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> I’ve worked in Tesla Autopilot before and saw it hit a mannequin because we never had mannequin in our dataset before ( we might have had it in the data but i

> I’ve worked in Tesla Autopilot before and saw it hit a mannequin because we never had mannequin in our dataset before ( we might have had it in the data but it was not a part of our ontology for the network to predict). Incredible. To be clear, your group and the company you work for saw fit to release your beta-quality autopilot onto public roads, as it was hitting human-looking objects in your test labs. Is that what you're admitting here? Did anyone in your group object to this? Were you personally concerned? Instead of moving fast and breaking things, what if you had not rushed your autopilot out, but waited on technology to improve to the point that your product wouldn't hit a human-looking object it had never seen before?

sashank_1509 4y ago
There’s too much insanity over building new tech these days, and I find a lot of hate directed on Autopilot, to stem from hate directed on Elon. Let’s go over the basics for Autopilot: 1. It costs thousands of dollars a year + 15k one time and it’s very easy to get banned from autopilot for life. They have a 3 strike rule + 1000 miles driven on your Tesla with a good safety before you’re allowed to access autopilot 2. I’ve seen 2 types of customers use autopilot. One is rich dudes, who buy it just to have all bells and whistles. They use it less than once a month and honestly it’s a waste of money for them. The other are passionate early adopters, they regularly make YouTube videos, constantly stress test our tech and are huge contributors of our tech itself. I’d say 10-20% of our users are the latter. The kind of group who don’t use autopilot? The regular old Joe, who perhaps would like Autopilot for some practical use case. It’s too expensive, has a lot of restrictions (like you have to grab the steering once every few minutes or autopilot disengages and then you get banned out of it even if you pay) that it doesn’t make sense for him to buy this tech anyway. In essence, this is not tech that is being used by regular people who have a chance of misusing it. Ever since the Uber self driving crash, heads roll if a self driving car crashes and as an engineer I don’t get any access to Tesla legal but it’s my understanding that in none of the cases filed against Tesla, did they prove Autopilot was active (forget Autopilot being the cause). So yes, we’re not building new tech that’s killing hundreds, no one has any ethical dilemmas here. We’re building tech that a passionate group of users really want to see succeed and help us do that, and rest of the users just give us money for some reason even though they don’t really use it or trust it. I would frankly be more torn about working in a place like Waymo where the user has almost no control over the car (they don’t even sit at the steering wheel), and they have to solve the problem one shot before releasing it to the public while Tesla can keep iterating step by step (with its passionate user base supporting us and showing love all the way) Edit: Changed this comment to make it smaller
- ModernMech 4y ago
  > Let’s go over the basics for Autopilot: Go on Pornhub right now (if you're not at work) and search for sex in tesla. You'll find people driving Teslas on public roads while having sex in the driver's seat. The guy touches the steering wheel every so often to keep the car autopilot activated. The videos have been posted over a span of years. Another one was literally posted yesterday. Combined they have 10s of millions of views. Is this what you mean when you speak of "passion" in Tesla owners? When will these Tesla owners be banned for life? Would you be okay with these people fucking in their Tesla as it drives around your town in broad daylight? Around you and your family? > I find the hate towards autopilot to always stem from non user and by standers. There are two other categories: 3: People who have been injured, maimed, or killed in Teslas, and the people who knew and loved them. This applies to me. 4: People who are passionate about robotics, and are disgusted at how Tesla in particular and Elon Musk especially are responsible for eroding public safety in the name of profits and market dominance. This also applies to me. I appreciate that some people who own Teslas are very "passionate" about the expensive toys they have bought. Toddlers are also just as passionate about their material world. But I really don't care how much they love their cars, what I care about are people who I know are dead, and my field is a joke. > And then we have bystanders like you with no understanding of what’s actually going on, who want to ban everybody from using Autopilot because you think drunk people are using Autopilot or something. I have Ph.D. in computer engineering focused on robotics. My dissertation was on dynamic autonomous control. I've built many autonomous vehicles in my time, including cars, forklifts, boats, airplanes, and wheelchairs. I teach graduate students at a top international university. I've worked at and consulted on robotics at top corporations you've heard of. Sorry if you mistook me for a bystander with no understanding of what's going on. What I want is my community to be safe. What I want is for professionals in my field to take safety seriously, and not release half baked admittedly beta quality software into the wild. That's the craziest part of all of this -- you and Elon and Tesla and all the passionate owners don't even contest that the software and hardware are not ready for the task. We had established protocols for testing autonomous vehicle in public areas in 2007 during the DARPA Urban challenge. Those protocols were designed to keep people safe, and they did. No one died. Tesla threw those protocols out the window, and guess what, people died. This is not saying that autopilot should be banned forever. It's saying you shouldn't move fast and break things, because sometimes those things are people, and sometimes those things are established safety protocols that are there for a reason. > (Needless to say Tesla will never hit a mannequin or anything like it ever again as 100s of videos by our passionate users have shown. I’ve also seen it avoid a teddy bear on a roller chair that was in the middle of the road for some reason, something definitely not in our training set) Is it needless to say? Because in 2016 a man was decapitated due to his AP system failing to sense an obstacle, and then it happened again to a second man in 2019 on a newer model, with the same failure mode: ttps://cdllife.com/2019/feds-say-autopilot-was-engaged-in-fatal-tesla-vs-semi-crash/ Why didn't Tesla fix this beta-level bug in 3 years? Is it fixed today? If not, how long until Tesla AP kills another person? If you had tested your hardware and software in a lab more, would those two people still be alive? Would their families still be whole? Have you reflected on this at all? Edit: I've responded to your original comment, but it seems you've heavily edited it after the fact. Although, your choice of words about "heads rolling" has incensed me to a degree that I cannot continue this discussion civilly, and have already gone too far. I'm not deleting this because I'd rather get it off my chest. I get that you're not responsible for those deaths, but Elon Musk is from my point of view, and also the general "move fast and break things" attitude is as well.

