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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 t

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
  No idea why you had to tout out that you had a PhD when I was pointing out that you were not a user. Well news flash, I did my PhD in EECS with a focus on Perception and Autonomous Vehicle Applications from a top 4 CS school and so did most people in Autopilot (Most are from Stanford, Berkeley or CMU in Tesla AP), in fact I worked with people who were a part of the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge who are in Autopilot now and I can assure you they think as deeply about safety as you claim you are. (I did not want to default to an argument of authority, but you made it that). I do in fact sleep soundly, knowing I don't call engineers murderers on online forums. The 2019 and 2016 case you're talking about engaged Autopilot not FSD Beta (The 2019 crash did it just 10 seconds before the crash). Autopilot is glorified cruise control, it maintains a distance to the car in front of you, does not avoid obstacles, is not meant to break unless there are exceptional circumstances or do anything really beyond following the lane. Independent testing by both the NHTSA and the EURO NCAP authority have given Tesla Autopilot the highest safety rating recorded by any car, so it is the safest cruise control among competitors, but it is a cruise control where crashes happen. Its not FSD. There has been only 1 case under FSD Beta under investigation by NHTSA, and that occurred in 2021, that is going on in the courts, I do expect Tesla to win that case, but let's see. That case involved damage to the car and no injuries or deaths reported. Also I edited the comment to make it smaller, I did not see your reply before editing my comment. I can revert it if you wish.
  - ModernMech 4y ago
    I've calmed down after your "heads will roll" comment so I promise to be civil. To continue. Yes, you should put back your original comment to reduce confusion. I'm fine reading a long comment. > No idea why you had to tout out that you had a PhD when I was pointing out that you were not a user. You said: 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. Which I took to mean you assumed I was a nonpractitioner who didn't know what I was talking about. I know you work at Tesla, so I know your credentials. Since you seemed so eager to dismiss me as a "bystander", my only point in telling you about my background wasn't to threaten you with it or to assert an unquestionable authority, but to inform you that I have the necessary experience and education to fully understand all the complexities you think are beyond my comprehension. I am not a "bystander", and while I do not own a Tesla (because of course I don't), that doesn't set you up to dismiss my point of view as uninformed. You can communicate to me as a peer, not a "bystander". > (Most are from Stanford, Berkeley or CMU in Tesla AP) Absolutely, I've gone to school with some of those people. I've been taught by some of those people. I've also taught some of the people you work with. I don't know who you are, but I know you know better, or at least your colleagues do. Which is why this is so especially painful for me. > I can assure you they think as deeply about safety as you claim you are. Do they though? Because... again, you're building a product that allows people to drive around town fucking in their car. I notice you didn't address that at all in your reply. What does your team have to say about that, and when will this be banned? Why did your team release "beta" quality hardware and software onto public streets? Why wasn't the public consulted? By the tone of your earlier comment about drunk drivers, it seems to imply that you think drunk people driving Teslas is beyond the pale. And yet, what do you say about people fucking in their Teslas? That's happening. Isn't that just as dangerous as drunk driving, if not more so? It's really easy to say you're thinking deeply about these things, but that seems to be as far as the consideration goes when looking at how your product is being used in reality. You didn't think enough about it that you realized the camera sensors on the AP system would be overwhelmed by a bright white obstruction, and it would cause the AP system to run into it at full speed. You didn't think enough about it to have robust sensing to overcome a single sensor being overwhelmed. Yet you shipped that to the public, and then someone died due to the lack of consideration of that failure mode by your company. To me, it seems like your company's decisions are based purely on maintaining a competitive edge by being a market leader and aggressively pushing unfinished products onto the general and unsuspecting public. Can you please outline the ethical framework you used to arrive at this decision? Please don't tell me it was "We need this as fast as possible to save as many lives in the future, short term casualties are a necessary evil for the greater good." > I do in fact sleep soundly, knowing I don't call engineers murderers on online forums. Thanks for confirming my expectations. I figured as much. I figured you had no problem with the fact that your product decapitated someone, and then your company did literally nothing about it for 3 years, leading to it happening again. For the sake of your sleep, I'm glad you're able to rationalize these decapitations as "it was just a glorified cruise control" as if it's the user's fault. Maybe the first time. But the second one is on your company. But to be clear I didn't call you personally a murderer; I literally said you're not responsible. But the thing you built is directly responsible. Your team is responsible for releasing these things into communities, which you yourself admit are beta quality. That's something you chose to do. Engineers must be held accountable when the things they engineer hurt people, otherwise they will engineer things that hurt people. If you haven't realized it yet, this whole feeling I have really about you but your company, so don't take what I'm saying personally, unless in fact you do feel your personal work had contributed to these people's deaths.
sealeck 4y ago
A cynical person might remark upon the fact that your being a Tesla employee might have some bearing on your position, but I am not such a person. > In essence, this is not tech that is being used by regular people who have a chance of misusing it. Now this is true in one sense – people who can't afford a Tesla and then aren't willing to spent an additional $15k on a piece of software, which has (many, many, many) times been described in a highly optimistic to the point of not having a very strict correlation with material reality way by the company's CEO, cannot use the software to drive in a car – and very false in another: _what if someone else's Tesla crashes into me_? > while Tesla can keep iterating step by step I could be wrong (this is a genuine statement, please don't take it as a passive aggressive one, it's not intended that way) but doesn't this rely on Tesla first finding a failure, then diagnosing a symptom, writing a fix, etc. The fact is though that this initial failure might be one of several crashes which have occured in a Tesla on AutoPilot, which isn't great?
- sashank_1509 4y ago
  PS., I have left Tesla but sure I might be biased since I have friends there and worked there for a while. > I could be wrong (this is a genuine statement, please don't take it as a passive aggressive one, it's not intended that way) but doesn't this rely on Tesla first finding a failure, then diagnosing a symptom, writing a fix, etc. The fact is though that this initial failure might be one of several crashes which have occured in a Tesla on AutoPilot, which isn't great? Failures are generally user disengagements not a crash. We measure user disengagements, classify them and try to drive the egregious ones to zero. FSD has had one major crash, no injuries that is being investigated by NHTSA, and a few minor bumps (I went in more detail below). > what if someone else's Tesla crashes into me_? I think that is a very fair point. It happened when a Uber self driving car crashed and killed a pedestrian which was a major incident in this industry. The problem with DL models is they are unexplainable and we cannot tell when they fail (Though in Uber case it was not exactly DL model failing). Tesla took this risk and has managed fine with no injuries to date. And now the main reason I made this post, the tech keeps getting better, we have this model from Meta that just literally segments everything in an image (even ones you take from your phone). It honestly feels we are leaving the risky DL territory and reaching the "we can't understand how but it just works" territory where you can rely on a Deep Learning to do what you expect it to do.

