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Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

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Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#311

Post by jacquesm »

revelation wrote: post #38
abalone wrote: post #6

> In May 2015, Eric Meadows, then a Tesla engineer, engaged Autopilot on a drive in a Model S from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Cruising along Highway 1, the car jerked left toward oncoming traffic. He yelped and steered back on course, according to his account and a video of the incident. Is this video online?

This isn't exactly an isolated incident, YouTube has lots of videos of autopilot steering wildly off course. The biggest problem is that Tesla allows turning on autopilot on roads that are not a highway and feature significant turns and hills obscuring "perfect lane vision", and the system is not prepared to handle that at all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBaolsFyD9I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOnuKrzCLYc

That's absolutely terrible. If a police cruiser would be behind you while driving like that you'd have a hard time arguing you were in control of the vehicle and not being cited. Unacceptable.

Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#312

Post by itengelhardt »

jacquesm wrote: post #305
terravion wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That said, aviation accident rates have been falling asymptotically while this "troubling trend" has been going on. In the US we've had no fatalities on domestic commercial flights since like 2009, and only the two at SFO a couple of years ago on international flights to the US. This is on a couple of billion flights with hundreds of billions of passenger departures.

Airliner pilot discipline is orders of magnitude better than your average driver.

That's why at current we have 1.3 million people dying on the road in the US alone. It might make the matter of transitioning to self-driving worse, but it also makes manual driving worse.

Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#313

Post by yahna »

wooter wrote: post #210
crocal wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the first paragraph, I don't understand the logic behind your comparison between a train failure mode and a car failure mode. However your assumption on braking capability is wrong and it is a crucial point. It does not matter how well your car can brake. Can your autonomous driving system guarantee it will always brake as hard and as fast as required when you will need it? Can you guarantee that the system will…

dude. this is not logical. if a system kills less people, we should use it. otherwise, you're just choosing to kill more people for a false sense of authority/security. not only foolish, but i resent that you believe you can make the choice for others. you are using appeals to authority and emotion rather than the scientific method.

We don't live in Rationalia.

Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#314

Post by abalone »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #271
abalone wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> making the majority of travel safe in exchange for making edge cases more deadly to untrained drivers has a simple solution: a higher bar for licensing human drivers. You are still misunderstanding the concern. The problem is not poorly trained drivers. The problem is that humans become less attentive after an extended period of problem-free automated operation. I hear you trying to make a Trolley Problem argument,…

> You are still misunderstanding the concern. The problem is not poorly trained drivers. The problem is that humans become less attentive after an extended period of problem-free automated operation. I understand the concern. I am saying the problem of slow return from periods of extended inattention is not significant in comparison to general human ineptitude. Level 2 systems may rely on "humans serving as a reliabl…

Yeah, you're talking about level 3. Most people think that's not a realistic level because "ample warning" requires seeing far into the future. Better to go straight to L4.

Also, you are definitely invoking the trolley problem: trading a big number of deaths that aren't your fault for a smaller number that are. Again, not the issue here. L2 needs an alert human backup. Otherwise it could very well be less safe.

But I would say the thrust of your argument is not that off, if we just understand it as "we need to go beyond L2, pronto".

Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#315

Post by bb611 »

crocal wrote: post #198
gervase wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the mapping between rail and motor vehicle transportation is not necessarily a direct one. Rail (excluding public transit like subway) is more infrastructural and largely unseen, and cars are basically a daily experience for the majority of the population; this fundamentally changes people's perceptions of each. > Nobody will ride a driverless vehicle provided the explanation that it is, you know, "already an…

Driverless trains so far are only used in mass transit so... I am afraid these are daily experience. For the second part of your argument, there are multiple problems, again backed by examples in the railway world. First, a politician will think twice before casting a devilish image of drivers. Having all the professional drivers against you is essentially a political hara-kiri. There is a reason why it took 10 years…

> Driverless trains so far are only used in mass transit so... I am afraid these are daily experience.

Not in the daily lives of the vast majority of Americans.

The three train systems I've used on a regular basis in the last half decade (NJ Transit's NE Corridor, Amtrak's Northeast Regional, and Caltrain) very much do not have driverless trains.

Two of those are in the top 10 commuter rail systems in the US.

Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#316

Post by stordoff »

calvinbhai wrote: post #247
empath75 wrote: post #8

The level-2 driving that Tesla is pushing seems like a worst case scenario to me. Requiring the driver to be awake and alert while not requiring them to actually do anything for long stretches of time is a recipe for disaster. Neither the driver nor the car manufacturer will have clear responsibility when there is an accident. The driver will blame the system for failing and the manufacturer will blame the driver for…

I agree, but it's really difficult to draw the line. I believe Auto transmission (AT) car drivers are more easily distracted than those driving stick shift or manual transmission (MT)). But AT makes life easy for so many people, that no one even considers if AT is making drivers less attentive. A classic example of this, the worst case scenario I have seen in person, is that of a woman talking on a mobile phone in on…

> Things like this just wouldn't be possible if that woman was driving a stick shift.

FWIW, in the UK where manual is more or less the norm, using a phone whilst driving is still fairly common (the penalties were increased recently due to people ignoring the law). From what I've seen, a lot of people will use the gear stick with the phone in the same hand (i.e. brief break in conversation whilst they switch gear).

Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#317

Post by aerlinger »

terravion wrote: post #296
contingencies wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wiener's Eighth and Final Law: You can never be too careful about what you put into a digital flight-guidance system. - Earl Wiener, Professor of Engineering, University of Miami (1980) It seems that we are locked into a spiral in which poor human performance begets automation, which worsens human performance, which begets increasing automation. The pattern is common to our time but is acute in aviation. Air France 4…

That said, aviation accident rates have been falling asymptotically while this "troubling trend" has been going on. In the US we've had no fatalities on domestic commercial flights since like 2009, and only the two at SFO a couple of years ago on international flights to the US. This is on a couple of billion flights with hundreds of billions of passenger departures.

> This is on a couple of billion flights

You sure about that number? Seems incredibly high to me.

Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#318

Post by portman »

terravion wrote: post #296
contingencies wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wiener's Eighth and Final Law: You can never be too careful about what you put into a digital flight-guidance system. - Earl Wiener, Professor of Engineering, University of Miami (1980) It seems that we are locked into a spiral in which poor human performance begets automation, which worsens human performance, which begets increasing automation. The pattern is common to our time but is acute in aviation. Air France 4…

That said, aviation accident rates have been falling asymptotically while this "troubling trend" has been going on. In the US we've had no fatalities on domestic commercial flights since like 2009, and only the two at SFO a couple of years ago on international flights to the US. This is on a couple of billion flights with hundreds of billions of passenger departures.

Commercial air travel will serve just shy of 4 billion departures this year, with about 40 million flights.

You are correct in the ratio (1:100) but I think you mistook departures for flights and extrapolated 2 orders of magnitude too far.

Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#319

Post by pbreit »

aetherson wrote: post #200
delinka wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"neighborhood"? Who commutes across a neighborhood as the full extent of their commute? I suspect it's within a rounding error. Driving across a city, however, I definitely see this. Daily. And "accident" I expect to mean everything from a light tap rear-ending to a full fledged crash. People rear-end each other in my city every day. On my commute, I'll come across two a day. Wet days, a few more. The other five dire…

About six years ago, I would drive from San Mateo to Oakland at least twice a week, after work, to meet my then-girlfriend. So that's down 92, across the bridge, and up to Oakland. It's about 30 miles, all on freeway, and at that time of day all in heavy (though not all stop-and-go) traffic. I don't think I ever saw three separate rear-ends in a single drive. I can't say for certain that I ever saw two. I didn't driv…

Between San Jose and San Francisco on 101 pretty common to see at least 1 fender-bender per commute.

Re: Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

#320

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

rsync wrote: post #280
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The level-2 driving that Tesla is pushing seems like a worst case scenario to me What are you measuring? The current autopilot already appears to be materially safer, in certain circumstances, than human drivers [1]. It seems probable Level 2 systems will be better still. A refrain I hear, and used to believe, is that machine accidents will cause public uproar in a way human-mediated accidents don't. Yet Tesla's au…

"What are you measuring? The current autopilot already appears to be materially safer, in certain circumstances, than human drivers [1]. It seems probable Level 2 systems will be better still." As far as I know it is indeed correct that autopilot safety is statistically higher than manual driving safety (albeit with a small sample size). However, something has always bothered me about that comparison ... Is it fair t…

"Appears" is the operative word. The new system is going to kill somebody. It hinges on building a whitelist of geolocated problematic radar signatures to avoid nuissance braking [1]. It's only a matter of time before a real danger that coincides with a whitelisted location causes a crash.

[1] https://www.tesla.com/blog/upgrading-autopilot-seeing-world-...

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