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Elon Musk: Tesla's Autopilot Software Could Save Half a Million Lives Every Year (fortune.com)
An anonymous reader writes: In the wake of a deadly crash involving a Model S that was driving with its Autopilot software turned on, Tesla CEO Elon Musk issued a few interesting remarks on the technology to Fortune. Notably, the publication recently ran a piece attempting to portray Tesla in a bad light by noting that Musk sold more than $2 billion worth of Tesla stock just 11 days after the aforementioned May, 2016 accident. And all the while, shareholders were kept in the dark up until recently. "Indeed, if anyone bothered to do the math (obviously, you did not) they would realize that of the over 1M auto deaths per year worldwide, approximately half a million people would have been saved if the Tesla autopilot was universally available. Please, take 5 mins and do the bloody math before you write an article that misleads the public.
when it doesnt http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/3...
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Pilot-aid would be better and might have saved an extra life.
The Tesla autopilot running under ideal conditions (with a human backup) compared to a human driver under all conditions are not equivalent, and we cannot directly compare their failure rates. Beware of naive statistics.
This would only be true under ideal circumstances in which everyone and everything worked flawlessly in tandem, and that just isn't the real world any more than the opposite statement. Suck it up, take responsibility, and be a man, Elon. Do the right thing and suspend public trials of this tech until it's truly ready.
How many years will it take for the automated car to be affordable for the common person? I can't afford a car with even the most minimal of automation right now save for standard cruise control. Did anyone catch the article on how the average family can't afford most cars as it is? Most people don't even see the point of buying a new car, much less an automated new car. Saving lives with automation is a pipe dream until there is a plan to make these something that everyone can buy which isn't going to happen any time soon. Stop making it an excuse to kill people with experimentation.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
He continued, “Indeed, if anyone bothered to do the math (obviously, you did not) they would realize that of the over 1M auto deaths per year worldwide, approximately half a million people would have been saved if the Tesla autopilot was universally available. Please, take 5 mins and do the bloody math before you write an article that misleads the public.”
Are these projections from peer-reviewed research published in a proper journal? Are these projections based on public Tesla claims? Is this Elon Musk pulling numbers out of his trunk?
Considering these are real lives of actual people at stake I hope Tesla did some serious research before selling these to the public.
I stole this Sig
That level of wealth alone would save far more lives. Anybody who could afford a Tesla could also afford clean drinking water, air conditioning, medicine, proper nutrition, etc. Musk is just taking in one figure and ignoring the fact that so much of the world is driving a run-down beater that doesn't have anti-lock brakes, or they're just driving motor scooters which are far more dangerous, or they're driving nothing at all and hauling water from toxic wells because of POVERTY. How about Musk buy a helmet for every 3rd world motor-scooter rider, then get back to us on this?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I think there's a huge unrealized danger to these quasi-autonomous cars because people will treat them like a a fully controlled car and do things they shouldn't (e.g. read the news paper, watch a movie, doze off, etc.). Right now the drivers of these expensive Tesla cars are not representative of the larger driving public. If we put this technology into 100% of the cars on the road I predict the number of accidents due to imperfect AI will rise significantly because of driver inattention. It may still prove to be an improvement over human controlled, but I doubt the numbers of lives saved will be what Musk claims.
Give me a car that will take me to work while I nap in the backseat. I have no interest in being on the road filled with semi-autonomous cars.
..and half of people think its the fault of the tool he was (mis)using.
Frankly Tesla's autopilot isn't all that special. It's just a combination of lane keeping, adaptive cruise control, and brake assist that pretty much is available from any car company.
There will never be an automated system if any kind that won't cause deaths.
I love the idea of self-driving cars, but I think it's going to be hard to get it to work acceptably "as is", that is, the way the problem is being approached.
Much of the decision-making must remain "onboard" the car but I think self-driving vehicles will be vastly improved with some feedback and control signals from the road or a locale-specific traffic guidance computer.
In other words, in addition to its own decision-making software, the vehicle should also be receiving some sort of signals or guidance info from the road in the area it's currently passing through.
Sort of an air-traffic control system where responsibility for air traffic is handed off from control center to control center as the plane makes its way from point A to point B. The difference is that this guidance should be completely automated, and be an adjunct to what the car does, not its primary means of navigation. I'm see this primarily as speed and road condition management info.
I know, I know- what about hackers? Yeah, that'll be an issue for sure, but it can be mitigated by the use of some solid encryption routines and boundary-monitoring, i.e. to make sure that a Bad Guy(tm) doesn't hack the controller and tell all the vehicles in its area to all speed up to 100mph or whatever. Or to tell 1/2 to speed up and 1/2 to come to a dead stop. Some things shouldn't be able to be overridden, such as max speed and collision avoidance.
In short, I think autonomous vehicles would be better (and probably safer) if they not only thought for themselves, but also were receiving some sanity-checking and guidance info specific to the road or area they travel on.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
The truth of the matter is, Tesla pretty much HAS to come out swinging, defending its self-driving technology, or else it's easily "game over" before it even really gets started for them. Somebody had to release the tech for the general public to use first, and Tesla took the chance. (The other car manufacturers have been far more conservative with things, offering only "emergency braking / collision detection and avoidance" or just parallel parking assist.... individual components that would make up a "self driving car".)
That said? I agree with the folks here saying his stats are way off the mark and unrealistic. Since you can't even use his technology right now when not on a highway, it's not even an option for saving any lives in collisions that happen on smaller roads.
I think it was Mercedes or maybe Audi who commented that the Tesla system uses cameras and computer AI to determine if something is in the car's way. Their system used radar in conjunction with cameras, which sounds superior to me.
It's all marketing hype and mere armchair statistics.
Fortune doesn't know how to do the math, I don't know how to do the math, Musk doesn't know how to do the math, but perhaps a few readers of this comment could do the math.
It would take 275 million miles of autonomous driving to have any confidence at all that an autonomous car is safer than a human driver.
Ars Technica reported on it, and if you want to see the math, the RAND corporation, who are kind of experts at the math, have a detailed report available, which explains the math.
Basically, while the marketing engine can claim that autonomous driving is safer, it's not even possible to have any proof of it within any reasonable level of statistical confidence.
I mean, sure, we try to make driving safer, and assisted driving may help, but please, let's be realistic about where we're at.
He has a bad case of the 'Chomskys'!
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I didn't RTFA but Tesla tracks all cars in real time. They have observed that cars on Autopilot are half as likely to have an accident (as measured by air bag deployment).
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Maths & Journalism don't mix just look at the press coverage of the UK EU Referendum
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