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
No idea why you had to tout out that you had a PhD when I was pointing out that you were not a user. Well news flash, I did my PhD in EECS with a focus on Perception and Autonomous Vehicle Applications from a top 4 CS school and so did most people in Autopilot (Most are from Stanford, Berkeley or CMU in Tesla AP), in fact I worked with people who were a part of the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge who are in Autopilot now and I can assure you they think as deeply about safety as you claim you are. (I did not want to default to an argument of authority, but you made it that). I do in fact sleep soundly, knowing I don't call engineers murderers on online forums. The 2019 and 2016 case you're talking about engaged Autopilot not FSD Beta (The 2019 crash did it just 10 seconds before the crash). Autopilot is glorified cruise control, it maintains a distance to the car in front of you, does not avoid obstacles, is not meant to break unless there are exceptional circumstances or do anything really beyond following the lane. Independent testing by both the NHTSA and the EURO NCAP authority have given Tesla Autopilot the highest safety rating recorded by any car, so it is the safest cruise control among competitors, but it is a cruise control where crashes happen. Its not FSD. There has been only 1 case under FSD Beta under investigation by NHTSA, and that occurred in 2021, that is going on in the courts, I do expect Tesla to win that case, but let's see. That case involved damage to the car and no injuries or deaths reported. Also I edited the comment to make it smaller, I did not see your reply before editing my comment. I can revert it if you wish.
- ModernMech 4y ago
  I've calmed down after your "heads will roll" comment so I promise to be civil. To continue. Yes, you should put back your original comment to reduce confusion. I'm fine reading a long comment. > No idea why you had to tout out that you had a PhD when I was pointing out that you were not a user. You said: 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. Which I took to mean you assumed I was a nonpractitioner who didn't know what I was talking about. I know you work at Tesla, so I know your credentials. Since you seemed so eager to dismiss me as a "bystander", my only point in telling you about my background wasn't to threaten you with it or to assert an unquestionable authority, but to inform you that I have the necessary experience and education to fully understand all the complexities you think are beyond my comprehension. I am not a "bystander", and while I do not own a Tesla (because of course I don't), that doesn't set you up to dismiss my point of view as uninformed. You can communicate to me as a peer, not a "bystander". > (Most are from Stanford, Berkeley or CMU in Tesla AP) Absolutely, I've gone to school with some of those people. I've been taught by some of those people. I've also taught some of the people you work with. I don't know who you are, but I know you know better, or at least your colleagues do. Which is why this is so especially painful for me. > I can assure you they think as deeply about safety as you claim you are. Do they though? Because... again, you're building a product that allows people to drive around town fucking in their car. I notice you didn't address that at all in your reply. What does your team have to say about that, and when will this be banned? Why did your team release "beta" quality hardware and software onto public streets? Why wasn't the public consulted? By the tone of your earlier comment about drunk drivers, it seems to imply that you think drunk people driving Teslas is beyond the pale. And yet, what do you say about people fucking in their Teslas? That's happening. Isn't that just as dangerous as drunk driving, if not more so? It's really easy to say you're thinking deeply about these things, but that seems to be as far as the consideration goes when looking at how your product is being used in reality. You didn't think enough about it that you realized the camera sensors on the AP system would be overwhelmed by a bright white obstruction, and it would cause the AP system to run into it at full speed. You didn't think enough about it to have robust sensing to overcome a single sensor being overwhelmed. Yet you shipped that to the public, and then someone died due to the lack of consideration of that failure mode by your company. To me, it seems like your company's decisions are based purely on maintaining a competitive edge by being a market leader and aggressively pushing unfinished products onto the general and unsuspecting public. Can you please outline the ethical framework you used to arrive at this decision? Please don't tell me it was "We need this as fast as possible to save as many lives in the future, short term casualties are a necessary evil for the greater good." > I do in fact sleep soundly, knowing I don't call engineers murderers on online forums. Thanks for confirming my expectations. I figured as much. I figured you had no problem with the fact that your product decapitated someone, and then your company did literally nothing about it for 3 years, leading to it happening again. For the sake of your sleep, I'm glad you're able to rationalize these decapitations as "it was just a glorified cruise control" as if it's the user's fault. Maybe the first time. But the second one is on your company. But to be clear I didn't call you personally a murderer; I literally said you're not responsible. But the thing you built is directly responsible. Your team is responsible for releasing these things into communities, which you yourself admit are beta quality. That's something you chose to do. Engineers must be held accountable when the things they engineer hurt people, otherwise they will engineer things that hurt people. If you haven't realized it yet, this whole feeling I have really about you but your company, so don't take what I'm saying personally, unless in fact you do feel your personal work had contributed to these people's deaths.

