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Tesla Autopilot

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Re: Tesla Autopilot

#201

Post by dmurray »

tajen wrote: post #144
adanto6840 wrote: post #11

This is quite interesting, I hadn't seen or heard about their intention to restrict like this, prior reading it tonight: "Please note also that using a self-driving Tesla for car sharing and ride hailing for friends and family is fine, but doing so for revenue purposes will only be permissible on the Tesla Network, details of which will be released next year."

That means a city is in uncertainty if it tries to buy 3 or 4 Tesla to serve as paid minibuses on local territory – neither can a company for a campus, TV channels for a huge studio range, entertainment park to drive their agents around or a shuttle service to the airport who would like to provide limousine services.

At worst they could call Tesla and ask for permission and a separate license agreement. I'd expect Tesla to agree in any of those cases.

Re: Tesla Autopilot

#202

Post by Reason077 »

tigershark wrote: post #187
the_rosentotter wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It terrifies me to think of relying on image recognition software to correctly determine an upcoming crossing road (with cars zipping across) so it can properly slow down, rather than get broadsided at full speed. Or a number of other life-and-death situations (which are common during driving). It just seems fragile (what if the 'vision' is somehow impaired, f.ex. blinded by sunlight, or the road markings are wrong o…

Seriously? Do you want to spend an incredibly huge amount of money to put magnets to delimit lanes all around the world?When there are so many roads without any clear painted lane marking, when the paint itself fades away in an handful of years and the magnets will last a couple of years at best ONLY if embedded in the asphalt, that means spending 100 times the amount of money above. And when in 2-3 years time we ver…

"worse than the British building thousands of km of canals when after 20-30 years the rails were dominating transportation."

I'm not sure that's a fair analogy. Without the canal network to cheaply transport goods and resources in bulk, it's hard to imagine how Britain could ever have industrialised to the point where building a railway network became possible in the first place!

Besides, railways did not immediately obsolete the canals as you seem to suggest. Some canals were still being built and extended until the early 1900s (70+ years after the railway boom), and the last commercial freight services lasted until as late as 1970 - suggesting it was really motorways that "killed off" commercial canal traffic.

One key point of difference is that (like road freight) pretty much anyone could operate a freight service using canals, where as the railways were in the hands of a few huge corporations. That meant a lot of niche, point-to-point freight was more viable to transport over water than rail.

Re: Tesla Autopilot

#203

Post by obastani »

Daviey wrote: post #193
TeMPOraL wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, human "machine vision" has graceful failure modes. You don't switch from seeing cars to seeing nothing to seeing an elephant just because the input got a little noisy. The same cannot be said about current ML demonstrations - because they operate on just vision. Humans continuously reconcile visual input with their model of the world and with other inputs, to the point of overriding visual data if neede…

You've never been temporary blinded by a low-sun? Never sneezed and had your eyes closed at the wrong moment? This is the same thing..

Humans know when they can't see properly. The problem with adversarial examples is that the neural net thinks it's doing great. You have to manually specify every possible failure mode for the neural net before hand -- if you miss one, you might have an accident.

Re: Tesla Autopilot

#204

Post by TeMPOraL »

Daviey wrote: post #193
TeMPOraL wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, human "machine vision" has graceful failure modes. You don't switch from seeing cars to seeing nothing to seeing an elephant just because the input got a little noisy. The same cannot be said about current ML demonstrations - because they operate on just vision. Humans continuously reconcile visual input with their model of the world and with other inputs, to the point of overriding visual data if neede…

You've never been temporary blinded by a low-sun? Never sneezed and had your eyes closed at the wrong moment? This is the same thing..

It's not. When you're being blinded by sun, you don't suddenly see elephants or spaceships or comic books. You also don't think the world just disappeared - you know to just ignore the visual input.

Also, I'm more worried about temporary, unexpected configuration of things that suddenly make a NN see something weird.

Re: Tesla Autopilot

#205

Post by IanCal »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #199

Self-driving cars' marketing pitch is that they could reduce road accidents, but if we really want to reduce road accidents, might we not have a better chance at it if we removed cars from roads altogether? We could replace them with, I don't know, some kind of overground system of personal pods on rails, or something like that. I think one big selling point of cars has always been that they grant the user a great am…

> Self-driving cars propose to reduce this risk of death and injury by taking away the autonomy we traded it for in the first place.

