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Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

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Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#311

Post by siljon »

He complained once before about this stretch, and yet he kept driving auto pilot at the same location? I would never dare to do that, and sounds suicidal. Also I would never dare to fully trust auto-pilot and I think they should change the official name to driver assistance instead, until auto-pilot is ready.

Which is how Tesla want to treat it according to the article: "Tesla says Autopilot is intended to be used for driver assistance and that drivers must be ready to intervene at all times."

Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#312

Post by mistahenry »

fxtentacle wrote: post #223
liability wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Optimistically; maybe everybody is hiding their 'secret sauce'. But I expect you're probably right.

I was optimistic like that in university. Great times :) But then I went into consulting and saw that big companies have teams of lawyers that settle proactively out of court to keep inconvenient truths out of the public opinion. Like the first few exploding iPhones. (Just an example, never worked there) BTW, did you hear about the Uber crash where their AI couldn't track a pedestrian and then killed her?

That’s an unfair characterization if you’re talking about the crash in Arizona. Perhaps: “Did you hear about the Uber crash where the AI couldn’t track a pedestrian jaywalking at night across the middle of a nearly pitch black two lane highway and then killed her?” would have been more apt. https://youtu.be/ufNNuafuU7M

That being said, I’m a huge skeptic of the current state of self driving cars. I would have assumed these systems use LIDAR as well as vision and could have at least slammed on the brakes.

Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#314

Post by sebcat »

keanzu wrote: post #291
fxtentacle wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dead Uber pedestrian where the AI dismissed the data as faulty and did not slow down at all. I think every human would slow down if they see things that they cannot explain. An AI will not. It's basically the same problem as when an image recognition AI is 99% sure that the photo of your cat shows guacamole. Current AIs do not have a concept of absolute confidence, they only produce an estimate relative to the ot…

> dead Uber pedestrian Elaine Herzberg was in dark clothing crossing a dark street well away from any crosswalk or street lighting. Would a human driver have performed better? From the footage I saw she was nearly invisible, I would have hit her too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufNNuafuU7M This was not a hard fail for the AI.

The exposure time and the dynamic range of the sensor affects the visibility of the person in that video - it is very likely that a non-distracted human would have performed better.

The vehicle was equipped with both radar and lidar. The victim was detected as an unknown object six seconds prior to impact, and at 1.3 seconds prior to impact when the victim entered the road the system determined that emergency braking by the driver was required, however the (distracted) driver was not alerted of this.

Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#315

Post by mtgx »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #162
keanzu wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a regulatory basis true self driving only needs to outperform humans. Humans are good at driving but imperfect we have a nasty tendency to get ourselves into accidents, both fatal and non. My thought was that the public would fear and refuse to use the technology but some brave souls are jumping right in. My opinion: full self driving is only a matter of time. At some point in the future insurance companies will f…

The facts around current car safety is that it's already really quite good. In modern cars and "autopilot-feasible conditions" you are talking well below 1 fatality per billion vehicle miles travelled with regular human drivers. This means that if a model has sold 1 million cars they each need to drive 100 000 miles with autopilot enabled before the insurance company has enough statistics to say "this is safer than a…

No, the "facts" you keep reading about (from the same companies trying to sell you on the technology) are extremely misleading.

Tesla for instance does that statistic against "average driving" but the "Average driving" happens in cities. And most Teslas enable Autopilot on highways, where Tesla recommends enabling it, too.

Accidents happen much less on highways, so of course this "statistic" looks better. Put Autopiloted Teslas in the cities and then see how that statistic fares. My guess is it will become much, much worse.

The more real statistic is that even Waymo, which is about an order of magnitude better than anything else on the market, has an "incident" where a human driver would need to intervene every 5000 miles. For everyone else, a human driver would need to intervene every few hundred miles.

That's far from the "self-driving" technology we were promised.

Two relevant posts from someone that used to lead the Waymo project, before it was named Waymo:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2019/06/10/gmcrui...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2019/04/18/are-ro...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/04/uber-goog...

Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#316

Post by holstvoogd »

harrisonjackson wrote: post #6

Tesla says autopilot works but that driver should be ready to intervene. This is terrifying - like having a kid riding shotgun that might just reach out and turn the wheel while you are on the highway. Anyone who has driven with autopilot, how quickly might it react to a perceived obstacle? Would it take a hard turn into a median faster than a person could reasonably react if it thought there was something in the roa…

Exactly like autopilot on a plane! :o

Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#317

Post by eloisant »

heavyset_go wrote: post #279
thdrdt wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Current self-driving might be safer than the avarage driver, but what most people forget is how unsafe it is when it fails. It fails harder than most avarage drivers and even bad drivers. In my eyes self-driving should still be called driving-assistance.

> Current self-driving might be safer than the avarage driver, So far there isn't any evidence for this assumption.

If you compare the number of accident per km, I'm pretty sure the numbers for self-driving are much lower than human drivers.

When a self-driving car is involved in an accident, it's in the news all over the world.

Human drivers kill or get killed every day, in every country.

Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#318

Post by kgabis »

keanzu wrote: post #291
fxtentacle wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dead Uber pedestrian where the AI dismissed the data as faulty and did not slow down at all. I think every human would slow down if they see things that they cannot explain. An AI will not. It's basically the same problem as when an image recognition AI is 99% sure that the photo of your cat shows guacamole. Current AIs do not have a concept of absolute confidence, they only produce an estimate relative to the ot…

> dead Uber pedestrian Elaine Herzberg was in dark clothing crossing a dark street well away from any crosswalk or street lighting. Would a human driver have performed better? From the footage I saw she was nearly invisible, I would have hit her too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufNNuafuU7M This was not a hard fail for the AI.

The footage shows how car's cameras saw the accident. Human eyes have much greater dynamic range than that, so I wouldn't assume that a human driver would not perform better. Something appearing pitch black on this footage could be well recognisable to you. Also, this car's lidar also failed to recognise the pedestrian so if this isn't an AI fail then I don't know what is.

Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#319

Post by Traster »

_ph_ wrote: post #266

The headline alone should show, what is odd with this case. * Tesla clearly states, that the autopilot is a driving aid and should not be used unobserved. * The engineer complained about the autopilot not working perfectly at the very place of crash. (Quite understandeable when seeing the state of the road and mostly absence of line markings in videos of the crash site). * Evidence seems to show that prior to the cra…

> the autopilot is a driving aid and should not be used unobserved.

That's not an autopilot is it. It's driver assist. Like every other car manufacturer calls it (and incidentally, they don't have these problems).

Re: Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot

#320

Post by easytiger »

maeln wrote: post #310
mrits wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone wants to live in a dense population.

This is true. But what I wish for is better public transport in countryside. Automated train that can run also late at night and more bus would have relieved most of my woes when I was living in the countryside.

You could even make it so that you drive it yourself and keep it outside your home to use when you need.

What an innovation that would be

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