5 ms·

It's quite literally a public beta, just that the other traffic participants didn't get a say in the opt-in. Given the stakes for them I agree that it begs the

by sho_hn 5y ago

It's quite literally a public beta, just that the other traffic participants didn't get a say in the opt-in. Given the stakes for them I agree that it begs the question. In the end it's a regulation problem, not a Tesla problem (even though yes, the specific decision to exercise their options is theirs) - do you allow unlicensed drivers to perform this on-road testing of unfinshed vehicles or not? It's not quite a deliberate information hiding campaign as with MCAS (as far as we know). But it is pre-production testing of experimental engineering on safety-critical equipment. Experiments not guaranteed to pan out, and engineering lacking a mature certification process.

Barrin92 5y ago
the fact that there is such a thing as a 'public beta' for moving two tons of steel through pedestrian areas at lethal speeds seriously makes me question our collective sanity. Imagine if gun vendors did public betas where random police officers just get a beta testing gun. "It might fire in random directions at arbitrary intervals 5% of the time, but that's just how innovation goes folks. You don't like that, do you hate progress?"
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  >Imagine if gun vendors did public betas where random police officers just get a beta testing gun. This is a thing. They give marketing samples to organizations they want to sell to on a "try 'em out and let us know if you want to buy more" basis.
  - b112 5y ago
    Marketing samples are not public betas. They are marketing samples of tested product.
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      If your complaint is that a very conservative manufacturing industry doesn't have 1:1 analogues with software development then I guess it's valid. Giving organizations stuff you haven't 100% nailed down yet expecting them to come back with stuff they want changed in order to buy is pretty par for the course in the firearms industry. That's as close to a public beta as you're gonna get.
      - everforward 5y ago
        The big difference is that marketing firearms are still safe, or as safe as firearms tend to get. It's a fully functional firearm; they want feedback on whether the ergonomics are good, whether the weight is good, how it handles recoil, etc. It would be more akin to handing out prototype weapons to police departments, which doesn't happen specifically because they might fire themselves or blow up or fail in some annoying but not spectacular way like failing to feed new rounds.
        throwaway0a5e 5y ago
        The key mechanical features always "work" but little stuff like "gun fails to cycle 500% more often with the particular spec of ammo a particular force uses". A rifle spec'd out for sale to Cambodia probably is going to have a lot of teething issues if you try and sell it to the Swedes unchanged. Are these things "safe"? IDK. But no force is going to put in an order for tens of thousands of guns unless correctable issues like those are proven fixed. Infantry arms are a battle of margins. Everything "works" but a marginally more finicky gun to use is going to mean the people using it are marginally less effective which extrapolates pretty directly to "safety". At the end of the day the analogy isn't great and we're building a castle in a swamp here.
- dkjaudyeqooe 5y ago
  That reminds me of the ED-209 prototype in Robocop: "You have 20 seconds to comply!"
  - pmoriarty 5y ago
    Here's the "20 seconds to comply" scene from Robocop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hzlt7IbTp6M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hzlt7IbTp6M
- renewiltord 5y ago
  This is a fair point. It's pretty bad that we have learner drivers on the road. Can't think of anything more public beta-y than that. Maybe trainee doctors?
  - gvb 5y ago
    I've had three "learner drivers" in my family and I spent quite a few hours as the "safety person" during their apprenticeship. During all those hours I never touched the wheel, brake, or gas. I gave advice occasionally, but never felt that the "learner driver" was driving unsafely. I assure you that 15 year old young adults drive much better than a Tesla "self driving" computer with millions of miles and millions of hours of training.
    - renewiltord 5y ago
      Oh I’m sure you were convinced but you never asked me if I consented to you randomly putting underaged kids behind the wheel of a two ton vehicle on a road which I share with you. You’re a regular Yaroslav Kudrinsky, just with better luck. But I suppose one can go around swinging swords in a crowd, hit no one, and convince oneself of one’s good judgment.
