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Software Update Adds Autonomous Driving To Tesla's Bag of Tricks (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader writes with the news that Tesla owners today found their cars had been upgraded with the company's new autopilot feature: "That means the next time you see a Model S cruising next to you on the interstate, look closely: It may be driving itself."
Adds the submitter: Well, I guess some of you will be celebrating this; but this submitters' fear, is that if this technology becomes pervasive, the skill of operating a vehicle will be lost, as is any skill that isn't practiced regularly. It is unlikely that 'self-driving cars' will reach a point where they can handle 100% of all driving circumstances without human intervention, emergency circumstances being the first and foremost example of what an automated system could not adequately handle unaided; what will we do then, when injuries that could have been avoided or when lives are lost because people aren't competent to operate a vehicle any longer?
It costs $2,500 to unlock this new software feature.
Better known as 318230.
sue their asses off.
Surely it isn't legal everywhere yet?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
One might argue that many drivers on the roads today already aren't particularly proficient at controlling their vehicles. While it might be that some persons skills would grow worse with disuse, I think there are a goodly number of individuals out there who would be safer 'drivers' if they weren't in direct control over their cars themselves. And I don't mean just those who have poor eyesight or slow reflexes.
... "I read part of it all the way through." -- Movie Mogul Sam Goldwyn (and some slashdot readers)
People barely have any skill at that *now*.
We already have incompetent people killing others in mundane situations due to carelessness and incompetence
I told them when GM introduced its new fangled hydramatic transmission, it is going degrade the driver's skill, soon no one would know how to declutch and shift. And I was proven right. I was just bragging about my prediction coming true the other day and my grandpa chimed in. "Son, the slippery slope goes way back. I never liked them self starter anyways ... Nothing like cranking up the old tin lizzy with a cranking rod to fully wake up in the morning" he went.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Honestly, I don't see many that HAVE it...
Tesla owners today found that their cars had been upgraded with the company's new autopilot feature
Can it be programmed to find a charging station and plug itself in all by itself when its battery get low, like a Roomba? And, while they're at it, can it be programmed to vacuum my carpets or mow my lawn?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Not only that, but:
That is a SINGLE sentence.
How about if the autonomous car just stopped itself as quickly as possible in the case of an incident that it cannot handle? Then a human could take over.
From Wikipedia:
FATAL crashes.
Not just regular crashes. Or crashes with some injuries.
Even if we can only reduce that by 50% it would be worth it. Who cares if people don't learn how to operate a vehicle? As the parent poster noted, they seem to be having problems doing so SAFELY right now.
Not all cars driven by humans can handle 100% of all driving circumstances, and that's with a human 'intervening' the entire time.
I predict that rural highway driving will be the first place that autos can operate autonomously. It may be only limited-access highways (freeways with no intersections, no lights, no at-grade crossings) but could probably work on traditional federal highways. Cities and rural undeveloped or underdeveloped roads will have to come later.
I'm not all that worried about atrophying driver skill. It will be a very long time before the bulk of driving can be autonomous, and I expect that until we have cars that don't need human intervention (which will mean developing protocols and procedures for handling exceptional situations) drivers will still have to drive enough to keep their skills.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Give me a call when one of these clever cars can back my boat down a crowded ramp. All ramps have different slope angles and water levels change with the tides so every launch requires a different solution of where to stop.
From what I've seen of self-driving mowers and robot vacuum cleaners in action I'm not enthused about the level of thought that goes into problem solving for these things.
Quite happy to see millions of these things in New York and Los Angeles though, and from Youtube footage, around Moscow would be a hoot too.
Computers:
* See and process information from all directions at once
* React in a millisecond to changing conditions
* Never get bored, tired, or distracted
* Don't drive recklessly for thrills
The notion that humans will actually react better than an automated system in an emergency seems backwards to me. I expect a computer to react much more competently and predictably, if for no other reason than the computer can analyze and react a thousand times faster. It's humans that are *causing* most of the emergencies in the first place by needlessly driving into each other at high speeds.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I've always wondered how self driving cars would handle rural areas. In particular rural mountain areas with a foot of snow on the road. In a lot of rural areas there may be a distance of hundreds or thousands of meters between the GPS position of a house and the actual house. I can just envision walking a mile uphill in a foot snow while your car sits at the bottom of your driveway with a blinking, "NO ROAD" error. I just don't see how that problem can be overcome to the point where all vehicles could be 100% self driving without any possibility of direct steering/throttle input from the driver.
