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Stuff like this is completely expected of nonlinear, high dimensional controllers (and neural networks used for object detection and decision anlaysis fit into

Stuff like this is completely expected of nonlinear, high dimensional controllers (and neural networks used for object detection and decision anlaysis fit into this category)... NN's are not fit for high-predictability, high-safety-factor control. I wonder if, in fact, we cannot construct a NN controller with the level of unusual object detection and edge-case scenario recognition required to match an average human drivers capability to recognize and react appropriately to unusual situations. I mean to say that I think this is something like an NP-hard problem... to make it one-log better you need 100x the data and 100x the NN dimensionality. Model complexity explodes... I also think we are spending a lot of time and effort solving the wrong part of the transportation problem. Cars have a thermodynamic problem for society --> a 1500kg car to move 1-2 80kg people is very energy inefficient and resource intensive to manufacturer. We need remote work, more home delivery options (e-truck/vehicles), greater incentive for electric bikes, and better/more public transportation. my 0.02...

fctorial 6y ago
I think it was trained (or learned) to avoid the rear of vehicles, and slow down when it sees it. The rooftop doesn't look anything like the rear.
- gambiting 6y ago
  Surely a Tesla has a front radar to measure distance though, no? If it's rapidly approaching to an object that's not moving, who cares what it looks like?
  - oldgradstudent 6y ago
    Can it actually distinguish reliably between an overnight truck and a manhole cover, an overpass, and an overhead sign? These are far more common occurrences. Reportedly it can't. https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/ https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/
    - gambiting 6y ago
      No, but I mean all cars for some time now have to include anti-collision radar as standard, it doesn't use cameras to recognize anything, it just goes "you're approaching a stationary object without slowing down - SLAM BRAKES". I'm guessing what's happening here is that Tesla is aware that it's approaching a stationary object, but the camera system overrides it because it doesn't recognize it as a danger. So in a way, a much simpler system would have prevented this accident,.
      - oldgradstudent 6y ago
        You can do that, but what level of false positives are you willing to accept? How often are willing to have your car perform an emergency stop for an overhead sign? How safe is it to have your car brake aggressively in a middle of the highway for nothing?
        gambiting 6y ago
        I don't know why you keep mentioning the overhead signs? The anti-collision radars that are mandated in every new car are mounted on the bonnet level, they won't react to an overhead sign. And yeah, emergency braking in the middle of the highway is not safe at all, but seeing as literally all new cars have to have that system and we're not seeing people randomly braking in the middle of the motorway for no reason I can only guess it's fine. Besides, the system doesn't start braking if you're actively applying throttle, it will start beeping at you but it doesn't start braking until you lift your foot off the gas.
        oldgradstudent 6y ago
        Because overhead signs were mentioned as one of common sources of radar false positives during the reporting about the 2016 Tesla crash.
        oldgradstudent 6y ago
        > but seeing as literally all new cars have to have that system and we're not seeing people randomly braking in the middle of the motorway for no reason I can only guess it's fine. But we definitely do. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/automatic-emergency-braking-in-cars-will-be-standard-by-2022-but-false-activations-still-a-concern/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/automatic-emergency-braking-in-... The price we pay for having relatively few false positives is a high false negative rate. For example, a Tesla won't stop for an overturned truck or the pedestrian standing next to it.
  - ForHackernews 6y ago
    If you watch the video, it looks like it did slam on the brakes right before collision. Maybe that was the human driver intervening, or maybe it was last-minute emergency system kicking in.
raxxorrax 6y ago
While it is true about NN, we should not forget the same is true for human drivers.
a_imho 6y ago
We need remote work, more home delivery options (e-truck/vehicles), greater incentive for electric bikes, and better/more public transportation. 100% agreed. Unfortunately improving transportation and mobility is pretty much orthogonal to profiting off the ai/ml hype cycle.
pmarreck 6y ago
