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Quoth Musk: " So the cars in the fleet essentially becoming self-driving via software update, I think, might end up being the biggest increase in asset value o

by titzer 5y ago

Quoth Musk: " So the cars in the fleet essentially becoming self-driving via software update, I think, might end up being the biggest increase in asset value of any asset class in history" This sentence is packed so tightly with irony that I can't believe it was uttered by a self-aware human. Yes, it's a great idea that two ton vehicles capable of 100mph just "update" themselves to be fully self-driving. Because what could go wrong? Forget about terminators, just the strategic risk in the event of a cyberwar. Astonishing lack of awareness. And he complains that AI is "summoning the demon"? And yes, they are just "an asset class" whose value needs to be increased because STONKS. I can't even.

3pt14159 5y ago
You're being downvoted, but you're not wrong about the strategic risk. I worked on that for a while and at least got people to take it seriously. When I started there weren't even regulations coming for self-driving cars. At the end of the day, we use nukes to deter against strategic risks and if undeterrable adversaries have strategic capabilities then we're doing it wrong.
paulpauper 5y ago
I don't think critics realize how much testing has gone into this technology
- notfromhere 5y ago
  It’s not good enough to market as self driving. It’s a fancy cruise control with lane assist. The whole thing is a stock pump that went too far
  - misiti3780 5y ago
    If you're in the beta program or have access to youtube, you would know that is not what it is at all.
    - devmor 5y ago
      Yes, if you have access to YouTube you'd know it's not even a functional lane assist.
    - lm28469 5y ago
      Videos like these ? https://www.reddit.com/r/IdiotsInCars/comments/rgiu8m/the_future_is_now/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IdiotsInCars/comments/rgiu8m/the_fu...
      - misiti3780 5y ago
        Wow, you cherry-picked 10 seconds of video from 1000s of hours of content! Amazing work! That video was 4 minor versions ago also.
        lm28469 5y ago
        The thing is when you want to go global with a "10s in 1000 hours" problems is that it'll happen every single day to thousands of people. It's all fun and games when you're a website or a mobile app, not so much when you're a 500+hp two tonnes metal cage using public infrastructure as a beta test sandbox
        FireBeyond 5y ago
        Was that the minor version that introduced phantom braking? Or the minor version tossed over the fence a few days later that "fixed" phantom braking? Or the minor version after that re-introduced a different phantom braking issue? Or the minor version after that...
    - jjulius 5y ago
      Care to elaborate, for those of us who are perhaps more ignorant on the subject?
      - misiti3780 5y ago
        Sure, the OP said that Tesla FSD is "fancy cruise control with lane assist". If you have FSD Beta 10.10 installed in your car (which 60K+ people have in the US), you can input a destination and it will take you there. That includes stop/go at green lights, changing lanes, going around parked cars, making un-protective left turns etc. It's not perfect, but it's beta, and the iterative improvements have been very noticeable over the past few months.
- ekanes 5y ago
  That could be true, but given that few systems cannot be compromised by a determined attacker with resources, it seems worth thinking through what happens if a fleet of these is controlled remotely by people with bad intent.
- petee 5y ago
  I think proponents underestimate how much testing is needed to make such a system actually safe. edit: FSD is clearly still alpha; ive seen it steer towards on coming traffic, and almost cut off large vehicles but for human intervention.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    I think online commentators don't understand how low the general public's bar for "safe" is. People will be elated if they can buy a car that can chauffeur them around as well as a teenager who's had their learner's permit for two days. At least with the car you're already in the driver's seat and don't need to articulate to it what it's doing wrong. Sure you'll have to keep an eye on it to make sure it's not setting itself up for a situation it can't handle but you have to keep an eye on the teenager too. Crappy half-baked automation is prevalent the world over in all sorts of situations. The normal, unwashed, much derided masses are perfectly capable of learning its quirks so they can keep it out of trouble. The idea that a car "can't see" bollards or bike lane marking or partial lane obstructions or whatever is not a hard one for people to grasp.
    - thaway2839 5y ago
    - oauea 5y ago
      and who's going to be responsible when that car drives full speed into a mother and her 3 kids?
      - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
        Why don't you plug that situation into my analogy and see what happens? The existing legal framework is already set up to handle this. Considering how strongly HN advocates for strict liability for car drivers I find your reply baffling. Why wouldn't the driver be liable?
        5y ago
- devmor 5y ago
  I don't think defenders realize how much more testing is needed for this technology.
- WJW 5y ago
  I think the critics see the amount of bugs in code that has been tested much more than self-driving cars and have very reasonable doubts about giving over something as important as driving. Even without (say) foreign actors trying to hack the cars or jamming the sensors, they seem to keep driving into stationary objects all on their own.
- titzer 5y ago
  Pieces of software like OS kernels and browsers run code quadrillions upon quadrillions of times per day and yet still suffer hundreds, if not thousands of critical security vulnerabilities. Testing only demonstrates the presence of bugs, not the absence. There's a whole field of high-assurance software, with verification, formally-proven compilers with translation validation. Only there is there hope that one can write software and prove it, with a machine-checked proof, correct. Tesla is not that far. Not even close. But no matter, let's just deploy it anyway.
- foobiekr 5y ago
  Critics mostly have made the correct observation that the investment, time and effort required for each increment of improvement seems to place the problem in the “theoretically possibly but probably practically unreachable” domain. Tesla can’t even implement auto breaking on a straightaway that doesn’t kill model pedestrians in controlled testing. Only the truly credulous think they can get to FSD in any realistic timeframe let alone Musk’s fantasies.
