6 ms·

Aside of all the other obvious reasons to not get a Tesla these days this is #1 imo. Camera feeds and a neural network are not enough for self driving, no matte

by Mo3 2y ago

Aside of all the other obvious reasons to not get a Tesla these days this is #1 imo. Camera feeds and a neural network are not enough for self driving, no matter how much they're training. Never ever.

nickthegreek 2y ago
At the very least they seem to have downsides that the can be easily overcame with a lidar system/combination of them. That alone is enough to help me decide when its my family that would be the passengers.
- crooked-v 2y ago
  And every other modern auto-braking safety system, except for Subaru for some reason, incorporates at least basic proximity radar.
bpodgursky 2y ago
I am not claiming that Tesla FSD is at this point, but it is obviously possible to use cameras and neural networks to drive a car, because that is literally how humans drive.
- beepbooptheory 2y ago
  Hubert Dreyfus rolling in his grave..
- vel0city 2y ago
  Humans have more senses than just vision. Also a few cameras aren't completely covering the range of human vision.
  - bpodgursky 2y ago
    ? Do you use your sense of smell to drive a car? Are deaf people allowed to drive cars? No, the cameras we have now, or at least the data processing, is probably not there yet, but it's absurd to claim it's "never" possible. It's obviously either possible in a year or fifteen years, all basic hardware is advancing fast.
    - tredre3 2y ago
      > it's absurd to claim it's "never" possible Absolutely correct. The problem is that Elon has been saying that for ten years and we're not really closer to it being true. So, in the meantime, would it kill him to admit that he was wrong about lidar?
    - vel0city 2y ago
      > but it's absurd to claim it's "never" possible. I've never made such a claim. I use self driving features in my car a good bit. They use more than just cameras though. > Are deaf people allowed to drive cars? Sure, but I'd say someone unable to hear things would be disadvanted at driving and potentially less safe. But you've also completely ignored the sense of feeling, understanding the feedback you're feeling on the wheel. Ignoring the feeling of the wheels on the road. Ignoring the feeling of the g forces as the car moves. Ignoring the feeling of body sway when it's windy. You're also ignoring as others have mentioned the theory of mind of how other things actually behave around the streets. We're still not 100% sure these automated systems can actually comprehend these things. All things a computer could sense, no doubt. But it's far more than just a few cameras.
      - bpodgursky 2y ago
        > Camera feeds and a neural network are not enough for self driving, no matter how much they're training. Never ever. This is the OP claim I am saying is absurd.
  - intrasight 2y ago
    Yes, but I don't think you could argue the point that the visual sense is probably 95% of it. But even so, it could be decades before computers achieve the sensory capabilities of the human visual system. Why not, during those hundred years, add some lidar to the sensory mix. Just because it didn't evolve in humans doesn't mean it's not a good thing. Bats and dolphins use the biological analogue very effectively.
    - iknowstuff 2y ago
      Their cameras have better dynamic range than humans, not to mention the neural net can consume multiple exposures simultaneously. From surround video.
      - vel0city 2y ago
        > Their cameras have better dynamic range than humans This is obviously untrue if you've ever watched videos from sentry mode.
        iknowstuff 2y ago
        Sentry mode videos are sdr
    - bcrl 2y ago
      Vision isn't the only problem. Can computers do a decent job of theory-of-mind of other drivers? What about seeing a tire bouncing down off an overpass that's visible to the driver? Software developers love saying that it's the 95% that matters, but in safety critical systems, that simplification simply does not work.
      - intrasight 2y ago
        > Software developers love saying that it's the 95% that matters Perhaps if they're early in their career. But any who have done challenging projects know that it's the last 5% that's the hardest and that often matters the most.
  - aplummer 2y ago
    Also humans suck at driving compared to what we expect of machines
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- seszett 2y ago
  Do Tesla cars have stereo vision, though? I don't think they build a 3D model of the world around them at all, while humans do (not only based on our stereo vision) and largely rely on that to drive.
  - andsoitis 2y ago
    Apparently, Tesla has stated that they do not use paired cameras for ranging or depth perception, which is the standard approach for stereoscopic vision. Instead of stereoscopic vision, Tesla's neural net processes the data from the cameras to create a 3D view of the surroundings. https://electrek.co/2021/07/07/hacker-tesla-full-self-drivings-vision-depth-perception-neural-net-can-see/ https://electrek.co/2021/07/07/hacker-tesla-full-self-drivin...
  - iknowstuff 2y ago
    They do have 2-3 front facing cameras and their e2ee does necessarily get the same understanding of the world around it.
  - sorenjan 2y ago
    They do build a 3D model: https://youtu.be/6x-Xb_uT7ts?t=129 https://youtu.be/6x-Xb_uT7ts?t=129 Although I think it's interesting that even in his demo there are cars popping in and out of existence in the 3D visualization of the environment. I don't think that makes much sense, if a car is observed and then occluded the logical conclusion should be that it's probably still there, maybe add an increasing uncertainty to its location, instead of assuming it disappeared.
    - bryanlarsen 2y ago
      Tesla switched from a 3D model that with the popping glitchiness you describe to a 4D model without the popping several months ago.
      - SR2Z 2y ago
        Sure, but during the entire time of Autopilot/FSD so far, Teslas have been crashing in ridiculous ways and killing their drivers. The "but they've patched that failure!" excuse has ALSO been around, and while the cars are definitely getting better, they're still also definitely killing people in ridiculous ways.