> I wonder if, in fact, we cannot construct a NN controller with the level of unusual object detection and edge-case scenario recognition required to match an average human drivers capability to recognize and react appropriately to unusual situations Well, I mean, according to some philosophers, our existence is proof that it can at least be done in the physical world...
ZhuanXia 6y ago
Bear case for self-driving: in 1 million miles of driving, roughly the number between major human accidents, do we really think these cars will not encounter one AI-complete problem.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  In order for there to be a major accident, there not only has to be a mistake, it has to be a mistake with a major consequence, and it has to be that nobody else there avoided it either. In general a car that doesn't see a pedestrian isn't a major accident unless the pedestrian also doesn't see the car. If not for that there would be a whole lot more fatalities with human drivers as well. A self-driving car obviously shouldn't do that, but neither should a human, and they do. Which makes it less hard for the computer to do it at least as well. You can also expect the computers to improve over time by learning from each others' mistakes, which human drivers generally don't.
  - jcranmer 6y ago
    While it is the case that it usually takes two people to cause an accident, there are plenty of scenarios where there is only one person who is capable of taking the action necessary to avoid it. For example, an elderly person in the crosswalk is not going to be capable of getting out of the way of a speeding car. It's already the case that pedestrian/car collisions are usually written off as the pedestrian's fault until proven otherwise--the Uber self-driving car that killed a pedestrian is a great example of that in action.
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      And the same is true of human drivers, is my point. You don't just need the mistake, you need all the other things to go wrong too. The pedestrian entered the crosswalk even though a car was coming, instead of waiting to make sure the car stops first (as pedestrians often do). The car failed to identify something. The thing it failed to identify was a pedestrian and not a mailbox or a trashcan. The pedestrian was elderly and couldn't jump out of the way fast enough etc. It all has to go wrong at once. Mistakes are common but most mistakes aren't fatal.
outworlder 6y ago
I agree with the idea that car-based transportation is inefficient. However, people will not get rid of it until they are forced to.
- zucker42 6y ago
  People don't have to be forced to get rid of cars, they just have to be incentivized to get rid of cars. That can be done by increasing the convenience of other options compared to cars or by decreasing the price of other options compared to cars.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    It would go a long way to even make it possible to get rid of cars. There are huge swathes of America which aren't within a mile of mass transit. And you can't fix that with more mass transit, because the density there isn't high enough to justify it -- a bus with one rider is worse than a car. What you need is to get rid of zoning density restrictions. That's the only way for more people to live close enough to things for walking and mass transit to be viable.
    - danans 6y ago
      > There are huge swathes of America which aren't within a mile of mass transit. > What you need is to get rid of zoning density restrictions. Most of those places were built for and are still dominated by the votes of people who don't want more density and transit options, for a variety of reasons, some reasonable, and others based in the nation's sordid racial history. I don't agree with those people, but until the settled, voting population inhabiting those vast swathes gets significantly younger and more pro-transit and density, I don't see what you call for happening soon.
      - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        This is one of the few instances where doing something at a more central (e.g. statewide) level of government could be productive.
zarkov99 6y ago
I don't think its the wrong problem. If we had perfect self-driving today it would still make sense to have all the things you mention, that is more remote work, etc, but you would also have safe long distance cargo hauling, safer road trips, cheaper home delivery, etc.
- monadic2 6y ago
  The technology is called “autopilot”. Blame the expectations of consumers for safe use on Tesla marketing.
  - rcMgD2BwE72F 6y ago
    All previous mentions of autopilot were for the exact same technology that Tesla uses: assist the pilot but require him/her to keep monitoring its action and intervene when necessary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopilot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopilot
    - monadic2 6y ago
      Ahh yes, people are definitely more familiar with aircraft functionality than they are with hollywood buttons that do magic, tesla definitely did not imply that the car could drive itself.
walleeee 6y ago
