5 ms·

I wonder what Elon is going to do when _his_ "full self driving" fails to materialize. Which it will. Not only you can't do this with just cameras and radar, I

by m0zg 7y ago

I wonder what Elon is going to do when _his_ "full self driving" fails to materialize. Which it will. Not only you can't do this with just cameras and radar, I doubt you can do it _period_ without modifying the roads specifically for such cars, and segregating them from human drivers. And even then it will be difficult psychologically and legally to convince the public that this is "better" than a (possibly inebriated) human, for reasons that have been discussed to death already.

MegaButts 7y ago
Tesla makes their money selling cars, and Autopilot sales are non-refundable. They get paid even if they don't deliver, so I'm not sure how much they care other than keeping the hype alive.
- m0zg 7y ago
  That's all well and good until they get sued by people who paid $7.5K each for FSD and never got it.
  - marcinzm 7y ago
    Then worst case they'll get a class action lawsuit, appeal the verdict three times and then end up giving everyone $100 worth of credits towards a future Tesla. Lawyers will net a couple hundred million.
    - csours 7y ago
      I hesitate to comment, as I work for a competitor, but I imagine that the reputational harm may be even worse than the monetary.
      - marcinzm 7y ago
        I would have thought so before but we've had multiple people killed in auto-pilot related accidents already and people still buy. Tesla will spin the news and results and probably get a settlement statement that makes them look not so bad. Especially if everyone is in the same boat and failing to get the technology working well enough. Then Tesla will simply boast at how much better they are than competitors.
        m0zg 7y ago
        30K people get killed in car accidents in the US, and "people still buy". Heart disease kills half a million a year and people still eat twinkies. What else is new? That's called "freedom". The issue is that if I paid a ton of money for something, I do generally expect to get what I paid for. And in this case that's not gonna happen. [*] Hypothetically, I'm not presently a Tesla customer.
        llsf 7y ago
        I have a friend, commuting 6hrs every day (3hrs + 3hrs back) in a Tesla model S, using autopilot (3 days a week). He has been doing it for almost a year now. So far, so good... given the number of miles driven, it is actually pretty good.
        jnwatson 7y ago
        No it isn't. As the article implies, the number of miles driven, or even the amount of time driven, isn't a good estimate of AI quality. The best standard is the number of unusual events that the autopilot could handle without human intervention. I've had 30 hours of driving in a Tesla, and I had to intervene 6 times, twice with no warning. That doesn't mean that Autopilot isn't a useful tool, but it does require operator diligence.
        llsf 7y ago
        When I said that it is pretty good, I base it solely on the fact that my friend is still alive, even while driving 6hrs per commute mostly on autopilot. I will have to ask him how often he has to intervene (mostly highway). But I do know that he has been watching a lot of Netflix during his commute... so your mileage might vary.
        ngcc_hk 7y ago
        It is like Ethernet vs token ring. Not as safe and especially no guarantee. Some packet or life lost. Ethernet win for simplicity and ease of expansion/installation and surprisingly for management. Not completely safe. No driving is.
- stefan8r 7y ago
  Exactly. Tesla is an EV company that uses Autopilot to get better margins (and marketing)
aphextron 7y ago
>Not only you can't do this with just cameras and radar Humans do it really well with just two cameras. It's not a hardware problem; it is entirely software. Whether self driving is possible or not with current AI techniques is debatable, but we're not waiting on any advances in hardware to do it.
- Animats 7y ago
  As the article points out, machine learning has its limits. It can do some things reasonably well, but it does max out. It's easy to get to 90% accuracy, hard to get to 98%, and 99.9% is out of reach.
- qchris 7y ago
  > Humans do it really well with just two cameras. If you don't mind, I think I'm going to steal that quote. It makes a really good point very succinctly.
  - MegaButts 7y ago
    It's true, but it ignores the fact that human eyes have orders of magnitude more dynamic range than even very expensive specialized cameras, and it obviously ignores the fact that we haven't invented general AI yet. It's a pithy response that undermines the challenge of a problem nobody has been able to solve even with years of effort and billions of dollars.
    - qchris 7y ago
      I agree that human eyes do have benefits over your typical camera, but I don't think the phrase ignores that GAI hasn't been created yet; rather, it concisely points that out and makes it clear how difficult it is to do. As the OP said, "it's not a hardware problem," in that the quality or number of cameras, sensors, etc. isn't the bottleneck to solving this problem.
    - aphextron 7y ago
      >It's true, but it ignores the fact that human eyes have orders of magnitude more dynamic range than even very expensive specialized cameras, and it obviously ignores the fact that we haven't invented general AI yet. That level of resolution doesn't matter at all for driving. People can drive just as well through a video feed, like Starsky was doing. Yes general AI does not exist yet, but my point is simply that the parent made a comment about the need for hardware which is simply not true.
mft_ 7y ago
> It’s widely understood that the hardest part of building AI is how it deals with situations that happen uncommonly, i.e. edge cases. In fact, the better your model, the harder it is to find robust data sets of novel edge cases. I have no idea whether Tesla will or won’t succeed. But they do have one major advantage over just about every other AV company out there, which addresses the point above. That is, their huge network of camera-equipped cars (a million and counting) provides probably the deepest, richest AV learning dataset on the planet, and probably by orders of magnitude. If accessing the dataset and thus novel edge cases is one of the major challenges in AV development, Tesla is very well placed.
Robotbeat 7y ago
> I wonder what Elon is going to do when _his_ "full self driving" fails to materialize. ... > ...modifying the roads specifically for such cars, and segregating them from human drivers. You were #this close# to answering your own question! Answer: https://boringcompany.com https://boringcompany.com
- dbt00 7y ago
  If you're going to spend trillions of dollars to dig point to point tunnels for autonomous vehicles, why not only spend hundreds of billions to build subways instead that can carry 100x the number of passengers?
  - Robotbeat 7y ago
    Because, if built like subways are in the US today ($900 million per mile), that would only give you a few hundred miles of subway. So a few city centers might have better public transit, but the vast, vast majority of the US would not. (Which isn't to say we can't do both if tunneling can be done much cheaper. It's pretty silly to think we, a mostly suburban nation unfortunately, only need high density subways and nothing else. Particularly during a global pandemic with social distancing.) Additionally, with highway-like vehicle spacing and high capacity stretched Model Xes (as the Boring Company proposed), the throughput is the same order of magnitude as a typical subway line. With denser spacing, potentially even higher. Anyway, the question is about what Elon's backup plan was. This is it, regardless of whether it works or not. (And there's plenty of reason to think it won't, to be fair!)
JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
I wish he would just give up on it and make cheaper cars without any autonomous abilities at all. The world needs cheap electric cars, I don’t want any AV in my car. How much cost does all the AV tilting at windmills add to a Tesla?

