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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

#791

Post by microtherion »

jm4 wrote: post #776
dkonofalski wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I don't understand the sad conclusion of the story in the article. The driver knew that AutoPilot had issues with that stretch of the freeway and was able to repeat the issues on several occasions but still thought it best to be on his phone, while driving 71 mph, at the mercy of AutoPilot? Especially considering that he was an engineer who had expressed concern over this, it seems silly to me that he wou…

That’s the part I don’t get either. The only thing I can come up with is he wasn’t paying attention to the drive up to that point and didn’t notice he was in a problem area. I have a Tesla and there are definitely problem areas. You learn them fairly quickly when you are taking the same route all the time and you’re trained to either turn off autopilot or at least be alert when going through those areas. Or maybe you…

> The only thing I can come up with is he wasn’t paying attention to the drive up to that point and didn’t notice he was in a problem area.

It's a well known phenomenon that the more you automate away routine tasks, the harder it is for the driver to stay alert and take over in non-routine situations. My understanding is that airplane pilots are specifically trained in strategies to avoid falling into that trap.

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

#792

Post by vkou »

keanzu wrote: post #483
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…

SAE Level 5 is completely transformative, it will utterly change the market and the use of cars. Once you can conveniently call up an automated Uber the need, at least in cities, to buy your own car will effectively vanish. This is Uber's endgame - get humans out of the loop. As long as cars still need human drivers this cost savings can't be realized. > Forget better braking systems that apply themselves automatical…

> Once you can conveniently call up an automated Uber the need, at least in cities, to buy your own car will effectively vanish.

As a passenger, there is no difference to me whether my car/bus/train is self-driving or not. As long as I'm not driving, it doesn't matter if a meat, or a silicon neural network operates it.

Given the above, how does this make self-driving a transformative technology?

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

#793

Post by sitkack »

microcolonel wrote: post #741
MereInterest wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading through the crash test procedure, it is astounding how little attention is paid to pedestrians. 1. Front crash test. Procedure: Crash car into stationary barrier at 35 mph. Is also applicable to face-to-face crash with car of same size, going at same speed. 2. Side crash test. Procedure: Slam concrete block into side of stationary car at 38.5 mph. 3. Side pole test. Procedure: Drag car sideways towards a pole…

> Reading through the crash test procedure, it is astounding how little attention is paid to pedestrians. In the U.S. at least, pedestrian safety concerns mainly affect prescriptive legislation (i.e. no pop up headlights). Some countries and blocs have testing similar to crash tests, but I'm not really sure how effective something like that is: any meaningful standard would need to have exceptions for different categ…

This a trap we all fall into. Because you are smart but don't understand that a thing could exist, doesn't mean it doesn't. We often use this crutch when absolving someone else of an action taken or a design flaw. "I would have never thought of that!" or "How could someone have anticipated that?"

> I can't see that much can be done about pedestrian safety once your vehicle is colliding with a human being.

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

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

#794

Post by oppositelock »

fxtentacle wrote: post #187

I avoid new technology, exactly because I'm an engineer. I wonder if that is just me, but when new technology is introduced and hyped, I usually take a quick look at implementations, research, and talks just to get an idea of what the state of the art really is like. As a result, I have become the late adopter among my group of friends because the first iteration of any new technology usually just isn't worth the iss…

ML hype spawned a lot of self driving car hype, and a lot of promises which can't be delivered in any short time frame. It started with Comma.ai, but others picked up the full ML torch and went with it. Other companies are making steady, sure progress using the old school robotics approach of throwing sensors at the problem, Waymo, for example. Others are being reckless and trying to use vision alone (Tesla). It's a mess.

However, safe self driving is coming, slowly but surely (I work at a company which produces tech for these guys). The hyped companies are in trouble, but car OEM's, partnered with companies you've never heard of, are making slow, steady progress, all the while being subject to government functional safety requirements, particularly in the US and EU. There is zero chance that a Tesla or GM car will be allowed to fully self drive, so no matter how advanced these systems are, they're sold as level 2 systems requiring driver oversight and qualify as cruise control in regulations.

