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> ... using its customers as QA when they sell products that can kill people They aren't just using their own customers, they are using all of us. The cars wo

> ... using its customers as QA when they sell products that can kill people They aren't just using their own customers, they are using all of us. The cars won't be just crashing into inanimate objects, but school buses and ambulances. The QA is being done to all of us and our loved ones near their cars.

jojo2333 6y ago
Still magnitudes safer than human drivers.
- nutanc 6y ago
  Lets do a simple test: You are in between two walls and there are two straight lanes. Lane 1 has Tesla FSD coming in at full speed. Lane 2 has a human driver coming in at full speed. You can choose to be in one lane. The FSD and the human can both see you only 50 mts out and if they brake as soon as they see you, you will survive. Which lane will you choose?
  - tshaddox 6y ago
    Well, a Model S can just barely stop in 50 meters at 60mph, while some other luxury and sporty cars in the segment can stop in 35 meters or less. And that’s only 60mph, hardly “top speed” or even a normal highway speed. So regardless of driver assistance features, I’d choose a car that at least has a chance to even physically stop assuming instant reflexes. 50 meters is probably a much too small distance for this thought experiment.
    - argomo 6y ago
      I don't know my cars that well, but an alert driver will take at least 300ms to begin reacting. That's over 8m at 60mph (not sure why we're combining unit systems here). So I'll stand in front of the Model S in this particular scenario and hope to get away with 'mere' broken legs/pelvis. Give the human more time and is probably take the human, not because that's necessarily the more reliable option, but because its distribution of outcomes is more well known to me.
      - sudosysgen 6y ago
        Most, if not essentially all, cars in that category have emergency automatic braking, so the Model S still isn't the best choice.
- alkonaut 6y ago
  Drunk drivers and human mistakes are two things I accept in traffic (or rather - laws and human behavior both show we don’t accept them). It’s factored into my risk. And FSD isn’t orders of magnitude safer. They are barely as good as human drivers and only in some conditions. For the worst situations they aren’t comparable at all (since they won’t drive at all) This must be repeated over and over for some reason: people will never accept self driving cars that are just as good or bad as human drivers. Nor should we. It’s a much too low bar. Self driving cars will need to be orders of magnitude safer than human drivers to be even remotely acceptable.
  - pixelbash 6y ago
    If it's consistently as good as an average human that's still better than an average human. That's because robots don't get tired, hungover, angry, bored, drunk, or get an eyelash in their eye at a really bad time.
    - alkonaut 6y ago
      Yes. But again people won’t accept that. People will rather be killed more often by drivers that feel guilt, go to prison, have strokes or poor eyesight than less often by a machine that does not have all of those flaws but also none of the feelings and responsibilities.
      - mokus 6y ago
        I’d be thrilled if self-driving cars could meet that bar, because then I can feel at least as comfortable napping in the car as I do driving it. And unlike humans, I have the expectation that my car learns when other cars crash, so I have a lot of reason to expect that once the system rolls out it will continue to improve. I hate almost everything about Tesla and their business model but the idea of full automatic driving, once vetted to even a bare minimum level of approximate human parity, is enough to make me consider one anyway.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
- rainyMammoth 6y ago
  It absolutely isn't.
optimiz3 6y ago
Tesla runs their new releases for millions of miles on the wide fleet in shadow mode before they release to limited beta. This is not an untested release in the way the article makes it seem.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
  That's not as useful as it might sound. If a particular action the driver didn't take would lead to results that didn't happen, then shadow mode will have a lot of trouble knowing that. In general it's a problem called "off policy evaluation" and it's really hard. Tesla has to estimate what would have happened counterfactually, had the bot been driving, instead of seeing what happens with the bot driving. A million miles of this shadow mode evaluation isn't worth nearly as many miles of actual self driving.
  - optimiz3 6y ago
    > If a particular action the driver didn't take would lead to results that didn't happen I'm having a hard time parsing your double-negative, but when shadow mode is running, it's choices are back-tested in real-time with the driver's choices, so I'm not sure how this fails to replicate what a real-driver would have done in such scenarios.
    - egsmi 6y ago
      Here an example. I’m on the freeway in my Tesla and instead of staying behind a car, at a safe following distance as predicted, I change lanes and speed past. Was it because, 1) the car was doing something I perceived as dangerous and I moved to a safer position, 2) I’m in a freaking Tesla and I can
    - matthewdgreen 6y ago
      Tesla's shadow mode is collecting real data up until the point where the car's decisionmaking process and the human driver disagree. Everything after that is simulated fantasy. And since human drivers aren't necessarily going to do "the right thing" in all circumstances (there isn't necessarily a single 'right thing') you can't treat 'car-disagrees-with-human' as an error case.

