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I do not get why your comment is so controversial - you are absolutely right. Conventional cameras alone are not trustworthy for self-driving, and this is part

I do not get why your comment is so controversial - you are absolutely right. Conventional cameras alone are not trustworthy for self-driving, and this is part of the reason every respectable company venturing into self-driving is incorporation technologies like LIDAR. I find it sketchy that Tesla markets "future full-self-driving" when they are unlikely to have the hardware to make that a safe experience.

toomuchtodo 8y ago
I think it's important to recognize that Tesla is (partially) a technology deflation play (its also a financial engineering play, but that is out of scope for this thread). Their ability to deliver is a function of the costs of their basic technology supplies (batteries for the Roadster were expensive, less so for the S, X, and energy storage, and now even less so for the 3). This is very similar to the cost decline curve of solar, wind, and storage in the utility energy space (project developers provide bids based on where prices will be in 3-5 years). Tesla can do this because technology and batteries rapidly decreases in cost every year. Need new autopilot compute hardware? It should be cheaper by the time they need to perform the swap to realize the capability. Need LIDAR? They'll find a way to install it, and the costs should be fairly reasonable per vehicle instead of thousands, or tens of thousands, if they went all in when it was expensive. This is not unlike a technology startup, where technical debt you're going to pay off in the future is an acceptable tradeoff, so you push off the decision and/or work until the last possible moment (but no further).
- threeseed 8y ago
  ALL of the other OEMs are building autonomous cars using LIDAR so cost isn't a factor. And relating it to technical debt makes no sense as you have to design with LIDAR in the beginning.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    Can you provide a citation to an OEM that is putting LIDAR in vehicles being sold to customers today?
    - threeseed 8y ago
      GM/Honda are partnering with Cruise. Fiat are partnering with Waymo. Everyone is partnering with someone or organising supply deals. And everyone other than Tesla uses LIDAR. Also I never said these cars were being sold today.
      - toomuchtodo 8y ago
        > Also I never said these cars were being sold today. Then you're moving the goal posts. Tesla is selling cars today to people that they are (EDIT) targeting support of full autonomy, or have their hardware swapped to do so. Everything else is an experiment in a lab or on a track.
        dragonwriter 8y ago
        > Tesla is selling cars today to people that will eventually support full autonomy, or have their hardware swapped to do so. Well, Tesla claims that. It's quite possible that neither will happen.
        threeseed 8y ago
        Some of us think that Tesla's technology is an experiment. An incredibly dangerous one.
        toomuchtodo 8y ago
        Federal regulators do not agree with your assessment. https://thehill.com/policy/transportation/automobiles/315133-federal-regulators-close-tesla-autopilot-probe-wont-seek https://thehill.com/policy/transportation/automobiles/315133... > Federal regulators "did not identify any defects" in Tesla's autopilot feature after a lengthy investigation of the technology, officials announced Thursday. > A six-month investigation failed to uncover any flaws with the autopilot's emergency breaking technology and other advanced features linked to a deadly accident last year, according to a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) report released Thursday. > "NHTSA’s examination did not identify any defects in design or performance of the AEB or Autopilot systems of the subject vehicles nor any incidents in which the systems did not perform as designed," the NHTSA report said.
jaimex2 8y ago
Ever wondered why in millions of years nature didnt evolve a LIDAR equivalent and most species use passive vision? I think Tesla is bang on the money going only with cameras. They are already better than the human eye.
- threeseed 8y ago
  Eagles can see 4-8x further than humans can and many varieties of birds can see in additional spectrums to ours. And of course SONAR exists in whales, dolphins etc which is a corollary.
  - manicdee 8y ago
    And yet here we are with limited spectrum stereo vision, at the top of the evolutionary ladder.
    - candiodari 8y ago
      He neglects to mention that those sensors eagles use have their own limitations. They have zero peripheral vision. It's like having strong binoculars glued to your eyes. This has consequences. It takes them forever to find anything, even if they can do it from great distances. They are blind for several seconds when they change position (such as when they just caught prey), or just generally at short range. And you can try this with cats: this makes it very easy to sneak up on them. No peripheral vision, directional hearing ... if they're focused in front of them, you can almost just walk up to them from the back, they won't notice. These things are tradeoffs. Humans are prey species, pack hunters. If a human is paying attention you can't really hope to sneak up on them. One human is easy to take down. But 10 humans will defend each other effectively.
    - davidgould 8y ago
      There is no such thing as "the top of the evolutionary ladder." There is well fit to an environment and not well fit. To say "top of the ladder" implies that evolution encodes the concept of "progress". It does not. This notion of "top of the ladder" has been used to promote all sorts of pseudo-scientific racism and used to justify all sorts of bad conduct up to and including genocide. I'm not accusing you of any of this, just pointing out that a seemingly innocuous, almost cliched term like "evolutionary ladder" can carry a lot of unwelcome baggage.
nickik 8y ago
So basically you simple predefined what technology makes people 'respectable' and and what not. Seems to me that you are just assuming knowledge that actually nobody has.
- salawat 8y ago
  They aren't assuming. If you aren't radiating and measuring the return, you're at a massive disadvantage in terms of your sensor package. It's s bit like trusting a computer to drive at 70 mph on a pitch black stretch of highway it has never seem before. Enjoy overdriving your headlights and hitting a deer or something else. Tesla is cutting corners by eschewing a well-known technology that will increase the fidelity of their autonomous driving system. That is irresponsible.
  - nickik 8y ago
    Its only irresponsible if they actually sell anything that doesn't work. So far what the offer is fine for what it is. People who don't want to wait can get their money back at any time.
    - salawat 8y ago
      If you define working as "encouraging drivers to drive in a more disengaged state, while at the same time adding additional sources of hazard or malfunction for both the disengaged driver, and other motorists to be alert for", then I got nothing that'll seemingly convince you, as it appears we'd be arguing right past each other. Do. No. Harm. It isn't just for Doctors. You can't sit on the positivist side of the fence and say, "Bah, it'll never happen." It always does. When the cost is lives, you don't mess around or skimp. Closer to Perfection over pretty good is 100% justifiable in safety critical applications. In many cases, critical systems are redundantly reinforced. Look up risk compensation to understand why a half-baked solution is almost guaranteed to be worse. If you are still relying on the human to compensate for failures in a system in an environment where response time to live is measured in seconds, you might as well just have them being alert and engaged at all times with as few things to have to compensate for malfunctioning as possible. Another somewhat tangential demonstration of this is observable in nuclear reactor design, and utilising delayed fission product neutrons to attain criticality. This slows down the timescale over which things can go horribly wrong to the scale of minutes instead of seconds that would make avoiding prompt criticality highly problematic.