> greater incentive for electric bikes Greater incentive for any sort of bike or small/low-tech personal vehicle, imo
Retric 6y ago
Cars don’t really require all that much energy. A 15,000 mile per year car at 4 kWh per mile is 10.3 kWh per day. You can get that much solar power for the fraction of the price of the average new car. Roads, human lives, traffic congestion, etc are much larger issues than energy. Over 20% of NYC is devoted to cars and they don’t even come close to covering the cities transportation needs.
- perl4ever 6y ago
  But maybe 50 kWh a day is embodied in the manufacturing/depreciation of the car, I'd estimate.
  - omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
    76000kwh at 50kwh/day is about 1500 days, or 4+ years. https://blogs.nicholas.duke.edu/citizenscientist/embodied-energy/ https://blogs.nicholas.duke.edu/citizenscientist/embodied-en... The average car is a smidge under 12 years old, which is about 17kWh/day.
    - perl4ever 6y ago
      I was assuming 15 years, but I was also assuming too high an energy intensity; please see my other follow-up.
  - 1958325146 6y ago
    Where does your estimate of 50 kWh per day come from? According to [1], Tesla's 2017 manufacturing and delivery released 186000 metric tons of CO2, most of that "indirect" (as in at their suppliers). (146000 for "Facilities" and 39000 for Sales, Service, and Delivery.) According to [2], they delivered 101312 vehicles in the same period. That is 1.8 metric tons of CO2 per delivered car. Your rate of conversion between kWh and metric ton of CO2 may vary, but the US average is about .99 lbs/kWh [3] or 3640 kWh per car. If we assume a car lasts 10 years, that is about 1 kWh/day. Also these numbers are from back when the made almost entirely Model S and X, so it is probably with a 3-filled fleet. [1] https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/tesla-impact-report-2019.pdf https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/tesla-impact-report-2019.pdf , page 16 [2] https://ir.tesla.com/news-releases/news-release-details/tesla-q4-2017-vehicle-production-and-deliveries https://ir.tesla.com/news-releases/news-release-details/tesl... [3] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11
gameswithgo 6y ago
the human is the existence proof of a NN that can match a human.
viraptor 6y ago
> to make it one-log better you need 100x the data and 100x the NN dimensionality. I'm not sure why you think so. At some point the dimensions will get diminishing returns. Maybe you need only 100x the data at this point (or maybe not). But assuming it's both without knowing the current configuration / limits is just a random guess.
- s1artibartfast 6y ago
  Isnt the point that you have to get deep into the diminishing returns to root out extremely rate errors?
  - viraptor 6y ago
    Not always. Sometimes the fix may be just to add some teaching samples you haven't seen before and the NN is already capable of handling.
jariel 6y ago
So this is a great point - but - we're not bound by AI ... can we not start to narrow the issues with regular tech? For example, in this situation, something that more predictably tells the driver that there is 'literally something in the middle of the road', or at least possibly trigger an alarm? I wonder if someone can comment on the relevant advances on giving AI the proper human-designed boundaries that may help?
jvanderbot 6y ago
Cars should not detect "obstacles". They should detect roads. They should not seek _exceptions_ to driveable space through classification- or segmentation-first strategies. They should only detect driveable space. Full stop. You either detect a full-stopping-distance's worth of clear road through reliable (non visual) ranging with dense enough samples to preclude wheel-catching voids ... or you will continue to run into "objects" which slipped through your classifier. I can accept reduction in this margin (e.g. in dense traffic flow) when it is first shown to work with margin.
- jve 6y ago
  Still there are some exceptions. Kid has collapsed on a lane and lying down on the lane. In a way that line markings are NOT crossed and head is further than legs from Car's (and your) point of view. Car MUST stop. Or maybe that's just a fox that's lying down there - and depending on road, speed, etc - you take more risk dodging, breaking and car SHOULD just go. Just one example I immediately thought of.
  - strogonoff 6y ago
    Any anomaly makes the space non-driveable. It’s a road. An autopilot should not be entrusted to decide further, beyond anomaly detection sufficiently far ahead to allow for braking.
    - dathinab 6y ago
      But of road becomes non "drivable" at a point ahead where you can't stop in time you need to evaluate what to do (hit it, try evade, etc.) which are all hard decision. > An autopilot should not be entrusted to decide further, beyond anomaly detection sufficiently far ahead to allow for braking. This isn't possible. Not just technical but theoretical. Situations in streets can change way to fast. Both through external factors and other cars. Even on a straight highway with fences on the side to prevent anything from going on it this would still but work. Once it happens an intermediate decision is needed which can not be reached on time by delegation to the driver (as the driver want driving you can't except a good reaction speed even if that person had the eyes on the road).