"Software will never be able to beat human reactions!" Yet in many cases now, it already has.
Flying is in some respects much simpler than driving; and, auto-pilots can now take off, cruise, and land.
The real test? What the insurance rates are -- self-driving cars will likely be a lower risk, and thus cost less to insure. Perhaps not at the beginning, while the kinks are being worked out. (Around the dial.)
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Sure humans might lose some of their proficiency at controlling a vehicle but the self-driving car would make those skills less necessary.
Which would have fewer fatal accidents: automated vehicles with a human with poor skills or a standard car with normal everyday drivers?
I am betting the automated car wins. Sure the automated car may have some accidents that the human might avoid but I'm betting the total goes down.
Now I don't want an automated vehicle but that is because I really enjoy driving but the accident thing is IMO a red herring.
What makes you think that an automated car would be worse that you or you grandma at driving in bad weather?
People arguing that some people will get hurt because a human no longer knows how to control the vehicle in an emergency are like anti-vaxxers saying their one child *might* react negatively to the vaccine. Both groups are ignoring the 99.9% of cases where people will NO LONGER BE DYING from STUPID SHIT.
"if this technology becomes pervasive, the skill of operating a vehicle will be lost" Based on my experience this has already happened (or more likely never existed in the first place ;-)
It may not be worse but it will have programmed sense, so it will refuse to attempt it.
I can't speak for everyone but I have these type features in my car (adaptive cruise, lane assist, proximity warnings, blind spot detection, etc) and I can say without a doubt for me it surely hasn't made me a better driver. I get into my other car without all of that and find myself making noob driving mistakes (not checking blind spots, not keeping consistent speed, much longer parallel parking, etc). It's actually kind of unnerving at how fast I came to rely on the car to do these tasks for me.
I haven't seen any studies so maybe I'm just a goof but I consciously try not to rely on those things because I don't want to forget how to actually drive.
I thought it takes a lot of hw to have a decent auto-pilot capability (laser rangers, video cameras, radars) .
Apparently, Teslas were already equipped?
4wdloop
Also I see autonomous vehicles being staged in their deployment. Self-driving vehicles are a traffic and transport engineers wet dream, they will dramatically increase traffic flows on existing roads. So there will be a significant incentive to municipalities to get sections of their roads "AI" ready.
My prediction is that trunk roads will be the first ones to go autonomous with councils actively contributing to the mapping of the roads. Essentially you will get into your car, drive yourself through the back streets till you get to your main road and at that point the car takes over. Initially you will be mixed in with human driven cars, but then over time priority lanes and pathing will be given to the self driving cars until finally, once self driving cars hit critical mass the trunk roads will be self drive only.
You will still have to be able to drive, in fact a % of every drive will be driven by a human. But the main roads with the bulk traffic will be autonomous.
I get that _you_ may feel safer if something else does things for you but lets be realistic about the numbers and risk. Fear mongering is not how you go about advocating change, but that is what you are attempting to do. The appeal to emotion is way too obvious.
To start, we are moving the numbers to more recent 2013, in which you had a .0088% chance of a fatal car crash.
By comparison, you had a .17% chance of dying do to heart disease, a .02% chance of dying from diabetes. You had a higher chance of death by suicide and influenza than you did from a car wreck. (math done using a sample size of 350,000,000 and numbers from the CDC and here (easier to find than numbers hidden in the bowels of the CDC PDF).
The point is there are lots of risks in life. Breathing in a lung full of air could cause you to catch influenza, or pneumonia. You are way more likely to DIE from those things than by driving a car, even with shitty drivers on the road. Eating poorly, not exercising, and ingesting the wrong substances (carcinogens) are exponentially more deadly than cars.