- manquer 2y ago
  The actual problem statement is can such a system do so safely. If it is just to drive a car all you need are some stepper motors and a raspberry pi. The goal is to reduce accident and fatalities not eliminate jobs . If LiDAR has 1/10th the fatality rate of camera setup and is less costlier than 10x the value of human life(as used in legal proceedings) then it still the only viable option
- Aloisius 2y ago
  I think artificial neural networks was implied and there is a world of difference between how biological and artificial neural networks function. That said, I'm not sure that's what the barrier is. I think humans would have trouble driving with a fixed low resolution camera too.
- Detrytus 2y ago
  1. Human "neural network" is few orders of magnitude more powerful than the best neural network available right now. 2. This might be obvious question but: Humans have two eyes and they are few centimeters apart so that we could use stereoscopic vision to estimate the distance. Does Tesla FSD even attempt to do something similar?
  - bpodgursky 2y ago
    It is legal and safe to drive with 1 working eye. Humans have many ways of modeling distances in the real world that do not rely on stereoscopic depth.
- jayd16 2y ago
  A human is not just a NN, but I do wonder how well a human could drive given the Tesla camera feed. Seems like it would surely be worse than behind the wheel.
- rtkwe 2y ago
  Neural nets generally don't have the same level of interconnections and neurons as the human brain because it's tougher to train. I agree in principal that the human brain should be possible to replicate in a computer but I'm not sure we can do it with the current design of single direction connections between nodes. I highly doubt we'll be able to scale it down to a machine that's reasonable to fit in a car any time soon though and that's what Tesla is promising they can do with the current hardware package installed in cars (never mind that they also promised it'd be possible with the last major revision and had to walk that back and will have to install upgraded electronics in people's vehicles, unless they're just going to strand all HW3 owners who paid of FSD but the hardware is to wimpy to handle it unless that's changed since the robotaxi event).
- nickthegreek 2y ago
  Don’t we want it to be like way better than humans at driving? The dream pitch was that we wouldn’t have tens of thousands of preventable deaths every year. So install the damn lidar. At some point it is coming down to penny pinching and that means that preventable deaths number will not sink to the promise.
- ryandvm 2y ago
  The problem with that argument is that a Tesla isn't nearly as clever as a human. I have never thought a white tractor trailer disappeared as it crossed in front of me against a bright sky. I know that I should drive a little bit slower on Halloween evening because there are kids running around. I know that I need to be a little more cautious driving past the playground or dog park. I have object permanence. As it is, AI just isn't smart enough to rely on only vision and they ought to be taking advantage of every economically viable sensor to make up for the difference. Hell, I thought the goal was to do better than humans?
  - stnmtn 2y ago
    I get your point, but do you think, over the course of a decade, the average human driver or the average car with tesla FSD is more likely to have an accident where the the fault is their own?
- ModernMech 2y ago
  Eyes are not cameras and brains are not neural networks. Until we have artificial techniques that can match the performance and functionality of this amazing biological equipment we have, our cars must rely on other sensors like LiDAR to make up for the deficiencies in our artificial perception networks that are not overcome by current techniques.
- consumer451 2y ago
  Musk himself said during the last Tesla AI Day: ~"FSD will basically require AGI." I would add that it would require not only AGI, but real-time AGI!
sMarsIntruder 2y ago
You started with a bias and ended with another one.
desixavryn 2y ago
Have you used latest FSD on HW4 recently? If not, please try it out for a few days and then come back to correct your comment :-)
- Hamuko 2y ago
  Have they managed to fix the "parking sensors"?
  - desixavryn 2y ago
    Using vision only on my HW4-Model-Y it seems to work fine.
- windward 2y ago
  Honest question: why does the HW4 matter? Hasn't FSD been sold as a service all cars with older hardware can use?
dist-epoch 2y ago
> Camera feeds and a neural network are not enough for self driving I guess we should ban humans driving then.
- sMarsIntruder 2y ago
  I’m noticing how comments with common sense gets easily downvoted.
lowmagnet 2y ago
I do wonder if this is provable via information theory.
hnburnsy 2y ago
Agreed, but I believe that camera feeds and infrastructure changes could be enough.
FeloniousHam 2y ago
Have you actually used FSD for, say, a week? I'm a fan and everyday user of FSD. It's not perfect, but it's immensely useful, and frankly amazing. It works. It drives me to work and back everyday, with maybe 1 or 2 interventions each way. I've never met any actual Tesla driver who was confused by the marketing (they're all tech guys). Some like it, some don't think it's worth the money, but everyone understands what it is. (I'm not arguing against more detection hardware, but engineering is about trade offs.)
- bingofuel 2y ago
  But not every Tesla owner is a tech guy. Not every Tesla driver lives in perfect sunny conditions. And in this case, a misinformed (or not informed at all) buyer's "engineering trade off" is death.
  - thefourthchime 2y ago
    It drives at night and in pretty heavy rain just fine.
    - FeloniousHam 2y ago
      It is not fully autonomous. It quits when blinded by the rising sun. It does drive in the rain. I just drove for an hour through a torrential downpour on a road trip, way less stressful than without it.