- lm28469 5y ago
  I don't think fanboys realise what Elon is, what's his strategy, what self driving requires, the state of the current tech, &c. So far it's ridiculously underwhelming, even I didn't think it was going to flop that bad and I was very skeptical to begin with. Tesla users are experiencing some sort of Stockholm's syndrome, it's scary
  - idop 5y ago
    Billionaire worship. I really don't get it.
  - fkarg 5y ago
    I wonder. Even with the (loud) minority of extreme fanboys, I'd argue that most fans probably know more about Tesla's strategy and the current tech than most others.
    - FireBeyond 5y ago
      Another, then. These fans are often the ones parroting the entirely incorrect "You have to have incidents and near misses in order to train it to do the right thing next time". I've heard that way too often.
- porbelm 5y ago
  I don't think Musk zealots realize how stupid it was to demand it work with only camera sight, banning LIDAR, so the AI has piss data without depth perception to work with Tesla's FSD will never come to fruition as a stand-alone system.
  - shmoe 5y ago
    No one "banned" LIDAR.. I think whatever comes to be will rely on more than just vision at some point in years to come. Regardless of what Elon says.
    - HWR_14 5y ago
      I agree it will need to go beyond cameras if it ever works. But the question becomes, will Tesla be on the hook to upgrade the sensors in cars that are camera only, or will they instead deploy unworkable software to those cars?
  - fkarg 5y ago
    Funny thing is, they removed Radar because it provided less accurate data on depth than their vision system. I doubt that there's much gain in including an additional source of depth information. Sure, it might be more precise than what is possible with vision alone, but it's also not needed.
    - ohgodplsno 5y ago
      Source: Musk said so and provided no proof. It is the absolute standard in any safety-critical industry to have multiple sensors all feeding data and making up for each other's weaknesses. Cars are not excluded from that.
    - porbelm 5y ago
      I refuse to believe that Tesla's image-based AI can discern better distance and depth information than LIDAR (even if they're using cameras with calibrated positioning for stereoscopic vision or something) without better sources than "Elon said so." And I am talking about LIDAR not RADAR, even though RADAR also could be used as yet another sensor in the stack. Using only regular vision is a typical dumb Musk thing; LIDAR was quite a bit more expensive when these self-driving things begun to take hold and Musk didn't want that cost so he went all-in with his own dumb solution of "software will fix it."
- donkeyd 5y ago
  Not that much, honestly. They've already switched tech stack multiple times. They recently removed radar from new cars, the 'camera only' stack hasn't been tested that much. They also have mostly tested on and built for California roads and weather. My Tesla once tried to steer me into a guard rail (multiple times) because the setting sun caused a lens flare. You can't tell me that this is well tested technology that will enable level 3. Only after doing that twice, autopilot noticed it and disables autosteer. The cameras also have condensation and freezing issues, causing them to not work on cold, wet days. This was a car that was, according to Elon, fully equipped for self driving. I really enjoyed autosteer, but there's major flaws in the current implementation and I seriously doubt they'll deliver on current hardware. If they don't, I'm really curious about the outcome of the lawsuits.
  - urthor 5y ago
    The nature of the business is that artificial intelligence of all flavors is extremely poor at being 100% correct. 90%, maybe one day, but not now. The concept that automobiles will travel without human assistance to override IO mistakes from sensors is ridiculous.
- justapassenger 5y ago
  Compared to not hotdog app? Yeah, a lot. Compared to actual safety critical automation systems, designed to operate with humans? It hasn’t even started. Edit, as I pressed enter by mistake. What’s happening now isn’t testing, as a system as whole isn’t ready for that. It starts with proper design and long validation, before you can start talking about proper testing. Tesla is rewriting all parts of it constantly. What’s happening right now is mostly PR exercise, plus collection of low quality training data.
gitfan86 5y ago
Airplanes were very dangerous at first, but here we are today.
- dimitrios1 5y ago
  This is a very ironic statement to be making given the subject and the recent affairs with Boeings software updates.
  - gitfan86 5y ago
    If cars had the same death rate per mile as airplanes, tens of thousands of lives would be saved every year in the US alone.
    - skeeter2020 5y ago
      Pithey comment that is true based on current usage patterns, but a total lie when everyone starts flying to work or the grocery store... and they're the pilot.
      - gitfan86 5y ago
        Agreed, the human pilot is the problem. The sooner we can remove them from the situation, the more lives will be saved
        k12sosse 5y ago
        Don't worry, that will be enabled at a later date. Mid-Atlantic.
        Cthulhu_ 5y ago
        If drivers got the same training and stuck to the same rules as airline pilots, we'd have a lot less accidents. Most accidents [citation needed] are still caused by reckless driving; inattentiveness (exacerbated by driving assistance), speeding, drunk driving, aggressive driving, etc. Moving to automatic driving will probably be a thing long term, but for the short term, it's a human problem. If only people were held more accountable for driving badly.
throwjs51009 5y ago
What's so unbelievable about it? It's on brand https://video.hardlimit.com/videos/watch/ede3d957-2a1f-4ec4-900a-78b1082c641c https://video.hardlimit.com/videos/watch/ede3d957-2a1f-4ec4-...
dm319 5y ago
“My personal guess is that we’ll achieve Full Self-Driving this year at a safety level significantly greater than a person." The preceding bit, just as bad IMO.
webdoodle 5y ago
I'm expecting a Ghost in the Shell type attack on Tesla's update software that gives all the Tesla's self driving, and they auto-drive themselves to the next protest, ala Freedom Convoy without the truckers. Then brick them, once they reach the protest, so they can't be driven home (only towed).

