Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash • Hacker News Board

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#831

Post by imtringued » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 1:28 PM UTC

mozumder wrote: post #426

fapjacks wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to preface my post to say that I think developing self-driving automobiles is so important that it's worth the implied cost of potentially tens of thousands of lives in order to perfect the technology, because that's what people do; make sacrifices to improve the world we live in so that future generations don't have to know the same problem. But I think you're right. I think the "best" way to move forward unt…

People love their cars too much. Cars should just be phased out in favor of mass transit everywhere. Yes, you can live without the convenience of your car. No really, you can. Now think about how you would enable that to happen. What local politicians are you willing to write to, or support, in order to enable a better mass transit option for you? And how would you enable more people to support those local politician…

This is certainly possible and I would welcome it but this is something that cannot be done overnight. It will take decades to convince politicians and more decades to upgrade the existing infrastructure.

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#832

Post by imtringued » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 1:56 PM UTC

mozumder wrote: post #419

lopmotr wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What structural changes? Considering that self-driving cars are already running daily in many cities, those changes must be fairly minor since they've already been implemented in those cities.

You need those structural changes to make their fatality rates as small as regular cars. Right now self-driving cars aren't viable in the real-world due to their extremely high fatality rate, which are comparable to motorcycles. Meanwhile, there are several car models with ZERO fatalities.

Tesla is lacking static obstacle detection. You can't expect it to be safer than a human until they fix this glaring issue.

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#833

Post by alpos » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 3:42 PM UTC

wott wrote: post #429

alpos wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think of it this way: Most car manufacturers are releasing their products on the public year after year, knowing full well that a decent percentage of people that drive away from the dealership will be killed by the thing they just bought. Tesla is merely trying to take the next step in reducing that percentage. Their strategy is sound and we so far have not come up with any alternatives that stand a remote chance…

> Most car manufacturers are releasing their products on the public year after year, knowing full well that a decent percentage of people that drive away from the dealership will be killed by the thing they just bought. Nope, and that's the whole difference. They will be killed by theirs actions, their choices, their inattention, or those of other drivers. They won't be killed by the machine. With autopilot / pseudo-…

I agree that it is a psychological difference but our behavior as a society suggests a recognition that the machine and it's makers have a role in whether or not people die in cars. This is why we demand safer cars and sue car makers when their designs failed or did not meet our expectations in protecting the occupants.

I can agree with the notion that the machine killed the person in all cases where the the machine does not include any controls for the person.

As a society, we currently recognize that the causes of accidents and the probability of occupant death are dependent on multiple factors, one of which is the car and it's safety features (or lack there of). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision#Causes

We also already have a significant level of automation in almost all cars, yet we are rarely tempted to say that having cruise-control, automatic transmissions, electronic throttle control, or computer controlled fuel injection means we are not in control and therefore the machine is totally at fault in every accident.

Operating a car was much harder to get right before these things existed and the difference can still be observed in comparison to small aircraft operations. Then and now we still blame some accidents on "driver/pilot error" while others are blamed on "engine failure", "structural failure", or "environmental factors".

I think having steering assistance or even true autopilot will not change this. In airplanes, the pilots have to know when and how to use an autopilot if the plane has one. If the pilot switches on the autopilot and it tries to crash the plane, the pilot is expected to override and re-program it, failure to do so would be considered pilot error. Similarly, drivers will have to know when and how to use cruse-control/steering-assist and should be expected to override it when it doesn't do the right thing.

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#834

Post by alpos » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 4:32 PM UTC

skgoa wrote: post #701

alpos wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How should one deploy such a product at all? Actual usage is really the only way anyone will know if the models are trained appropriately to handle most/all situations they will encounter in the real world.

> Actual usage is really the only way anyone will know if the models are trained appropriately to handle most/all situations they will encounter in the real world. Because testing stuff before throwing it on the market isn't a thing anymore?

Surely you do not assume that Tesla had done no testing at all before selling these things.

I forewent commenting on their pre-market testing because I assumed that flokie already knew that the cars and ML models they use had been extensively tested on tracks and in simulation before the first Tesla was allowed on California roads. And they would have be complete idiots had they not done such testing, no investors would have funded that. Reactions like flokie's were completely predictable the moment driver assistance techniques were thought of. The only acceptable response a company can have to such criticism is "we have tested this extensively and it is safer than driving manually".

