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Just listening to this talk scares me. The amount of errors - even in a seemingly normal, sunny day - is mind boggling to think people trust this crap. How can

Just listening to this talk scares me. The amount of errors - even in a seemingly normal, sunny day - is mind boggling to think people trust this crap. How can we rely on the output of eight cameras? This is not a kid's science project. It's all fancy neural networks until someone dies. Pretty callous and Silicon valley-mindset for such an important and critical function of the car. Will never buy a Tesla after having seen this.

optimiz3 7y ago
Your comments read like /r/RealTesla | TSLAQ fud. Please explain, in detail, what your specific objections are, and how you are more qualified on this subject matter than the presenter.
- mindfulplay 7y ago
  I am honestly scared even of WayMo that I think unless NHTSA gets its acts together this shit shouldn't be allowed on roads. It's often reactionary - people wait for someone to die and then suddenly you have nervous Musk in front of Congress and such crap. Why wait? Why can't these be regulated before allowing on roads? And no, failover control is not acceptable given the past incidents and deaths.
  - Joky 7y ago
    You seem to use "regulated" as in "forbidden" right now, but maybe I am misreading so can you elaborate? Today thousands are dying every year on the road, are we just forbidding cars entirely? > And no, failover control is not acceptable given the past incidents and deaths. How many incidents/deaths per miles driven? How does it compare to all the other transportation systems?
    - JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
      https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1119936_tesla-fatal-crash-rate-with-autopilot-still-no-better-than-with-human-drivers https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1119936_tesla-fatal-cra... “Perhaps that’s because, as it turns out, Teslas on Autopilot could have a higher fatal accident rate than those driven entirely by humans.”
    - perl4ever 7y ago
      Why are people so committed to the idea that self-driving cars are anywhere near human standards? It just seems like a groundless assertion of faith to me. Professional drivers can go for a million miles without an accident, and I don't believe anyone's autonomous driving software can get within an order of magnitude of that without a disengagement, even in favorable conditions. You may disagree that a disengagement is equivalent to a human having an accident, but I strongly feel that it is. In either case, you have a situation where the driver reached a point where it was definitively unable to determine an appropriate next action.
      - tim333 7y ago
        I don't think most people think they are near human standards now. But there is the prospect for them being there before too long.
  - chrisco255 7y ago
    The only way to train these things is on actual roads. As far as I know, all of these systems require a human driver present at this time. None are fully autonomous.
    - tim333 7y ago
      Waymo have done some very limited full autonomous https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21427036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21427036 They still have backup drivers mostly though.
newnewpdro 7y ago
Same. Watching the AI visualization of summons in-action was horrifying, and made clear why many have reported summons mode as resembling a drunk person navigating a parking lot.
- natch 7y ago
  Yes it's not perfected yet, which is why it requires human supervision for now. Having it operate in the wild as it is now (again, under human supervision) will help it become less horrifying, which I think you would agree is what we want.
  - newnewpdro 7y ago
    I don't agree, as I don't particularly value/want a future with self-driving vehicles. I also think the way Tesla is going about this is utterly idiotic and reckless. It upsets me that I'm sharing roads with vehicles having these dysfunctional immature systems. Point this crap at video game engines and don't let it anywhere near real people until it can drive millions of virtual miles in something like GTA without hitting anyone/anything and without behaving like a drunk driver who lost their glasses.
    - natch 7y ago
      >I don't agree, as I don't particularly value/want a future with self-driving vehicles. If bad human drivers killed only themselves, that would be one thing, plenty of Darwin awards to go around. But they don't. I do value reducing traffic fatalities to near zero. I think that would be fantastic. The GTA idea is a good one. I think they've done that, many times over, but I could be wrong. They way Tesla is doing it is interesting. Have human supervision, so even though the system may behave as you say like a drunk driver who lost their glasses, at least the human is there keeping it in check. Humans aren't perfect, but I've found (and statistics have shown) that the system plus a human is better than a human alone. That alone should make you less upset. These cars are less reckless than cars driven by humans. Human supervision is just one element of the very smart way Tesla is going about this. The other element is incremental changes. A lot can be said about that but I won't now. Teslas are getting small and big safety improvements that roll out over time as full self driving gets closer and closer. This should make you feel better. If you see a Tesla in autopilot, it won't be tailgating. If you see people tailgating in a Tesla, you can be sure autopilot is not turned on. Even with the follow distance set to the lowest, the distance kept is larger than what is done by most humans. This should also make you less upset. When driving in stop and go traffic with Teslas with autopilot on, if the owner sets the follow distance to say the middle range, you'll find you are often able to merge in in front of them, because they allow space for that (and for safety). This should help too. Over time, the system is getting better and better. Eventually, it will all be ok!
freediver 7y ago