  - rhizome 5y ago
    Category error: people have brains.
    - HarryHirsch 5y ago
      That's the important one - a Tesla has no concept of the real world. Remember that clip where a Tesla was slowing down because it mistook the full moon in the sky for a traffic light? Likewise, no one would aim at a cyclist, except when they are a homicidal criminal.
      - noizejoy 5y ago
        … or under the influence of some substance, or a health event, or voluntary or involuntary distraction, or …
- FireBeyond 5y ago
  Someone said in another thread earlier today that there is a worry that we are making the path towards FSD too erratic, and that if we screw it up, the next shot might be in generations. People are arguing, with a straight face, that we are ruining (aspects of) humanity by not letting Tesla be laisez-faire with such things (and lets be real, it's predominantly Tesla who is just in full Cowboy/YOLO mode... other players in this field certainly aren't perfect, but they are at least trying to be conservative and cautious).
  - jimmydorry 5y ago
    It's still a regulatory failure in the end. If the government does not want to lay down exactly what path should be taken in getting to FSD, then we should not complain when we don't agree with the path that the manufacturers choose. As long as Tesla can demonstrate a similar or better rate of serious harm than human drivers, why should we stop them? It's up to government to do their job and outline exactly what price society should bear in the pursuit of this paradigm shift (because let's not kid ourselves, FSD is a complete shift in paradigm for society).
    - FireBeyond 5y ago
      > As long as Tesla can demonstrate a similar or better rate of serious harm than human drivers, why should we stop them? Because it can't, or won't. Instead they release statistics that _imply_ that it is better, that they have to know are absolutely misleading, because anyone who did high school statistics would be aware thereof. Everything else, they refuse to release.
      - jimmydorry 5y ago
        I'm not aware of _anyone_ releasing such data in a way. Not that I have been looking that closely for it (so I certainly could have missed this!). This is another major regulatory failure. Government should lay out the minimum data that the companies must publish, so we can get a better idea of their performance. (It's still a chicken and egg scenario though. You can't get that kind of data anywhere but on public roads in uncontrolled environments.)
Retric 5y ago
I was expecting autopilot to be seriously dangerous, but the data doesn’t back that up. Out of 234 deaths from accidents involving Tesla’s 12 people have died while Tesla autopilot was known to be in use or had recently been in use. http://www.tesladeaths.com http://www.tesladeaths.com Autopilot might be slightly worse than human drivers depending on how you slice the data but that’s about it. I don’t think it’s a regulation problem as much as it is an acceptance by regulators that driving is inherently dangerous and autopilot isn’t dramatically worse. It’s not even obvious if on net more people would have died if Tesla had never released autopilot.
- andbberger 5y ago
  the data is extremely questionable
  - Retric 5y ago
    In what way?
    - andbberger 5y ago
      Sampling bias, confirmation bias. Did you delete your link to tesladeaths.com because you realized the fine print about sketchy autopilot data contradicted your point? Oops!
      - Retric 5y ago
        No, I was trying to keep the link without a http:// http://, https://www.tesladeaths.com/ https://www.tesladeaths.com/ or https://www.tesladeaths.com/ https://www.tesladeaths.com/ works www.tesladeaths.com doesn’t nore does www.tesladeaths.com/ I am sure I have seen comment links without the http:// http:// but might have just gotten so used to it than I stopped seeing it.
        andbberger 5y ago
        uh huh. why do you think it's reasonable to conclude that this system is safe given that the reported data is based on faulty analysis [0] and inexplicably exempt from reporting requirements for testing self-driving cars? [0] https://jalopnik.com/feds-tesla-autosteer-safety-investigation-was-bullshit-1832542003 https://jalopnik.com/feds-tesla-autosteer-safety-investigati...
paulcole 5y ago
> In the end it's a regulation problem, not a Tesla problem Are you joking? If you’re the one causing the problem, you’re the problem. No regulation can prevent me from kicking someone in the shins. This isn’t a regulation problem, it’s a me problem.
- nrb 5y ago
  The <Insert State Here> Code certainly applies penalties for assault and battery, and you can rest assured knowing shin-kicking would happen regularly without it. The car problem presented here is quite a bit more shades of gray and we absolutely need to set acceptable parameters for the technology.
