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Scenarios in which Tesla FSD Beta 9.0 fails

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Re: Scenarios in which Tesla FSD Beta 9.0 fails

#281
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that it 'only' requires human intervention so rarely is still incredibly dangerous. You can't ask a human to have complete focus for hours on end when they're not making any inputs, and then require them to intervene at a moment's notice. That's not how humans work. Also, the fact that they're distributing safety critical software to the public as a 'beta' is just insanity. How many more people need to die a…

> You can't ask a human to have complete focus for hours on end when they're not making any inputs, and then require them to intervene at a moment's notice. That's not how humans work. I agree. Everyone agrees. That's why FSD Beta 9 is closed to the public. My understanding is that only a few thousand approved drivers can use it. > Also, the fact that they're distributing safety critical software to the public as a '…

What do the people sign that share the roads with those people? Or are they just colateral?

A closed beta needs to happen on private roads. If it happens on public roads it is not a closed beta.

Re: Scenarios in which Tesla FSD Beta 9.0 fails

#282
post #281
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't ask a human to have complete focus for hours on end when they're not making any inputs, and then require them to intervene at a moment's notice. That's not how humans work. I agree. Everyone agrees. That's why FSD Beta 9 is closed to the public. My understanding is that only a few thousand approved drivers can use it. > Also, the fact that they're distributing safety critical software to the public as a '…

What do the people sign that share the roads with those people? Or are they just colateral? A closed beta needs to happen on private roads. If it happens on public roads it is not a closed beta.

> What do the people sign that share the roads with those people?

Some of the videos show drivers having to agree to take full responsibility for all driving.

Re: Scenarios in which Tesla FSD Beta 9.0 fails

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FSD occasionally requesting driver to take over in genuinely difficult situations would be completely fine. The videos in the Twitter feed are nothing like that. The car makes potentially catastrophic blunders, like driving straight into a concrete pylon, with 100% confidence.

You know these are extract from multiple hours of video and it's a closed beta?

It doesn't matter how many hours of video there is, all it takes is hitting one pole to dramatically impact your life or the lives of others.

As a pedestrian and someone who shares the road with drivers who use FSD, I don't get to opt out of this "closed beta", and I certainly wouldn't care about how many hours of quality content it has on YouTube if it caused a car to hit me or drove me off the road.

Re: Scenarios in which Tesla FSD Beta 9.0 fails

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The post I was responding to said lidar, not radar. But if you want to switch to radar, we can talk about that too. > camera sees air, radar sees wall, slam on brakes Seeing bridges as walls is not a fundamental property of radar. That's an implementation problem. If cars are doing radar poorly, maybe the fix is to start doing it less poorly instead of throwing it away entirely.

Well, that was specifically about blending two different sensors with different characteristics. For you walking, it would be like blending your eyes with your nose. If your eyes tells you the floor is safe, and your nose smells something bad, do you stop? Anytime you have two different sensors with different characteristics, you want "the best". Your body uses your eyes to see where to walk, and your nose to test if…

Unfortunately your example is inapt because the center of your vision and your peripheral vision may as well be entirely separate systems that don't overlap, and the way brains apply focus doesn't translate to how cameras work. Your scenario is closer to asking about the center of your focus saying the path in front of you is clear and your peripheral vision detecting inbound motion from the side. Peripheral motion detection overrides the clear forward view, but it's because they aren't trying to record the same information.

Here's why:

> If your eyes tells you the floor is safe, and your nose smells something bad, do you stop?

Absolutely, yes, if the bad smell smells like dog shit or vomit or something else that I definitely don't want to step in. If I'm walking, I'm very unlikely to be looking directly at my feet and much more likely to be looking ahead to do predictive path planning. I definitely do stop at least transiently in your scenario and then apply extra visual focus to the ground right in front of my feet so that I don't step on dog shit. The center of my vision is great at discerning details, but peripheral vision is terrible for that.

Anyway, the obvious answer to your inquiry based on my explanation here is to use confidence weighting and adaptive focus. If I think something might be happening somewhere, I focus my available resources directly at the problem.

Re: Scenarios in which Tesla FSD Beta 9.0 fails

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The monorail posts and planters would be trivially handled by LIDAR. Tesla's aversion to time of flight sensors often strikes me a premature given our level of planning/perception technology.

I feel like the Xbox Kinect from 2010 would be a better vision solution than what they’ve got here, at least for the 20 feet ahead of you.