by m0zg 7y ago

MegaButts 7y ago

Tesla makes their money selling cars, and Autopilot sales are non-refundable. They get paid even if they don't deliver, so I'm not sure how much they care other than keeping the hype alive.

m0zg 7y ago
That's all well and good until they get sued by people who paid $7.5K each for FSD and never got it.
- marcinzm 7y ago
  Then worst case they'll get a class action lawsuit, appeal the verdict three times and then end up giving everyone $100 worth of credits towards a future Tesla. Lawyers will net a couple hundred million.
  - csours 7y ago
    I hesitate to comment, as I work for a competitor, but I imagine that the reputational harm may be even worse than the monetary.
    - marcinzm 7y ago
      I would have thought so before but we've had multiple people killed in auto-pilot related accidents already and people still buy. Tesla will spin the news and results and probably get a settlement statement that makes them look not so bad. Especially if everyone is in the same boat and failing to get the technology working well enough. Then Tesla will simply boast at how much better they are than competitors.
      - m0zg 7y ago
        30K people get killed in car accidents in the US, and "people still buy". Heart disease kills half a million a year and people still eat twinkies. What else is new? That's called "freedom". The issue is that if I paid a ton of money for something, I do generally expect to get what I paid for. And in this case that's not gonna happen. [*] Hypothetically, I'm not presently a Tesla customer.
      - llsf 7y ago
        I have a friend, commuting 6hrs every day (3hrs + 3hrs back) in a Tesla model S, using autopilot (3 days a week). He has been doing it for almost a year now. So far, so good... given the number of miles driven, it is actually pretty good.
        jnwatson 7y ago
        No it isn't. As the article implies, the number of miles driven, or even the amount of time driven, isn't a good estimate of AI quality. The best standard is the number of unusual events that the autopilot could handle without human intervention. I've had 30 hours of driving in a Tesla, and I had to intervene 6 times, twice with no warning. That doesn't mean that Autopilot isn't a useful tool, but it does require operator diligence.
        llsf 7y ago
        When I said that it is pretty good, I base it solely on the fact that my friend is still alive, even while driving 6hrs per commute mostly on autopilot. I will have to ask him how often he has to intervene (mostly highway). But I do know that he has been watching a lot of Netflix during his commute... so your mileage might vary.
        ngcc_hk 7y ago
        It is like Ethernet vs token ring. Not as safe and especially no guarantee. Some packet or life lost. Ethernet win for simplicity and ease of expansion/installation and surprisingly for management. Not completely safe. No driving is.
stefan8r 7y ago
Exactly. Tesla is an EV company that uses Autopilot to get better margins (and marketing)

