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US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

reuters.com

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Re: US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

#721

Post by rainsford »

londons_explore wrote: post #703
llamaimperative wrote: post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla does not release the data required to substantiate such a claim. It simply doesn’t and you’re either lying or being lied to.

tesla releases this data: https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport

That data is not an apples to apples comparison unless autopilot is used in exactly the same mix of conditions as human driving. Tesla doesn't share that in the report, but I'd bet it's not equivalent. I personally tend to turn on driving automation features (in my non-Tesla car) in easier conditions and drive myself when anything unusual or complicated is going on, and I'd bet most drivers of Teslas and otherwise do the same.

This is important because I'd bet similar data on the use of standard, non-adaptive cruise control would similarly show it's much safer than human drivers. But of course that would be because people use cruise control most in long-distance highway driving outside of congested areas, where you're least likely to have an accident.

Re: US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

#722

Post by [deleted] »

nemo44x wrote: post #694
sschueller wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

He’s not doing anything activists haven’t done for years to get out the vote. In college famous rock and hip hop groups would come on campus to play shows that had voter registration tables upon entry and lots of messaging about who to vote for and then being endlessly recruited to volunteer/phone bank/canvas for some group that was supporting the event. Activism cuts both ways.

[deleted]

Re: US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

#723

Post by josephcsible »

V99 wrote: post #430
gambiting wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>. How about a quarter? Or a tenth? The answer is zero. An airplane autopilot has increased the overall safety of airplanes by several orders of magnitude compared to human pilots, but literally no errors in its operation are tolerated, whether they are deadly or not. The exact same standard has to apply to cars or any automated machine for that matter. If there is any issue discovered in any car with this tech then…

Airplane autopilots follow a lateral & sometimes vertical path through the sky prescribed by the pilot(s). They are good at doing that. This does increase safety, because it frees up the pilot(s) from having to carefully maintain a straight 3d line through the sky for hours at a time. But they do not listen to ATC. They do not know where other planes are. They do not keep themselves away from other planes. Or the gro…

> They do not know where other planes are.

Yes they do. It's called TCAS.

> Or the ground.

Yes they do. It's called Auto-GCAS.

Re: US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

#724

Post by josephcsible »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #261
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #226

The interesting question is how good self-driving has to be before people tolerate it. It's clear that having half the casualty rate per distance traveled of the median human driver isn't acceptable. How about a quarter? Or a tenth? Accidents caused by human drivers are one of the largest causes of injury and death, but they're not newsworthy the way an accident involving automated driving is. It's all too easy to se…

I think we should not be satisfied with merely “better than a human”. Flying is so safe precisely because we treat any casualty as unacceptable. We should aspire to make automobiles at least that safe.

Aspire to, yes. But if we say "we're going to ban FSD until it's perfect, even though it already saves lives relative to the average human driver", you're making automobiles less safe.

Re: US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

#725

Post by Majromax »

LadyCailin wrote: post #626
mrjin wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it does, can it resurrect the deceased?

But people driving manually kill people all the time too. The bar for self driving isn’t «does it never kill anyone», it’s «does it kill people less than manual driving». We’re not there yet, and Tesla’s «FSD» is marketing bullshit, but we certainly will be there one day, and at that point, we need to understand what we as a society will do when a self driving car kills someone. It’s not obvious what the best solutio…

> The bar for self driving isn’t «does it never kill anyone», it’s «does it kill people less than manual driving».

Socially, that's not quite the standard. As a society, we're at ease with auto fatalities because there's often Someone To Blame. "Alcohol was involved in the incident," a report might say, and we're more comfortable even though nobody's been brought back to life. Alternatively, "he was asking for it, walking at night in dark clothing, nobody could have seen him."

This is an emotional standard that speaks to us as human, story-telling creatures that look for order in the universe, but this is not a proper actuarial standard. We might need FSD to be manifestly safer than even the best human drivers before we're comfortable with its universal use.

Re: US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

#726

Post by jvolkman »

coffeefirst wrote: post #682
darknavi wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You slowly build a relationship with it and understand where it will fail. I drive my 20-30 minute commutes largely with FSD, as well as our 8-10 hour road trips. It works great, but 100% needs to be supervised and is basically just nicer cruise control.