sashank_1509 4y ago

There’s too much insanity over building new tech these days, and I find a lot of hate directed on Autopilot, to stem from hate directed on Elon. Let’s go over the basics for Autopilot: 1. It costs thousands of dollars a year + 15k one time and it’s very easy to get banned from autopilot for life. They have a 3 strike rule + 1000 miles driven on your Tesla with a good safety before you’re allowed to access autopilot 2. I’ve seen 2 types of customers use autopilot. One is rich dudes, who buy it just to have all bells and whistles. They use it less than once a month and honestly it’s a waste of money for them. The other are passionate early adopters, they regularly make YouTube videos, constantly stress test our tech and are huge contributors of our tech itself. I’d say 10-20% of our users are the latter. The kind of group who don’t use autopilot? The regular old Joe, who perhaps would like Autopilot for some practical use case. It’s too expensive, has a lot of restrictions (like you have to grab the steering once every few minutes or autopilot disengages and then you get banned out of it even if you pay) that it doesn’t make sense for him to buy this tech anyway. In essence, this is not tech that is being used by regular people who have a chance of misusing it. Ever since the Uber self driving crash, heads roll if a self driving car crashes and as an engineer I don’t get any access to Tesla legal but it’s my understanding that in none of the cases filed against Tesla, did they prove Autopilot was active (forget Autopilot being the cause). So yes, we’re not building new tech that’s killing hundreds, no one has any ethical dilemmas here. We’re building tech that a passionate group of users really want to see succeed and help us do that, and rest of the users just give us money for some reason even though they don’t really use it or trust it. I would frankly be more torn about working in a place like Waymo where the user has almost no control over the car (they don’t even sit at the steering wheel), and they have to solve the problem one shot before releasing it to the public while Tesla can keep iterating step by step (with its passionate user base supporting us and showing love all the way) Edit: Changed this comment to make it smaller

ModernMech 4y ago
> Let’s go over the basics for Autopilot: Go on Pornhub right now (if you're not at work) and search for sex in tesla. You'll find people driving Teslas on public roads while having sex in the driver's seat. The guy touches the steering wheel every so often to keep the car autopilot activated. The videos have been posted over a span of years. Another one was literally posted yesterday. Combined they have 10s of millions of views. Is this what you mean when you speak of "passion" in Tesla owners? When will these Tesla owners be banned for life? Would you be okay with these people fucking in their Tesla as it drives around your town in broad daylight? Around you and your family? > I find the hate towards autopilot to always stem from non user and by standers. There are two other categories: 3: People who have been injured, maimed, or killed in Teslas, and the people who knew and loved them. This applies to me. 4: People who are passionate about robotics, and are disgusted at how Tesla in particular and Elon Musk especially are responsible for eroding public safety in the name of profits and market dominance. This also applies to me. I appreciate that some people who own Teslas are very "passionate" about the expensive toys they have bought. Toddlers are also just as passionate about their material world. But I really don't care how much they love their cars, what I care about are people who I know are dead, and my field is a joke. > And then we have bystanders like you with no understanding of what’s actually going on, who want to ban everybody from using Autopilot because you think drunk people are using Autopilot or something. I have Ph.D. in computer engineering focused on robotics. My dissertation was on dynamic autonomous control. I've built many autonomous vehicles in my time, including cars, forklifts, boats, airplanes, and wheelchairs. I teach graduate students at a top international university. I've worked at and consulted on robotics at top corporations you've heard of. Sorry if you mistook me for a bystander with no understanding of what's going on. What I want is my community to be safe. What I want is for professionals in my field to take safety seriously, and not release half baked admittedly beta quality software into the wild. That's the craziest part of all of this -- you and Elon and Tesla and all the passionate owners don't even contest that the software and hardware are not ready for the task. We had established protocols for testing autonomous vehicle in public areas in 2007 during the DARPA Urban challenge. Those protocols were designed to keep people safe, and they did. No one died. Tesla threw those protocols out the window, and guess what, people died. This is not saying that autopilot should be banned forever. It's saying you shouldn't move fast and break things, because sometimes those things are people, and sometimes those things are established safety protocols that are there for a reason. > (Needless to say Tesla will never hit a mannequin or anything like it ever again as 100s of videos by our passionate users have shown. I’ve also seen it avoid a teddy bear on a roller chair that was in the middle of the road for some reason, something definitely not in our training set) Is it needless to say? Because in 2016 a man was decapitated due to his AP system failing to sense an obstacle, and then it happened again to a second man in 2019 on a newer model, with the same failure mode: ttps://cdllife.com/2019/feds-say-autopilot-was-engaged-in-fatal-tesla-vs-semi-crash/ Why didn't Tesla fix this beta-level bug in 3 years? Is it fixed today? If not, how long until Tesla AP kills another person? If you had tested your hardware and software in a lab more, would those two people still be alive? Would their families still be whole? Have you reflected on this at all? Edit: I've responded to your original comment, but it seems you've heavily edited it after the fact. Although, your choice of words about "heads rolling" has incensed me to a degree that I cannot continue this discussion civilly, and have already gone too far. I'm not deleting this because I'd rather get it off my chest. I get that you're not responsible for those deaths, but Elon Musk is from my point of view, and also the general "move fast and break things" attitude is as well.