sealeck 4y ago

A cynical person might remark upon the fact that your being a Tesla employee might have some bearing on your position, but I am not such a person. > In essence, this is not tech that is being used by regular people who have a chance of misusing it. Now this is true in one sense – people who can't afford a Tesla and then aren't willing to spent an additional $15k on a piece of software, which has (many, many, many) times been described in a highly optimistic to the point of not having a very strict correlation with material reality way by the company's CEO, cannot use the software to drive in a car – and very false in another: _what if someone else's Tesla crashes into me_? > while Tesla can keep iterating step by step I could be wrong (this is a genuine statement, please don't take it as a passive aggressive one, it's not intended that way) but doesn't this rely on Tesla first finding a failure, then diagnosing a symptom, writing a fix, etc. The fact is though that this initial failure might be one of several crashes which have occured in a Tesla on AutoPilot, which isn't great?

sashank_1509 4y ago
PS., I have left Tesla but sure I might be biased since I have friends there and worked there for a while. > I could be wrong (this is a genuine statement, please don't take it as a passive aggressive one, it's not intended that way) but doesn't this rely on Tesla first finding a failure, then diagnosing a symptom, writing a fix, etc. The fact is though that this initial failure might be one of several crashes which have occured in a Tesla on AutoPilot, which isn't great? Failures are generally user disengagements not a crash. We measure user disengagements, classify them and try to drive the egregious ones to zero. FSD has had one major crash, no injuries that is being investigated by NHTSA, and a few minor bumps (I went in more detail below). > what if someone else's Tesla crashes into me_? I think that is a very fair point. It happened when a Uber self driving car crashed and killed a pedestrian which was a major incident in this industry. The problem with DL models is they are unexplainable and we cannot tell when they fail (Though in Uber case it was not exactly DL model failing). Tesla took this risk and has managed fine with no injuries to date. And now the main reason I made this post, the tech keeps getting better, we have this model from Meta that just literally segments everything in an image (even ones you take from your phone). It honestly feels we are leaving the risky DL territory and reaching the "we can't understand how but it just works" territory where you can rely on a Deep Learning to do what you expect it to do.