Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Engineer behavior outside of competence is indistinguishable from MBA behavior.
But the engineers are supposed to know better. The MBAs are _trained_ that 'competence is irrelevant' they can manage anything.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Denials notwithstanding, a deep neural net is just a fancy rule-based expert system. The rules are in the form IF A THEN B where A is a pattern and B is a category or label. It's GOFAI redux. Deep nets suffer from the same problem as all rule based expert systems: they are brittle. Given a situation for which there is no rule, they fail catastrophically.
Full driving autonomy will not happen until AGI gets here. Unfortunately for Musk, nobody knows how to do that.
Five magic words make this controversy go away;
Its just like plane autopilot.
Elon, you are off the hook.
The current hardware doesn't have side facing cameras (or lidar or radar) on the front sides of the car. There are cameras in the side front fenders (in the logo) but they are looking backwards. They need to have side cameras close to the front of the car and high up as possible because before proceeding onwards from a Stop sign you need to see what's coming at you from the left or right side. The camera mounted in the middle post of the windows doesn't have an adequate view.
through no fault of his own
Are you referring to that idiotic youtuber? Through what leap of logic does one conclude that he wasn't at fault?
Ezekiel 23:20
Your mom is just a fancy rule-based expert system.
Ezekiel 23:20
The software engineer will deploy it at some given milestone and then work out the bugs. The MBA will re-define and accelerate the milestone.
That the fountain of BS that is Elon Musk allegedly put personal profit ahead of people's lives?
It seems incredible to me that any engineer who values their career would do any work for him in any shape or form.
I've heard him described as "a latter day Edison".
Unfortunately, Musk knows as much about engineering as Sonny Bono did about downhill skiing.
I think he's a naturally slothful person, sluggish and indolent, a dawdling flaneur, content to waste his life spread eagled on pillows forever indulging himself in the pleasures of the palm.
TL;DR: A complete wanker.
The Machine stops.
We are amazingly great in new situations. In fact, most of the patterns we experience on a daily basis are encountered for the first time. We know how to generalize.
This is MBA behavior, not engineer behavior.
That's funny, because when I read this the first thing I thought was that he sounded like one of the new-school engineers. You know, the ones with the motto "move fast and break things".
Really, who isn't?
Trump?
Ezekiel 23:20
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".
.. this feels like lawyers trying to put the screws on Telsa for not shipping a product that prevents people ending themselves through idiocy.
Why should Tesla be treated different than any other company that must prevent idiots from killing or injuring themselves with their products? In Tesla's case, one could argue Musk was encouraging them to take risks based on his early descriptions of its capabilities.
There's been more people than those mentioned here who left Tesla. Chris Lattner is one.
Nobody wants self-driving cars?
Human's aren't that great in situation's for which they don't have experience either...
Like pluralizing thing's?
It won't matter because AGI will mark the extinction of humans.
Ah yes, but marketing is reality to a lawyer looking for a payday. You cannot SELL something with color glossy printed materials if what you are actually getting isn't as described in said color glossy materials.
You can bet that the lawyers will have their way with Tesla should the "autopilot" thing turn out to have faults (or even limitations) that might kill you and these are not plainly disclosed in the advertisements. You can also bet that Tesla will now require signatures (in blood) that indemnify them of all liability for any faults or limitations, past, present or future to make it harder for their customers to sue...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
That's hardly the only time. There was an incidental in China where autopilot drove full speed into a road sweeper that it apparently couldn't see.
Tesla seem to have admitted it doesn't work as originally advertised, by repeatedly increasing the amount of effort it makes to keep the driver alert.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Better yet don't call it autopilot. Even if you try to explain it, there are plenty of fools who won't get it. Call it "drive assist" and people might be a little less foolish. Some assholes will still misuse it, but you can't stop someone hellbent on stupidity.
I can come up with a few examples that I STRONGLY suspect don't meet that standard... Mostly they drive cars around here, but some of them are in public office...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
We know how to generalize.
Hmmm... Ain't that the truth...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
You know, a country with money's a little like a mule with a spinning wheel. No one knows how he got it and danged if it knows how to use it.
Heh-heh, mule.
The name's Musk, Elon Musk. And I come before you good people tonight with an idea. Probably the greatest... Aw, it's not for you. It's more of a China idea.
Now, wait just a minute. We're twice as smart as the people of China. Just tell us your idea and we'll give you subsidies for it.
All right. I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll show you my idea. I give you the Tesla Autopilotl!
I've sold autopilots to Plymouth, Oldsmobile, and Studebaker, and by gum, it put them on the map!
Well, sir, there's nothin' on earth like a genuine bona-fide electrified one-car autopilot! What'd I say?
