Tesla has a history of using remote diagnostics to snitch on drivers instead of allowing investigators to do their job. It’s a valid concern that your car manufacturer will use the interior cameras to blame a crime on you. These automatic tagging features also bring to question the bias in algorithms. What does this mean for drivers with disabilities? Is it possible that a safe driver with ADHD or Turrets etc might b…
Tesla hacker reveals what driver-facing camera is looking for
281–290 of 455 posts
Re: Tesla hacker reveals what driver-facing camera is looking for
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
This purist notion of 'they should never be allowed to drive a car, for everyone else's protection' crumbles at the most trivial examination when you consider that you're talking about leaving millions of people jobless or in significantly worse quality of life conditions You contend that there are millions of people who knowingly drive while tired enough to fall asleep at the wheel and with a history of doing so? If…
> According to the National Sleep Foundation, about half of U.S. adult drivers admit to consistently getting behind the wheel while feeling drowsy. About 20% admit to falling asleep behind the wheel at some point in the past year – with more than 40% admitting this has happened at least once in their driving careers. From: https://www.nsc.org/road-safety/safety-topics/fatigued-drivi... Those are enormous numbers. I w…
If we're being brutally objective here, road accidents are extremely expensive in purely economic terms. Obviously there could be a loss of productivity for anyone directly involved who was injured. But then you also need to expend considerable resources to clear the accident site and fully reopen the road. While you're doing that, you might be delaying many people due to congestion in the area of the accident. Then there is the cost of caring for anyone wounded, repairing any physical damage done to public infrastructure, and repairing or replacing any other vehicles that were involved and any cargo they were carrying. And of course, in the worst case, you have the profound effects of losing people entirely under such tragic circumstances, which involve not just losing anything they would have contributed for the rest of their lives, but also the consequences for their family and friends, their employers or clients, and anyone else who depended on them economically right down to the place on the corner where they stopped to buy a coffee each morning on the way into the office.
So even if we're only trying to avoid the most catastrophic cases such as someone actually falling asleep and causing a multi-vehicle pile-up on a major road, and even if we err on the side of caution and take many thousands of drivers off the road who are at significant risk of causing such an accident but in reality would not have done so, it's still not clear cut that the economic hit would be greater than the harm prevented.
For those who like hard data, I can't immediately offer you any, but as a very rough guide, here in the UK (where we already have lower per-capita road deaths than most of the world) I have seen arguments made about local road improvement schemes that suggested a seven-figure cost to save a single life would be economically justified. It's not hard to believe if you consider that a fatal accident can close a road for several hours, leaving thousands of vehicles stranded, and involving dozens of emergency responders and all of the equipment and vehicles they need, in addition to the injury, death and damage caused to anyone directly involved.
Re: Tesla hacker reveals what driver-facing camera is looking for
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't want autopilot so I can actually sleep at the wheel, I want it in case I do. You should never get behind the wheel if there's a chance you'll fall asleep! You shouldn't be driving. Period. This is incredibly dangerous and puts innocent people at risk. No technology should compensate for this. We don't design technology to help drivers under the influence feel better about their driving. Please don't get beh…
> Please don't get behind the wheel if you're drowsy. I know two people with the issue that GP is talking about, and it's not what you're talking about. They're perfectly alert when they get behind the wheel. They get drowsy on longer drives like 1hr+, which is why any time we do road trips I drive for them. And all that 'pull over and take a power nap' bullshit doesn't work. It's not grounded in any science to start…
If you can't stay awake for an hour that must be very challenging but I don't think you should be driving at all for longer distances. At least not on a road you share with other people!
Re: Tesla hacker reveals what driver-facing camera is looking for
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
I value technical impossibility much higher than legal prohibition.
Then don't buy it?
If the general public goes against your preference then your preference will no longer be an option. For cars this likely means that the only way to get a car that isn't spyware/ad tech will be buying an old car before this happened. That option eventually becomes more and more difficult until you give up and accept whatever the corporations are pushing.
Re: Tesla hacker reveals what driver-facing camera is looking for
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For most people, the other option is to stop driving to work and then be jobless and eventually homeless, make their kids go hungry, or go bankrupt. You say that as if there weren't any other options. You have public transport and you can share a car (and expenses) with someone who has your same destination. > For most people, it's a life and family destroying sentence. Dying in a car accident is literally a death…
A very large number of people in the US have access to no public transit whatsoever - and as for sharing a car... that’s what they’re likely doing with their partner. One person uses it to go to work while the other is at home, probably caring for their children.
How do all these hopelessly trapped families ever take their kids to things like medical appointments?
Re: Tesla hacker reveals what driver-facing camera is looking for
#286One of the reasons I would love to have autopilot is because I have a history of dozing off at the wheel. Never so much where I've had an accident, but bad enough where I've scared myself badly. I don't want autopilot so I can actually sleep at the wheel, I want it in case I do . I'd vastly prefer if the car noticed I was inattentive that it notified me. My feeling is for long drives this would be a safety feature, b…
Getting into the bay area, it was dark, and I was damn tired. Had this been a long trip of some kind, I'd have at least pulled over and done a power nap, but I foolishly decided to press on, since we were less than 30 minutes from home and bed.