jojo2333 6y ago

Still magnitudes safer than human drivers.

nutanc 6y ago
Lets do a simple test: You are in between two walls and there are two straight lanes. Lane 1 has Tesla FSD coming in at full speed. Lane 2 has a human driver coming in at full speed. You can choose to be in one lane. The FSD and the human can both see you only 50 mts out and if they brake as soon as they see you, you will survive. Which lane will you choose?
- tshaddox 6y ago
  Well, a Model S can just barely stop in 50 meters at 60mph, while some other luxury and sporty cars in the segment can stop in 35 meters or less. And that’s only 60mph, hardly “top speed” or even a normal highway speed. So regardless of driver assistance features, I’d choose a car that at least has a chance to even physically stop assuming instant reflexes. 50 meters is probably a much too small distance for this thought experiment.
  - argomo 6y ago
    I don't know my cars that well, but an alert driver will take at least 300ms to begin reacting. That's over 8m at 60mph (not sure why we're combining unit systems here). So I'll stand in front of the Model S in this particular scenario and hope to get away with 'mere' broken legs/pelvis. Give the human more time and is probably take the human, not because that's necessarily the more reliable option, but because its distribution of outcomes is more well known to me.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      Most, if not essentially all, cars in that category have emergency automatic braking, so the Model S still isn't the best choice.
alkonaut 6y ago
Drunk drivers and human mistakes are two things I accept in traffic (or rather - laws and human behavior both show we don’t accept them). It’s factored into my risk. And FSD isn’t orders of magnitude safer. They are barely as good as human drivers and only in some conditions. For the worst situations they aren’t comparable at all (since they won’t drive at all) This must be repeated over and over for some reason: people will never accept self driving cars that are just as good or bad as human drivers. Nor should we. It’s a much too low bar. Self driving cars will need to be orders of magnitude safer than human drivers to be even remotely acceptable.
- pixelbash 6y ago
  If it's consistently as good as an average human that's still better than an average human. That's because robots don't get tired, hungover, angry, bored, drunk, or get an eyelash in their eye at a really bad time.
  - alkonaut 6y ago
    Yes. But again people won’t accept that. People will rather be killed more often by drivers that feel guilt, go to prison, have strokes or poor eyesight than less often by a machine that does not have all of those flaws but also none of the feelings and responsibilities.
    - mokus 6y ago
      I’d be thrilled if self-driving cars could meet that bar, because then I can feel at least as comfortable napping in the car as I do driving it. And unlike humans, I have the expectation that my car learns when other cars crash, so I have a lot of reason to expect that once the system rolls out it will continue to improve. I hate almost everything about Tesla and their business model but the idea of full automatic driving, once vetted to even a bare minimum level of approximate human parity, is enough to make me consider one anyway.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
rainyMammoth 6y ago
It absolutely isn't.

optimiz3 6y ago

Tesla runs their new releases for millions of miles on the wide fleet in shadow mode before they release to limited beta. This is not an untested release in the way the article makes it seem.

6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
That's not as useful as it might sound. If a particular action the driver didn't take would lead to results that didn't happen, then shadow mode will have a lot of trouble knowing that. In general it's a problem called "off policy evaluation" and it's really hard. Tesla has to estimate what would have happened counterfactually, had the bot been driving, instead of seeing what happens with the bot driving. A million miles of this shadow mode evaluation isn't worth nearly as many miles of actual self driving.
- optimiz3 6y ago
  > If a particular action the driver didn't take would lead to results that didn't happen I'm having a hard time parsing your double-negative, but when shadow mode is running, it's choices are back-tested in real-time with the driver's choices, so I'm not sure how this fails to replicate what a real-driver would have done in such scenarios.
  - egsmi 6y ago
    Here an example. I’m on the freeway in my Tesla and instead of staying behind a car, at a safe following distance as predicted, I change lanes and speed past. Was it because, 1) the car was doing something I perceived as dangerous and I moved to a safer position, 2) I’m in a freaking Tesla and I can
  - matthewdgreen 6y ago
    Tesla's shadow mode is collecting real data up until the point where the car's decisionmaking process and the human driver disagree. Everything after that is simulated fantasy. And since human drivers aren't necessarily going to do "the right thing" in all circumstances (there isn't necessarily a single 'right thing') you can't treat 'car-disagrees-with-human' as an error case.