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Autopilot-bashing articles are becoming more and more popular as people love to gawk at accidents. I believe a lot of the comments on these threads are no more
by adt2bt 8y ago
Autopilot-bashing articles are becoming more and more popular as people love to gawk at accidents. I believe a lot of the comments on these threads are no more than online rubbernecking.
When these things pop up, I'd love to know the answers to some of these questions.
1. What is the rate of accidents for Tesla drivers with and without Autopilot on similar driving terrain.
2. How 'correctable' are these flaws in Autopilot? I doubt someone is programming in what to do in every situation. Is the solution to twiddle with some weights and pray your ML pipeline spits out a better version? I'm guessing the true answer lies in the middle, but I don't have the technical background to know for sure.
3. I see a lot of references to Waymo leading the pack of would-be self driving vehicles. What is it that Waymo has done that makes their self-driving tech so much better?
4. Are we okay with accepting the costs of self driving cars given their potential in the future? Most major transport-related revolutions have come with a significant human cost at the outset as the early adopters accept a large amount of risk to push the technology forward. With time and usage, things stabilize and become safer. Flying was quite dangerous early on, too.
- manicdee 8y agoWhat Waymo have done is not release a product for sale that can even remotely be confused for some level of autonomy. They have ensured this by not releasing a product. Autopilot is not autonomous. It needs human supervision, and the fact that some simplistic “autonomy scale” includes “requires human supervision” is the largest part of this problem. If it requires any supervision, it is not autonomous. Any discussion of autonomy that even mentions Autopilot is automatically null and void. I would consider it the autonomy equivalent of Godwin’s law: in any discussion about autonomy the chance of comparing the safety of an autonomous system to Autopilot or Cruise Control approaches 1 and the first person to mention the comparison automatically loses the argument.
- batmansmk 8y agoI'll try to answer as best as I can. 1. Your question seems mostly answered in this recent article https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-safety-statistics/ https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-safety-statistic... 2. I don't know much about architecture / model used by Tesla. I don't have open access to the accident's details. It is challenging for most people to publicly and answer your question based on facts. Sorry! 3. Again, I would say only very limited number of people have a clear vision about what's the current status. Some claim it is hard for Tesla to manufacture and design cars, solar panels, batteries and designing an autopilot at the same time. It requires a very broad diversity of skills that may be hard to steer and build from the ground up. 4. Fair enough, point taken. My personal complain is not about the technology in general but about Tesla's marketing. I hope the first planes were not claiming to be safer. The Titanic did though :).
- nopriorarrests 8y ago3. Waymo is R&D project at this moment. They are solving hard technical problem and disregard associated costs (such as LIDAR). Tesla claims that hardware in model 3 is capable of self-driving once software catches up. That allows them to charge 3K USD for "FSD package". These are two very different approaches to the same problem.