toomuchtodo 8y ago

I think it's important to recognize that Tesla is (partially) a technology deflation play (its also a financial engineering play, but that is out of scope for this thread). Their ability to deliver is a function of the costs of their basic technology supplies (batteries for the Roadster were expensive, less so for the S, X, and energy storage, and now even less so for the 3). This is very similar to the cost decline curve of solar, wind, and storage in the utility energy space (project developers provide bids based on where prices will be in 3-5 years). Tesla can do this because technology and batteries rapidly decreases in cost every year. Need new autopilot compute hardware? It should be cheaper by the time they need to perform the swap to realize the capability. Need LIDAR? They'll find a way to install it, and the costs should be fairly reasonable per vehicle instead of thousands, or tens of thousands, if they went all in when it was expensive. This is not unlike a technology startup, where technical debt you're going to pay off in the future is an acceptable tradeoff, so you push off the decision and/or work until the last possible moment (but no further).

threeseed 8y ago
ALL of the other OEMs are building autonomous cars using LIDAR so cost isn't a factor. And relating it to technical debt makes no sense as you have to design with LIDAR in the beginning.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Can you provide a citation to an OEM that is putting LIDAR in vehicles being sold to customers today?
  - threeseed 8y ago
    GM/Honda are partnering with Cruise. Fiat are partnering with Waymo. Everyone is partnering with someone or organising supply deals. And everyone other than Tesla uses LIDAR. Also I never said these cars were being sold today.
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      > Also I never said these cars were being sold today. Then you're moving the goal posts. Tesla is selling cars today to people that they are (EDIT) targeting support of full autonomy, or have their hardware swapped to do so. Everything else is an experiment in a lab or on a track.
      - dragonwriter 8y ago
        > Tesla is selling cars today to people that will eventually support full autonomy, or have their hardware swapped to do so. Well, Tesla claims that. It's quite possible that neither will happen.
      - threeseed 8y ago
        Some of us think that Tesla's technology is an experiment. An incredibly dangerous one.
        toomuchtodo 8y ago
        Federal regulators do not agree with your assessment. https://thehill.com/policy/transportation/automobiles/315133-federal-regulators-close-tesla-autopilot-probe-wont-seek https://thehill.com/policy/transportation/automobiles/315133... > Federal regulators "did not identify any defects" in Tesla's autopilot feature after a lengthy investigation of the technology, officials announced Thursday. > A six-month investigation failed to uncover any flaws with the autopilot's emergency breaking technology and other advanced features linked to a deadly accident last year, according to a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) report released Thursday. > "NHTSA’s examination did not identify any defects in design or performance of the AEB or Autopilot systems of the subject vehicles nor any incidents in which the systems did not perform as designed," the NHTSA report said.