aphextron 7y ago

>Not only you can't do this with just cameras and radar Humans do it really well with just two cameras. It's not a hardware problem; it is entirely software. Whether self driving is possible or not with current AI techniques is debatable, but we're not waiting on any advances in hardware to do it.

Animats 7y ago
As the article points out, machine learning has its limits. It can do some things reasonably well, but it does max out. It's easy to get to 90% accuracy, hard to get to 98%, and 99.9% is out of reach.
qchris 7y ago
> Humans do it really well with just two cameras. If you don't mind, I think I'm going to steal that quote. It makes a really good point very succinctly.
- MegaButts 7y ago
  It's true, but it ignores the fact that human eyes have orders of magnitude more dynamic range than even very expensive specialized cameras, and it obviously ignores the fact that we haven't invented general AI yet. It's a pithy response that undermines the challenge of a problem nobody has been able to solve even with years of effort and billions of dollars.
  - qchris 7y ago
    I agree that human eyes do have benefits over your typical camera, but I don't think the phrase ignores that GAI hasn't been created yet; rather, it concisely points that out and makes it clear how difficult it is to do. As the OP said, "it's not a hardware problem," in that the quality or number of cameras, sensors, etc. isn't the bottleneck to solving this problem.
  - aphextron 7y ago
    >It's true, but it ignores the fact that human eyes have orders of magnitude more dynamic range than even very expensive specialized cameras, and it obviously ignores the fact that we haven't invented general AI yet. That level of resolution doesn't matter at all for driving. People can drive just as well through a video feed, like Starsky was doing. Yes general AI does not exist yet, but my point is simply that the parent made a comment about the need for hardware which is simply not true.

mft_ 7y ago

> It’s widely understood that the hardest part of building AI is how it deals with situations that happen uncommonly, i.e. edge cases. In fact, the better your model, the harder it is to find robust data sets of novel edge cases. I have no idea whether Tesla will or won’t succeed. But they do have one major advantage over just about every other AV company out there, which addresses the point above. That is, their huge network of camera-equipped cars (a million and counting) provides probably the deepest, richest AV learning dataset on the planet, and probably by orders of magnitude. If accessing the dataset and thus novel edge cases is one of the major challenges in AV development, Tesla is very well placed.

Robotbeat 7y ago

> I wonder what Elon is going to do when _his_ "full self driving" fails to materialize. ... > ...modifying the roads specifically for such cars, and segregating them from human drivers. You were #this close# to answering your own question! Answer: https://boringcompany.com https://boringcompany.com

dbt00 7y ago
If you're going to spend trillions of dollars to dig point to point tunnels for autonomous vehicles, why not only spend hundreds of billions to build subways instead that can carry 100x the number of passengers?
- Robotbeat 7y ago
  Because, if built like subways are in the US today ($900 million per mile), that would only give you a few hundred miles of subway. So a few city centers might have better public transit, but the vast, vast majority of the US would not. (Which isn't to say we can't do both if tunneling can be done much cheaper. It's pretty silly to think we, a mostly suburban nation unfortunately, only need high density subways and nothing else. Particularly during a global pandemic with social distancing.) Additionally, with highway-like vehicle spacing and high capacity stretched Model Xes (as the Boring Company proposed), the throughput is the same order of magnitude as a typical subway line. With denser spacing, potentially even higher. Anyway, the question is about what Elon's backup plan was. This is it, regardless of whether it works or not. (And there's plenty of reason to think it won't, to be fair!)

JohnJamesRambo 7y ago

I wish he would just give up on it and make cheaper cars without any autonomous abilities at all. The world needs cheap electric cars, I don’t want any AV in my car. How much cost does all the AV tilting at windmills add to a Tesla?