6 ms·

its not hype if the tech is real.

untog 7y ago
And it is hype if the tech isn't real. I mean, it's called "auto pilot". It is not an auto pilot. It is not nearly ready for unattended driving. And yet, people use it as such and are surprised when they crash into a divider or something. There's a built in assumption that because the tech has progressed from point A to point B that it'll easily move to point C in the same amount of time. That's not at all guaranteed, and for all of the millions (billions?) being poured into self driving tech we don't have to show for it. It may be many, many years before we do.
- derekp7 7y ago
  I fully understand the frustration with people thinking Tesla's driver assist is more than what it is. But what I don't understand is the issue people have with the product name. Almost all commercial airlines have an autopilot, but not one of them flies without an actual pilot and co-pilot in the cockpit. The only thing an airplane autopilot does is keep the bearing and altitude constant -- Tesla's "autopilot" actually does a bit more than that. Is the outrage over calling it "autopilot" based on the public's misunderstanding of how an airplane's autopilot works?
  - untog 7y ago
    My issue with the name is that it's a bad comparison at best, and misleading at worst. Yes, a plane autopilot only maintains bearing and altitude, but that's also all a plane needs to do. An equivalent system in a car would be utterly useless, so if you're taking Tesla's terms literally then they're telling you they've made something that's of no use to you. If, instead, you think of an autopilot as being something that allows the pilot to take their attention off the controls to do something else then, well, Tesla's autopilot explicitly doesn't do that. So it's not the right name when taken either literally or figuratively, so little wonder people get confused.
    - dexen 7y ago
      >but that's also all a plane needs to do Quite the opposite, there are common scenarios when the plane needs to deviate from pre-programmed course or otherwise can't rely just on an autopilot. All of them are handled either by higher-level automation (eg. ILS for landing), or by pilots themselves. Unsurprisingly the hand-over is signaled similarly to what Tesla does - audible and tactile cues for the pilots. A pilot can also initiate take over at any time by the way of flight control inputs. Lastly, regardless whichever automation is active, the pilot in charge is held both morally and legally responsible for the airplane and passengers or cargo, and expected to turn off the the automation when proper. All in all Tesla's "Autopilot" already does more than an autopilot does. And while I'm somewhat pessimistic on how quickly it can become better than humans both statistically and also in rare scenarios, there is constant progress by all major vendors. Common scenarios for an autopilot to be disconnected, or to initiate handover: - collisions avoidance; the air corridors are busy places, and maneuvering to maintain safe distance from other planes is expected - take-off and landing, though those can be performed by higher level automation - pattern holding around the air-port, where course change is frequent - re-routing to avoid severe weather or handle emergencies - handling major turbulences (autopilots have limited maximum rate of change for safety reasons) - loss of instrumentation, due to icing, foreign object ingestion, malfunctions; a common setup is "2 out of 3 sensors need to be in agreement" As you can see, the equivalents of some of those scenarios are already handled pretty well by self-driving cars, like self-parking, or collision avoidance.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    A roll of duct-tape fixing the steering wheel and the accelerator pedal would be the rough equivalent of an auto pilot for cars if you want to take that analogy as far as it will go. So clearly 'auto pilot' was marketing speak rather than a literal description of what the device is supposed to do leaving a lot of room for interpretation. This has already led to a number of fatalities and may lead to a bunch more of them, and all that because naming it 'driver assist' would lose a couple of sales, but would accurately describe what's in the tin.
  - misnome 7y ago
    > Is the outrage over calling it "autopilot" based on the public's misunderstanding of how an airplane's autopilot works? Not if the name was chosen to deliberately be misleading.
  - simion314 7y ago
    There is an autoland system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland >The only thing an airplane autopilot does is keep the bearing and altitude constant If autopilot means that then we had autopilot in years, I remember students creating toy projects that were following the road. The issue is that some(no idea of a number) people, including Tesla owners, think the car drives itself and do not pay 100% attention. I am not sure why they do not understand that there is a chance they will get killed or kill somebody and the driver has full responsibility.
  - jhayward 7y ago
    > The only thing an airplane autopilot does is keep the bearing and altitude constant That was probably true in the 1950s. Today's flight automation manages the entire flight profile including climbout and descent, fuel management, etc.
  - arcbyte 7y ago
    You are exactly right and every sane human being has always known this. I have no idea what hole all these troll commenters are climbing out of that they dont understand basic english.
  - zimbatm 7y ago