You are right this approach is scary, and it is astonishingly innacurate (im a tesla owner). However the reason are not eight cameras. You should be able to drive fine with just one camera (thought experiment: could you drive a car 1000 miles from you, just by seeing what the driver of that car would see, no extra cameras, sensors or lidars?).
- mindfulplay 7y ago
  I work closely on ondevice OCR technology - something that has improved so much and still cannot figure out the difference between I and 1. And that took many decades not even years and in a very constrained problem space. Releasing a "self driving" metal torpedo even if it's a limited Summons should at least be regulated if not outright banned. I feel like even a single accident let alone death should put these idiots behind bars.
  - jayd16 7y ago
    It is regulated. Would you like it to be regulated in a specific, different way?
  - rawoke083600 7y ago
    How do we currently regulate and put behind bars the human drivers that drives the metal torpedoes like idiots ? Specifically the ones that are not caught.
- mdorazio 7y ago
  One stereoscopic ultra-HDR 4K camera would be fine... if it was backed by a strong AI. To even suggest that ML is anywhere wen remotely close to this level is the height of hubris.
  - freediver 7y ago
    Not even stereoscopic, you could still drive with one eye shut.
panarky 7y ago
> mind boggling to think people trust this crap It's also mind boggling to think we currently trust organic tissue to do this crap, some of which is bathed in psychoactive chemicals. And yet we do, and as a result, horrendous catastrophes occur every minute of every day. > It's all fancy neural networks until someone dies No, that can't be the standard, not when people are dying right now in the current regime. Unless the new regime kills and maims at a higher rate than the current regime, there is no reason for fear.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  "It's also mind boggling to think we currently trust organic tissue to do this crap, some of which is bathed in psychoactive chemicals." The appropriate standard for self-driving cars is a sober professional driver, not the average idiot on Saturday night. It isn't unusual for a driver to go a million miles without an accident, when that's their job.
  - ajross 7y ago
    No, the appropriate standard for a self-driving car is the driver they replace. If they're safer than whoever would have been driving (be it on a saturday night or not) then they're a net win. Right now the average idiots are buying more Teslas than mail carriers and cab drivers, though that might change I guess. Numbers are numbers.
    - perl4ever 7y ago
      A Tesla owner could ride in a cab or on a bus, though. On average, it seems like without a Tesla they would be at least minimally more likely to. You seem to be implying that cab drivers are the only people who ride in cabs.
    - ars 7y ago
      If you like numbers, then you'll like this one: Humans achieve 7 9's of reliability when driving a car, as measured for fatalities by time, or 8 9's if you measure by miles. I've yet to see a computer just stay up that long, never mind actually doing anything the whole time. (If you use the collision rate instead, the numbers are about 500 times worse - but that's still quite a lot of 9's.) People have this fixed thought that humans are terrible drives. They are not! Computers have their work cut out for them to exceed the reliability record humans have set.
k2xl 7y ago
Hmm how do you explain that data shows that there are likely less accidents and less road fatalities when autopilot is engaged?
- lsh 7y ago
  citation, please
  - kjksf 7y ago
    https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport
    - simion314 7y ago
      The autopilot is a drive assist , I can explain that there are less accidents when drive assists is one because - the driver is still present and will most of the time intervene and save his life(there are some youtube videos where the Tesla AI was trying to kill the driver and those incidents don't appear as accidents int the stats) - "autopilot" is engaged mostly on highways , but the statistics are not accounting for this - they are also comparing the safety of a new car versus the median of all cars(old and new, cheap or expensive) on all demographics(how many teens own a Tesla?) I would like that Tesla make all the data open or have an independent group analyze it, including the disengagements, I wonder how isolated are the cases where the car is driving you into trucks or stone wall but the drivers intervened and saved themselves and also saved Tesla from a bad statistic.
    - FireBeyond 7y ago
      Which is entirely cherry picked and optimistic. Autopilot has the luxury of being able to / requiring disengagement in less-than-favorable driving conditions. Humans don't. A fair comparison would be comparing against the miles/conditions/roads driven.
yo-scot-99 7y ago
this tech is interesting but so poorly understood that it's just using the (public) roads as one large alpha test. given a NN there is no way to verify what safety ranges are there. for instance if each camera slightly changed exposure or occlusion are the results smoothly changing? all they can do is try it and hope the inputs are in a safe part of their optimization space.
natch 7y ago
It does require human supervision while driving. Tesla makes this very clear. It's also all over the Internet. But there will always be people who do not get this. Those people should not drive Teslas, or pretty much any modern car for that matter. If you are under the impression that you would be relying on this system to drive the car, then I agree you should not get a Tesla. Of course full self driving is coming at some point, but that's a conversation for another day. Meantime Tesla is making steps toward it very incrementally with things like the "stop mode" rolling out right now.
matz1 7y ago
How many actually dies? Do you have the statistic?
0-_-0 7y ago
Just replace "eight" with "two" and this could have been written about the human brain
- oska 7y ago
  And driving with only one is still legal.
  - anticensor 7y ago
    Monocular or deaf driving is subject to many restrictions including being unable to drive a commercial vehicle.