Until you have multiple cars trying to project multiple arrays of infrared dots onto objects 20 meters away in bright sunlight and then getting an accurate reading on which of the array kerfuffle is theirs.

Re: Scenarios in which Tesla FSD Beta 9.0 fails

#286
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand how something this broken is allowed to operate on public roads. Also out in a rural area. Running out to pickup lunch a few minutes ago, a young man flipped their old pickup truck on its side in an intersection, having hit the median for some reason. I too don't understand how humans are allowed to operate on public roads. Most of them are terrible at it. About 35k people a year die in motor veh…

Could have been equipment failure on the truck - a tie rod end failing or such will create some interesting behaviors. > I believe the argument is the software will improve to eventually be as good or better than humans, and I have a hard time not believing that. I find it easy to believe that software won't manage to deal well with all the weird things that reality can throw at a car, because we suck at software as…

> Humans can write very good software. The Space Shuttle engineering group wrote some damned fine software. They look literally nothing like the #YOLO coding that makes up most of Silicon Valley, and deal with a far, far more constrained environment as well than a typical public road.

Safety-critical software like that used in the space shuttle is incredible expensive for the level of complexity involved (which is not very high, compared to other projects). A self-driving car is probably one of the most complex software projects ever attempted. If you were to apply the same techniques as the shuttle to achieve self-driving you would literally never finish (not even the tech giants have enough money to do this). So to achieve this you not only need to solve the very difficult initial problems you also need to come up with a way of getting extreme reliability in a much more efficient way than anyone has achieved before.

Re: Scenarios in which Tesla FSD Beta 9.0 fails

#287
post #282
post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do the people sign that share the roads with those people? Or are they just colateral? A closed beta needs to happen on private roads. If it happens on public roads it is not a closed beta.

> What do the people sign that share the roads with those people? Some of the videos show drivers having to agree to take full responsibility for all driving.

I mean even if that’s true so-called beta software shouldn’t be on public roads.

Re: Scenarios in which Tesla FSD Beta 9.0 fails

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're going to build what amounts to new infrastructure, shouldn't we build transportation infrastructure that does away with the need to own cars? At least for transport in urban and suburban areas.

IMHO they're the same thing. Automate all cars to get around the right of way and high construction costs that limit rail development. I think the upgrades needed to roads are minimal in comparison. Maybe some sensors and signals but it may be just perfecting signage, lines, etc.

Pavement holds up a lot better in rain and snow than electronics, and still needs to be replaced every few years. Agreed that it should be a bare minimum expectation to have the roads painted clearly, but there are plenty of roads in eg Chicago where I don’t think there is an official number of lanes, it’s just kind of a free for all. Just going through the whole system and deciding where the boundaries are is a gargantuan task. American railroads haven’t even managed to upgrade their signals for PTC without failures left and right - if riding Amtrak or NYC metro is any indication the cars will have to coast at 5mph whenever there are signal problems.

Re: Scenarios in which Tesla FSD Beta 9.0 fails

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not have redundant sensors and crosscheck them? Boeing 737 Max had only one AOA sensor [1], and that wasn't a great idea. https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/30/politics/boeing-sensor-737-ma...

Right, so what happens when one says wall, and one says clear air? You brake? That is what happens now with phantom braking. Approaching a bridge? camera sees air, radar sees wall, slam on brakes. You want the best sensor type over a high-fidelity sensor and a lower fidelity sensor. The Tesla system has 8 cameras (3 forward), so they def have overlap between what they are considering better cameras. Time will prove w…

>That is what happens now with phantom braking.

Uber seemed to have programmed an artificial delay when the system got confused. There's a good breakdown of the timeline showing how the system kept misclassifying the bicyclist who was killed, but I couldn't immediately find it. That breakdown shows their strategy at implementing delays in the decision process. According to the NTSB report[1]:

>"According to Uber, emergency braking maneuvers are not enabled while the vehicle is under computer control, to reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior"

When I read that in the context of the programmed delays it seems to indicate "we wanted to avoid nuisance braking so we put in a delay when the system was confused." As someone who used to work in safety-critical software, it blows my mind that you would deliberately hobble one of your main risk mitigations because your system gets confused. While TSLA may be focusing on a platform that gets better data with better sensors, they still need to translate it to better decisions.

[1] https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/...

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