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Radar gives false positives. Pretend you are a computer for a second. You get told by radar that right in front of you there is an obstacle. You are five feet f
by JoshCole 4y ago
Radar gives false positives. Pretend you are a computer for a second. You get told by radar that right in front of you there is an obstacle. You are five feet from crashing. The only option to avoid it would be to slam on your breaks. Meanwhile the vision system tells you that you are on a freeway, there is a car directly behind you, and there is a bridge ahead of you.
Do you a) slam on the breaks or b) drive under the underpass that was producing the false senor reading?
You've already declared your answer. You choose option a, because you think radar is amazing and you think people who think otherwise are naive morons. What happens next is that you slam on the brakes, surprising the person behind you. They slam into your vehicle. Their child wasn't wearing his seat belt. He flies forward, slamming through the window. His brains splatter the pavement. His body rolls without his brains into another lane. A horrified person to your left swerves to avoid hitting the kids body as they drive by, plowing into another car.
Congratulations. You are a genius. Everyone else is naive. Thank you for playing murder innocent people.
Of course, this isn't what actually happens. What actually happens is that your decision results in a sudden break, but the person at the wheel recognizes this is a mistake and presses down on the pedal. Your decision making ability is taken away, because you are a moron. They do so, because they trusted their vision system more than they trusted your stupid radar based decision. So the error correction mechanism that stopped your murder attempt? Vision.
Thank God for that, but the person in the vehicle is annoyed. They report the issue, not liking that bridges consistently produce that behavior. Tesla investigates. They realize that the radar sensor is producing false positives. After empirically validating that removing radar is better at driving in this edge case they roll out the improvement. Tesla removes your ability to decide to kill people because you are too obsessed with radar.
Later, even as the empirical results show that self driving is now better than human driving in terms of safety, partly of course due to it being human+computer driving now computer alone, a person names knodi123 goes online and calls people naive for thinking that vision is preferable to radar.
He gets asked this question. If you were the driver of that car, which would you rather trust? The car's decision made on the basis of radar? Or your own decision made on the basis of vision?