Today, we have full autonomy in some truck routes (only as proofs of concept), in ship yards, parking shuttles, mining equipment, quarry trucks, etc, places where the problem domain is more constrained. Generalized self driving is a ways off, but by the time you can make use of it, it will be safe, it just won't come from Tesla or Cruise or Uber.

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

#795

Post by clairity »

neuronic wrote: post #441
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…

> This whole self driving, fully autonomous thing has become some sort of strange faux-religion. What really bugs me, as someone working in consulting as a hands-on backend developer with a previous background in technical consulting at an accounting Big4 (student job), is the insane amount of PR, politics and marketing talk by people who have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA what they are talking about. I witnessed politicians an…

note that "gradient descent" isn't AI either. it's more computational linear algebra: a heuristic for numerical methods used to solve (usually to a local extrema) systems of equations without direct analytical solution(s).

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

#796

Post by philwelch »

xkemp wrote: post #500
neuronic wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This whole self driving, fully autonomous thing has become some sort of strange faux-religion. What really bugs me, as someone working in consulting as a hands-on backend developer with a previous background in technical consulting at an accounting Big4 (student job), is the insane amount of PR, politics and marketing talk by people who have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA what they are talking about. I witnessed politicians an…

Predicting with All-Caps confidence that autonomous driving is "decades away" is at least as indefensible as overly optimistic predictions were.

On what grounds?

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

#797

Post by vkou »

heedlessly3 wrote: post #755
aguyfromnb wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The standard should be fewer deaths than human-operated (or even auto assisted ) cars. How do we go about testing this? By tallying up autonomous deaths until there are fewer per year than human drivers? > We need to reduce those as much as possible but to demand ZERO before the technology can be used is just unrealistic Human driver skill varies immensely by person. The idea that anyone who is (or even considers t…

It is laughable that you don't think the goal wasn't already zero. It has been zero the whole time. Real life and ideals are different thing. You can't promise that accidents will never happen. But you can promise that accidents will be substantially reduced. In the US, about 35k people die per year from motor vehicle related deaths. If you get it down to 10k, then that would be a major success. Of course, you will s…

> In the US, about 35k people die per year from motor vehicle related deaths. If you get it down to 10k, then that would be a major success.

If we were actually serious about reducing motor vehicle deaths, we would mandate that every car be equipped with a breathalyzer device. No fancy new technology is necessary, and there's plenty of low-hanging fruit (Impaired driving) that we can deal with.

For some reason, though, the religion of autonomous driving does not consider this as a solution to minimizing road fatalities.

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

#798

Post by sitkack »

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…

I often fall asleep on the bus, while reading a book.

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

#799

Post by philwelch »

tim333 wrote: post #610
ipsi wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that there are so, so many edge cases to worry about. Simple example: someone decides to troll you in your self-driving car and steps out in front of it. You don't have controls in the car, so you can't go around them - you have to wait for them to move. In reality, it seems like it would resolve quickly - you get out and yell at them, call the police if that doesn't work, etc. But it can get more sinist…

Re robbers, car jackers and the like in some ways you may be better with a self driving car as they seem to be covered with cameras and report back to base the whole time so the crooks would be photographed and the cops called. Already the Tesla cameras have caught a few https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqBWt9rRx-U Re all the edge cases - yeah that'll take a while.

Yes, that’s going to be very helpful to the investigators when they finally figured out what happened to the car and to your body. Might not be helpful to you, though....

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

#800

Post by jungturk »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #248
skolsuper wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they truly believe that the autopilot driving is safer than unassisted, they might reasonably consider it an immoral act not to ship it. Given the number of lives lost in auto accidents every day, the issue is not as clear-cut as you're suggesting. It's a real-world trolley problem.

No. If they know that it’s safer in some respects but unsafe in others they should make sure it’s only used as an assistance system and make sure the driver is still watching the road when it’s turned on. What’s immoral is that they allow people to turn this thing on and then play Candy Crush on their phone while the car does the driving, fully aware that this might lead to fatal accidents in some cases. Their market…

They require pressure on the steering wheel and make it quite clear that you're responsible for taking control at any time when you activate autopilot.

You and I probably agree that this might be wishful thinking to expect some portion of the driving public to do so faithfully.

Perhaps additional technology can help better guarantee attention and participation on the part of the driver.

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