gonzo41 6y ago
-- Cars have a thermodynamic problem for society --> a 1500kg car to move 1-2 80kg people is very energy inefficient and resource intensive to manufacturer. I think there's a good gap in the market to be made by E-Bikes, but it needs regulatory help (Bike lans with barricades) to make people feel safe enough to commute. My reasonably old and frail father has an E-Bike and he zips around town on it. The hill assist is great (Though i did enjoy the slightest bit of schadenfreude when he's battery died before the return uphill to his house on day) But he lives in a town with a lot of bike paths, so he's not really on the road. I think if you can break open that market you could make driving safer and make biking safer. It's just right now driving is a wealthy gabmit. Rich people drive tesla's and value signal with them it's not a new issue but getting people onto bicycles would be great for everyone on the road.
- throwaway1777 6y ago
  Yeah except this crash was on the highway. No one is taking ebikes on the highway. It’s arguably the most controlled environment there is for cars outside of a test track.
  - jablan 6y ago
    Regular use of (e)bikes within a city can make people sell their cars, and use other means of transport for occasional longer rides. Since I replaced my car with a bike, I also spend much less time in a car on the highways.
  - gonzo41 6y ago
    But once autopilot works on the highway you don't think they aren't going to try and corner the market with inner city driver assist.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
akira2501 6y ago
> a 1500kg car to move 1-2 80kg people is very energy inefficient and resource intensive to manufacturer. Cars used to weigh /less/. The weight is the price of all of our drastically improved safety systems. Either way, you're stuck with a lot of that infrastructure if you want to move food and other goods between cities. All of that is the price of flexibility in our logistics. The great wonder of our time is that we can do all of that _and_ start the long process of deprecating using fossil fuels. Now, if we can build the cars to last much longer than we currently do, we're really starting to win. > and better/more public transportation. I feel like there's a hidden trade off here as well. I think the "better" and "more available" you make public transportation, the less dense your ridership gets on certain lines, and the less likely you are to truly gain any efficiency across the system.
- jablan 6y ago
  > less likely you are to truly gain any efficiency across the system Urban sprawl is part of the problem and should be addressed at the same time.
jsharf 6y ago
I think that your definition of "NP-Hard" is incorrect. It would be better to instead say "Exponentially bound in required training data size" I say this because having a solid model of these terms is required when making "intuitive conjecture" about what is and isn't feasibly possible. Driving is NP-Hard? It would hint that humans have brains capable of computation more powerful than a turing machine. Which... suffice it to say we probably don't. I'm not aware of any proven algorithms that humans can compute which computers cannot. In images free of distortion and noise, computers were outperforming humans in image recognition 2 years ago! [0]. Since then, with advances in GANs (which specifically addresses the noise/distortion issue), I suspect we are close to achieving super-human image recognition. The last missing piece is "context" or prior knowledge. If you only see a whisp of hair sticking out from behind an object, you have prior knowledge that hair grows on humans, and that there's probably a person there. This last piece is being addressed by multi-modal networks [1]. If you have any doubt of the power of computer vision, my last hope is to link you to this paper from 2017, look at the "regions-hierarchical" results: https://cs.stanford.edu/people/ranjaykrishna/im2p/index.html https://cs.stanford.edu/people/ranjaykrishna/im2p/index.html [0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.06969.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.06969.pdf [1] https://www.themtank.org/multi-modal-methods https://www.themtank.org/multi-modal-methods
- mark-r 6y ago
  The mistake is believing this is a training data problem. You may have never seen an overturned truck before, but if you spot one on the road in front of you you'll easily figure out you need to stop. You don't even need to know exactly what it is, you just need to know A) you are going to do damage to it or vice versa if you hit it, and B) it's not getting out of your way.
pbreit 6y ago
Any indication yet that auto-pilot was active?