If you want to push self driving cars I'm fine with that. You can buy one and do as you wish. Current technology does not make them that much better than humans. Come to Mountain View and drive around near one. They can't differentiate between a speed limit sign and a "during school speed limit" sign so we end up having big backups on some main roads because of those cars. They don't accelerate any faster than my grandma, and don't break any better or worse than a person either.
One day I'm sure they will be great, but that day is not today. I would still rather have the option of manual versus no control of the car. Think about tyranny and extortion for a minute, and that can be corporate as well as government.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I've been driving with antilock breaks for so long, I'm fairly certain I'd die on an icy road without them--but the breaks themselves (combined with traction control and other features) reduce the chances of me ever needing to use them in the first place.
If autonomous cars are better "drivers" than people, I'd expect far fewer emergency situations on the road.
emergency circumstances being the first and foremost example of what an automated system could not adequately handle unaided
I disagree. Emergency circumstances are when I would MOST trust an automated system to choose and execute the best response quickly.
So what if driving skills are lost. How many people can genuinely start a fire without a match, lighter or some other ready to go ignition device? How about those people who can actually remember the composition of gunpowder, and if they can know a way to actually get those ingredients? Ok, now about how to skin an animal, how to hunt, how to build shelter?
If driving a car goes the way of riding horses then skills are lost to the general public and only retained by those with a particular interest in them. And you know what? Nothing of value was lost.
Such as when the center engine of a DC-10 goes "bang", cutting off the hydraulics and the only control is from adjusting the throttles of the remaining two good engines?
And for atrophied skills, consider Air France 330 (IIRC) from 2009, which was flown in a controlled stall into the Atlantic Ocean because the co-pilot forgot that recovery from a stall requires the nose to be pushed down. Original cause was autopilot decoupling when the pitot tube got iced up.
Main problem with computer control is trusting that the people writing the software properly anticipated all of the situations that could be encountered. The quality of most code leaves me with a bad feeling about this. An example, an Airbus on a demonstration flight crashed because the software countermanded the pilot's attempt to pull out of a dive, the software was trying to prevent excessive g-loads but the programmer didn't consider that hitting the ground would be worse than bending the airframe.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
So there will be a significant incentive to municipalities to get sections of their roads "AI" ready.
There will, however, be just as little money to do that as there is to maintain them currently. The cost of getting roads "AI ready" will fall, in any case, on the taxpayer, the vast majority of whom will not be able to afford to own an AV.
Initially you will be mixed in with human driven cars, but then over time priority lanes and pathing will be given to the self driving cars
And the money for creating new lanes just for the few who own AV will come from the general taxpayer, too.
once self driving cars hit critical mass the trunk roads will be self drive only.
It will never happen. There will be too many taxpayers who don't own the cars who have just as much right to use the main roads as anyone else. Forcing those people off the main roads will only cripple the non-main roads as they will be forced to pick up the long-distance travelers and deal with the local users both.
But the main roads with the bulk traffic will be autonomous.
I remember when we were being told that every car would be a flying car. I remember when AT&T was telling us that video phone calls would be the normal way of communicating -- using wired phone lines.
Every new technology has acolytes who make stupendous claims in the face of reality, and the vast majority of those claims never come true.
Do we count the Slashdot editors who are beaten to death by mobs of people for posting "self-driving car" advertisements every few hours?
You are welcome on my lawn.
We'll do the same thing we do when current software fails. We'll fix bugs.
How about if the autonomous car just stopped itself as quickly as possible in the case of an incident that it cannot handle?
What could possibly go wrong?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The notion that humans will actually react better than an automated system in an emergency seems backwards to me.
I was thinking that cars might struggle at first with strange scenarios, not ones where it needs to react swiftly. Something like if a police officer is directing your vehicle around an accident at a five way intersection, in a construction zone during a rainstorm at dawn, or some such thing.
Blah blah horse and buggy are way better blah blah what's gonna happen with all the blacksmiths blah blah horses are smarter blah blah.
Get with the program.
Cut global warming.
Drive clean.
No more chemicals or explosion based propulsion.
I think you'll be able to find cases where humans react better and cases where computers work better.