    Airplane pilots are being trained for specific aircraft models, which certainly includes how the "autopilot" functions, when to use it and what it does and doesn't do. There is not risk that the overloaded term will be misunderstood in that context. To get a Tesla all that is required is enough money to buy it.
  - ThinkingGuy 7y ago
    Airline pilot Patrick Smith has a great description of how much human skill is required, even while using autopilot: (skip down to the section that begins "Here, let me give you a quick demonstration:") http://www.askthepilot.com/pilotless-planes/ http://www.askthepilot.com/pilotless-planes/
- NotSammyHagar 7y ago
  I agree with what you are saying, but an auto-pilot in an airplane requires a pilot to be there to supervise it.
- zaroth 7y ago
  Have you driven with it? Have you seen the progress in new features and reliability in just the last 6 months of OTA updates? Their cars are becoming more and more autonomous, and they are rolling out this autonomy in ways that is very impressive. The fact that they can say a new lane change algorithm went live and they know they are now doing 100,000 lane changes a day without a single incident. The fact that they can see when I take over during a lane change and that sequence is stored and anonymously included in future training sets. I have been experiencing the massive pace of progress over the last 6 months of OTA updates, and I almost believe Musk when he says he can get to FSD in a few years. IMO you may have cars get “stuck” in very strange situations which will be extremely annoying, but I think they will be significantly safer than humans, hugely convenient the vast majority of the time, and save a lot of lives in the process. I wish Tesla the best of luck.
  - nexuist 7y ago
    I also wish Tesla the best of luck, but Musk isn't saying he can get to FSD "in a few years" - he said by the end of this year. This is the hype being railed against. I'm confident that they can solve the FSD problem, but I'm not convinced they can do it faster than of Elon time.
    - bhauer 7y ago
      It really depends on your interpretation of the following clip [1]. He says "feature complete" by later this year, but then says "feature complete... to the degree that the person in the car does not need to pay attention" and classifies that as maybe second quarter of next year. Later still is sufficiently complete to convince regulators, with an estimate of later next year. And I think it's uncharitable to interpret these as delivery commitments. From the tone of the delivery, they are clearly targets (probably aggressive targets) and not commitments. Those who bludgeon Musk for being overly optimistic with timelines seem to overemphasize the importance of specific timeliness and lose sight of the bigger picture. [1] https://youtu.be/Ucp0TTmvqOE?t=9939 https://youtu.be/Ucp0TTmvqOE?t=9939
      - 7y ago
- Dirlewanger 7y ago
  I think it's pretty hilarious that as late as last year, Tesla's Autopilot page (https://www.tesla.com/autopilot https://www.tesla.com/autopilot) used to have the tagline "Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Cars" (especially at the time the median crash/death happened), but now they've changed it to "Future of Driving" and "[...] full self-driving capabilities in the future—through software updates designed to improve functionality over time." I really want Tesla to succeed and break the ICE monopoly, but when they oversell mission-critical features like that, I'm perfectly content seeing shit blow up in their face. Musk is a brash and reckless CEO, no one should be surprised hordes of people are hedging for his downfall.
- harry8 7y ago
  Just quietly you do know that "auto pilot" comes from aeroplanes, eg Airbus and Boeing passenger jets and is not ready for unattended flight without pilots present in the cockpit, right? I'm pretty sceptical about having nobody in the front seat of the car while it drives me myself. Time will tell. I can be sanguine about it as I have nothing directly riding on it (as it were) either way.
- elisharobinson 7y ago
  my question is why do you think that 144 tops with the sensor array is not enough to achieve FSD . IMO the chips are real the cars are real the data collected is real and the network is real
hugh4life 7y ago
Safe self driving cars without some kind of outside coordination with either the road or other vehicles is an impossibility. It's impossible to do this safely on a mass scale without the road infrastructure made for it.
- simion314 7y ago
  Exactly, see how things got when in the Boeing one sensor sent a wrong input and the software was designed with a flaw, now imagine the super complex input of video cameras, that feed into a magic ANN when something goes wrong or when the input is something weird that the ANN was not trained for. I am fine for Tesla to train the code with the fleet but the problem is with the marketing and drivers that put live in danger by thinking the problem is already solved.
- grey-area 7y ago
  :) Computers beating humans at chess was also an impossibility. Then beating humans at Go was an impossibility. Then beating humans at a strategy game like Dota was an impossibility (openai 99.4% win rate). https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/23/18512356/dota-2-openai-ai-arena-gaming-esports https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/23/18512356/dota-2-openai-ai... Machine learning has made massive progress in the last decade, I would not bet against it.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]