by titzer 5y ago

3pt14159 5y ago

You're being downvoted, but you're not wrong about the strategic risk. I worked on that for a while and at least got people to take it seriously. When I started there weren't even regulations coming for self-driving cars. At the end of the day, we use nukes to deter against strategic risks and if undeterrable adversaries have strategic capabilities then we're doing it wrong.

paulpauper 5y ago

I don't think critics realize how much testing has gone into this technology

notfromhere 5y ago
It’s not good enough to market as self driving. It’s a fancy cruise control with lane assist. The whole thing is a stock pump that went too far
- misiti3780 5y ago
  If you're in the beta program or have access to youtube, you would know that is not what it is at all.
  - devmor 5y ago
    Yes, if you have access to YouTube you'd know it's not even a functional lane assist.
  - lm28469 5y ago
    Videos like these ? https://www.reddit.com/r/IdiotsInCars/comments/rgiu8m/the_future_is_now/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IdiotsInCars/comments/rgiu8m/the_fu...
    - misiti3780 5y ago
      Wow, you cherry-picked 10 seconds of video from 1000s of hours of content! Amazing work! That video was 4 minor versions ago also.
      - lm28469 5y ago
        The thing is when you want to go global with a "10s in 1000 hours" problems is that it'll happen every single day to thousands of people. It's all fun and games when you're a website or a mobile app, not so much when you're a 500+hp two tonnes metal cage using public infrastructure as a beta test sandbox
      - FireBeyond 5y ago
        Was that the minor version that introduced phantom braking? Or the minor version tossed over the fence a few days later that "fixed" phantom braking? Or the minor version after that re-introduced a different phantom braking issue? Or the minor version after that...
  - jjulius 5y ago
    Care to elaborate, for those of us who are perhaps more ignorant on the subject?
    - misiti3780 5y ago
      Sure, the OP said that Tesla FSD is "fancy cruise control with lane assist". If you have FSD Beta 10.10 installed in your car (which 60K+ people have in the US), you can input a destination and it will take you there. That includes stop/go at green lights, changing lanes, going around parked cars, making un-protective left turns etc. It's not perfect, but it's beta, and the iterative improvements have been very noticeable over the past few months.
ekanes 5y ago
That could be true, but given that few systems cannot be compromised by a determined attacker with resources, it seems worth thinking through what happens if a fleet of these is controlled remotely by people with bad intent.
petee 5y ago
I think proponents underestimate how much testing is needed to make such a system actually safe. edit: FSD is clearly still alpha; ive seen it steer towards on coming traffic, and almost cut off large vehicles but for human intervention.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  I think online commentators don't understand how low the general public's bar for "safe" is. People will be elated if they can buy a car that can chauffeur them around as well as a teenager who's had their learner's permit for two days. At least with the car you're already in the driver's seat and don't need to articulate to it what it's doing wrong. Sure you'll have to keep an eye on it to make sure it's not setting itself up for a situation it can't handle but you have to keep an eye on the teenager too. Crappy half-baked automation is prevalent the world over in all sorts of situations. The normal, unwashed, much derided masses are perfectly capable of learning its quirks so they can keep it out of trouble. The idea that a car "can't see" bollards or bike lane marking or partial lane obstructions or whatever is not a hard one for people to grasp.
  - thaway2839 5y ago
  - oauea 5y ago
    and who's going to be responsible when that car drives full speed into a mother and her 3 kids?
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      Why don't you plug that situation into my analogy and see what happens? The existing legal framework is already set up to handle this. Considering how strongly HN advocates for strict liability for car drivers I find your reply baffling. Why wouldn't the driver be liable?
      - 5y ago
devmor 5y ago
I don't think defenders realize how much more testing is needed for this technology.
WJW 5y ago
I think the critics see the amount of bugs in code that has been tested much more than self-driving cars and have very reasonable doubts about giving over something as important as driving. Even without (say) foreign actors trying to hack the cars or jamming the sensors, they seem to keep driving into stationary objects all on their own.
titzer 5y ago
Pieces of software like OS kernels and browsers run code quadrillions upon quadrillions of times per day and yet still suffer hundreds, if not thousands of critical security vulnerabilities. Testing only demonstrates the presence of bugs, not the absence. There's a whole field of high-assurance software, with verification, formally-proven compilers with translation validation. Only there is there hope that one can write software and prove it, with a machine-checked proof, correct. Tesla is not that far. Not even close. But no matter, let's just deploy it anyway.