fctorial 6y ago

I think it was trained (or learned) to avoid the rear of vehicles, and slow down when it sees it. The rooftop doesn't look anything like the rear.

gambiting 6y ago
Surely a Tesla has a front radar to measure distance though, no? If it's rapidly approaching to an object that's not moving, who cares what it looks like?
- oldgradstudent 6y ago
  Can it actually distinguish reliably between an overnight truck and a manhole cover, an overpass, and an overhead sign? These are far more common occurrences. Reportedly it can't. https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/ https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/
  - gambiting 6y ago
    No, but I mean all cars for some time now have to include anti-collision radar as standard, it doesn't use cameras to recognize anything, it just goes "you're approaching a stationary object without slowing down - SLAM BRAKES". I'm guessing what's happening here is that Tesla is aware that it's approaching a stationary object, but the camera system overrides it because it doesn't recognize it as a danger. So in a way, a much simpler system would have prevented this accident,.
    - oldgradstudent 6y ago
      You can do that, but what level of false positives are you willing to accept? How often are willing to have your car perform an emergency stop for an overhead sign? How safe is it to have your car brake aggressively in a middle of the highway for nothing?
      - gambiting 6y ago
        I don't know why you keep mentioning the overhead signs? The anti-collision radars that are mandated in every new car are mounted on the bonnet level, they won't react to an overhead sign. And yeah, emergency braking in the middle of the highway is not safe at all, but seeing as literally all new cars have to have that system and we're not seeing people randomly braking in the middle of the motorway for no reason I can only guess it's fine. Besides, the system doesn't start braking if you're actively applying throttle, it will start beeping at you but it doesn't start braking until you lift your foot off the gas.
        oldgradstudent 6y ago
        Because overhead signs were mentioned as one of common sources of radar false positives during the reporting about the 2016 Tesla crash.
        oldgradstudent 6y ago
        > but seeing as literally all new cars have to have that system and we're not seeing people randomly braking in the middle of the motorway for no reason I can only guess it's fine. But we definitely do. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/automatic-emergency-braking-in-cars-will-be-standard-by-2022-but-false-activations-still-a-concern/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/automatic-emergency-braking-in-... The price we pay for having relatively few false positives is a high false negative rate. For example, a Tesla won't stop for an overturned truck or the pedestrian standing next to it.
- ForHackernews 6y ago
  If you watch the video, it looks like it did slam on the brakes right before collision. Maybe that was the human driver intervening, or maybe it was last-minute emergency system kicking in.

raxxorrax 6y ago

While it is true about NN, we should not forget the same is true for human drivers.

a_imho 6y ago

We need remote work, more home delivery options (e-truck/vehicles), greater incentive for electric bikes, and better/more public transportation. 100% agreed. Unfortunately improving transportation and mobility is pretty much orthogonal to profiting off the ai/ml hype cycle.

pmarreck 6y ago

> I wonder if, in fact, we cannot construct a NN controller with the level of unusual object detection and edge-case scenario recognition required to match an average human drivers capability to recognize and react appropriately to unusual situations Well, I mean, according to some philosophers, our existence is proof that it can at least be done in the physical world...