This is true, for now... but consider what happens over time: every time a computer does something sufficiently poorly (i.e. badly enough to cause an accident), there will be a full black-box recording and log of the conditions and operations that led up to the accident. The car company's programmers will go over the situation with a fine-toothed comb to understand what happened, and update the software to handle that situation better in the future.
Rinse and repeat for a decade or two, and the number of scenarios where the car is still worse than a human will start to become quite small.
(Meanwhile, human beings will continue to drive at more or less their present skill level, since they don't learn much from each others' mistakes)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Actually, I think bad weather is one of the places where automated cars will make a very positive impact on safety. We already have a limited form of this technology with things like anti-lock brakes, traction control, stability control, etc. If you've spent your entire life driving cars with these safety features, they probably feel normal to you. But, as the article suggests, once you come to rely on these features, you lose your ability to handle the vehicle safely in the absence of them. Have you ever pumped your brakes to prevent skidding? Do you know how to steer out of oversteer? Can your brain detect these conditions and react to them before you are in a dangerous situation? For most people, the answer is "probably not".
SPOCK: Yes. Yes.
MCCOY: What is it, Spock?
SPOCK; An invention, Doctor. First potassium nitrate, and now if he can find some sulphur and a charcoal deposit or ordinary coal.
(Kirk is at the outcrop of sharp diamonds, and putting them into the bamboo too.)
* Never get bored, tired, or distracted
I'd add to that list:
* Never drive preoccupied or in emotional imbalance
* Never drive intoxicated or on drugs
Let's face it, we don't leave the rest of our lives behind when we get behind the wheel. If things are troubling or exciting at home or at work or in your love life or with your friends or relatives the mind is churning on it. And while I don't know many who will blatantly drive drunk, I think quite a few have pushed it with hangovers and such. It certainly doesn't take much to drive better than humans at their worst...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Well where I live they are always building new roads and tunnels to keep traffic moving. So there is a budget there. And they also seem quite keen on making lanes transit lanes where you have to have a minimum of 2 or 3 people in the car to use them. They don't build extra lanes to do this. They re-purpose existing lanes. And mapping a road way in high resolution is significantly cheaper than digging a big ass tunnel.
And you are right, the funding will come from the general tax payer. The same tax payer who may not even own a car at all. This is how government works so I'm not sure what your point is... I pay taxes for buses I never use....
Lets say self drive cars came out today, fully working. They will be hugely expensive and most people wont have them. Then in 5 years time a large number of new luxury models will have self drive. 10 years after that it will be most mainstream cars will have it. 10 years after that it will simply be standard in all cars. Give it another 10 and there will be almost no cars without self drive on the road.
Once AV becomes a developed system the costs will become negligible. Think about it. How many old PCs do you have lying around that even though they are perfectly functional you can't even give away? Electronics are cheap once they become mass produced. When you are talking about 90 million units per year your cost per item will be low.
You forgot about the part where a sensor fails, the AV is the cause of a multiple fatality accident (e.g., plows head on to a school bus), the entire country hates on the automaker, and the families of the victims all sue the automaker.
I can see the fnords!
"Bad weather" as in rain is not a problem. The problem is snow and ice. Tesla's technology comes from Mobileye inc. http://www.mobileye.com/ Tesla's technology and Google's technology do not work in snow and ice. It will work at night and in many rainy conditions although glare can cause problems at night in the rain. The sensor's depend on seeing painted lane markers, which may be difficult when there is glare from light in the dark in the rain.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
This is the most awesome thing ever. All you morons riding in your self driving cars will be forced to pull over because those of us with manual drive cars will figure out real quick your cars will do everything in its power to prevent a crash. All we have to do is act like we are going to run into your car and it will get out of our way. I will never be stuck in traffic again.
We live in an age where computers with excellent programming have extreme trouble and can't deal with reading some squiggly letters yet we expect them to flawlessly navigate in the real world equivalent of a captcha phrase?
Adaptive cruse, proximity warning and even lane following on the freeway seem to be achievable today with a reasonable level of safety. But it's simply not going to be fully autonomous until we have as creative algorithms as living things employ. I mean its a sad state of affairs when it takes multiple cameras, lidar, sonar, radar and more, with world class programming, to fail at besting a half attentive human basically using a stereo camera setup alone. You have to manually enter the entire map on the route to even compare and that simply isn't scalable or even the same thing.
