8 ms·

I doubt Tesla has multiple (more like dozens of) major industry first sensor and AI breakthroughs, regardless of how closely OP follows them or not.

by throwaway2048 8y ago

fastball 8y ago
OP seems to be operating under the premise that such a system must be "no-fail". That is not what Tesla is going for.
- empath75 8y ago
  Considering that they’ve already killed a couple of people, that’s a given.
  - grey-area 8y ago
    Humans kill over 100 people per day in traffic accidents in the US alone - I don’t think no-fail (0 deaths) is a reasonable requirement, just being safer than humans is enough. I do agree with the OPs skepticism though - full autonomy is 10 years away.
    - mehrdadn 8y ago
      > Humans kill over 100 people per day in traffic accidents in the US alone - I don’t think no-fail (0 deaths) is a reasonable requirement, just being safer than humans is enough. This is a fallacy. People don't just look at safety statistics. The actual manner/setting in which something can kill you matters a ton too. There's a huge difference between a computer that crashes in even the most benign situations and one that only crashes in truly difficult situations, even if the the first one isn't any more frequent than the second. Hypothetical example: you've stopped behind a red light and your car randomly starts moving, and you get hit by another car. Turns out your car has a habit of glitching like this every 165,000 miles or so (which seems to be the average accident rate) for no apparent reason. Would you be fine this car? I don't think most people would even come close to finding this acceptable. They want to be safe when they haven't done anything dangerous -- they want to be in reasonable control of their destiny. P.S. people are also more forgiving of each other than computers. E.g. a 1-second reaction time can be pretty acceptable for a human but, but if the computer I'd trusted with my life had that kind of reaction time it would get defenestrated pretty quickly.
      - grey-area 8y ago
        > This is a fallacy. Please do point out where the statement is incorrect. I wasn't talking about perception, people have all kinds of ideas about machines (mostly unfounded), but typically safety records drive policy, not whether drivers think they are better than the machine. I believe machine assisted driving is safer than unassisted already and will continue to improve such that in 10 or 20 years human drivers will be the exception, not the norm. That will happen because computers are already safer in most conditions - the switch will happen when they are demonstrably far safer in all conditions. Remember they don't have to beat the best human driver, just the average.
        llukas 8y ago
        > That will happen because computers are already safer in most conditions - the switch will happen when they are demonstrably far safer in all conditions. Computers currently can disengage in any conditions for any reason - how did you come with conclusion computers are already safer?
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
        If that was actually the case, i.e. it had a lower accident rate than humans buts its accidents were silly bugs, it wouldn't be a "huge difference" -- it would be a slight improvement that would become a major improvement when the bug gets fixed. If the average person thinks they're better than the computer when the computer is better than the average person, the average person is incorrect. > They want to be safe when they haven't done anything dangerous -- they want to be in reasonable control of their destiny. If you don't trust the computer, does that mean you won't trust another driver, if the computer is better than the average driver? Then how do you drive at all, when the roads are full of average drivers who could hit you at any time?
        notahacker 8y ago
        > If the average person thinks they're better than the computer when the computer is better than the average person, the average person is incorrect. Until you remember that to obtain statistically significant evidence that the latest version number of Tesla (or any other firm's) software is safer than the average driver entails hundreds of millions of miles of driving. And for that matter that the "average driver" accident rates are skewed upwards by the number of incidents involving people who you'd never, ever volunteer to be driven by [in their state of intoxication]. In the mean time, the human heuristic that a car which tries to kill you by accelerating at lane dividers isn't safer than your own average level of driving skill in many circumstances is probably better than trusting exponential curves and the Elon Musk reality distortion field.
    - bostonpete 8y ago
      > Humans kill over 100 people per day in traffic accidents in the US alone They also drive 8-9 billion miles per day. That's around 1 death per 90 million miles of driving. Given the number of AV miles that are driven annually right now, we actually would expect to see ~0 deaths per year if AVs were as safe as humans...
