Melbourne hit-and-run blamed on Tesla Autopilot, could set legal precedent
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Re: Melbourne hit-and-run blamed on Tesla Autopilot, could set legal precedent
#2The run part: I think they're a young overseas resident who panicked. They returned and handed themselves in to police at the scene.
A lot of younger foreigners have no idea what to do in an accident and in their home economy can face retribution, extortion, sometimes at the hands of police. In Australia, you stay, you help the victim, you report the accident. That's the law. In theory all drivers should know this but you get a year on your homeland licence before having to sit a local road rules exam.
I have nothing to add regarding self driving. Well I do: I think it's been misnamed and oversold.
Re: Melbourne hit-and-run blamed on Tesla Autopilot, could set legal precedent
#3The run part: I think they're a young overseas resident who panicked. They returned and handed themselves in to police at the scene. A lot of younger foreigners have no idea what to do in an accident and in their home economy can face retribution, extortion, sometimes at the hands of police. In Australia, you stay, you help the victim, you report the accident. That's the law. In theory all drivers should know this bu…
> I think it's been misnamed and oversold.
Yep. I marvel at the "Machine Learning AI ad algorithms" that try to sell me junk. I get 3 (three!) emails a day from aliexpress about stuff i already bought ... from aliexpress. Same thing with Amazon. I bought a, lets say "toaster" from amazon, and for the next 6 months every weird amazon ad on the wide internet and every time i hit the amazon home page it's trying to sell me toasters.
I don't even see it like "it's like a child, it finds something interesting and repeats it" because even a child gives up after a week. maybe a lot of people don't see "AI" as "old tech" - even though some of the first real "advances" - and i say that with a wry smile - were documented 40 years ago or more.
It's complete and utter snake oil. There are some cute toys that AI/ML can do, i can clone certain voices passably, for instance. There's "deepfakes" where a screenshot is enough to maybe fool someone not wearing their glasses at 3 meters, on a smart phone screen. There's obviously the AI in video games, etc.
But we're a good 25 years out from a truly autonomous, road-worthy, self-driving human transport.
Someone will always have to "look over the shoulder" until then.
The day i can hire a private self-driving taxi/limo to pick me up at my house and drive me to an arbitrary location, at any time of day or year, is the day i start to tinfoil my house to prevent the grey goo from coming inside.
edit: i should note that i would ab-so-loutely love a car service that was cheaper than hiring a limo for a week, if you can even do that. If the car is driving by itself, i can sleep while it gets from interesting place in the US to interesting place, and spend most of my time awake documenting and photographing and interviewing people, rather than hating interstate 10, 20, and 40; which is how most of my "road trips" for the past 20 years have gone. I've traveled this country "a lot", and i rarely have cute stories about places i've been to because i've either been completely wiped and just slept there somewhere, or i was in a hurry to beat the sun/state police/whatever through the state. I'd love to spend a few weeks in wyoming and montana and wisconsin, but if i have to drive it, the only thing i'll publish is a couple of shots of mountains, the kids posing in front of some tourist trap, and that's about it.
I passively consume, yet nearly universally ignore and eschew all "AI" news.
Re: Melbourne hit-and-run blamed on Tesla Autopilot, could set legal precedent
#4> A hit-and-run incident in Melbourne yesterday could set a legal precedent for the use of autonomous driving technologies in Australia.
There is no precedent to be set. If you are behind the wheel of a car you are responsible for it's operation. 'Autopilot' or not. And hard to say it was the autopilot's fault for driving off and returning to the police station two hours later.
Re: Melbourne hit-and-run blamed on Tesla Autopilot, could set legal precedent
#5In Melbourne, quite often there are 4 lane roads (2 lanes in each direction) with tramlines in the inner two lanes going in each direction. At the tram stops, passengers need to walk across the outer lane to get to/from the sidewalk, so cars need to stop behind the tram even if they are in the outer lane and not directly behind the tram so that they can make way for passengers.
Having moved here from Sydney a few years ago, where there are no trams in this configuration, this took a lot of getting used to, since if I was in the outer lane my natural instinct was to keep driving as the road ahead seems clear at first.
I'm not sure how common this is globally, but I wonder if Tesla's autopilot is configured for this edge case? I imagine it would be difficult to program since it would detect the tram as simply another vehicle and the road ahead as clear? Then again, I suppose it should have detected the pedestrian in any case?
Re: Melbourne hit-and-run blamed on Tesla Autopilot, could set legal precedent
#6The run part: I think they're a young overseas resident who panicked. They returned and handed themselves in to police at the scene. A lot of younger foreigners have no idea what to do in an accident and in their home economy can face retribution, extortion, sometimes at the hands of police. In Australia, you stay, you help the victim, you report the accident. That's the law. In theory all drivers should know this bu…
> I think it's been misnamed and oversold. Yep. I marvel at the "Machine Learning AI ad algorithms" that try to sell me junk. I get 3 (three!) emails a day from aliexpress about stuff i already bought ... from aliexpress. Same thing with Amazon. I bought a, lets say "toaster" from amazon, and for the next 6 months every weird amazon ad on the wide internet and every time i hit the amazon home page it's trying to sell…
Where AI has made really great advancements is all the stuff that you can memorize.
Like GitHub Co-Pilot reurgitating John Carmack's source code. Also, stochastic language models have reached the point where they seem like magic, e.g. automated YouTube subtitles and translations, or text to speech. But that all works by memorizing word fragments (CTC) and/or memorizing sentence fragments (n-Gram).
Re: Melbourne hit-and-run blamed on Tesla Autopilot, could set legal precedent
#7The run part: I think they're a young overseas resident who panicked. They returned and handed themselves in to police at the scene. A lot of younger foreigners have no idea what to do in an accident and in their home economy can face retribution, extortion, sometimes at the hands of police. In Australia, you stay, you help the victim, you report the accident. That's the law. In theory all drivers should know this bu…
> I think they're a young overseas resident who panicked.
Ok, I need to call this out. Unless I missed something, there's nothing to suggest that the person involved is an overseas resident.
> but you get a year on your homeland licence before having to sit a local road rules exam.
P-plates suggests she's doing a local driving licence. If you area foreigner from quite a few countries you just show your existing driving licence and get a Vic one without any exams and without p-plates.
Re: Melbourne hit-and-run blamed on Tesla Autopilot, could set legal precedent
#8In Melbourne, quite often there are 4 lane roads (2 lanes in each direction) with tramlines in the inner two lanes going in each direction. At the tram stops, passengers need to walk across the outer lane to get to/from the sidewalk, so cars need to stop behind the tram even if they are in the outer lane and not directly behind the tram so that they can make way for passengers. Having moved here from Sydney a few yea…
This is a thing in Toronto.
There also is a similar senario for all school buses where traffic in both directions must stop. But that might be detectable by the stop sign.
Re: Melbourne hit-and-run blamed on Tesla Autopilot, could set legal precedent
#9I didn’t realize Autopilot disabled the vehicle’s brakes. This poor driver couldn’t stop even after the collision. Seems like a terrible design choice.
Re: Melbourne hit-and-run blamed on Tesla Autopilot, could set legal precedent
#10I didn’t realize Autopilot disabled the vehicle’s brakes. This poor driver couldn’t stop even after the collision. Seems like a terrible design choice.
Autopilot does not disable vehicle brakes. In fact vehicle brakes immediately disables Autopilot. If they're actually claiming that they had no brakes then that makes it likely they're lying about using Autopilot at all.