Autopilot!
What's it called?
Autopilot.
That's right! Autopilot!
Autopilot, autopilot, autopilot, autopilot, autopilot...
I hear those things are awfully new.
It's user tested, but not by you.
Is there a chance the car could crash?
It's not your life, so splash the cash.
First adopters must be brave...
They'll be given early graves.
Will this venture fund new green jobs?
No, good sir, I'm the new Steve Jobs.
We've killed off our whole space program.
Fund my SpaceX, my good man.
I swear, it's the country's only choice! Log in to PayPal and raise your voice!
Autopilot
What's it called?
Autopilot
AUTOPILOT!
But the economy's still all fucked and broken.
Subsidies, this man has stolen!
Autopilot
Autopilot
Autopilot!
Autopilot!!!
Auto...*CRASH*
Yes, particularly when human safety is at the heart of the matter. OF course, sometimes there is enough evidence to move forward if one feels the concerns are addressed, when doing so there should be some validation.
Aside from that, I think Musk is guilty of misrepresenting safety numbers. He repeatedly stated cars on autopilot were safer than cars without, even stated a number, but used apples and oranges data to do that comparison, with no normalization of the non-Tesla data to make in comparable. I think he's smart enough to know exactly what he was doing, and was happy to intentionally mislead the public. Probably because he believed the system truly was safer even though there was not sufficient data to make that claim.
Except those words are false. It is NOT just like plane autopilot. Your Tesla on autopilot going down highway 101 is in a vastly different environment than an airplane flying on autopilot in the middle of the Pacific ocean at 30,000 feet altitude.
Plane autopilot is safe because it is well understood by all parties that it is not to be engaged in an environment containing tractor-trailers and pedestrians in your path. Telling people Tesla autopilot is just like plane autopilot is dangerous snake oilmanship.
The guys who program the self driving features are probably different from the guys who are working in materials science trying to improve the batteries. You might be able to move funds from one department to the other, but my guess is that Tesla already has the best minds in the right places, and they would hit diminishing returns trying to bring in fresh blood. Not that there isn't more talent out there, but that Tesla already has as much talent as it can support efficiently. Hiring more now would lead to diminishing returns. Beyond hiring and moving funds around, I don't know what else you expect an organization like Tesla to do to encourage development in specific areas.
No, he was instructed not to do what he did. And he did it anyway. Seems pretty clear to me.
Ezekiel 23:20
I was being sarcastic. I guess I'd better go ahead and state that now
And thus she earns a label?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I don't have the exact words Musk has used, but I distinctly remember that he said that all Teslas will come equipped with the HARDWARE necessary for fully autonomous self-driving (computer power, sensors), but that the actual functionality would depend on a future software upgrade.
Now you and I, as software-related techies most of us, know that that will have to be one MASSIVELY COMPLEX and not really invented yet by any stretch of the imagination software upgrade, but technically, what he said is not false.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
"Is it safe?" is the wrong question.
The real question is: "are the fatalities, injuries and accidents that occur per passenger mile greater or less when compared to a human driver?"
"Safe" is a subjective and unmeasurable term, unless you define it in unreasonable terms (for example if your definition of safe is zero accidents).
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Can you please focus on making your electric cars and the batteries that run them better and more affordable instead of getting sidetracked with these bullshit features that nobody wants?
Actually, I think everybody wants the stuff the pied piper is attempting to sell (I'd love to have all that stuff he keeps dreaming up), he just doesn't have it at a price anybody can really afford. I cannot afford a Tesla, even the stripped down model myself.
Of course, Musk's issue is that a Tesla is way too expensive BECAUSE of all this wiz-bang cool stuff he keep stuffing in them, and THAT is why Tesla will continue to struggle as a company until this kind of madness stops.
Take an example from history. The beauty of the Ford Model-T wasn't that it was available only in black and only in one configuration from the factory, but that it was CHEAPER than the hand built cars of the day and the average Joe could afford one. The average Joe cannot afford a Tesla, which is why he cannot sell enough of them. There is something to learn from Ford.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
artificial deep neural nets know how to generalize too. What's your point?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
You assume Musk's motives are about selling cars... I'm not so sure that's true.
I actually think that Musk's driving force is more about PR than running any of his business ventures the most productive way possible. I suspect that he craves the attention that comes from having that flashy idea, and the money that comes from the starry eyed investors who flock to his door to "invest" in them. I don't think he's a snake oil salesman, only that he's not opposed to throwing plausible ideas up on the wall and see what kind of attention sticks to it.
In short, he only really cares about the attention. Which doesn't mean he's not about turning a profit, he wants that too, but because it brings him positive attention. Which, in Musk's case, hasn't been a bad thing for him.