      - fattire 8y ago
        FWIW, Tesla claims to have logged 1.2 billion autopilot (primarily freeway only) miles as of last summer: https://electrek.co/2018/07/17/tesla-autopilot-miles-shadow-mode-report/ https://electrek.co/2018/07/17/tesla-autopilot-miles-shadow-... It is probably best to categorize these as autopilot PLUS human supervision, but anyway, Wikipedia cites 3 autopilot-caused deaths worldwide over 3 years or so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_self-driving_car_fatalities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_self-driving_car_fatal...
        joshuamorton 8y ago
        It's all worth subcategorizing. Highway driving is substantially safer than surface streets, and if you stick to awake, sober, daytime drivers in good weather, the safety of human drivers is even higher. Given that autopilot can handle nighttime, but not the others, it's completely possible that 1/300 million miles is above the sober good weather highway human driver fatality rate.
    - rayiner 8y ago
      Humans drive 8 billion miles per day in the US, through a variety of conditions, crazy weather, crazy traffic, crazy pedestrians, etc. “Just being safer than humans” is an extremely tall order.
    - DrScump 8y ago
      just being safer than humans is enough "Enough" for a statistician... but not if you're the one killed in an "acceptable" edge case that most humans handle fine.
    - Piskvorrr 8y ago
      Full autonomy has been 10 years away for half a century. If driving still exists in a century, I'd wager that full autonomy would still be 10 years away then.
- hellllllllooo 8y ago
  It's not that it has to be no-fail it's that the failures need to be a subset of the failures that humans make. If the failures are in places that humans can easily and reliably handle (which is the case now) then people won't trust these systems. If the failures are created by the software not being able to handle basic driving tasks and wouldn't normally happen with a person driving then this is a huge problem with the system. A system that repeatedly drives at a lane divider repeatedly is not something people should trust. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/03/dashcam-video-shows-tesla-steering-toward-lane-divider-again/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/03/dashcam-video-shows-tes...
  - SilasX 8y ago
    Yes! I think that’s the right way to measure whether you’ve solved self-driving cars: if it has similar (possibly worse) failure rates to humans in each environment where humans are expected to operate. Example: say an SDC never had collisions except when a cop is directing traffic, and in that case it floors it full speed to the cop. I would not consider that to have solved self driving cars, even though dealing with a cop directing traffic is so rare that its accident rate is lower.
codeulike 8y ago
Elon Musk takes huge ambitious gambles. In this case the gamble is that good AI and the huge amount of training data from the Tesla fleet will win out over lidar. It is a gamble. But if you look at other gambles SpaceX and Tesla have taken, the context changes a bit. Everyone talks about innovation, but innovating is actually a gamble.
- dmix 8y ago
  As part of that risk I'm sure Tesla would far rather burn the people who paid extra for some technology that wasn't ready yet than release something that is sub-par at a minimum and dangerous at worst Killing a bunch of people or jamming up traffic is a quick way to going out of business in the car industry, so there's far more incentives to wait for the real thing. It's not like an optional $2-3k add-on (to a $40-60k product) that turns out to be useless would be a game changer. People will just not trust them to pre-invest and wait to buy it when it's available.
  - taneq 8y ago
    > I'm sure Tesla would far rather burn the people who paid extra for some technology that wasn't ready yet than release something that is sub-par at a minimum and dangerous at worst. Uhh... I love Tesla but current Autopilot, that they have released, is definitely not what I'd call "public-ready".[1] And they agree, which is why it's locked behind clickwrap disclaimers and warnings and described as a "beta". Don't get me wrong, I want one. But I wouldn't want my mum to use Autopilot. [1] It can't see stopped cars on the highway (!) and gets confused by freeway exits, sometimes driving directly at the gore point. Worse, this second issue was fixed and is now happening again, indicating a critical lack of regression testing. (!!)
    - Piskvorrr 8y ago
      Speaking from a code archeology ;) perspective, there's another explanation: the previous fix has addressed the proximate problem, but also unearthed a deeper problem, which may or may not be fixable.
- 8y ago

