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> I get the utilitarian argument that maybe self driving cars could reduce traffic accidents in the future by being better than humans on average. This keeps b

> I get the utilitarian argument that maybe self driving cars could reduce traffic accidents in the future by being better than humans on average. This keeps being touted (by Elon and others), but is a long way away: https://twitter.com/Tweetermeyer/status/1488673180403191808 https://twitter.com/Tweetermeyer/status/1488673180403191808 Tesla uses misleading stats (like not excluding highway miles, which are inherently safer) to try and make it seem like autopilot is any good.

ModernMech 5y ago
Yeah, and the reason Elon is reaching for aggregate statistics is because he can't argue that his platform is fundamentally sound. I mean, the primary directive of any driverless car is: don't run into anything. That's it, that's all it has to do. Yet Teslas routinely run into stationary objects, and not because those objects are somehow particularly pathological and would generally fool most anyone. No, they are specifically confounding to the way Tesla does things, in a way that practitioners in the field aware of and know how to solve, but which Elon Musk stubbornly refuses to recognize. I keep harping on it but the decapitation incident in 2016 is just so illustrative of what kind of culture Tesla is fostering. Here's a situation where reckless engineering choices by Tesla literally caused a customer to lose his head. The solution which would fix this problem would be to add more orthogonal sensor modalities, so that any blind spot in one sensor can be compensated for by another (e.g. LIDAR will not see a glass wall, but SONOR will). But what did Tesla do? They actually doubled down! They removed existing orthogonal sensors and they made everything worse! Now basically the entire thing is driven by vision, and it's still predictably exhibiting the same failure mode of running into broad and stationary objects as it did 5 years ago (which by the way was approximately the amount of time Elon Musk predicted it would take for them to get to level 5 autonomous driving. Instead they've bumbled around for half a decade and failed to make any significant progress).

ModernMech 5y ago

Yeah, and the reason Elon is reaching for aggregate statistics is because he can't argue that his platform is fundamentally sound. I mean, the primary directive of any driverless car is: don't run into anything. That's it, that's all it has to do. Yet Teslas routinely run into stationary objects, and not because those objects are somehow particularly pathological and would generally fool most anyone. No, they are specifically confounding to the way Tesla does things, in a way that practitioners in the field aware of and know how to solve, but which Elon Musk stubbornly refuses to recognize. I keep harping on it but the decapitation incident in 2016 is just so illustrative of what kind of culture Tesla is fostering. Here's a situation where reckless engineering choices by Tesla literally caused a customer to lose his head. The solution which would fix this problem would be to add more orthogonal sensor modalities, so that any blind spot in one sensor can be compensated for by another (e.g. LIDAR will not see a glass wall, but SONOR will). But what did Tesla do? They actually doubled down! They removed existing orthogonal sensors and they made everything worse! Now basically the entire thing is driven by vision, and it's still predictably exhibiting the same failure mode of running into broad and stationary objects as it did 5 years ago (which by the way was approximately the amount of time Elon Musk predicted it would take for them to get to level 5 autonomous driving. Instead they've bumbled around for half a decade and failed to make any significant progress).