foobiekr 5y ago
Critics mostly have made the correct observation that the investment, time and effort required for each increment of improvement seems to place the problem in the “theoretically possibly but probably practically unreachable” domain. Tesla can’t even implement auto breaking on a straightaway that doesn’t kill model pedestrians in controlled testing. Only the truly credulous think they can get to FSD in any realistic timeframe let alone Musk’s fantasies.
lm28469 5y ago
I don't think fanboys realise what Elon is, what's his strategy, what self driving requires, the state of the current tech, &c. So far it's ridiculously underwhelming, even I didn't think it was going to flop that bad and I was very skeptical to begin with. Tesla users are experiencing some sort of Stockholm's syndrome, it's scary
- idop 5y ago
  Billionaire worship. I really don't get it.
- fkarg 5y ago
  I wonder. Even with the (loud) minority of extreme fanboys, I'd argue that most fans probably know more about Tesla's strategy and the current tech than most others.
  - FireBeyond 5y ago
    Another, then. These fans are often the ones parroting the entirely incorrect "You have to have incidents and near misses in order to train it to do the right thing next time". I've heard that way too often.
porbelm 5y ago
I don't think Musk zealots realize how stupid it was to demand it work with only camera sight, banning LIDAR, so the AI has piss data without depth perception to work with Tesla's FSD will never come to fruition as a stand-alone system.
- shmoe 5y ago
  No one "banned" LIDAR.. I think whatever comes to be will rely on more than just vision at some point in years to come. Regardless of what Elon says.
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    I agree it will need to go beyond cameras if it ever works. But the question becomes, will Tesla be on the hook to upgrade the sensors in cars that are camera only, or will they instead deploy unworkable software to those cars?
- fkarg 5y ago
  Funny thing is, they removed Radar because it provided less accurate data on depth than their vision system. I doubt that there's much gain in including an additional source of depth information. Sure, it might be more precise than what is possible with vision alone, but it's also not needed.
  - ohgodplsno 5y ago
    Source: Musk said so and provided no proof. It is the absolute standard in any safety-critical industry to have multiple sensors all feeding data and making up for each other's weaknesses. Cars are not excluded from that.
  - porbelm 5y ago
    I refuse to believe that Tesla's image-based AI can discern better distance and depth information than LIDAR (even if they're using cameras with calibrated positioning for stereoscopic vision or something) without better sources than "Elon said so." And I am talking about LIDAR not RADAR, even though RADAR also could be used as yet another sensor in the stack. Using only regular vision is a typical dumb Musk thing; LIDAR was quite a bit more expensive when these self-driving things begun to take hold and Musk didn't want that cost so he went all-in with his own dumb solution of "software will fix it."
donkeyd 5y ago
Not that much, honestly. They've already switched tech stack multiple times. They recently removed radar from new cars, the 'camera only' stack hasn't been tested that much. They also have mostly tested on and built for California roads and weather. My Tesla once tried to steer me into a guard rail (multiple times) because the setting sun caused a lens flare. You can't tell me that this is well tested technology that will enable level 3. Only after doing that twice, autopilot noticed it and disables autosteer. The cameras also have condensation and freezing issues, causing them to not work on cold, wet days. This was a car that was, according to Elon, fully equipped for self driving. I really enjoyed autosteer, but there's major flaws in the current implementation and I seriously doubt they'll deliver on current hardware. If they don't, I'm really curious about the outcome of the lawsuits.
- urthor 5y ago
  The nature of the business is that artificial intelligence of all flavors is extremely poor at being 100% correct. 90%, maybe one day, but not now. The concept that automobiles will travel without human assistance to override IO mistakes from sensors is ridiculous.
justapassenger 5y ago
Compared to not hotdog app? Yeah, a lot. Compared to actual safety critical automation systems, designed to operate with humans? It hasn’t even started. Edit, as I pressed enter by mistake. What’s happening now isn’t testing, as a system as whole isn’t ready for that. It starts with proper design and long validation, before you can start talking about proper testing. Tesla is rewriting all parts of it constantly. What’s happening right now is mostly PR exercise, plus collection of low quality training data.