ZhuanXia 6y ago

Bear case for self-driving: in 1 million miles of driving, roughly the number between major human accidents, do we really think these cars will not encounter one AI-complete problem.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
In order for there to be a major accident, there not only has to be a mistake, it has to be a mistake with a major consequence, and it has to be that nobody else there avoided it either. In general a car that doesn't see a pedestrian isn't a major accident unless the pedestrian also doesn't see the car. If not for that there would be a whole lot more fatalities with human drivers as well. A self-driving car obviously shouldn't do that, but neither should a human, and they do. Which makes it less hard for the computer to do it at least as well. You can also expect the computers to improve over time by learning from each others' mistakes, which human drivers generally don't.
- jcranmer 6y ago
  While it is the case that it usually takes two people to cause an accident, there are plenty of scenarios where there is only one person who is capable of taking the action necessary to avoid it. For example, an elderly person in the crosswalk is not going to be capable of getting out of the way of a speeding car. It's already the case that pedestrian/car collisions are usually written off as the pedestrian's fault until proven otherwise--the Uber self-driving car that killed a pedestrian is a great example of that in action.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    And the same is true of human drivers, is my point. You don't just need the mistake, you need all the other things to go wrong too. The pedestrian entered the crosswalk even though a car was coming, instead of waiting to make sure the car stops first (as pedestrians often do). The car failed to identify something. The thing it failed to identify was a pedestrian and not a mailbox or a trashcan. The pedestrian was elderly and couldn't jump out of the way fast enough etc. It all has to go wrong at once. Mistakes are common but most mistakes aren't fatal.

outworlder 6y ago

I agree with the idea that car-based transportation is inefficient. However, people will not get rid of it until they are forced to.

zucker42 6y ago
People don't have to be forced to get rid of cars, they just have to be incentivized to get rid of cars. That can be done by increasing the convenience of other options compared to cars or by decreasing the price of other options compared to cars.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  It would go a long way to even make it possible to get rid of cars. There are huge swathes of America which aren't within a mile of mass transit. And you can't fix that with more mass transit, because the density there isn't high enough to justify it -- a bus with one rider is worse than a car. What you need is to get rid of zoning density restrictions. That's the only way for more people to live close enough to things for walking and mass transit to be viable.
  - danans 6y ago
    > There are huge swathes of America which aren't within a mile of mass transit. > What you need is to get rid of zoning density restrictions. Most of those places were built for and are still dominated by the votes of people who don't want more density and transit options, for a variety of reasons, some reasonable, and others based in the nation's sordid racial history. I don't agree with those people, but until the settled, voting population inhabiting those vast swathes gets significantly younger and more pro-transit and density, I don't see what you call for happening soon.
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      This is one of the few instances where doing something at a more central (e.g. statewide) level of government could be productive.

zarkov99 6y ago

I don't think its the wrong problem. If we had perfect self-driving today it would still make sense to have all the things you mention, that is more remote work, etc, but you would also have safe long distance cargo hauling, safer road trips, cheaper home delivery, etc.

monadic2 6y ago
The technology is called “autopilot”. Blame the expectations of consumers for safe use on Tesla marketing.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 6y ago
  All previous mentions of autopilot were for the exact same technology that Tesla uses: assist the pilot but require him/her to keep monitoring its action and intervene when necessary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopilot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopilot
  - monadic2 6y ago
    Ahh yes, people are definitely more familiar with aircraft functionality than they are with hollywood buttons that do magic, tesla definitely did not imply that the car could drive itself.

walleeee 6y ago

> greater incentive for electric bikes Greater incentive for any sort of bike or small/low-tech personal vehicle, imo

Retric 6y ago

Cars don’t really require all that much energy. A 15,000 mile per year car at 4 kWh per mile is 10.3 kWh per day. You can get that much solar power for the fraction of the price of the average new car. Roads, human lives, traffic congestion, etc are much larger issues than energy. Over 20% of NYC is devoted to cars and they don’t even come close to covering the cities transportation needs.

