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George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

electrek.co

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Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#361

Post by BurningFrog »

tedunangst wrote: post #332
BurningFrog wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They certainly could, which is part of my point. Whether they do or not depends on the honesty, bias, and personal ambitions of the people running the agency. The empirical experience is that regulatory agencies over time gravitate towards favoring the big established players in the industry they're regulating. The economist term is "Regulatory Capture".

Not quite. Regulatory capture doesn't mean you like the big companies, it means you like the industry you regulate. So if you regulate coal mines, you probably think coal mines are good, whether they're large or small. If you're a highway regulator, it probably means you think highways are pretty awesome, but that doesn't mean you think only Detroit muscle cars should be allowed on the highway.

I disagree.

One of the common ways this works is that the regulator keeps adding more and more complex regulations.

It's counterintuitive that a major company welcomes or instigates added regulations that will cost $20M/year to comply with. But since that makes it more expensive to start competing companies, they can make a lot more money from their increasingly secure oligopoly position.

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#362

Post by thfuran »

lutorm wrote: post #305
TeMPOraL wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the other way around - you need a proof that they perform comparable to an average driver during expected use, and they do not have absurdly stupid corner cases during actually expected use.

Well, humans have absurdly stupid corner cases during actual use, too. It depends on how small the corner is, I think.

Yes and humans require certification before they are permitted to drive vehicles on public roadways.

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#363

Post by makmanalp »

dexterdog wrote: post #355
makmanalp wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, they probably didn't - because large auto companies have time and resources devoted to safety and compliance.

And bribery

Bribery to overlook certain numbers and results perhaps, but I think it'd be a unlikely to hear that the NHTSA just completely skipped on all regulatory checks entirely, which is what geohot wants.

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#364

Post by thfuran »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #342
lutorm wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the information requested, if you read the actual definitions, uses a lot of "any" and "all", so if you take that literally it's not exactly an elevator pitch style description they are asking for. "Describe in detail the features of the comma one" and "Provide a detailed description of the conditions under which you believe a vehicle equipped with comma one may operate safely ... [and] a detailed description o…

I would have assumed that anyone serious about releasing this type of product would have made contact with the relevant government departments and worked with them along the way to ensure they meet the requirements. Also, the documentation being asked for is something the company should be able to put together fairly easily because they ought to have asked and answered these questions along the way to building the pr…

Yeah, determining the requirements of a product you are attempting to produce ought not to be left to the end of design.

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#365

Post by AceJohnny2 »

kamkha wrote: post #302

Comma's main advantage over Tesla's Autopilot was, as I understand it, the use of cameras to collect video data. Hotz presented that as the advantage at TechCrunch Disrupt, at least, saying that he could beat Tesla's Autopilot because he had full video data from a small smartphone app that he had test users running as they drove while Tesla's vehicles had no video input. I wonder if his choice to cancel Comma is rela…

> while Tesla's vehicles had no video input.

This is factually incorrect.

Tesla vehicles rely on Mobileye [1] cameras to do its environmental analysis. These cameras come with the processing hardware to analyze the sensor data they're getting, and spits out environmental information that the driver assistance [2] can use to navigate the car.

Whether Tesla had access to the sensor data directly rather than just the analyzed stream is not public information. Now that Mobileye broke up with Tesla [3], it's unlikely they'll ever have it.

Mobileye has years of experience in dealing with the kind of visual data you need to have on the road, such as crazy HDR (you want to be able to extract useful information when the sun is glaring at you as well as in the dark woods in the night, and be able to switch immediately as when you're going through a tunnel). They've developed dedicated hardware to reliably and quickly do object distance and velocity detection: this is exactly the scenario that a "Real-Time OS" is made for. You cannot afford to be pre-empted and lose 5ms on your analysis and miss an action frame.

Thinking you can pull this off reliably with a non-RTOS and consumer cameras is... naive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobileye

[2] Mobileye's equipment was never rated for full-on "Autopilot", which is why they were very unhappy with Tesla marketing their systems as such

[3] http://www.wsj.com/articles/mobileye-ends-partnership-with-t...