I'd been using autopilot for most of the trip, closely supervising it of course.
Suddenly I was awakened by the frantic, loud beeping that you get when you don't keep some minor torque on the steering wheel for a while.
It scared the hell out of me and my family in the car.
With their help, we were able to make it home safely.
Your specific use case is valid, but the other commenters are also correct. Autopilot still needs to be supervised, and one should NOT be driving while extremely drowsy.
In my many decades of driving, and countless long trips, this is the first time I've fallen asleep, and I've always done the right thing and (at a minimum) taken power naps as needed.
But circumstances conspired and I did the wrong thing.
I'm not claiming that Autopilot saved our lives or anything; I would almost certainly have been woken up by the rumble strips when the car drifted out of the lane.
To those who might argue that using Tesla Autopilot might tend to cause people to take bigger relevant risks: that's possible, but it's been a godsend for us. Using it doesn't make me, personally, any less attentive of a driver. Indeed, I'm quite a bit more alert to the important things than without it.
Re: Tesla hacker reveals what driver-facing camera is looking for
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's quite a reach and a bad take. I've only been in the full-time tech industry for about 3.5 years. Before then I was working hourly jobs to make ends meet, including working half time or more while studying full-time in college, working during high school, etc. This so I could pay rent and tuition with minimal, if any, aid. I couldn't even afford a car until after graduating from university. I was walking or tak…
> I couldn't even afford a car until after graduating from university. > I was walking or taking public transportation everywhere prior to finally getting a car. I had to afford a car in order to be able to get to work when I got my first job. Taking public transport would be a 4 hour journey in each direction (assuming I get to each transit point on time, assuming everything arrives on time). I couldn't afford the c…
>Having climbed from societal rock-bottom to a decent position in the tech industry, my mind is constantly blown by the fact that the average techie thinks their life is anything like what the vast majority of this planet are dealing with.
I'm not sure what your point is supposed to be, here? You say that I, and other like-minded people, are just "average techies" despite literally just explaining that some of us too had our own challenges.
I think it's okay to admit that nearly everybody has had their share of challenging backgrounds. Some people's privileges are the other's disadvantages and so on. That much is obvious.
But aside from that. Backgrounds aside.
Driving when you know you have a constant issue of falling asleep, getting drowsy, all of the above is unsafe. Even if you have priorities that you place above your own health/well-being, the problem with having those issues and still choosing to drive is that you are now deciding how others will be affected by your decision.
The moment you begin endangering other people's lives is the same moment that backgrounds, poorly-disadvantaged or not, become meaningless.
Because I highly doubt some victim's family is going to be impressed that you or someone else knowingly chose to drive repeatedly while acknowledging they would not be fully aware of what they were doing just because of working conditions.
Re: Tesla hacker reveals what driver-facing camera is looking for
#288One of the reasons I would love to have autopilot is because I have a history of dozing off at the wheel. Never so much where I've had an accident, but bad enough where I've scared myself badly. I don't want autopilot so I can actually sleep at the wheel, I want it in case I do . I'd vastly prefer if the car noticed I was inattentive that it notified me. My feeling is for long drives this would be a safety feature, b…
Re: Tesla hacker reveals what driver-facing camera is looking for
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
In one paragraph you've conveyed my point better than I could across multiple comments. This is the heart of what I was getting at. This, and the fact that the HN demographic, mostly being techies, seem to be a bit disconnected from what real life looks like to 80%+ of the population of the world. A few instances per year of not coming in to work due to poor sleep or having to order Uber wouldn't just inconvenicence…
In an earlier life, I worked in the trucking industry. If you refused to drive anytime you were fatigued, you would not be successful in the industry (one reason I am very glad to not be doing that anymore; it's also one of the most dangerous occupations out there, partly for that reason). I think that lots of the people here have never worked a non-privileged job in their lives.
He slammed into a pickup truck and killed that truck's occupant.
I had to be called in as a witness of the incident by the victim and trucking company's attorneys.
I think there's a strong difference between (rightfully so) blaming the companies that force this environment and the people who are just trying to make a living safely.
Re: Tesla hacker reveals what driver-facing camera is looking for
#290One of the reasons I would love to have autopilot is because I have a history of dozing off at the wheel. Never so much where I've had an accident, but bad enough where I've scared myself badly. I don't want autopilot so I can actually sleep at the wheel, I want it in case I do . I'd vastly prefer if the car noticed I was inattentive that it notified me. My feeling is for long drives this would be a safety feature, b…
> I don't want autopilot so I can actually sleep at the wheel, I want it in case I do. You should never get behind the wheel if there's a chance you'll fall asleep! You shouldn't be driving. Period. This is incredibly dangerous and puts innocent people at risk. No technology should compensate for this. We don't design technology to help drivers under the influence feel better about their driving. Please don't get beh…
You're shouting at a wall.
People think "drowsy" isn't a problem, the same way they think that texting and driving isn't a problem because they saw someone jump backwards in slow motion in The Matrix.
Drowsy driving is no better than buzzed driving, which legally is drunk driving.