And it is hype if the tech isn't real. I mean, it's called "auto pilot". It is not an auto pilot. It is not nearly ready for unattended driving. And yet, people use it as such and are surprised when they crash into a divider or something. There's a built in assumption that because the tech has progressed from point A to point B that it'll easily move to point C in the same amount of time. That's not at all guaranteed, and for all of the millions (billions?) being poured into self driving tech we don't have to show for it. It may be many, many years before we do.

derekp7 7y ago
I fully understand the frustration with people thinking Tesla's driver assist is more than what it is. But what I don't understand is the issue people have with the product name. Almost all commercial airlines have an autopilot, but not one of them flies without an actual pilot and co-pilot in the cockpit. The only thing an airplane autopilot does is keep the bearing and altitude constant -- Tesla's "autopilot" actually does a bit more than that. Is the outrage over calling it "autopilot" based on the public's misunderstanding of how an airplane's autopilot works?
- untog 7y ago
  My issue with the name is that it's a bad comparison at best, and misleading at worst. Yes, a plane autopilot only maintains bearing and altitude, but that's also all a plane needs to do. An equivalent system in a car would be utterly useless, so if you're taking Tesla's terms literally then they're telling you they've made something that's of no use to you. If, instead, you think of an autopilot as being something that allows the pilot to take their attention off the controls to do something else then, well, Tesla's autopilot explicitly doesn't do that. So it's not the right name when taken either literally or figuratively, so little wonder people get confused.
  - dexen 7y ago
    >but that's also all a plane needs to do Quite the opposite, there are common scenarios when the plane needs to deviate from pre-programmed course or otherwise can't rely just on an autopilot. All of them are handled either by higher-level automation (eg. ILS for landing), or by pilots themselves. Unsurprisingly the hand-over is signaled similarly to what Tesla does - audible and tactile cues for the pilots. A pilot can also initiate take over at any time by the way of flight control inputs. Lastly, regardless whichever automation is active, the pilot in charge is held both morally and legally responsible for the airplane and passengers or cargo, and expected to turn off the the automation when proper. All in all Tesla's "Autopilot" already does more than an autopilot does. And while I'm somewhat pessimistic on how quickly it can become better than humans both statistically and also in rare scenarios, there is constant progress by all major vendors. Common scenarios for an autopilot to be disconnected, or to initiate handover: - collisions avoidance; the air corridors are busy places, and maneuvering to maintain safe distance from other planes is expected - take-off and landing, though those can be performed by higher level automation - pattern holding around the air-port, where course change is frequent - re-routing to avoid severe weather or handle emergencies - handling major turbulences (autopilots have limited maximum rate of change for safety reasons) - loss of instrumentation, due to icing, foreign object ingestion, malfunctions; a common setup is "2 out of 3 sensors need to be in agreement" As you can see, the equivalents of some of those scenarios are already handled pretty well by self-driving cars, like self-parking, or collision avoidance.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- jacquesm 7y ago
  A roll of duct-tape fixing the steering wheel and the accelerator pedal would be the rough equivalent of an auto pilot for cars if you want to take that analogy as far as it will go. So clearly 'auto pilot' was marketing speak rather than a literal description of what the device is supposed to do leaving a lot of room for interpretation. This has already led to a number of fatalities and may lead to a bunch more of them, and all that because naming it 'driver assist' would lose a couple of sales, but would accurately describe what's in the tin.
- misnome 7y ago
  > Is the outrage over calling it "autopilot" based on the public's misunderstanding of how an airplane's autopilot works? Not if the name was chosen to deliberately be misleading.
- simion314 7y ago
  There is an autoland system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland >The only thing an airplane autopilot does is keep the bearing and altitude constant If autopilot means that then we had autopilot in years, I remember students creating toy projects that were following the road. The issue is that some(no idea of a number) people, including Tesla owners, think the car drives itself and do not pay 100% attention. I am not sure why they do not understand that there is a chance they will get killed or kill somebody and the driver has full responsibility.
- jhayward 7y ago
  > The only thing an airplane autopilot does is keep the bearing and altitude constant That was probably true in the 1950s. Today's flight automation manages the entire flight profile including climbout and descent, fuel management, etc.
- arcbyte 7y ago
  You are exactly right and every sane human being has always known this. I have no idea what hole all these troll commenters are climbing out of that they dont understand basic english.
- zimbatm 7y ago