Can you give details of this Airbus demonstration flight crash? I think you've got a garbled version of Air France flight 296. The plane did refuse the pilot's command to raise the nose, but that was to prevent a stall. At the time this pilot/plane conflict occurred, the pilot had flown the plane into a state where a crash was inevitable.
Inspired by the United Airlines flight 232 (the DC-10 crash you cite), software has been written to control planes by differential thrust, and to do so better than people can. As I recall, it was deemed to expensive to put it into service. (I'm aware of two incidents since then when such software might have been used, and it probably would not have changed the outcome for either. Japan Airlines 123 likely was unlandable even with computer due to vertical stabilizer damage, and the DHL A300 damaged by a SAM at Baghdad in 2003 was landed successfully manually.)
I agree with you that "Main problem with computer control is trusting that the people writing the software properly anticipated all of the situations that could be encountered." However they don't need perfection - so long as they anticipate enough that computer-caused catastrophes are less common than human-caused catastrophes they prevent, it is a safety win.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
"Driving is fun. You have an algorithm for that?"
Oh, but they also took that into account: driving is less fun each day it passes.
"And I'd certainly choose computer over human for bringing my car to a safe stop when it has to deal with aquaplaning."
No dose of software can overcome physic laws. ...but, on the other hand, it can infuse a dose of common sense so it has not to deal with aquaplaning by avoiding it instead.
* Never get bored, tired, or distracted
I'd add to that list: * Never drive preoccupied or in emotional imbalance * Never drive intoxicated or on drugs
When I have sex, there is a chance I could get a disease, or a stalker girlfriend, but regardless of risk, there are some pleasures in life I'll never outsource to a machine. Driving is similar and I'm sure I'm not the only one with this opinion.
So much human-hyping in that.
Firstly, which skills, exactly, do you keep sharp through a monotonous, repetitive activity like highway driving? Especially in the US with its turtle-speed speed limits? With the Tesla and other car makers approach to autonomous driving, the car is not even trying to manage all possible situations, only the ones that are so fucking boring, humans actually fall asleep doing them.
Secondly, what makes you think humans are better in emergency situations? For starters, we have this literally fatal flaw called reaction time.
No, humans are terrible in car emergencies. 99% or so of them require one of two very simple things that a computer is much better at: Bring the vehicle to a controlled stop, fast. - or - Steer to avoid the obstacle, do it right now.
What computers can't handle well are exceptional situations. But in 20+ years of driving, I've not had one of those that was an emergency. This is stuff like road construction where the lane markers are completely missing. Or some situation where police is directing traffic, telling you to do something that the road signs and markers clearly forbid - do the self-driving cars understand police gestures and that they overrule road signs?
In an emergency, fast is better than smart, especially when a crash is unavoidable. Every km/h you can get slower before crashing matters to the injuries you will suffer.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I'm in.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Actually, I think bad weather is one of the places where automated cars will make a very positive impact on safety. We already have a limited form of this technology with things like anti-lock brakes, traction control, stability control, etc. If you've spent your entire life driving cars with these safety features, they probably feel normal to you. But, as the article suggests, once you come to rely on these features, you lose your ability to handle the vehicle safely in the absence of them. Have you ever pumped your brakes to prevent skidding? Do you know how to steer out of oversteer? Can your brain detect these conditions and react to them before you are in a dangerous situation? For most people, the answer is "probably not".
Every winter I go out skidding alone in my car to hone those skills. I'm driving a FWD Ford Focus now so it understeers, but I do pull the hand brake to play a bit and practice.
Three years ago I drove on snow for the first time while visiting Tromso. The minute we got the rental car I took it out skidding and my friend in the passenger sear was terrified. However, on the last day of our trip I was rounding a roundabout when I lost traction at about 15-20 KPH and almost understeered into a lake. I managed to steer off the road and regain control. The passenger didn't even know that I had lost control, he just perceived that I was driving off the roadway. Snow is _slippery_ and I have only my few minutes practicing skidding to thank for saving us from an icy swim that day.