  - paulcole 5y ago
    Yes, but my point is that if you’re being a jerk, then you’re the problem, not the person who is not saying, “please don’t be a jerk.” You don’t need a regulation telling you not to be a jerk — unless of course you are a jerk. And even then, you’d probably still be a jerk, regulation or not.
- XorNot 5y ago
  Except it is: literally none of this is illegal. And it's not clear how it could be illegal: what's the distinction between cruise control and lane keeping and these systems? Very little - nothing you can codify. It's also very likely that this system can pass a standard driving test: AIs are really good at handling fixed test cases. So any regulation you do pass has a complicated assurance problem: how does it prove the system is safe? Pretend Tesla just knocked "beta" off the name and said "this is a limited self driving system, Tesla exclusive" - then you wind up in the same bucket with the same "it's the drivers responsibility problem". People see this footage and assume Tesla self drive does this all the time - but it wouldn't. It probably passes this scenario in testing 100% of the time: but the issue of course is the test is not quite whatever this circumstance is, and the system has a dramatic failure. There is absolutely a regulation problem.
  - 5y ago
salawat 5y ago
...I am aware of zero other manufacturers brazen enough in terms of blatant disregard for Engineering Ethics to have embarked on this type of testing before Silicon Valley did. In fact, there were licensure processes for this sort of thing already in place in California iirc, so this is less gray area, more "lets outsource testing to the end user". Frankly, it's downright disturbing.
cwkoss 5y ago
What does MCAS mean here?
- ofcrpls 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuvering_Characteristics_Augmentation_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuvering_Characteristics_Au...
- sho_hn 5y ago
  It's a software system overriding pilot input on Boeing 737 MAX airplanes, designed to make up for cost reductions in adequate hardware design. Pilots were deliberately not well-informed and the system caused two crashes. It was brought up elsewhere in the discussion. In general cars are headed into an aviation-like situation with automation, so case comparisons are becoming more frequent. It's very apples to oranges here, but loosely relevant wrt/ information/documentation and in the cameras-vs-LIDAR/sensor fusion debate.
  - rhizome 5y ago
    I'm sure the policy and regulatory systems will be able to fend off the lobbyists of the richest person in the world working to get the word "liability" redefined in the law. \s
wavefunction 5y ago
lol @ public beta
oogabooga13 5y ago
I've wondered if it would be a good idea to have some sort of external indicator on cars that indicates to others that are driving, cycling, on foot that the vehicle is in autonomous mode. At least then maybe one can understand the potential risk driving around them. (Noted that an indicator doesn't really help if the vehicle is behind you in a lot of instances!)
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  One thing I've noticed the past couple of years is that it isn't that hard to determine whether or not a car is autonomously driving. If they're driving like they're drunk and they're in a Tesla, 9 out of 10 times, you'll see that that the driver isn't paying attention to the road at all because they're using Autopilot or FSD. I just treat the Tesla drivers around me on the road as if they're drunk and keep my distance.
  - sho_hn 5y ago
    Elsewhere in the thread a FSD Beta participant is imploring other drivers to keep their distance to Teslas because the software "gets easily spooked". This makes it even harder to assess the safety of the system - other drivers are helping it along as well.
- sho_hn 5y ago
  Several manufacturers have experimented with such systems in concept cars, e.g. animated grilles that signal in green when an oncoming car has recognized a pedestrian and is slowing in response.
bcrl 5y ago
A public "beta" of a self driving car should lean towards failing safe. I would expect it to have sudden braking issues and be overly conservative. The kind of bugs we're seeing where obstacles are blatantly ignored make it feel more like an "alpha" release. But hey, we're not designing airplanes here, just thousand pound chunks of metal flying around roads capable of killing people.
jrib 5y ago
MCAS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuvering_Characteristics_Augmentation_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuvering_Characteristics_Au...