Market forces aside, no car drives on roads in any US state without extensive testing and certification. All of the companies testing self-driving technology had to get special permits to do so.

Even just a reading of their actual statements offers some insight in to the amount of testing and data collection they are still doing. https://www.tesla.com/blog/what-we-know-about-last-weeks-acc... https://www.tesla.com/blog/update-last-week%E2%80%99s-accide...

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#835

Post by TipVFL » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 7:28 PM UTC

imtringued wrote: post #830

TipVFL wrote: post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans can only look in one direction, and only from inside the car with their view obstructed, and they're only paying attention sometimes. Check out this article, it is easy to never see a bike you're on a collision course with. https://singletrackworld.com/2018/01/collision-course-why-th...

We're not talking about complicated scenarios with multiple moving actors. Tesla's autopilot cannot even do something as basic as detect stationary obstacles that are directly in front of the car. It will crash into barriers even if the highway is completely devoid of other cars. You may consider humans as bad drivers but Tesla's autopilot is even worse than that: It can't even look in one direction!

I'm talking about the pitfalls of human perception, and the low-hanging fruit of ways that self-driving systems can potentially outperform humans.

I'm not claiming Tesla's system is currently better than a human, just that there is plenty of potential for a machine to outperform humans perceptually. As it is, Tesla's system isn't exactly the gold standard.

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#836

Post by hyperbole » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 11:10 PM UTC

scoggs wrote: post #531

hyperbole wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy this either nor should we it's not how the feature is marketed. "The system is designed to be able to conduct short and long distance trips with no action required by the person in the driver’s seat." The result of this statement and the functionality that matches it is it creates a re-enforced false sense of security. Does it matter whether the driver of the model X whose auto pilot drove straight into a…

> I'm not opposed to Tesla's sale of such functionality, sell whatever you want, but I am opposed to the marketing material selling this in a way that contradicts the legal language required to protect Tesla... First let me state that I agree with this 110%! I'm not sure if this is what you are getting at but I'm seeing a difference between the engineers exact definition of what the system is, what it does, and how i…

No one wins when someone dies... I'm sure your right that Tesla employees are torn up.

My concern is that it looks like Tesla is 90% of the way there to full autonomy and the way the feature is marketing will lull even engineers who know more about how these systems work into a false sense of security and end up dying as a result -- they'll trust a system that shouldn't be trusted. There isn't a good system for detecting a lack of focus especially when it won't take more than a few milliseconds to go from good to tragic.

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#837

Post by pvaldes » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 11:12 PM UTC

As most routes in a normal journey are a repetition, maybe the car could learn from an human first. The owner drive a few times in their normal route and the car uses this info to train the autopilot in the same route and paying attention to the differences between what the car would have done and the human really did.

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#838

Post by pvaldes » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 11:16 PM UTC

As most routes in a normal journey are a repetition, maybe the car could learn from an human first. The owner drive a few times in their normal route and the car uses this info to train the autopilot paying attention to the differences between what the car would have done and what the human really did.

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#839

Post by kbutler » Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 12:33 AM UTC

Fins wrote: post #479

kbutler wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Nearly 1.3 million people die in road crashes each year, on average 3,287 deaths a day. An additional 20-50 million are injured or disabled. " And $879B in USA per year.

So we should kill even more people, who had never signed up to be guinea pigs, so that maybe there will be a self-driving car at some point? Which most of those dying in those crashes will not be able to afford anytime soon anyway...

No, but every year we delay replacing human drivers with something much safer, we incur huge distributed costs.

It is thus very important.

Re: Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash

#840

Post by Fins » Sat, Apr 14, 2018, 2:41 AM UTC

kbutler wrote: post #839

Fins wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we should kill even more people, who had never signed up to be guinea pigs, so that maybe there will be a self-driving car at some point? Which most of those dying in those crashes will not be able to afford anytime soon anyway...

No, but every year we delay replacing human drivers with something much safer, we incur huge distributed costs. It is thus very important.

Thnat's assuming that the replacement actually is safer, which in case of the Auto-Pilot is not the case now, and not necessarily the case ever. There is a reason Waymo isn't unleashing their stuff onto unsuspecting public.