Sadly it's been almost twenty years since I've driven a car without ABS, and I do wonder how I would handle an ABS failure. My terrible Ford Focus has single-channel ABS and rear disc brakes, so the ABS kicks in even in normal driving conditions, sometimes even in the dry (even with the wife driving). At least I've gotten a fair bit of practice in _obstacle avoidance_ with the increased stopping distance when that happens, but it is unnerving when that happens approaching a crosswalk with pedestrians.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
I think the issue with some modern aeroplanes, which links in well with this discussion on semi-autonomous vehicles, is that although the planes are chock full of useful/helpful features and protections which have been part of reducing the overall accident/fatality rate, when the systems eventually give up it can be a big surprise.
Going suddenly from everything OK to here, you have a go can be very messy and has lead to some fairly spectacular crashes. The human element of the operation has not been involved in the decision loop or had access to certain inputs until the software decides that its goose is cooked, gives up the ghost and leaves the resulting mess to a startled operator to make some sense of. It takes alertness, skill, deep technical knowledge and a large dose of luck to recover from a situation where the automatics have gone ???, as it is normally when there have been multiple failures which have defeated sensor logic.
There is also the issue of de-skilling, which inevitably happens when an automated system produces better overall results than a human driven one. You let the automatics do the job but do not get enough practice to stay competent or never reach that level in the first place. How can a neural network (you) get good at something without sufficient training?
This is true, for now... but consider what happens over time: every time a computer does something sufficiently poorly (i.e. badly enough to cause an accident), there will be a full black-box recording and log of the conditions and operations that led up to the accident. The car company's programmers will go over the situation with a fine-toothed comb to understand what happened, and update the software to handle that situation better in the future.
They've been doing that for decades in aviation and yet we still require humans in the cockpit. We've been able to automate most flights for some time now but there is a demonstrable benefit to having a human pilot involved in many cases. You are quite correct that over time it will get better but I think the time where a computer only system outperforms a computer/human system will be a long way off.
(Meanwhile, human beings will continue to drive at more or less their present skill level, since they don't learn much from each others' mistakes)
That does not have to be the case. The reason people don't become better drivers is because there is no requirement for them to be better. Getting a driver's license is ludicrously easy when in reality it should be much harder to get and maintain like a pilot's license. People get better when you train them to be better. But we just give a few classes to a teenager, a perfunctory test and then proclaim them ready to drive safely until the time they die. And because of that many of them die much sooner than they might otherwise. There are a lot of people on the road who have NO business driving a motor vehicle. I've got a few in my family.
We also aren't very harsh on punishing drivers who do things that are known to be dangerous. If I'm flying a plane and I'm observed doing something stupid the FAA will come down on me (rightly) like a ton of bricks. We're generally much softer on drivers and I think to our detriment.
While many drivers may THINK they are "skilled", the mere fact that there is no "Are you a retard?" test when buying a car or getting a driver's license and the physical test is mostly concerned with "Are you blind?" and NOT with one's hand-eye coordination or reflexes - indicate that the level of "skill" among the general population is mostly imaginary.
Traffic needs to be rigorously coordinated with special roadside signals and marks, special laws and regulations are created to manage traffic, even special roads are there because most people suck at driving and pedestrian walkways on the side of the road are elevated ABOVE the level of the road so it would be harder for drivers to drive on them - almost all infrastructure BUILT FOR DRIVING is built with intention to LIMIT driver's ability to drive wherever and however he/she likes.
Driving infrastructure is engineered with an assumption that MOST PEOPLE SUCK AT DRIVING.
Hint: Half of all the drivers are below average - because Gauss.
Only the upper 16% or so have "skill", and a rather significant number of those are professional drivers working in human and cargo transport and having actual driving skills and experience required to hold that position.
Everyone else is either slightly better than average (with only about a quarter of population being better enough for it to count), an "average driver" or among the wast armies of below average drivers.
And when it doesn't matter how skilled you are if the guys in front and back of you and on all sides are below average (well... the guy on your left might be an "average or better" driver) - you're far better off if everyone is being piloted around by a computer.
And nothing of skills will be lost.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
If the auto-pilot outperforms most human drivers, then switching to it is a win.
