Elon Musk Rolled Out Autopilot Despite Engineers' Safety Concerns, Says Report (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: When Elon Musk announced last fall that all of Tesla's cars would be capable of "full autonomy," engineers who were working on the suite of self-driving features, known as Autopilot, did not believe the system was ready to safely control a car, according to the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ report sheds more light on the tension that exists between the Autopilot team and Musk. CNN previously reported in July that Musk "brushed aside certain concerns as negligible compared to Autopilot's overall lifesaving potential," and that employees who worked on Autopilot "struggled" to make the same reconciliation.

A major cause of this conflict has apparently been the way Musk chose to market Autopilot. The decision to refer to Autopilot as a "full self-driving" solution -- language that makes multiple appearances on the company's website, especially during the process of ordering a car -- was the spark for multiple departures, including Sterling Anderson, who was in charge of the Autopilot team during last year's announcement. Anderson left the company two months later, and was hit with a lawsuit from Tesla that alleged breach of contract, employee poaching, and theft of data related to Autopilot, though the suit was eventually settled. A year before that, a lead engineer warned the company that Autopilot wasn't ready to be released shortly before the original rollout. Evan Nakano, the senior system design and architecture engineer at the time, wrote that development of Autopilot was based on "reckless decision making that has potentially put customer lives at risk," according to documents obtained by the WSJ.

Comments

Re:There's always one or two voices....

[JohnFen]

anyone who's tried to execute a change or deliver an outcome will always find one or two dissenting voices in any organisation of scale.

Absolutely true. And it's equally true that it's foolish to not take those dissenting opinions very seriously (even if, after careful consideration, they don't change your plans).

In any organization, there is a strong "rah-rah" tendency, and people tend to suppress their own doubts. Nobody wants to be a wet blanket or potentially risk their career by not seeming to be a "team player". So the voices of those who point out problems need to be listened to much more carefully than the voices of those who say "everything's great".

Re:Mr Musk

[PoopJuggler]

Nobody wants self-driving cars?

Re:Not surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

If it doesn't autonomously pilot the vehicle, it's not autopilot and should not be called such.

And autopilot for planes is far, far, far more advanced, capable, robust, and reliable than the shit Elon is selling. The people using it are explicitly trained on what it can and can't do. People buying Teslas only get the marketing speak shoved in their face.

When any autopilot specifically informs a human driver to put their hands on the wheel and pay attention, and the fucking idiot behind the wheel ignores that, I'd say it's pretty damn obvious who and what is at fault.

Airline pilots are intelligent and highly trained individuals. That is why they are not found on every street corner, and are worth more than a dime a dozen. The main mistake Elon made was assuming that the average driver wasn't a fucking idiot.

Someone always has to make the tough call

[RhettLivingston]

I've been in engineering organizations releasing new products that had life saving or threatening potential. It is always an agonizing, scary hard call as to when you've passed the threshold of risk.

There is a bell curve with a peak. You rarely hit the peak. If you make the call too late, you cost the lives of those you might have saved - too soon, you cost lives of those who might have saved themselves.

Even if you hit the peak perfectly, you'll always be able to truthfully argue that some people are being saved who would have died and some are dying who would have lived. The peak is a point of balance between the two - not a perfect elimination.

I can remember many times hating my bosses when they released a product that I didn't feel was ready. As an engineer, I have to be over-focused on the problems and stand no chance of seeing when I am perfectly perched on that probability peak. They had to pry the projects from my hands to get them out the door. I actually begged in tears once. But, in retrospect, I can't think of any case where my bosses weren't right in releasing the product that I was concerned about releasing.

What we need to force progress is for attorneys to get smart and start figuring out how to file more effective suits for lack of progress toward autonomy. How many are dying today because we don't have it? We need to focus hard on that.

Re:Someone always has to make the tough call

[RhettLivingston]

Having the license in this country is often career-ending, much like having a PhD. It can make it very difficult to get a job. I've been in corporations that had thousands of engineers and never met anyone I knew to have it. I think they tend to be in certain structural and mechanical, and most civil and architectural engineering areas. The electrical, aeronautical, and computer engineering professions have much less of this.

Regardless, there is no such thing as a vehicle on the road today that does not make some safety compromise. Not one single vehicle uses the best-known safety mechanism for every single aspect of the car. No one could buy it if they did, and it wouldn't meet other necessary criteria if every compromise was made in the safety direction. Our government often has to force the matter by making regulations like the ones coming down the pipe soon to require all vehicles to have automatic braking technology. This is tech that has been available for a while, but many engineers must be signing off on vehicles that are killing people, otherwise, the government wouldn't have to be stepping in.

Everything engineered makes these compromises. For example, every building might be designed to handle a 500-year quake, but what happens if a 5,000-year quake comes along?

Airbags are an interesting example. Even the best airbag systems kill some people who would not have died without airbags. But they save many more that would have. So, you accept the compromise. Many years ago, seatbelts did the same and still do. Yet, we have them, and are even required by law in most places to wear them.

With the autonomous vehicle question, it is ready to deploy when it will save more people than it will kill when measured versus human drivers (all of them, not just the competent ones). To wait any longer would be killing those people that it might have saved. Of course, determining when that point is is a near impossibility. The hard call will either be made or the vehicles will never be made because the engineers will never be able to say with any product that it is not flawed in some situation - often in which it is being misused by the consumer.

Realistically, we do wait longer than the point of net balance because the public does not understand statistically-based decisions very well. When it is your family member that died because the tech failed you want to blame the tech without looking at the whole picture. We often don't even know when our family member died because the tech that could have saved them was held back because it was being over-engineered.

Often, these hard decisions are the reason for regulation - not to protect the public but to allow the companies protection in deploying something that a big picture organization like the government has determined will be a net benefit to the public while being a detriment to some individuals. The engineers then have the excuse of having met the regulation. It seems to work better with our minds.

Absent specific regulations and tests to target (which is the ideal situation in a free society), the business leaders are usually the ones who make the tough calls.

Re:Deep neural nets will never give us full autono

[BasilBrush]

Neural Nets are very specifically NOT rule based. They are trained.
GOFAI was pretty much a phrase invented to label stuff that IS NOT the neural net approach.
Autonomous vehicles do not need AGI. It's very much a single domain system. You don't need your autonomous car to be able to diagnose diseases for example.