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After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

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Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#191

Post by 1123581321 »

kirse wrote: post #184
erobbins wrote: post #138

I think Tesla eventually has a catastrophic accident and is sued and/or criminally prosecuted into oblivion. I feel sorry for the people who are going to have to die for this to happen. This trope that humans are bad drivers is, in general, crap. Humans are very good drivers. The US has 7.3 deaths per billion km driven. This means if you drive 50km a day, every day, you are (essentially) guaranteed to die... after 75…

I feel sorry for the people who are going to have to die for this to happen. I try to explain this to friends who are far too optimistic on self-crashing car technology. Self-driving cars (SDC) ultimately trade one class of problems that result in death (human-attention deficit) for another class of growing issues (sensor malfunctions/incapabilities, software defects). Ultimately SDC deaths end up as bugs/features on…

You are saying that the cost to develop successful self-driving cars is 1-50 quadrillion dollars using an optimistic estimate of rail costs. That does not seem reasonable. Perhaps 200 billion across all companies have been invested in self-driving cars so far (I.e., Waymo is just a fraction of that.)

Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#193

Post by albntomat0 »

kirse wrote: post #184
erobbins wrote: post #138

I think Tesla eventually has a catastrophic accident and is sued and/or criminally prosecuted into oblivion. I feel sorry for the people who are going to have to die for this to happen. This trope that humans are bad drivers is, in general, crap. Humans are very good drivers. The US has 7.3 deaths per billion km driven. This means if you drive 50km a day, every day, you are (essentially) guaranteed to die... after 75…

I feel sorry for the people who are going to have to die for this to happen. I try to explain this to friends who are far too optimistic on self-crashing car technology. Self-driving cars (SDC) ultimately trade one class of problems that result in death (human-attention deficit) for another class of growing issues (sensor malfunctions/incapabilities, software defects). Ultimately SDC deaths end up as bugs/features on…

> Ultimately SDC deaths end up as bugs/features on some random devteam's backlog, and I have no desire to have a JIRA ticket named in my honor.

Instead you can be the victim in a vehicular manslaughter case due to DUI/texting/etc.

As stated elsewhere on this thread, self-driving needs to be measurably better than a human. My state displays how many people have been killed thus far this year on the automatic traffic signs (used for amber alert, traffic info, etc as well). A 20% reduction in the 3000+ folks killed in 2018 would mean a whole lot for those saved.

Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#194

Post by gamblor956 »

slg wrote: post #141
skwb wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's still the issue. If there's a bug in the software code for a programmable pacemaker, it doesn't matter if the fundamental design is flawed. For governmental regulators, it's the actual implimentation and real world performance that matters. Sure, a bug fix for a routine being called is maybe easier to fix, but the real world performance is still the important metric to track.

Ok, but a lot of people are arguing something along the lines of "there is a bug in the pacemaker, let's take take out everyone's pacemakers". I am not saying we shouldn't be critical of Tesla or hold them accountable for their product. My point is simply that their product doesn't have to be infallible for it to still be an improvement over the current solution.

A pacemaker has objective improvements over the alternative, namely, death. So if a pacemaker has a bug, it's still overwhelmingly better than the baseline scenario of "no pacemakers."

A self-driving Tesla is not objectively better than a regular, human-driven car. The jury's still out on whether any self-driving car is even as good as the average human driver, so if one of them has a bug that causes serious accidents in reproducible situations, that's not better than the baseline situation it's being compared to.

Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#195

Post by automathematics »

x38iq84n wrote: post #2

I have always wondered... Does the AP have some higher-level notion of object permanence, continuity (road behind a horizon or after a curve) and things like that? Does it track a pedestrian that is momentarily hidden behind an obstacle and will probably reemerge in a second or two on the other side? Does it expect that kids may run after that ball that just flew from behind a car? Does it continuously track and impr…

In these videos, "Autopilot" is mentioned as the culprit, which seems to be a subset of the features Tesla has.

It seems to me there are 3 layers:

(level 0: Just Adaptive Cruise Control (use radar to adjust speed up to a max). Human still steers.

- 1: Adaptive Cruise Control (use radar to adjust speed up to a max) + Autosteer (camera's watch the lane markers and follow them). This is referred to as "Autopilot"

NOTE: This is where the accidents happen. The car isn't driving towards a barrier, it's following the lane markers and hits an error state. This is also NOT self driving.