perl4ever 6y ago
But maybe 50 kWh a day is embodied in the manufacturing/depreciation of the car, I'd estimate.
- omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
  76000kwh at 50kwh/day is about 1500 days, or 4+ years. https://blogs.nicholas.duke.edu/citizenscientist/embodied-energy/ https://blogs.nicholas.duke.edu/citizenscientist/embodied-en... The average car is a smidge under 12 years old, which is about 17kWh/day.
  - perl4ever 6y ago
    I was assuming 15 years, but I was also assuming too high an energy intensity; please see my other follow-up.
- 1958325146 6y ago
  Where does your estimate of 50 kWh per day come from? According to [1], Tesla's 2017 manufacturing and delivery released 186000 metric tons of CO2, most of that "indirect" (as in at their suppliers). (146000 for "Facilities" and 39000 for Sales, Service, and Delivery.) According to [2], they delivered 101312 vehicles in the same period. That is 1.8 metric tons of CO2 per delivered car. Your rate of conversion between kWh and metric ton of CO2 may vary, but the US average is about .99 lbs/kWh [3] or 3640 kWh per car. If we assume a car lasts 10 years, that is about 1 kWh/day. Also these numbers are from back when the made almost entirely Model S and X, so it is probably with a 3-filled fleet. [1] https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/tesla-impact-report-2019.pdf https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/tesla-impact-report-2019.pdf , page 16 [2] https://ir.tesla.com/news-releases/news-release-details/tesla-q4-2017-vehicle-production-and-deliveries https://ir.tesla.com/news-releases/news-release-details/tesl... [3] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11

gameswithgo 6y ago

the human is the existence proof of a NN that can match a human.

viraptor 6y ago

> to make it one-log better you need 100x the data and 100x the NN dimensionality. I'm not sure why you think so. At some point the dimensions will get diminishing returns. Maybe you need only 100x the data at this point (or maybe not). But assuming it's both without knowing the current configuration / limits is just a random guess.

s1artibartfast 6y ago
Isnt the point that you have to get deep into the diminishing returns to root out extremely rate errors?
- viraptor 6y ago
  Not always. Sometimes the fix may be just to add some teaching samples you haven't seen before and the NN is already capable of handling.

jariel 6y ago

So this is a great point - but - we're not bound by AI ... can we not start to narrow the issues with regular tech? For example, in this situation, something that more predictably tells the driver that there is 'literally something in the middle of the road', or at least possibly trigger an alarm? I wonder if someone can comment on the relevant advances on giving AI the proper human-designed boundaries that may help?

jvanderbot 6y ago

Cars should not detect "obstacles". They should detect roads. They should not seek _exceptions_ to driveable space through classification- or segmentation-first strategies. They should only detect driveable space. Full stop. You either detect a full-stopping-distance's worth of clear road through reliable (non visual) ranging with dense enough samples to preclude wheel-catching voids ... or you will continue to run into "objects" which slipped through your classifier. I can accept reduction in this margin (e.g. in dense traffic flow) when it is first shown to work with margin.

jve 6y ago
Still there are some exceptions. Kid has collapsed on a lane and lying down on the lane. In a way that line markings are NOT crossed and head is further than legs from Car's (and your) point of view. Car MUST stop. Or maybe that's just a fox that's lying down there - and depending on road, speed, etc - you take more risk dodging, breaking and car SHOULD just go. Just one example I immediately thought of.
- strogonoff 6y ago
  Any anomaly makes the space non-driveable. It’s a road. An autopilot should not be entrusted to decide further, beyond anomaly detection sufficiently far ahead to allow for braking.
  - dathinab 6y ago
    But of road becomes non "drivable" at a point ahead where you can't stop in time you need to evaluate what to do (hit it, try evade, etc.) which are all hard decision. > An autopilot should not be entrusted to decide further, beyond anomaly detection sufficiently far ahead to allow for braking. This isn't possible. Not just technical but theoretical. Situations in streets can change way to fast. Both through external factors and other cars. Even on a straight highway with fences on the side to prevent anything from going on it this would still but work. Once it happens an intermediate decision is needed which can not be reached on time by delegation to the driver (as the driver want driving you can't except a good reaction speed even if that person had the eyes on the road).

