Tesla Engineer Says Musk Overstated Tesla Autopilot Reality • Hacker News Board

Re: Tesla Engineer Says Musk Overstated Tesla Autopilot Reality

#121

Post by DreamScatter » Sun, May 09, 2021, 1:07 PM UTC

kingsuper20 wrote: post #46

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #22

I think the big issue is that if you really want autonomous driving over any road, you will likely either need sensors beyond vision or some AGI level model of the world. For example, on the highway, truck infront of you drops some debris. What do you do? It can be dangerous to suddenly swerve or brake, but also dangerous to hit something. What you do In real life is quickly evaluate. You are looking at the object th…

> I think the big issue is that if you really want autonomous driving over any road, you will likely either need sensors beyond vision or some AGI level model of the world. Somehow people manage without this. Without any real knowledge of the problems the engineers are hitting, my current take is that to produce a reasonably good autonomous driving system requires killing some people. Slowly adding features will send…

Killing people to achieve a technology is unacceptable and unethical ... maybe in nazi germany you could pull that off, but I think you'd eventually be charged with crimes against humanity.

Re: Tesla Engineer Says Musk Overstated Tesla Autopilot Reality

#122

Post by wutbrodo » Sun, May 09, 2021, 6:53 PM UTC

dreamcompiler wrote: post #95

wutbrodo wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I work in AV eng/research and have never heard someone say this. Most of the people I know in the space are pretty clear-headed about how dangerous human driving is. We are generally less optimistic about timing, but that was more true a couple years ago (before all the big cos' 2019 deadlines got pushed back) than it is now. Current timelines seem like an achievable challenge to me, and I don't think I'm unusu…

Two things can be true at the same time: 1. Human-driven cars are dangerous. 2. Autonomous driving (currently) is dangerous. AD solves some human driving problems (like inattention) but introduces new ones (like driving under trucks).

Obviously so, and this doesn't contradict anything I said. But the types of people who work on AVs are quantitative enough to understand that these magnitudes can differ, and are able to process that difference instead of waving them away as "both dangerous" and sticking with the status quo out of blind habit.

Almost literally every decision trades off one danger for another: to pick an adjacent example, airbags introduce dangers that are different from the ones they solve. And yet, "airbags have dangers! Take them out of your car" is a woefully incomplete understanding of the risk landscape, driven more by our Neanderthal brain's superstition than our Homo Sapiens reasoning about risk.

That sort of magical thinking is a hurdle that every shift in the risk landscape needs to overcome ("what if vaccines have microchips in them??").

This is, of course, dependent on actual comparative safety stats, but I've yet to hear a safety argument against taking a Waymo ride over an Uber in Chandler[1]. If the same level of transparency and rigor is used in more complex environments, I'd take a cruise/waymo car in sf too (once they launch).

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2020/10/30/waymo-...

Re: Tesla Engineer Says Musk Overstated Tesla Autopilot Reality

#123

Post by bluGill » Mon, May 10, 2021, 10:04 AM UTC

joshuamorton wrote: post #118

bluGill wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Madrid does all underground lines lines like your phase 2 for about 1 billion. Someone needs to learn about cost control. Think of how much more they could get with Madrid prices.

Not saying that CA prices aren't inflated, but there are also geological differences that probably matter. Madrid isn't near active fault lines (not to mention generic soil differences that can matter, but IDK if they do in this case).

I don't have Japanese costs, but they are lower, and deal with worse earthquakes than CA

Re: Tesla Engineer Says Musk Overstated Tesla Autopilot Reality

#124

Post by dreamcompiler » Tue, May 11, 2021, 3:51 AM UTC

wutbrodo wrote: post #122

dreamcompiler wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two things can be true at the same time: 1. Human-driven cars are dangerous. 2. Autonomous driving (currently) is dangerous. AD solves some human driving problems (like inattention) but introduces new ones (like driving under trucks).

Obviously so, and this doesn't contradict anything I said. But the types of people who work on AVs are quantitative enough to understand that these magnitudes can differ, and are able to process that difference instead of waving them away as "both dangerous" and sticking with the status quo out of blind habit. Almost literally every decision trades off one danger for another: to pick an adjacent example, airbags intr…

I don't find your analogy to airbags persuasive. The vector space of "weird situations where an airbag can kill a person who would not have been killed otherwise" is vastly smaller in dimension and size than the comparative space where autonomous driving can kill someone. That in and of itself does not make AD a bad idea, but it does make it a much harder engineering problem.

As engineers we can pretty much completely characterize the airbag space and make predictions about where airbags are dangerous, and then mitigate those. What makes AD a bad idea is that such characterization is impossible with the AD space because AD is currently done almost exclusively by feeding massive amounts of data into a neural net pattern matcher. In other words we have no idea why AD works, and thus we have no idea when AD won't work until somebody dies. This is no way to do engineering, especially when lives are at stake.

Re: Tesla Engineer Says Musk Overstated Tesla Autopilot Reality

#125

Post by wutbrodo » Tue, May 11, 2021, 7:54 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #106

wutbrodo wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's my point. Presumably Detroit doesn't have winter driving conditions in the summer, in which case robotaxis are feasible seasonally, or when there hasn't been rain/freezing conditions for X # of days, etc. Determining a bound on operating conditions is a far easier problem than making a car that drives itself. Before launching in any city, you have to validate that you can handle the idiosyncrasies of its drivi…

I'm not sure a want a human driver who only drives in winter - they will be out of practice when we need them. The snow problems mentioned above are real - but it isn't all winter, it is a couple weeks scattered around the whole season. Then the plows get out (and things warm up enough for salt to work) and you can drive like summer for a few days.

Right, and these companies are more than capable of running on a week to week or day to day basis (they already do this in the markets they test in).

> I'm not sure a want a human driver who only drives in winter - they will be out of practice when we need them

Do you feel similarly about making cities bike-friendly?