gitfan86 5y ago

Airplanes were very dangerous at first, but here we are today.

dimitrios1 5y ago
This is a very ironic statement to be making given the subject and the recent affairs with Boeings software updates.
- gitfan86 5y ago
  If cars had the same death rate per mile as airplanes, tens of thousands of lives would be saved every year in the US alone.
  - skeeter2020 5y ago
    Pithey comment that is true based on current usage patterns, but a total lie when everyone starts flying to work or the grocery store... and they're the pilot.
    - gitfan86 5y ago
      Agreed, the human pilot is the problem. The sooner we can remove them from the situation, the more lives will be saved
      - k12sosse 5y ago
        Don't worry, that will be enabled at a later date. Mid-Atlantic.
      - Cthulhu_ 5y ago
        If drivers got the same training and stuck to the same rules as airline pilots, we'd have a lot less accidents. Most accidents [citation needed] are still caused by reckless driving; inattentiveness (exacerbated by driving assistance), speeding, drunk driving, aggressive driving, etc. Moving to automatic driving will probably be a thing long term, but for the short term, it's a human problem. If only people were held more accountable for driving badly.

throwjs51009 5y ago

What's so unbelievable about it? It's on brand https://video.hardlimit.com/videos/watch/ede3d957-2a1f-4ec4-900a-78b1082c641c https://video.hardlimit.com/videos/watch/ede3d957-2a1f-4ec4-...

dm319 5y ago

“My personal guess is that we’ll achieve Full Self-Driving this year at a safety level significantly greater than a person." The preceding bit, just as bad IMO.

webdoodle 5y ago

I'm expecting a Ghost in the Shell type attack on Tesla's update software that gives all the Tesla's self driving, and they auto-drive themselves to the next protest, ala Freedom Convoy without the truckers. Then brick them, once they reach the protest, so they can't be driven home (only towed).