Hacked billboards make Teslas see phantom objects causing them to swerve or stop

Thank you, that newsweek article was a shit show on mobile.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each. The computer failure methods are new to us, but we're all too familiar with human failings. Humans have much slower reaction times. Humans get sleepy, drunk, or distracted. Humans sometimes get angry or impatient and do dangerous things with their vehicles.

The important metric is accidents per mile driven. Right now, Teslas on autopilot seem to be significantly safer than human drivers. From Tesla's vehicle safety report[1]:

> ...we registered one accident for every 4.53 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged. For those driving without Autopilot but with our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 2.27 million miles driven. For those driving without Autopilot and without our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 1.56 million miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA’s most recent data shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash every 479,000 miles.

Yes autopilot has issues and limitations, but it's already 3x safer than unaided drivers. Also, it seems to be improving in safety. Two years ago, autopilot's crash rate was only 1.5x lower than unaided Tesla drivers.

1. https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport

>Speech that is false and intentionally causes a panic should not be protected.

70% of facebook posts and newspapers instantly banned.

>There are a lot of similar failure modes in humans.

there are lot of similar failure modes in individual humans. The difference is individual driver errors are not correlated, a bad reflection tricks a few humans at once instead of tens of thousands of cars running the same model. There is significantly more brittleness in a fleet of cars than in a population of humans, because the human population has diversity in judgement and experience.

This is not simple to fix because this uniformity is actually a feature of automated systems, it makes them explainable, produces expected results and conform and cheap, training a human for 20 years is more expensive than training all the cars once. However it also makes them collectively vulnerable, which is why heavy machines tend to be locked away on factory floors.

Yes. Flashing lights at the correct frequency and intensity can cause a noticeable fraction of the population to immediately seize. Emergency vehicles are a known trigger.

Less glibly, yes. There are particular arrangements of roads which are known to get people killed by cars. For example, an intersection at a particular angle with particular speed limits cause cars to stay hidden in each others' a-pillars as they approach the intersection. There are bits of highway that are known to cause human drivers to drift; this is why many stretches of highway now have textured strips down the side to notify drivers that they've moved out of their lane.