by Mo3 2y ago

nickthegreek 2y ago

At the very least they seem to have downsides that the can be easily overcame with a lidar system/combination of them. That alone is enough to help me decide when its my family that would be the passengers.

crooked-v 2y ago
And every other modern auto-braking safety system, except for Subaru for some reason, incorporates at least basic proximity radar.

bpodgursky 2y ago

I am not claiming that Tesla FSD is at this point, but it is obviously possible to use cameras and neural networks to drive a car, because that is literally how humans drive.

beepbooptheory 2y ago
Hubert Dreyfus rolling in his grave..
vel0city 2y ago
Humans have more senses than just vision. Also a few cameras aren't completely covering the range of human vision.
- bpodgursky 2y ago
  ? Do you use your sense of smell to drive a car? Are deaf people allowed to drive cars? No, the cameras we have now, or at least the data processing, is probably not there yet, but it's absurd to claim it's "never" possible. It's obviously either possible in a year or fifteen years, all basic hardware is advancing fast.
  - tredre3 2y ago
    > it's absurd to claim it's "never" possible Absolutely correct. The problem is that Elon has been saying that for ten years and we're not really closer to it being true. So, in the meantime, would it kill him to admit that he was wrong about lidar?
  - vel0city 2y ago
    > but it's absurd to claim it's "never" possible. I've never made such a claim. I use self driving features in my car a good bit. They use more than just cameras though. > Are deaf people allowed to drive cars? Sure, but I'd say someone unable to hear things would be disadvanted at driving and potentially less safe. But you've also completely ignored the sense of feeling, understanding the feedback you're feeling on the wheel. Ignoring the feeling of the wheels on the road. Ignoring the feeling of the g forces as the car moves. Ignoring the feeling of body sway when it's windy. You're also ignoring as others have mentioned the theory of mind of how other things actually behave around the streets. We're still not 100% sure these automated systems can actually comprehend these things. All things a computer could sense, no doubt. But it's far more than just a few cameras.
    - bpodgursky 2y ago
      > Camera feeds and a neural network are not enough for self driving, no matter how much they're training. Never ever. This is the OP claim I am saying is absurd.
- intrasight 2y ago
  Yes, but I don't think you could argue the point that the visual sense is probably 95% of it. But even so, it could be decades before computers achieve the sensory capabilities of the human visual system. Why not, during those hundred years, add some lidar to the sensory mix. Just because it didn't evolve in humans doesn't mean it's not a good thing. Bats and dolphins use the biological analogue very effectively.
  - iknowstuff 2y ago
    Their cameras have better dynamic range than humans, not to mention the neural net can consume multiple exposures simultaneously. From surround video.
    - vel0city 2y ago
      > Their cameras have better dynamic range than humans This is obviously untrue if you've ever watched videos from sentry mode.
      - iknowstuff 2y ago
        Sentry mode videos are sdr
  - bcrl 2y ago
    Vision isn't the only problem. Can computers do a decent job of theory-of-mind of other drivers? What about seeing a tire bouncing down off an overpass that's visible to the driver? Software developers love saying that it's the 95% that matters, but in safety critical systems, that simplification simply does not work.
    - intrasight 2y ago
      > Software developers love saying that it's the 95% that matters Perhaps if they're early in their career. But any who have done challenging projects know that it's the last 5% that's the hardest and that often matters the most.
- aplummer 2y ago
  Also humans suck at driving compared to what we expect of machines
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
seszett 2y ago
Do Tesla cars have stereo vision, though? I don't think they build a 3D model of the world around them at all, while humans do (not only based on our stereo vision) and largely rely on that to drive.
- andsoitis 2y ago
  Apparently, Tesla has stated that they do not use paired cameras for ranging or depth perception, which is the standard approach for stereoscopic vision. Instead of stereoscopic vision, Tesla's neural net processes the data from the cameras to create a 3D view of the surroundings. https://electrek.co/2021/07/07/hacker-tesla-full-self-drivings-vision-depth-perception-neural-net-can-see/ https://electrek.co/2021/07/07/hacker-tesla-full-self-drivin...
- iknowstuff 2y ago
  They do have 2-3 front facing cameras and their e2ee does necessarily get the same understanding of the world around it.
- sorenjan 2y ago