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#366

Post by david-given »

HCIdivision17 wrote: post #287
hartator wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel $21,000 fine per day sounds pretty like "we want to shut you down". He never presented comma.ai as an autopilot but as a very smart line assist and adaptive cruise control.

The fine is punative. Noncompliance is often not acceptable when it comes to safety and environmental regulations. When I worked in plants, you can bet there were only two groups that would put the fear of God in operations: OSHA and the local environmental regulations agency. Fines could be thousands per hour (or per infraction, which could be collected hourly). Even if it's unreasonable (and for damn sure it can be…

Not to dispute your point, which I agree with, but --- argon metering? How can that be a safety or environmental hazard? You don't want to lose it overboard because it's expensive, but it's a noble gas, so it should be inert, right? What am I missing?

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#367

Post by BurningFrog »

SapphireSun wrote: post #322
BurningFrog wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They certainly could, which is part of my point. Whether they do or not depends on the honesty, bias, and personal ambitions of the people running the agency. The empirical experience is that regulatory agencies over time gravitate towards favoring the big established players in the industry they're regulating. The economist term is "Regulatory Capture".

You seem to be critiquing the idea of a government run by people and the idea that congress can defer rule making authority to people more educated in the particulars of an industry than the congress at large.

I'm fine with government run by people.

Giving some people a lot of discretionary power of others does worry me a lot. It might well be unavoidable sometimes, but it's really naive to not see the potential for abuse.

The calculation needs to be "if this agency is run by the usual corruptible and imperfect people like you and me, will it be a net gain for society?", rather than the "assume a selfless set of civic minded experts..." mindset I think a lot of people have.

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#368

Post by [deleted] »

csours wrote: post #54
hangonhn wrote: post #25

Wow. If he really moves his project to China to take advantage of a lax regulatory environment even though he couldn't pass the scrutiny in the US, he's being very immoral and cavalier about people's lives in China. I don't understand how a startup like Cruise can get past this regulatory hurlde in the US but Hotz can't.

Programming a neural network to learn to drive is fun; dealing with lawyers is not. I don't think it is a matter of passing the regulatory hurdle; it's a matter of not wanting to deal with it.

[deleted]

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#369

Post by DanBC »

david-given wrote: post #366
HCIdivision17 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fine is punative. Noncompliance is often not acceptable when it comes to safety and environmental regulations. When I worked in plants, you can bet there were only two groups that would put the fear of God in operations: OSHA and the local environmental regulations agency. Fines could be thousands per hour (or per infraction, which could be collected hourly). Even if it's unreasonable (and for damn sure it can be…

Not to dispute your point, which I agree with, but --- argon metering? How can that be a safety or environmental hazard? You don't want to lose it overboard because it's expensive, but it's a noble gas, so it should be inert, right? What am I missing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inert_gas_asphyxiation

It can displace air, causing death.

Here's one example of a death, although here they deliberately put the argon in there: http://maritimeaccident.org/2014/08/safespace-argoninert-gas...

Re: George Hotz cancels his Tesla Autopilot-like ‘comma one’

#370

Post by tptacek »

stale2002 wrote: post #343
x0x0 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And we've now, at the behest of these companies, redefined statists down to: - thinks it's OK for neighbors and local government to have a say in whether people run a hotel next door, possibly sharing a roof or even a wall - thinks it's OK to require pretty reasonable background checks ala Austin for taxi drivers - thinks it's OK to have some safety regulations around self driving cars sharing our roads beyond hey, i…

Congratulations, by waiting a year to implement self driving cars, through overly burdening government regulations, you just killed ten thousand people. What about those people? The people who WILL die in car accidents next year unless we do something about it. Screw them, right?

This isn't a self-driving car. It's a driver assist. It depends on an alert driver behind the wheel. What we're learning is that these systems can, in some circumstances, be the worst of both worlds --- a human driver lulled into complacency by technology that was not designed to handle complicated road conditions autonomously --- a system that itself generates both human and machine error.
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