  Airplane pilots are being trained for specific aircraft models, which certainly includes how the "autopilot" functions, when to use it and what it does and doesn't do. There is not risk that the overloaded term will be misunderstood in that context. To get a Tesla all that is required is enough money to buy it.
- ThinkingGuy 7y ago
  Airline pilot Patrick Smith has a great description of how much human skill is required, even while using autopilot: (skip down to the section that begins "Here, let me give you a quick demonstration:") http://www.askthepilot.com/pilotless-planes/ http://www.askthepilot.com/pilotless-planes/
NotSammyHagar 7y ago
I agree with what you are saying, but an auto-pilot in an airplane requires a pilot to be there to supervise it.
zaroth 7y ago
Have you driven with it? Have you seen the progress in new features and reliability in just the last 6 months of OTA updates? Their cars are becoming more and more autonomous, and they are rolling out this autonomy in ways that is very impressive. The fact that they can say a new lane change algorithm went live and they know they are now doing 100,000 lane changes a day without a single incident. The fact that they can see when I take over during a lane change and that sequence is stored and anonymously included in future training sets. I have been experiencing the massive pace of progress over the last 6 months of OTA updates, and I almost believe Musk when he says he can get to FSD in a few years. IMO you may have cars get “stuck” in very strange situations which will be extremely annoying, but I think they will be significantly safer than humans, hugely convenient the vast majority of the time, and save a lot of lives in the process. I wish Tesla the best of luck.
- nexuist 7y ago
  I also wish Tesla the best of luck, but Musk isn't saying he can get to FSD "in a few years" - he said by the end of this year. This is the hype being railed against. I'm confident that they can solve the FSD problem, but I'm not convinced they can do it faster than of Elon time.
  - bhauer 7y ago
    It really depends on your interpretation of the following clip [1]. He says "feature complete" by later this year, but then says "feature complete... to the degree that the person in the car does not need to pay attention" and classifies that as maybe second quarter of next year. Later still is sufficiently complete to convince regulators, with an estimate of later next year. And I think it's uncharitable to interpret these as delivery commitments. From the tone of the delivery, they are clearly targets (probably aggressive targets) and not commitments. Those who bludgeon Musk for being overly optimistic with timelines seem to overemphasize the importance of specific timeliness and lose sight of the bigger picture. [1] https://youtu.be/Ucp0TTmvqOE?t=9939 https://youtu.be/Ucp0TTmvqOE?t=9939
    - 7y ago
Dirlewanger 7y ago
I think it's pretty hilarious that as late as last year, Tesla's Autopilot page (https://www.tesla.com/autopilot https://www.tesla.com/autopilot) used to have the tagline "Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Cars" (especially at the time the median crash/death happened), but now they've changed it to "Future of Driving" and "[...] full self-driving capabilities in the future—through software updates designed to improve functionality over time." I really want Tesla to succeed and break the ICE monopoly, but when they oversell mission-critical features like that, I'm perfectly content seeing shit blow up in their face. Musk is a brash and reckless CEO, no one should be surprised hordes of people are hedging for his downfall.
harry8 7y ago
Just quietly you do know that "auto pilot" comes from aeroplanes, eg Airbus and Boeing passenger jets and is not ready for unattended flight without pilots present in the cockpit, right? I'm pretty sceptical about having nobody in the front seat of the car while it drives me myself. Time will tell. I can be sanguine about it as I have nothing directly riding on it (as it were) either way.
elisharobinson 7y ago
my question is why do you think that 144 tops with the sensor array is not enough to achieve FSD . IMO the chips are real the cars are real the data collected is real and the network is real

hugh4life 7y ago

Safe self driving cars without some kind of outside coordination with either the road or other vehicles is an impossibility. It's impossible to do this safely on a mass scale without the road infrastructure made for it.

simion314 7y ago
Exactly, see how things got when in the Boeing one sensor sent a wrong input and the software was designed with a flaw, now imagine the super complex input of video cameras, that feed into a magic ANN when something goes wrong or when the input is something weird that the ANN was not trained for. I am fine for Tesla to train the code with the fleet but the problem is with the marketing and drivers that put live in danger by thinking the problem is already solved.
grey-area 7y ago
:) Computers beating humans at chess was also an impossibility. Then beating humans at Go was an impossibility. Then beating humans at a strategy game like Dota was an impossibility (openai 99.4% win rate). https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/23/18512356/dota-2-openai-ai-arena-gaming-esports https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/23/18512356/dota-2-openai-ai... Machine learning has made massive progress in the last decade, I would not bet against it.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]