  They do build a 3D model: https://youtu.be/6x-Xb_uT7ts?t=129 https://youtu.be/6x-Xb_uT7ts?t=129 Although I think it's interesting that even in his demo there are cars popping in and out of existence in the 3D visualization of the environment. I don't think that makes much sense, if a car is observed and then occluded the logical conclusion should be that it's probably still there, maybe add an increasing uncertainty to its location, instead of assuming it disappeared.
  - bryanlarsen 2y ago
    Tesla switched from a 3D model that with the popping glitchiness you describe to a 4D model without the popping several months ago.
    - SR2Z 2y ago
      Sure, but during the entire time of Autopilot/FSD so far, Teslas have been crashing in ridiculous ways and killing their drivers. The "but they've patched that failure!" excuse has ALSO been around, and while the cars are definitely getting better, they're still also definitely killing people in ridiculous ways.
manquer 2y ago
The actual problem statement is can such a system do so safely. If it is just to drive a car all you need are some stepper motors and a raspberry pi. The goal is to reduce accident and fatalities not eliminate jobs . If LiDAR has 1/10th the fatality rate of camera setup and is less costlier than 10x the value of human life(as used in legal proceedings) then it still the only viable option
Aloisius 2y ago
I think artificial neural networks was implied and there is a world of difference between how biological and artificial neural networks function. That said, I'm not sure that's what the barrier is. I think humans would have trouble driving with a fixed low resolution camera too.
Detrytus 2y ago
1. Human "neural network" is few orders of magnitude more powerful than the best neural network available right now. 2. This might be obvious question but: Humans have two eyes and they are few centimeters apart so that we could use stereoscopic vision to estimate the distance. Does Tesla FSD even attempt to do something similar?
- bpodgursky 2y ago
  It is legal and safe to drive with 1 working eye. Humans have many ways of modeling distances in the real world that do not rely on stereoscopic depth.
jayd16 2y ago
A human is not just a NN, but I do wonder how well a human could drive given the Tesla camera feed. Seems like it would surely be worse than behind the wheel.
rtkwe 2y ago
Neural nets generally don't have the same level of interconnections and neurons as the human brain because it's tougher to train. I agree in principal that the human brain should be possible to replicate in a computer but I'm not sure we can do it with the current design of single direction connections between nodes. I highly doubt we'll be able to scale it down to a machine that's reasonable to fit in a car any time soon though and that's what Tesla is promising they can do with the current hardware package installed in cars (never mind that they also promised it'd be possible with the last major revision and had to walk that back and will have to install upgraded electronics in people's vehicles, unless they're just going to strand all HW3 owners who paid of FSD but the hardware is to wimpy to handle it unless that's changed since the robotaxi event).
nickthegreek 2y ago
Don’t we want it to be like way better than humans at driving? The dream pitch was that we wouldn’t have tens of thousands of preventable deaths every year. So install the damn lidar. At some point it is coming down to penny pinching and that means that preventable deaths number will not sink to the promise.
ryandvm 2y ago
The problem with that argument is that a Tesla isn't nearly as clever as a human. I have never thought a white tractor trailer disappeared as it crossed in front of me against a bright sky. I know that I should drive a little bit slower on Halloween evening because there are kids running around. I know that I need to be a little more cautious driving past the playground or dog park. I have object permanence. As it is, AI just isn't smart enough to rely on only vision and they ought to be taking advantage of every economically viable sensor to make up for the difference. Hell, I thought the goal was to do better than humans?
- stnmtn 2y ago
  I get your point, but do you think, over the course of a decade, the average human driver or the average car with tesla FSD is more likely to have an accident where the the fault is their own?
ModernMech 2y ago
Eyes are not cameras and brains are not neural networks. Until we have artificial techniques that can match the performance and functionality of this amazing biological equipment we have, our cars must rely on other sensors like LiDAR to make up for the deficiencies in our artificial perception networks that are not overcome by current techniques.
consumer451 2y ago
Musk himself said during the last Tesla AI Day: ~"FSD will basically require AGI." I would add that it would require not only AGI, but real-time AGI!