Think Howard Hughes, only as an extrovert...
Of course.. Your mileage may vary...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
And autopilot for planes is far, far, far more advanced, capable, robust, and reliable
That's mostly because it is also much simpler. The comparison with it is correct, it just omits the part where you have to additionally recognize roads, vehicles, traffic signs, pedestrians...all the things airplanes don't have to worry about. Airplane-level capability just isn't enough.
Ezekiel 23:20
When the car can drive in snow, heavy rain, fog, or around road construction let me know. As it is you can't even compare autonomous cars to people it's like gangsters to space stations as the only miles on self driving cars are sunny freeway miles and carefully planned city routes. No study I've seen compared them in the same situations.
IF the color glossy sales literature leads you to believe that the thing you are buying is capable of safely driving itself and the company doesn't go out of it's way to dispel such misconceptions, one could imply that the company either advertised falsely and/or produced a product that wasn't safe.
Change products for a second... Let's say you market a drug to treat some sickness. You clearly say it CURES the illness in your advertisements, and in most cases that's true. But in a small percentage of cases, it doesn't cure anything but kills the patient. Do you think you, the manufacturer, are going to be sued? You betcha, lawyers are going to be beating down the doors of every civil court in the country to file suit on behalf of those unfortunate people who die. Why do you think RX companies have all those warnings on their stuff? You think they do that because the FDA makes them? Maybe, but I don't think so.
Same thing for an "auto pilot" in a car.... Kill one person while on autopilot and queue up the civil suits...Follow that with large disclaimers and liability wavers for everyone...
It's why we cannot have nice things...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Of course, Musk's issue is that a Tesla is way too expensive BECAUSE of all this wiz-bang cool stuff he keep stuffing in them, and THAT is why Tesla will continue to struggle as a company until this kind of madness stops.
That is a valid point, but the other side is that the cars are going to be very expensive regardless simply because of the batteries, and that wiz-bang stuff is helpful in getting the target market to part with their $$$$ by further distinguishing the product.
No competent engineer, new or old, has ever uttered those words or advocated what they represent. Such a motto only works when you're involved in shit that doesn't really matter. In other words, it's perfect for Facebook, or a small Google team working on a new project that will be abandoned as soon as it's acquired a few loyal users, or a Silicon Valley startup no one's heard of writing an app that no one cares about.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Evidence?
'Engineer' is not just a job title.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
licensed engineers may be need for autodrive software or something like it.
The FAA does code audits on autopilot software.
Nobody wants? I can't wait!
I suppose you imagine no one wanted cruise control either.
No competent engineer, new or old, has ever uttered those words or advocated what they represent.
I completely agree. However, it's a sentiment that I hear quite commonly these days, usually from people in software engineering positions who are in their 20s.
Perhaps, but Musk is playing a loosing hand on this then... With Oil and Natural Gas prices at bargain basement prices and no real upside in sight, who can afford an EV anyway? The ROI on the investment just isn't there now.
For me (with a 15 min commute one way) an EV would be great, but there is zero chance I'm going to get one anytime soon. I simply cannot afford the extra expense of the purchase when even if I had free electricity to charge it with the cost savings on fuel wouldn't make up the difference in price in nearly a decade. By the time it paid for the extra cost to buy it, I'd be putting new batteries into it to keep it on the road. I'm sorry, my pickup truck is cheaper...
Musk needs to figure this out if he intends to sell his cars in volume. If he cannot get the cars cost competitive with his competition, then he's severely limited his target market and is going to struggle to turn much profit, selling a niche car to a niche market. To make money selling cars, you have to sell lots of them...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
If it doesn't autonomously pilot the vehicle, it's not autopilot and should not be called such.
It autonomously pilots the vehicle to about the same extent an airplane autopilot does. In neither case is the pilot or driver free to stop paying attention. The pilot is expected to monitor the behavior of the autopilot, which follows simple instructions such as, "fly a track to this radial to this VOR", or "climb to FL30 and level off, increasing speed to mach 0.81". It can chain those together and fly a preprogrammed route, but no matter what, the pilot must maintain situational awareness. Autopilots can and do fail, or develop problems such as entering a descent when level flight is commanded. Autopilots can and will disengage if something happens they aren't prepared to deal with.
Autopilot here means the roughly what it means in airplane land, which is why the name is tolerably apt. "It will help you with the drudgery of steering the vehicle around, but you the human must pay attention to what's happening and be prepared to intervene".
It's a lot simpler than that:
This article is bullshit.
Sorry to be so blunt, but it's journalistic malpractice. The author is confusing Enhanced Autopilot (EAP) with Full Self-Driving (FSD). To be clear:
* Some safety features related to autopilot, such as automatic braking and the like, are available to everyone for free.