gonzo41 6y ago

-- Cars have a thermodynamic problem for society --> a 1500kg car to move 1-2 80kg people is very energy inefficient and resource intensive to manufacturer. I think there's a good gap in the market to be made by E-Bikes, but it needs regulatory help (Bike lans with barricades) to make people feel safe enough to commute. My reasonably old and frail father has an E-Bike and he zips around town on it. The hill assist is great (Though i did enjoy the slightest bit of schadenfreude when he's battery died before the return uphill to his house on day) But he lives in a town with a lot of bike paths, so he's not really on the road. I think if you can break open that market you could make driving safer and make biking safer. It's just right now driving is a wealthy gabmit. Rich people drive tesla's and value signal with them it's not a new issue but getting people onto bicycles would be great for everyone on the road.

throwaway1777 6y ago
Yeah except this crash was on the highway. No one is taking ebikes on the highway. It’s arguably the most controlled environment there is for cars outside of a test track.
- jablan 6y ago
  Regular use of (e)bikes within a city can make people sell their cars, and use other means of transport for occasional longer rides. Since I replaced my car with a bike, I also spend much less time in a car on the highways.
- gonzo41 6y ago
  But once autopilot works on the highway you don't think they aren't going to try and corner the market with inner city driver assist.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

akira2501 6y ago

> a 1500kg car to move 1-2 80kg people is very energy inefficient and resource intensive to manufacturer. Cars used to weigh /less/. The weight is the price of all of our drastically improved safety systems. Either way, you're stuck with a lot of that infrastructure if you want to move food and other goods between cities. All of that is the price of flexibility in our logistics. The great wonder of our time is that we can do all of that _and_ start the long process of deprecating using fossil fuels. Now, if we can build the cars to last much longer than we currently do, we're really starting to win. > and better/more public transportation. I feel like there's a hidden trade off here as well. I think the "better" and "more available" you make public transportation, the less dense your ridership gets on certain lines, and the less likely you are to truly gain any efficiency across the system.

jablan 6y ago
> less likely you are to truly gain any efficiency across the system Urban sprawl is part of the problem and should be addressed at the same time.

jsharf 6y ago

I think that your definition of "NP-Hard" is incorrect. It would be better to instead say "Exponentially bound in required training data size" I say this because having a solid model of these terms is required when making "intuitive conjecture" about what is and isn't feasibly possible. Driving is NP-Hard? It would hint that humans have brains capable of computation more powerful than a turing machine. Which... suffice it to say we probably don't. I'm not aware of any proven algorithms that humans can compute which computers cannot. In images free of distortion and noise, computers were outperforming humans in image recognition 2 years ago! [0]. Since then, with advances in GANs (which specifically addresses the noise/distortion issue), I suspect we are close to achieving super-human image recognition. The last missing piece is "context" or prior knowledge. If you only see a whisp of hair sticking out from behind an object, you have prior knowledge that hair grows on humans, and that there's probably a person there. This last piece is being addressed by multi-modal networks [1]. If you have any doubt of the power of computer vision, my last hope is to link you to this paper from 2017, look at the "regions-hierarchical" results: https://cs.stanford.edu/people/ranjaykrishna/im2p/index.html https://cs.stanford.edu/people/ranjaykrishna/im2p/index.html [0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.06969.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.06969.pdf [1] https://www.themtank.org/multi-modal-methods https://www.themtank.org/multi-modal-methods

mark-r 6y ago
The mistake is believing this is a training data problem. You may have never seen an overturned truck before, but if you spot one on the road in front of you you'll easily figure out you need to stop. You don't even need to know exactly what it is, you just need to know A) you are going to do damage to it or vice versa if you hit it, and B) it's not getting out of your way.

pbreit 6y ago

Any indication yet that auto-pilot was active?