- 2: "Nav on Autopilot". This is an additional function you turn on where the car has more intelligent (use this word loosely) capabilities on highways. The car will still do everything on level 1 combined with lane changes (using cameras to detect objects and trajectories differentiating cars from trucks from pedestrians from bikes from motorcycles etc). It will still follow lane lines, but with a lot of additional information (is there an object? am I merging? am I exiting? etc)

- 3: "Full Self Driving". This is an additional package that doesn't exist to the public. Internally I'm sure they're testing the functionality but this is using all of the sensors and algorithms and likely neural networks to decide what to do. A cool point though is that all Tesla's are likely running this code in "shadow mode" where data can be collected and assumptions can be tested without endangering any actual drivers. (see here for some cool data on this: https://electrek.co/2019/03/05/tesla-autopilot-detects-stop-...). "Hey, I think the car, if full self driving SHOULD take action X. *compare to what the driver actually does and log the data" over BILLIONS of miles

So when a Tesla hits the barrier or gets in an accident, we're actually running "#1" and people start freaking out. But when we get to the capabilities of #3 a lot of the "object permanence and continuity" stuff starts to come into play.

Full Disclosure: - I drive a Model 3 every day on Autopilot 75% of the time - I only 75% think self driving is capability under the current Tesla software suite but I bought the package anyways.

Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#196

Post by gamblor956 »

ketzo wrote: post #114
slg wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to dismiss your whole point, because it is certainly valid, but that isn't really the issue here. It is entirely possible for bugs like this to exist in the self driving tech and for Tesla to be correct in their claims that Autopilot is on average safer than a human driver. It is obviously troubling to see self driving cars run into solid and stationary objects, but human drivers do that all the time too…

That’s one of those thorny AI-human problems, though — if I crash 1 in 10 drives, it’s my fault, and therefore much easier to rationalize to be, well, not my fault. If my Tesla crashes 1 in 100 drives, it’s a faulty machine and an obvious death trap.

If you crash 1 in 10 drives you have no business being on the road. Most people can drive for years without even having a single, minor accident.

If Tesla crashes 1 in 100 drives, it's absolutely a death trap since that's still an obscenely bad accident rate.

Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#197

Post by throwaway2048 »

DarmokJalad1701 wrote: post #148
txcwpalpha wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elevators and medical devices go through extensive testing and certification processes before they ever go near being put into service. And when they are updated, they again go through extensive testing and certification. Teslas, on the other hand, apparently change their handling and driving profile overnight at the whim of the software engineers at Tesla, without even telling the drivers , and introducing bugs like…

> apparently change their handling and driving profile overnight at the whim of the software engineers at Tesla, without even telling the drivers OTA updates only happen after confirmed by the users. Where did you hear that it happens without user intervention?

But they agreed to the terms of service, what is everyone complaining about?

Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#198

Post by mandeepj »

erobbins wrote: post #138

I think Tesla eventually has a catastrophic accident and is sued and/or criminally prosecuted into oblivion. I feel sorry for the people who are going to have to die for this to happen. This trope that humans are bad drivers is, in general, crap. Humans are very good drivers. The US has 7.3 deaths per billion km driven. This means if you drive 50km a day, every day, you are (essentially) guaranteed to die... after 75…

> This trope that humans are bad drivers

Humans are bad in general. At least, self-driving cars will not be texting or using their phone while driving or involving in road rage. This list is really long.

"Nearly 1.25 million people die in road crashes each year, on average 3,287 deaths a day. An additional 20-50 million are injured or disabled. More than half of all road traffic deaths occur among young adults ages 15-44"

https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/

Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#199

Post by Domenic_S »

simple_phrases wrote: post #188
thomasjudge wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because -in general- marketing material doesn't tell the whole truth, just the selected bit that sounds impressive.

Which, unfortunately, doesn't excuse them when users take Tesla at their word that their Autopilot feature is fully self-driving and end up in an accident and/or dead.

Is this hyperbole, or do you think Tesla actually said that?

Re: After 6 months of working fine, Tesla software update drives at barriers again

#200

Post by gamblor956 »

slg wrote: post #167
btilly wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to point you to a study showing that autosteer reduced accidents by 40%, but Google told me that this was recently shown to be wrong. In fact it increased accidents by 60%. See https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/02/in-2017-the-feds-said-t... for details and verification.

The the paragraph directly after that 60% number: >So does that mean that Autosteer actually makes crashes 59 percent more likely? Probably not. Those 5,714 vehicles represent only a small portion of Tesla's fleet, and there's no way to know if they're representative. And that's the point: it's reckless to try to draw conclusions from such flawed data. NHTSA should have either asked Tesla for more data or left that c…

Tesla turned over the best data set to the NHTSA. They had more data on Autopilot usage and chose not to turn it over. It's thus fair to assume that the data they did not provide would not have benefited the company. So if even the Tesla-provided data set shows Tesla is worse than a normal driver, then it's logical to assume that a full data set would show the same--or worse.
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