Apple engineer killed in Tesla crash had previously complained about autopilot • Hacker News Board

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

#621

Post by contravariant » Wed, Feb 12, 2020, 2:37 PM UTC

mcv wrote: post #478

Alupis wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole self driving, fully autonomous thing has become some sort of strange faux-religion. It's followers see no other possible solution as acceptable. Instead of putting our heads together to make really good driver assistance technologies and being satisfied, the darn thing needs to also drive itself everywhere otherwise we're leaving something on the table! Untill we have zero deaths, we cannot stop demanding…

I'm very excited about the possibility of self-driving cars. Let the car drive while I take a nap or read a book. But I have a hard time believing that the technology is anywhere close to being mature. You need a lot of contextual knowledge to drive safely in unusual circumstances. I totally believe that within well-defined limits, AI already outperforms humans, but traffic has no well-defined limits. Anything can ha…

You probably could get self-driving cars if you really wanted to, provided that the self-driving traffic doesn't mix with regular traffic. And ideally without humans in the self-driving cars.

Not sure that's what the self-driving cars proponents envisioned though.

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

#622

Post by gwbas1c » Wed, Feb 12, 2020, 2:38 PM UTC

Regular Tesla Autopilot driver here:

I just don't get this situation. With Autopilot, it takes a tiny amount of pressure on the steering wheel to take over. The pressure is so small that, when Autopilot jerks the wheel, you're more likely to turn it off.

So, assuming the driver was paying attention, with his hands on the wheel, this makes no sense. The only way the accident makes sense is if the driver fell asleep, wasn't paying attention, or accidentally turned off autopilot.

And falling asleep, or not paying attention, is a real risk in any car.

(Note: What I remember from older articles about this topic is that the car was nagging him for awhile to put his hands on the wheel.)

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

#623

Post by Four8Five » Wed, Feb 12, 2020, 2:39 PM UTC

I had a scary experience in a Model S on auto-pilot going over a bridge where the car swerved left and almost hit the concrete barrier. Not entirely sure what happened but since then, I've been hesitant to use auto-pilot 100% of the time.

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

#624

Post by bluGill » Wed, Feb 12, 2020, 2:39 PM UTC

keanzu wrote: post #556

bluGill wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt it. Vertical integration only works so far. I think the manufactures will sell cars to those want to run a taxi company. This is, and will remain a race to the bottom because competition is fierce: people buy price and first to get to them. They will also sell cars to normal people. Most people don't think about how convenient it is to have the storage of their personal car. If parking is free or cheap (which…

Congestion problems are dramatically alleviated if you can convert your city over to self driving only. Once the cars can drive in platoons they are packed in tight, no more accordion effect. On the way something like UberPool would be needed. Or the taxi can just drive me to the nearest train station and I can take mass transit into the city. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platoon_(automobile)

Platoons help, but there is only so much space on the roads. In short even allowed 5 times as many cars won't put New York subways out of business. Environmentalists will still want to put everybody on the bus (pick any mass transit technology) even in smaller cities.

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

#625

Post by contravariant » Wed, Feb 12, 2020, 2:40 PM UTC

syshum wrote: post #513

Alupis wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole self driving, fully autonomous thing has become some sort of strange faux-religion. It's followers see no other possible solution as acceptable. Instead of putting our heads together to make really good driver assistance technologies and being satisfied, the darn thing needs to also drive itself everywhere otherwise we're leaving something on the table! Untill we have zero deaths, we cannot stop demanding…

Actually one of the biggest obstacles to Level 5 is expectation of Zero Deaths for Level 5 autonomous operations. The standard should be fewer deaths than human-operated (or even auto assisted ) cars. When you have thousands of machines traveling in close proximity at speeds exceeding 50mph there will be deaths, this is unavoidable. We need to reduce those as much as possible but to demand ZERO before the technology…

One of the problems with merely fewer deaths than a human operated car is that technology tends to fail in 'silly' ways.