by sho_hn 5y ago

Barrin92 5y ago

the fact that there is such a thing as a 'public beta' for moving two tons of steel through pedestrian areas at lethal speeds seriously makes me question our collective sanity. Imagine if gun vendors did public betas where random police officers just get a beta testing gun. "It might fire in random directions at arbitrary intervals 5% of the time, but that's just how innovation goes folks. You don't like that, do you hate progress?"

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
>Imagine if gun vendors did public betas where random police officers just get a beta testing gun. This is a thing. They give marketing samples to organizations they want to sell to on a "try 'em out and let us know if you want to buy more" basis.
- b112 5y ago
  Marketing samples are not public betas. They are marketing samples of tested product.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    If your complaint is that a very conservative manufacturing industry doesn't have 1:1 analogues with software development then I guess it's valid. Giving organizations stuff you haven't 100% nailed down yet expecting them to come back with stuff they want changed in order to buy is pretty par for the course in the firearms industry. That's as close to a public beta as you're gonna get.
    - everforward 5y ago
      The big difference is that marketing firearms are still safe, or as safe as firearms tend to get. It's a fully functional firearm; they want feedback on whether the ergonomics are good, whether the weight is good, how it handles recoil, etc. It would be more akin to handing out prototype weapons to police departments, which doesn't happen specifically because they might fire themselves or blow up or fail in some annoying but not spectacular way like failing to feed new rounds.
      - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
        The key mechanical features always "work" but little stuff like "gun fails to cycle 500% more often with the particular spec of ammo a particular force uses". A rifle spec'd out for sale to Cambodia probably is going to have a lot of teething issues if you try and sell it to the Swedes unchanged. Are these things "safe"? IDK. But no force is going to put in an order for tens of thousands of guns unless correctable issues like those are proven fixed. Infantry arms are a battle of margins. Everything "works" but a marginally more finicky gun to use is going to mean the people using it are marginally less effective which extrapolates pretty directly to "safety". At the end of the day the analogy isn't great and we're building a castle in a swamp here.
dkjaudyeqooe 5y ago
That reminds me of the ED-209 prototype in Robocop: "You have 20 seconds to comply!"
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  Here's the "20 seconds to comply" scene from Robocop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hzlt7IbTp6M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hzlt7IbTp6M
renewiltord 5y ago
This is a fair point. It's pretty bad that we have learner drivers on the road. Can't think of anything more public beta-y than that. Maybe trainee doctors?
- gvb 5y ago
  I've had three "learner drivers" in my family and I spent quite a few hours as the "safety person" during their apprenticeship. During all those hours I never touched the wheel, brake, or gas. I gave advice occasionally, but never felt that the "learner driver" was driving unsafely. I assure you that 15 year old young adults drive much better than a Tesla "self driving" computer with millions of miles and millions of hours of training.
  - renewiltord 5y ago
    Oh I’m sure you were convinced but you never asked me if I consented to you randomly putting underaged kids behind the wheel of a two ton vehicle on a road which I share with you. You’re a regular Yaroslav Kudrinsky, just with better luck. But I suppose one can go around swinging swords in a crowd, hit no one, and convince oneself of one’s good judgment.
- rhizome 5y ago
  Category error: people have brains.
  - HarryHirsch 5y ago
    That's the important one - a Tesla has no concept of the real world. Remember that clip where a Tesla was slowing down because it mistook the full moon in the sky for a traffic light? Likewise, no one would aim at a cyclist, except when they are a homicidal criminal.
    - noizejoy 5y ago
      … or under the influence of some substance, or a health event, or voluntary or involuntary distraction, or …
FireBeyond 5y ago
Someone said in another thread earlier today that there is a worry that we are making the path towards FSD too erratic, and that if we screw it up, the next shot might be in generations. People are arguing, with a straight face, that we are ruining (aspects of) humanity by not letting Tesla be laisez-faire with such things (and lets be real, it's predominantly Tesla who is just in full Cowboy/YOLO mode... other players in this field certainly aren't perfect, but they are at least trying to be conservative and cautious).
- jimmydorry 5y ago
  It's still a regulatory failure in the end. If the government does not want to lay down exactly what path should be taken in getting to FSD, then we should not complain when we don't agree with the path that the manufacturers choose. As long as Tesla can demonstrate a similar or better rate of serious harm than human drivers, why should we stop them? It's up to government to do their job and outline exactly what price society should bear in the pursuit of this paradigm shift (because let's not kid ourselves, FSD is a complete shift in paradigm for society).
  - FireBeyond 5y ago
    > As long as Tesla can demonstrate a similar or better rate of serious harm than human drivers, why should we stop them? Because it can't, or won't. Instead they release statistics that _imply_ that it is better, that they have to know are absolutely misleading, because anyone who did high school statistics would be aware thereof. Everything else, they refuse to release.
    - jimmydorry 5y ago
      I'm not aware of _anyone_ releasing such data in a way. Not that I have been looking that closely for it (so I certainly could have missed this!). This is another major regulatory failure. Government should lay out the minimum data that the companies must publish, so we can get a better idea of their performance. (It's still a chicken and egg scenario though. You can't get that kind of data anywhere but on public roads in uncontrolled environments.)

Retric 5y ago

I was expecting autopilot to be seriously dangerous, but the data doesn’t back that up. Out of 234 deaths from accidents involving Tesla’s 12 people have died while Tesla autopilot was known to be in use or had recently been in use. http://www.tesladeaths.com http://www.tesladeaths.com Autopilot might be slightly worse than human drivers depending on how you slice the data but that’s about it. I don’t think it’s a regulation problem as much as it is an acceptance by regulators that driving is inherently dangerous and autopilot isn’t dramatically worse. It’s not even obvious if on net more people would have died if Tesla had never released autopilot.

andbberger 5y ago
the data is extremely questionable
- Retric 5y ago
  In what way?
  - andbberger 5y ago
    Sampling bias, confirmation bias. Did you delete your link to tesladeaths.com because you realized the fine print about sketchy autopilot data contradicted your point? Oops!
    - Retric 5y ago
      No, I was trying to keep the link without a http:// http://, https://www.tesladeaths.com/ https://www.tesladeaths.com/ or https://www.tesladeaths.com/ https://www.tesladeaths.com/ works www.tesladeaths.com doesn’t nore does www.tesladeaths.com/ I am sure I have seen comment links without the http:// http:// but might have just gotten so used to it than I stopped seeing it.
      - andbberger 5y ago
        uh huh. why do you think it's reasonable to conclude that this system is safe given that the reported data is based on faulty analysis [0] and inexplicably exempt from reporting requirements for testing self-driving cars? [0] https://jalopnik.com/feds-tesla-autosteer-safety-investigation-was-bullshit-1832542003 https://jalopnik.com/feds-tesla-autosteer-safety-investigati...