What I really want though, is to trade off auto pilot for higher speed. A robot can drive at 180 MPH just about as easily as it can drive at 55. I want to see real high-speed lanes on our highways. They could go a long way to reducing congestion.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The NTSB will tell you, far and away the most common mode of aircraft accidents is what they call "controlled flight into terrain". Not mechanical issues or weather.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It's fine to use Tesla's new software release of (what it calls) autopilot features as a basis for discussion of future possibilities, but this release is far from providing autonomous driving or a self-driving car. This is beta software of certain limited features; it requires constant vigilant attention to the road and surrounding conditions by the driver and is intended for use only on divided limited-access multi-lane highways. Indeed, it could be said -- as some users have -- that it requires *more* vigilance than conventional driving because the user is a beta tester.
Somewhat separately, at low speeds it will find and maneuver into parallel parking spaces.
Amusingly enough, they make the fallacious argument that the human is always better in "emergency situations" than the car. That begs the question: why would a human be capable of recognizing and reacting to an emergency situation more quickly and correctly than a computer? If the human can recognize the situation so much better, won't the human avoid the situation entirely in the first place?
Most humans respond to emergency situations by panic braking and trying to steer out of the way, which usually spins the car. Without rigorous driver training in advanced city and highway driving classes provided by Summit Racing or Skip Barber's Racing School--training which ranges $1000-ish for 3 days of 8 hour training blocks--drivers in the US never receive any instruction on threshold braking, steering in emergency situations (with or without anti-lock brakes), skid recovery, suspension system limits (how well your car handles), and defensive driving techniques including active awareness and lane toss exercises (steering instead of panic braking when you can avoid an obstacle you can't brake fast enough to avoid hitting).
Most people just don't have these skills; and many crash into shit while putting on make-up or eating an egg mcmuffin in the car.
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Yet so many here seem to think a human driver can overcome physical laws. Apparently humans are magic.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
"If you are in the right lane of a highway and cars are merging at slower speeds, most drivers want to move over a lane and go around them. But the Tesla does not know that. It will instead automatically slow to match the slower speeds of the merging cars."
So how many people will just sit in the right lane coming up on a merge, slow down, causing all the other cars behind, autonomous or otherwise, to slow down too, not knowing why, and you have either a crash (from unexpected slowdowns or abrupt lane changes) or a bottleneck.
This might not drive you from point A to point B, but it will further erode people's awareness and driving abilities.
Actually, around 90% of aviation accidents are caused by pilot error.
Your statistics are wrong. Pilot error accounts for 38% of major airline crashes, 75% of commuter/air-taxi crashes and 85% of general aviation crashes. So the least experienced pilots crash the most which is not at all surprising. This strongly supports my need-better-training thesis. Among the most experienced pilots with (presumably) the best quality and best maintained equipment, pilot error accounts for a minority of crashes. I stand by my thesis that a well designed human/computer system can be more robust than either part independently. The data largely seems to back me up on this though I will concede that future technology advances may shift things in favor of computer only someday.
Humans are really poor troubleshooters.
Untrained humans are poor troubleshooters though I agree that people in general have faults. And computers have different limitations, not the least of which is their inability to deal with unexpected circumstances.
The notion that humans will actually react better than an automated system in an emergency seems backwards to me.
This gets far worse when you introduce systems which have the side effect of reducing human attentiveness and reduce the need for a human to rely on a skill in the first place.
I have a story from a refinery I once worked at. One of the large compressors had an almost monthly hiccup which severely knocked about the process unit and typically caused some anger and panic in the control room. We found and fixed the compressor problem. 5 years later I was talking to some guys from that refinery and I asked them how it went. Apparently the compressor ran perfectly for 4 years after which it had a very minor hiccup by comparison to the previous ones. The entire refinery was down for a week because none of the operators remembered how to identify or rectify the problem and the safety system shut the entire hunk of metal down.
If you think humans are bad at emergency management now, just imagine how bad they will be when they don't actually have to deal with emergency or don't pay enough attention to know an emergency is actually happening.
consider Air France 330 (IIRC) from 2009
I think you mean AF447 - an Airbus A330
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.