why? because the advent of multi-touch screens means that most people can type much faster than they can hand-write anyway.