jaimex2 8y ago

Ever wondered why in millions of years nature didnt evolve a LIDAR equivalent and most species use passive vision? I think Tesla is bang on the money going only with cameras. They are already better than the human eye.

threeseed 8y ago
Eagles can see 4-8x further than humans can and many varieties of birds can see in additional spectrums to ours. And of course SONAR exists in whales, dolphins etc which is a corollary.
- manicdee 8y ago
  And yet here we are with limited spectrum stereo vision, at the top of the evolutionary ladder.
  - candiodari 8y ago
    He neglects to mention that those sensors eagles use have their own limitations. They have zero peripheral vision. It's like having strong binoculars glued to your eyes. This has consequences. It takes them forever to find anything, even if they can do it from great distances. They are blind for several seconds when they change position (such as when they just caught prey), or just generally at short range. And you can try this with cats: this makes it very easy to sneak up on them. No peripheral vision, directional hearing ... if they're focused in front of them, you can almost just walk up to them from the back, they won't notice. These things are tradeoffs. Humans are prey species, pack hunters. If a human is paying attention you can't really hope to sneak up on them. One human is easy to take down. But 10 humans will defend each other effectively.
  - davidgould 8y ago
    There is no such thing as "the top of the evolutionary ladder." There is well fit to an environment and not well fit. To say "top of the ladder" implies that evolution encodes the concept of "progress". It does not. This notion of "top of the ladder" has been used to promote all sorts of pseudo-scientific racism and used to justify all sorts of bad conduct up to and including genocide. I'm not accusing you of any of this, just pointing out that a seemingly innocuous, almost cliched term like "evolutionary ladder" can carry a lot of unwelcome baggage.

nickik 8y ago

So basically you simple predefined what technology makes people 'respectable' and and what not. Seems to me that you are just assuming knowledge that actually nobody has.

salawat 8y ago
They aren't assuming. If you aren't radiating and measuring the return, you're at a massive disadvantage in terms of your sensor package. It's s bit like trusting a computer to drive at 70 mph on a pitch black stretch of highway it has never seem before. Enjoy overdriving your headlights and hitting a deer or something else. Tesla is cutting corners by eschewing a well-known technology that will increase the fidelity of their autonomous driving system. That is irresponsible.
- nickik 8y ago
  Its only irresponsible if they actually sell anything that doesn't work. So far what the offer is fine for what it is. People who don't want to wait can get their money back at any time.
  - salawat 8y ago
    If you define working as "encouraging drivers to drive in a more disengaged state, while at the same time adding additional sources of hazard or malfunction for both the disengaged driver, and other motorists to be alert for", then I got nothing that'll seemingly convince you, as it appears we'd be arguing right past each other. Do. No. Harm. It isn't just for Doctors. You can't sit on the positivist side of the fence and say, "Bah, it'll never happen." It always does. When the cost is lives, you don't mess around or skimp. Closer to Perfection over pretty good is 100% justifiable in safety critical applications. In many cases, critical systems are redundantly reinforced. Look up risk compensation to understand why a half-baked solution is almost guaranteed to be worse. If you are still relying on the human to compensate for failures in a system in an environment where response time to live is measured in seconds, you might as well just have them being alert and engaged at all times with as few things to have to compensate for malfunctioning as possible. Another somewhat tangential demonstration of this is observable in nuclear reactor design, and utilising delayed fission product neutrons to attain criticality. This slows down the timescale over which things can go horribly wrong to the scale of minutes instead of seconds that would make avoiding prompt criticality highly problematic.