paulcole 5y ago

> In the end it's a regulation problem, not a Tesla problem Are you joking? If you’re the one causing the problem, you’re the problem. No regulation can prevent me from kicking someone in the shins. This isn’t a regulation problem, it’s a me problem.

nrb 5y ago
The <Insert State Here> Code certainly applies penalties for assault and battery, and you can rest assured knowing shin-kicking would happen regularly without it. The car problem presented here is quite a bit more shades of gray and we absolutely need to set acceptable parameters for the technology.
- paulcole 5y ago
  Yes, but my point is that if you’re being a jerk, then you’re the problem, not the person who is not saying, “please don’t be a jerk.” You don’t need a regulation telling you not to be a jerk — unless of course you are a jerk. And even then, you’d probably still be a jerk, regulation or not.
XorNot 5y ago
Except it is: literally none of this is illegal. And it's not clear how it could be illegal: what's the distinction between cruise control and lane keeping and these systems? Very little - nothing you can codify. It's also very likely that this system can pass a standard driving test: AIs are really good at handling fixed test cases. So any regulation you do pass has a complicated assurance problem: how does it prove the system is safe? Pretend Tesla just knocked "beta" off the name and said "this is a limited self driving system, Tesla exclusive" - then you wind up in the same bucket with the same "it's the drivers responsibility problem". People see this footage and assume Tesla self drive does this all the time - but it wouldn't. It probably passes this scenario in testing 100% of the time: but the issue of course is the test is not quite whatever this circumstance is, and the system has a dramatic failure. There is absolutely a regulation problem.
- 5y ago

salawat 5y ago

...I am aware of zero other manufacturers brazen enough in terms of blatant disregard for Engineering Ethics to have embarked on this type of testing before Silicon Valley did. In fact, there were licensure processes for this sort of thing already in place in California iirc, so this is less gray area, more "lets outsource testing to the end user". Frankly, it's downright disturbing.

cwkoss 5y ago

What does MCAS mean here?

ofcrpls 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuvering_Characteristics_Augmentation_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuvering_Characteristics_Au...
sho_hn 5y ago
It's a software system overriding pilot input on Boeing 737 MAX airplanes, designed to make up for cost reductions in adequate hardware design. Pilots were deliberately not well-informed and the system caused two crashes. It was brought up elsewhere in the discussion. In general cars are headed into an aviation-like situation with automation, so case comparisons are becoming more frequent. It's very apples to oranges here, but loosely relevant wrt/ information/documentation and in the cameras-vs-LIDAR/sensor fusion debate.
- rhizome 5y ago
  I'm sure the policy and regulatory systems will be able to fend off the lobbyists of the richest person in the world working to get the word "liability" redefined in the law. \s

wavefunction 5y ago

lol @ public beta

oogabooga13 5y ago

I've wondered if it would be a good idea to have some sort of external indicator on cars that indicates to others that are driving, cycling, on foot that the vehicle is in autonomous mode. At least then maybe one can understand the potential risk driving around them. (Noted that an indicator doesn't really help if the vehicle is behind you in a lot of instances!)

heavyset_go 5y ago
One thing I've noticed the past couple of years is that it isn't that hard to determine whether or not a car is autonomously driving. If they're driving like they're drunk and they're in a Tesla, 9 out of 10 times, you'll see that that the driver isn't paying attention to the road at all because they're using Autopilot or FSD. I just treat the Tesla drivers around me on the road as if they're drunk and keep my distance.
- sho_hn 5y ago
  Elsewhere in the thread a FSD Beta participant is imploring other drivers to keep their distance to Teslas because the software "gets easily spooked". This makes it even harder to assess the safety of the system - other drivers are helping it along as well.
sho_hn 5y ago
Several manufacturers have experimented with such systems in concept cars, e.g. animated grilles that signal in green when an oncoming car has recognized a pedestrian and is slowing in response.

bcrl 5y ago

A public "beta" of a self driving car should lean towards failing safe. I would expect it to have sudden braking issues and be overly conservative. The kind of bugs we're seeing where obstacles are blatantly ignored make it feel more like an "alpha" release. But hey, we're not designing airplanes here, just thousand pound chunks of metal flying around roads capable of killing people.

jrib 5y ago

MCAS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuvering_Characteristics_Augmentation_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuvering_Characteristics_Au...