A car that can drive itself does not remove the autonomy having a car gives you. The key part of the autonomy is going where you want, when you want. Not that you get to push the pedals and turn the wheel.

> We already have dumb machines that can do that: trains, trams, all sorts of vehicles-on-rails.

Which travel only from and to certain places, at certain times. It's why what would be a three hour drive is likely to take me closer to five hours tomorrow, for example. For another example: the train station near my friends house stops running trains at 7pm, the roads are open all night.

> We could replace them with, I don't know, some kind of overground system of personal pods on rails, or something like that.

Building an entirely new, country wide, overhead rail system that goes to or extremely close to every house? That sounds incredibly expensive.

> Why do we need self-driving cars, then?

They're an incremental improvement which requires no new major infrastructure.

Re: Tesla Autopilot

#206

Post by gkya »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #199

Self-driving cars' marketing pitch is that they could reduce road accidents, but if we really want to reduce road accidents, might we not have a better chance at it if we removed cars from roads altogether? We could replace them with, I don't know, some kind of overground system of personal pods on rails, or something like that. I think one big selling point of cars has always been that they grant the user a great am…

My observation is that generally Americans can't imagine a carless life as they have very bad public transport networks, according to what I see 8n movies etc. and read here on the HN. Whenever I made a similar comment it backfired. Improving the network is never an option for them and the reason is usually sth. like "I can't stand the people in the busses". And thus they look into complex options like this. I live in Istanbul and while the amount of construction work and all the economy and rant around is ugly, the metro especially is a joy most of the time. No way I'm getting a car as they are so costly and such a liability. Different life styles, different mindsets, I guess.

Re: Tesla Autopilot

#207

Post by bubblethink »

enknamel wrote: post #116
adanto6840 wrote: post #11

This is quite interesting, I hadn't seen or heard about their intention to restrict like this, prior reading it tonight: "Please note also that using a self-driving Tesla for car sharing and ride hailing for friends and family is fine, but doing so for revenue purposes will only be permissible on the Tesla Network, details of which will be released next year."

They've been clear on this point for quite a while. When I purchased mine with full self driving capability, I read it in the fine print and thought it was very smart of them. It's a weird proposition to turn your luxury car into an autonomous Uber. I would never do it.

What is so smart about it ? Literally every company on the planet has been doing this for at least a few decades now. And if you are plonking $100-150k on a car, what is weird about expecting some sort of return on it ?

Re: Tesla Autopilot

#208

Post by tigershark »

deelowe wrote: post #58
throwaway-1209 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lidar is not "necessary" hardware. Humans drive just fine without lidar.

It's pretty obvious what the poster meant. Why doesn't tesla need lidar? Cars aren't humans, so that comparison isn't really helpful.

Lidar is absolutely useless for level 5 autonomy given that doesn't work in "bad" weather. It may be useful for level 4 autonomy but for sure it is not necessary even then. Source: no car driven around the planet at the moment has any lidar apart for testing purposes.

Re: Tesla Autopilot

#209

Post by TeMPOraL »

ReverseCold wrote: post #200
joeblau wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't necessarily have to train it to see elephants, but Neural Networks fail in pretty interesting ways. This that are very obvious to you and I have the ability to confuse a CNN[1]. [1] - http://www.evolvingai.org/fooling

Those aren't too bad (out of context of the Tesla article), I can see how the ai might misinterpret those images. The bagel one, for example, is pretty on point.

Those examples show that ML algorithms "see" things much differently from us. It also shows they're very vulnerable to nonsense data. How can I be reasonably sure that some random play of shadows and lights, that would never fool a human, will cause a failure mode in a neural network in a vision-only self-driving car?

Re: Tesla Autopilot

#210

Post by bjelkeman-again »

nitrogen wrote: post #96
bjelkeman-again wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, having driven or been driven by the autopilot v1 hardware and software for thousands of kilometers, it is not ridiculous to use this safely. You configure how you use it once, you don't have to remember the state of every feature. There are moments when you have to think about what state the car is in. But in opinion it is by far offset by how much less tiring it is to drive a long way.

Having driven a long distance in the vicinity of a Tesla that was presumably on autopilot, I found it very unsafe-seeming, darting around within its lane, sometimes drifting onto the lane line. You may not realize if you aren't paying attention, but your car might not drive as well as you expect.

I have no experience with Autopilot v2, but v1 is better than I am at lane keeping on a motorway except for special circumstances, like when there are no lane markers.
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