This feels like the most dangerous possible combination (not for you, just to have on the road in large numbers). Good enough that the average user will stop paying attention, but not actually good enough to be left alone. And when the machine goes to do something lethally dumb, you have 5 seconds to notice and intervene.

This is what Waymo realized a decade ago and what helped define their rollout strategy: https://youtu.be/tiwVMrTLUWg?t=247&si=Twi_fQJC7whg3Oey

Re: US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

#727

Post by matwood »

nemo44x wrote: post #694
sschueller wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

He’s not doing anything activists haven’t done for years to get out the vote. In college famous rock and hip hop groups would come on campus to play shows that had voter registration tables upon entry and lots of messaging about who to vote for and then being endlessly recruited to volunteer/phone bank/canvas for some group that was supporting the event. Activism cuts both ways.

Direct payments do seem to be illegal in a way that having a rally or concert or canvassing are not.

https://electionlawblog.org/?p=146397

Re: US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

#728

Post by [deleted] »

nemo44x wrote: post #694
sschueller wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

He’s not doing anything activists haven’t done for years to get out the vote. In college famous rock and hip hop groups would come on campus to play shows that had voter registration tables upon entry and lots of messaging about who to vote for and then being endlessly recruited to volunteer/phone bank/canvas for some group that was supporting the event. Activism cuts both ways.

[deleted]

Re: US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

#729

Post by lolinder »

darknavi wrote: post #640
rootusrootus wrote: post #518

I'm on my second free FSD trial, just started for me today. Gave it another shot, and it seems largely similar to the last free trial they gave. Fun party trick, surprisingly good, right up until it's not. A hallmark of AI everywhere, is how great it is and just how abruptly and catastrophically it fails occasionally. Please, if you're going to try it, keep both hands on the wheel and your foot ready for the brake. W…

You slowly build a relationship with it and understand where it will fail. I drive my 20-30 minute commutes largely with FSD, as well as our 8-10 hour road trips. It works great, but 100% needs to be supervised and is basically just nicer cruise control.

When an update comes out does that relationship get reset (does it start failing on things that used to work), or has it been a uniform upward march?

I'm thinking of how every SaaS product I ever have to use regularly breaks my workflow to make 'improvements'.

Re: US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

#730

Post by everforward »

kergonath wrote: post #553
everforward wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is true of every field I can think of. Food gets salmonella and what not frequently. Surgeons forget sponges inside of people (and worse). Truckers run over cars. Manufacturers miss some failures in QA. Literally everywhere else, we accept that the costs of 100% safety are just unreasonably high. People would rather have a mostly safe device for $1 than a definitely safe one for $5. No one wants to pay to have eve…

> Literally everywhere else, we accept that the costs of 100% safety are just unreasonably high. Yes, but also in none of these situations would the consumer/customer/patient be held responsible. I don’t expect a system to be perfect, but I won’t accept any liability if it malfunctions as I use it the way it is intended. And even worse, I would not accept that the designers evade their responsibilities if it kills so…

You could be held liable if it impacts someone else. A restaurant serving improperly cooked chicken that gives people E Coli is liable. Private citizens may not have that duty, I’m not sure.

You would likely also be liable if you overloaded an electrical cable, causing a fire that killed someone.

“Using it in the way it was intended” is largely circular reasoning; of course it wasn’t intended to hurt anyone, so any usage that does hurt someone was clearly unintended. People frequently harm each other by misusing items in ways they didn’t realize were misuses.

> This is untenable. Does nobody want a formally verified avionics system in their airliner, either?

Not for the price it would cost. Airbus is the pioneer here, and even they apply formal verification sparingly. Here’s a paper from a few years ago about it, and how it’s untenable to formally verify the whole thing: https://www.di.ens.fr/~delmas/papers/fm09.pdf

Software development effort generally tends to scale superlinearly with complexity. I am not an expert, but the impression I get is that formal verification grows exponentially with complexity to the point that it is untenable for most things beyond research and fairly simple problems. It is a huge pain in the ass to do something like putting time bounds around reading a config file.

IO also sucks in formal verification from what I hear, and that’s like 80% of what a plane does. Read these 300 signals, do some standard math, output new signals to controls.

These things are much easier to do with tests, but tests only check for scenarios you’ve thought of already

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