optimiz3 7y ago

Your comments read like /r/RealTesla | TSLAQ fud. Please explain, in detail, what your specific objections are, and how you are more qualified on this subject matter than the presenter.

mindfulplay 7y ago
I am honestly scared even of WayMo that I think unless NHTSA gets its acts together this shit shouldn't be allowed on roads. It's often reactionary - people wait for someone to die and then suddenly you have nervous Musk in front of Congress and such crap. Why wait? Why can't these be regulated before allowing on roads? And no, failover control is not acceptable given the past incidents and deaths.
- Joky 7y ago
  You seem to use "regulated" as in "forbidden" right now, but maybe I am misreading so can you elaborate? Today thousands are dying every year on the road, are we just forbidding cars entirely? > And no, failover control is not acceptable given the past incidents and deaths. How many incidents/deaths per miles driven? How does it compare to all the other transportation systems?
  - JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
    https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1119936_tesla-fatal-crash-rate-with-autopilot-still-no-better-than-with-human-drivers https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1119936_tesla-fatal-cra... “Perhaps that’s because, as it turns out, Teslas on Autopilot could have a higher fatal accident rate than those driven entirely by humans.”
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    Why are people so committed to the idea that self-driving cars are anywhere near human standards? It just seems like a groundless assertion of faith to me. Professional drivers can go for a million miles without an accident, and I don't believe anyone's autonomous driving software can get within an order of magnitude of that without a disengagement, even in favorable conditions. You may disagree that a disengagement is equivalent to a human having an accident, but I strongly feel that it is. In either case, you have a situation where the driver reached a point where it was definitively unable to determine an appropriate next action.
    - tim333 7y ago
      I don't think most people think they are near human standards now. But there is the prospect for them being there before too long.
- chrisco255 7y ago
  The only way to train these things is on actual roads. As far as I know, all of these systems require a human driver present at this time. None are fully autonomous.
  - tim333 7y ago
    Waymo have done some very limited full autonomous https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21427036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21427036 They still have backup drivers mostly though.

newnewpdro 7y ago

Same. Watching the AI visualization of summons in-action was horrifying, and made clear why many have reported summons mode as resembling a drunk person navigating a parking lot.

natch 7y ago
Yes it's not perfected yet, which is why it requires human supervision for now. Having it operate in the wild as it is now (again, under human supervision) will help it become less horrifying, which I think you would agree is what we want.
- newnewpdro 7y ago
  I don't agree, as I don't particularly value/want a future with self-driving vehicles. I also think the way Tesla is going about this is utterly idiotic and reckless. It upsets me that I'm sharing roads with vehicles having these dysfunctional immature systems. Point this crap at video game engines and don't let it anywhere near real people until it can drive millions of virtual miles in something like GTA without hitting anyone/anything and without behaving like a drunk driver who lost their glasses.
  - natch 7y ago
    >I don't agree, as I don't particularly value/want a future with self-driving vehicles. If bad human drivers killed only themselves, that would be one thing, plenty of Darwin awards to go around. But they don't. I do value reducing traffic fatalities to near zero. I think that would be fantastic. The GTA idea is a good one. I think they've done that, many times over, but I could be wrong. They way Tesla is doing it is interesting. Have human supervision, so even though the system may behave as you say like a drunk driver who lost their glasses, at least the human is there keeping it in check. Humans aren't perfect, but I've found (and statistics have shown) that the system plus a human is better than a human alone. That alone should make you less upset. These cars are less reckless than cars driven by humans. Human supervision is just one element of the very smart way Tesla is going about this. The other element is incremental changes. A lot can be said about that but I won't now. Teslas are getting small and big safety improvements that roll out over time as full self driving gets closer and closer. This should make you feel better. If you see a Tesla in autopilot, it won't be tailgating. If you see people tailgating in a Tesla, you can be sure autopilot is not turned on. Even with the follow distance set to the lowest, the distance kept is larger than what is done by most humans. This should also make you less upset. When driving in stop and go traffic with Teslas with autopilot on, if the owner sets the follow distance to say the middle range, you'll find you are often able to merge in in front of them, because they allow space for that (and for safety). This should help too. Over time, the system is getting better and better. Eventually, it will all be ok!

freediver 7y ago

You are right this approach is scary, and it is astonishingly innacurate (im a tesla owner). However the reason are not eight cameras. You should be able to drive fine with just one camera (thought experiment: could you drive a car 1000 miles from you, just by seeing what the driver of that car would see, no extra cameras, sensors or lidars?).