I doubt Tesla has multiple (more like dozens of) major industry first sensor and AI breakthroughs, regardless of how closely OP follows them or not.

fastball 8y ago

OP seems to be operating under the premise that such a system must be "no-fail". That is not what Tesla is going for.

empath75 8y ago
Considering that they’ve already killed a couple of people, that’s a given.
- grey-area 8y ago
  Humans kill over 100 people per day in traffic accidents in the US alone - I don’t think no-fail (0 deaths) is a reasonable requirement, just being safer than humans is enough. I do agree with the OPs skepticism though - full autonomy is 10 years away.
  - mehrdadn 8y ago
    > Humans kill over 100 people per day in traffic accidents in the US alone - I don’t think no-fail (0 deaths) is a reasonable requirement, just being safer than humans is enough. This is a fallacy. People don't just look at safety statistics. The actual manner/setting in which something can kill you matters a ton too. There's a huge difference between a computer that crashes in even the most benign situations and one that only crashes in truly difficult situations, even if the the first one isn't any more frequent than the second. Hypothetical example: you've stopped behind a red light and your car randomly starts moving, and you get hit by another car. Turns out your car has a habit of glitching like this every 165,000 miles or so (which seems to be the average accident rate) for no apparent reason. Would you be fine this car? I don't think most people would even come close to finding this acceptable. They want to be safe when they haven't done anything dangerous -- they want to be in reasonable control of their destiny. P.S. people are also more forgiving of each other than computers. E.g. a 1-second reaction time can be pretty acceptable for a human but, but if the computer I'd trusted with my life had that kind of reaction time it would get defenestrated pretty quickly.
    - grey-area 8y ago
      > This is a fallacy. Please do point out where the statement is incorrect. I wasn't talking about perception, people have all kinds of ideas about machines (mostly unfounded), but typically safety records drive policy, not whether drivers think they are better than the machine. I believe machine assisted driving is safer than unassisted already and will continue to improve such that in 10 or 20 years human drivers will be the exception, not the norm. That will happen because computers are already safer in most conditions - the switch will happen when they are demonstrably far safer in all conditions. Remember they don't have to beat the best human driver, just the average.
      - llukas 8y ago
        > That will happen because computers are already safer in most conditions - the switch will happen when they are demonstrably far safer in all conditions. Computers currently can disengage in any conditions for any reason - how did you come with conclusion computers are already safer?
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
      If that was actually the case, i.e. it had a lower accident rate than humans buts its accidents were silly bugs, it wouldn't be a "huge difference" -- it would be a slight improvement that would become a major improvement when the bug gets fixed. If the average person thinks they're better than the computer when the computer is better than the average person, the average person is incorrect. > They want to be safe when they haven't done anything dangerous -- they want to be in reasonable control of their destiny. If you don't trust the computer, does that mean you won't trust another driver, if the computer is better than the average driver? Then how do you drive at all, when the roads are full of average drivers who could hit you at any time?
      - notahacker 8y ago
        > If the average person thinks they're better than the computer when the computer is better than the average person, the average person is incorrect. Until you remember that to obtain statistically significant evidence that the latest version number of Tesla (or any other firm's) software is safer than the average driver entails hundreds of millions of miles of driving. And for that matter that the "average driver" accident rates are skewed upwards by the number of incidents involving people who you'd never, ever volunteer to be driven by [in their state of intoxication]. In the mean time, the human heuristic that a car which tries to kill you by accelerating at lane dividers isn't safer than your own average level of driving skill in many circumstances is probably better than trusting exponential curves and the Elon Musk reality distortion field.
  - bostonpete 8y ago
    > Humans kill over 100 people per day in traffic accidents in the US alone They also drive 8-9 billion miles per day. That's around 1 death per 90 million miles of driving. Given the number of AV miles that are driven annually right now, we actually would expect to see ~0 deaths per year if AVs were as safe as humans...
    - fattire 8y ago
      FWIW, Tesla claims to have logged 1.2 billion autopilot (primarily freeway only) miles as of last summer: https://electrek.co/2018/07/17/tesla-autopilot-miles-shadow-mode-report/ https://electrek.co/2018/07/17/tesla-autopilot-miles-shadow-... It is probably best to categorize these as autopilot PLUS human supervision, but anyway, Wikipedia cites 3 autopilot-caused deaths worldwide over 3 years or so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_self-driving_car_fatalities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_self-driving_car_fatal...
      - joshuamorton 8y ago
        It's all worth subcategorizing. Highway driving is substantially safer than surface streets, and if you stick to awake, sober, daytime drivers in good weather, the safety of human drivers is even higher. Given that autopilot can handle nighttime, but not the others, it's completely possible that 1/300 million miles is above the sober good weather highway human driver fatality rate.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    Humans drive 8 billion miles per day in the US, through a variety of conditions, crazy weather, crazy traffic, crazy pedestrians, etc. “Just being safer than humans” is an extremely tall order.
  - DrScump 8y ago
    just being safer than humans is enough "Enough" for a statistician... but not if you're the one killed in an "acceptable" edge case that most humans handle fine.
  - Piskvorrr 8y ago
    Full autonomy has been 10 years away for half a century. If driving still exists in a century, I'd wager that full autonomy would still be 10 years away then.
hellllllllooo 8y ago
It's not that it has to be no-fail it's that the failures need to be a subset of the failures that humans make. If the failures are in places that humans can easily and reliably handle (which is the case now) then people won't trust these systems. If the failures are created by the software not being able to handle basic driving tasks and wouldn't normally happen with a person driving then this is a huge problem with the system. A system that repeatedly drives at a lane divider repeatedly is not something people should trust. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/03/dashcam-video-shows-tesla-steering-toward-lane-divider-again/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/03/dashcam-video-shows-tes...
- SilasX 8y ago
  Yes! I think that’s the right way to measure whether you’ve solved self-driving cars: if it has similar (possibly worse) failure rates to humans in each environment where humans are expected to operate. Example: say an SDC never had collisions except when a cop is directing traffic, and in that case it floors it full speed to the cop. I would not consider that to have solved self driving cars, even though dealing with a cop directing traffic is so rare that its accident rate is lower.