sMarsIntruder 2y ago

You started with a bias and ended with another one.

desixavryn 2y ago

Have you used latest FSD on HW4 recently? If not, please try it out for a few days and then come back to correct your comment :-)

Hamuko 2y ago
Have they managed to fix the "parking sensors"?
- desixavryn 2y ago
  Using vision only on my HW4-Model-Y it seems to work fine.
windward 2y ago
Honest question: why does the HW4 matter? Hasn't FSD been sold as a service all cars with older hardware can use?

dist-epoch 2y ago

> Camera feeds and a neural network are not enough for self driving I guess we should ban humans driving then.

sMarsIntruder 2y ago
I’m noticing how comments with common sense gets easily downvoted.

lowmagnet 2y ago

I do wonder if this is provable via information theory.

hnburnsy 2y ago

Agreed, but I believe that camera feeds and infrastructure changes could be enough.

FeloniousHam 2y ago

Have you actually used FSD for, say, a week? I'm a fan and everyday user of FSD. It's not perfect, but it's immensely useful, and frankly amazing. It works. It drives me to work and back everyday, with maybe 1 or 2 interventions each way. I've never met any actual Tesla driver who was confused by the marketing (they're all tech guys). Some like it, some don't think it's worth the money, but everyone understands what it is. (I'm not arguing against more detection hardware, but engineering is about trade offs.)

bingofuel 2y ago
But not every Tesla owner is a tech guy. Not every Tesla driver lives in perfect sunny conditions. And in this case, a misinformed (or not informed at all) buyer's "engineering trade off" is death.
- thefourthchime 2y ago
  It drives at night and in pretty heavy rain just fine.
  - FeloniousHam 2y ago
    It is not fully autonomous. It quits when blinded by the rising sun. It does drive in the rain. I just drove for an hour through a torrential downpour on a road trip, way less stressful than without it.