Also at the very least an self-driving car should reach the level of a good driver, having self-driving cars cause as many deaths as drunk or inattentive drivers do nowadays isn't defensible. Especially since there's usually no explanation and nobody to hold accountable.

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

#626

Post by xyproto » Wed, Feb 12, 2020, 2:43 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #560

sam_goody wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, flying cars will eventually arrive. Perhaps it will be limited to specific "lanes" (it will be much more palatable to the masses if it must (like cars) keep to a limited area). But it will not need to recognize pedestrians and bikers and human driven cars, and some standard will be introduced to allow all them self driving cars to talk to each other. At that point, Level 5 will be much easier, even obvious. All…

Flying cars might or might not happen (see other discussions here). However they will never be more than a niche. Airplanes need far more safety space than cars. For a car you need a few dozen meters to the cars front and back, and less than 1 side to side. For airplanes it is thousands of meters in all directions, and you are limited as to height before you run out of atmosphere. So even thought planes run in 3d spa…

Humans and bikes need even less safety space than cars.

I don't think safety space is a good criterion for predicting how widespread a means of transportation will become.

A fast mode of transportation, with a large safety space requirement, may be more efficient than other modes and/or become popular.

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

#627

Post by saalweachter » Wed, Feb 12, 2020, 2:43 PM UTC

ijpsud wrote: post #555

koheripbal wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having driven in Canadian winters, I honestly agree that reliable autonomous driving in inclement weather is indeed decades away. The visual recognition needed is well beyond the systems today.

Isn't that just "image de-obfuscation" though? Seems like narrow AI will be able to out-class humans at that in no time. You can generate as much training data for that as you want. Doesn't really require human-type intelligence. Though I guess you might mean that the obfuscation makes the edge cases even harder, which makes sense.

There's like fifty caveats that go along with this statement, but this is the internet so I'm just going to skip all that.

Something like half your human brain is devoted to visual processing.

There's a tendency to think that things like language is what makes the human brain special, or our ability to plan or think abstractly, and we talk about things like "eagle eyes", but the truth is humans are seeing machines with most everything else as an afterthought.

The reason your cat will attack paint spots on glass for hours and flips the hell out about laser pointers is because their visual systems are too simple to distinguish between those and the objects that actually interest them, like insects.

Vision is not the easy part of AI.

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

#628

Post by cesarb » Wed, Feb 12, 2020, 2:46 PM UTC

choward wrote: post #596

PopeRigby wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think self driving cars are a ridiculous solution to a problem we created and doesn't need to exist. The US building out the country for cars wasn't a good way to do transportation. If we just had trains going from city to city and subways in the cities, we wouldn't even need self driving cars.

I think it's pretty absurd that we don't have automated trains and light rails but somehow we think self driving cars are in the near future. Compared to cars on roads it should be trivial to automate trains on tracks. Why don't we go for the lower hanging fruit first?

> I think it's pretty absurd that we don't have automated trains and light rails

We do have them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_...

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

#629

Post by ohithereyou » Wed, Feb 12, 2020, 2:50 PM UTC

fortran77 wrote: post #607

snowwrestler wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think autonomous driving advocates would do well to look at the history of computer handwriting recognition, an easier technical problem with lower consequences that received significant investment over decades. But it has never gotten good enough to succeed in the marketplace against alternatives. Why? It never exceeded consumer expectations, which are extremely high for automated systems. Even a correctness rate…

Handwriting recognition works very well if you can capture the actual strokes used while writing and not just the end result.

That's great, but I would wager that nearly 100% of all writing ever done in human history was done without capturing the strokes while writing. Therefore, while this added accuracy is great, it is virtually useless for most written work.

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

#630

Post by jryan49 » Wed, Feb 12, 2020, 2:54 PM UTC

Four8Five wrote: post #623

I had a scary experience in a Model S on auto-pilot going over a bridge where the car swerved left and almost hit the concrete barrier. Not entirely sure what happened but since then, I've been hesitant to use auto-pilot 100% of the time.

Why would you use it at all at that point? If this guy took his experience with autopilot the first time it almost crashed his car, he'd probably still be alive.