codeulike 8y ago

Elon Musk takes huge ambitious gambles. In this case the gamble is that good AI and the huge amount of training data from the Tesla fleet will win out over lidar. It is a gamble. But if you look at other gambles SpaceX and Tesla have taken, the context changes a bit. Everyone talks about innovation, but innovating is actually a gamble.

dmix 8y ago
As part of that risk I'm sure Tesla would far rather burn the people who paid extra for some technology that wasn't ready yet than release something that is sub-par at a minimum and dangerous at worst Killing a bunch of people or jamming up traffic is a quick way to going out of business in the car industry, so there's far more incentives to wait for the real thing. It's not like an optional $2-3k add-on (to a $40-60k product) that turns out to be useless would be a game changer. People will just not trust them to pre-invest and wait to buy it when it's available.
- taneq 8y ago
  > I'm sure Tesla would far rather burn the people who paid extra for some technology that wasn't ready yet than release something that is sub-par at a minimum and dangerous at worst. Uhh... I love Tesla but current Autopilot, that they have released, is definitely not what I'd call "public-ready".[1] And they agree, which is why it's locked behind clickwrap disclaimers and warnings and described as a "beta". Don't get me wrong, I want one. But I wouldn't want my mum to use Autopilot. [1] It can't see stopped cars on the highway (!) and gets confused by freeway exits, sometimes driving directly at the gore point. Worse, this second issue was fixed and is now happening again, indicating a critical lack of regression testing. (!!)
  - Piskvorrr 8y ago
    Speaking from a code archeology ;) perspective, there's another explanation: the previous fix has addressed the proximate problem, but also unearthed a deeper problem, which may or may not be fixable.
8y ago