mindfulplay 7y ago
I work closely on ondevice OCR technology - something that has improved so much and still cannot figure out the difference between I and 1. And that took many decades not even years and in a very constrained problem space. Releasing a "self driving" metal torpedo even if it's a limited Summons should at least be regulated if not outright banned. I feel like even a single accident let alone death should put these idiots behind bars.
- jayd16 7y ago
  It is regulated. Would you like it to be regulated in a specific, different way?
- rawoke083600 7y ago
  How do we currently regulate and put behind bars the human drivers that drives the metal torpedoes like idiots ? Specifically the ones that are not caught.
mdorazio 7y ago
One stereoscopic ultra-HDR 4K camera would be fine... if it was backed by a strong AI. To even suggest that ML is anywhere wen remotely close to this level is the height of hubris.
- freediver 7y ago
  Not even stereoscopic, you could still drive with one eye shut.

panarky 7y ago

> mind boggling to think people trust this crap It's also mind boggling to think we currently trust organic tissue to do this crap, some of which is bathed in psychoactive chemicals. And yet we do, and as a result, horrendous catastrophes occur every minute of every day. > It's all fancy neural networks until someone dies No, that can't be the standard, not when people are dying right now in the current regime. Unless the new regime kills and maims at a higher rate than the current regime, there is no reason for fear.

perl4ever 7y ago
"It's also mind boggling to think we currently trust organic tissue to do this crap, some of which is bathed in psychoactive chemicals." The appropriate standard for self-driving cars is a sober professional driver, not the average idiot on Saturday night. It isn't unusual for a driver to go a million miles without an accident, when that's their job.
- ajross 7y ago
  No, the appropriate standard for a self-driving car is the driver they replace. If they're safer than whoever would have been driving (be it on a saturday night or not) then they're a net win. Right now the average idiots are buying more Teslas than mail carriers and cab drivers, though that might change I guess. Numbers are numbers.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    A Tesla owner could ride in a cab or on a bus, though. On average, it seems like without a Tesla they would be at least minimally more likely to. You seem to be implying that cab drivers are the only people who ride in cabs.
  - ars 7y ago
    If you like numbers, then you'll like this one: Humans achieve 7 9's of reliability when driving a car, as measured for fatalities by time, or 8 9's if you measure by miles. I've yet to see a computer just stay up that long, never mind actually doing anything the whole time. (If you use the collision rate instead, the numbers are about 500 times worse - but that's still quite a lot of 9's.) People have this fixed thought that humans are terrible drives. They are not! Computers have their work cut out for them to exceed the reliability record humans have set.

k2xl 7y ago

Hmm how do you explain that data shows that there are likely less accidents and less road fatalities when autopilot is engaged?

lsh 7y ago
citation, please
- kjksf 7y ago
  https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport
  - simion314 7y ago
    The autopilot is a drive assist , I can explain that there are less accidents when drive assists is one because - the driver is still present and will most of the time intervene and save his life(there are some youtube videos where the Tesla AI was trying to kill the driver and those incidents don't appear as accidents int the stats) - "autopilot" is engaged mostly on highways , but the statistics are not accounting for this - they are also comparing the safety of a new car versus the median of all cars(old and new, cheap or expensive) on all demographics(how many teens own a Tesla?) I would like that Tesla make all the data open or have an independent group analyze it, including the disengagements, I wonder how isolated are the cases where the car is driving you into trucks or stone wall but the drivers intervened and saved themselves and also saved Tesla from a bad statistic.
  - FireBeyond 7y ago
    Which is entirely cherry picked and optimistic. Autopilot has the luxury of being able to / requiring disengagement in less-than-favorable driving conditions. Humans don't. A fair comparison would be comparing against the miles/conditions/roads driven.

yo-scot-99 7y ago

this tech is interesting but so poorly understood that it's just using the (public) roads as one large alpha test. given a NN there is no way to verify what safety ranges are there. for instance if each camera slightly changed exposure or occlusion are the results smoothly changing? all they can do is try it and hope the inputs are in a safe part of their optimization space.

natch 7y ago

It does require human supervision while driving. Tesla makes this very clear. It's also all over the Internet. But there will always be people who do not get this. Those people should not drive Teslas, or pretty much any modern car for that matter. If you are under the impression that you would be relying on this system to drive the car, then I agree you should not get a Tesla. Of course full self driving is coming at some point, but that's a conversation for another day. Meantime Tesla is making steps toward it very incrementally with things like the "stop mode" rolling out right now.

matz1 7y ago

How many actually dies? Do you have the statistic?

0-_-0 7y ago

Just replace "eight" with "two" and this could have been written about the human brain

oska 7y ago
And driving with only one is still legal.
- anticensor 7y ago
  Monocular or deaf driving is subject to many restrictions including being unable to drive a commercial vehicle.