* EAP is an optional add-on available today ($5k on the Model 3 if purchased at the time of buying the vehicle, $6k as an over-the-air upgrade) which provides lane-following (requires hands on the wheel and driver attention) and driverless summon features (very low speed, "back out of / into a tight space / drive down the parking lot" stuff without a driver in the car). More to the point, there are two entirely different versions that have existed over the year. AP 1.0 was used on earlier vehicles, based on software and hardware from Mobile Eye. Tesla and Mobile Eye split in a contract dispute. Mobile Eye claims that Tesla wasn't using their hardware right. Tesla says that Mobile Eye found out that Tesla was working on an in-house Autopilot system and demanded that they stop as a precondition to get to continue to use their hardware. Mobile Eye says they knew about Tesla's internal work but didn't feel threatened by it. Regardless, Tesla was forced to switch to their internal version, AP 2.0, which was a step backward. AP 2 is just now catching up to the features of AP1.
* FSD is Tesla's current goal, where the vehicle can drive itself without you having to have your hands on the wheel or paying constant attention. You cannot use FSD, even if you buy it. It costs $3k on the Model 3 ($4k as an over-the-air upgrade later). The article is talking about FSD being rolled out before engineers think it's ready. To reiterate: you can only buy FSD right now, you can't use it until it's ready. Tesla apparently tried to clarify this for the author:
The author apparently nonetheless still failed to understand what that means. You Cannot Use FSD. Period. If engineers are complaining about FSD being rolled out too soon, they're complaining about Tesla selling something that its drivers aren't going to be able to use for too long of a period of time. And you know what, I fully agree with the engineers in that regard - I think it's wrong of Tesla to sell something that there's a big question as to whether they'll be able to get it working reliably enough or pass the serious regulatory barriers in its way.
But if engineers are complaining about FSD, then it's not complaints about EAP. Because the two are very distinct things. EAP isn't perfect, don't get me wrong - and the 1.0 / 2.0 switch was a big setback (they still don't use all of the cameras on the vehicle). But it also pesters drivers enough if they show signs of not paying attention to the road (e.g. not holding onto the wheel) in order to overcome its imperfections (the level of pestering was significantly increased after AP1's fatal accident, in which the driver was apparently watching movies during most of his trip).
Ever since, I've been suspicious of Jesus and very careful around chlorine.
This is a prime example of what I'm talking about when I say so-called 'self driving cars' are being rushed to market.
NONE of them are really ready and won't be for quite some time -- if ever.
Meanwhile people really don't want them anyway.
There's also the motorcyclist in Norway that was run over from behind by a tesla that couldn't detect it.
I pretty much agree with you on the ROI thing. That's why Musk was brilliant to sell a high end vehicle where ROI wasn't a fatal concern for the customer. I'd also love to have an EV, it would be a blast to drive, but the ROI is fatal to my buying decision as well, as are my travel needs. Not only that, but I'd have to clean out my garage to park it by a charger and that's a showstopper right there.
Chris Lattner wasn't there long enough to get started. We don't know why be backed out.
Personally I could never see why a compiler guy was being hired as head of one of the most complicated AI projects anyway. Different field.
Electric cars cool, self-driving cars bad.
If Musk really wants to "save the planet", drop the self-driving crap already. It makes the car more expensive so less people can afford one, meaning they keep their old polluting car or even buy a brand new polluting car.
#DeleteFacebook
Absolutely right, but I was talking specifically about people holding software engineering positions.
"Move fast and break things" started as the engineering motto at Facebook (thanks, Zuck). Unfortunately, there's a whole bunch of people who still think that sounds great.
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.
No, he was instructed not to do what he did. And he did it anyway. Seems pretty clear to me.
Yes, two things are very clear;
1) The driver was irresponsible and legally at fault
2) Tesla autopilot was not good enough to stop the car from plowing into the truck on its own.
And autopilot for planes is far, far, far more advanced
This comment demonstrates an glaring ignorance of how plane and automobile autopilots work.
And autopilot for planes is far, far, far more advanced, capable, robust, and reliable than the shit Elon is selling.
That's total bullshit. Autopilot for airplanes has been around for many decades now. It just maintains a heading and altitude. It's roughly analogous to cruise control on cars in technological terms, and maybe automatic lane-keeping in actual functional terms (since cars have to follow a road, planes don't; of course, technologically, lane-keeping is far, far, far more advanced than the autopilot in a typical Cessna).
Yes, there are very advanced autopilots in today's newest passenger planes like the 787, but the term is not exclusive to those, and there's countless decades-old Cessnas and Pipers out there with autopilots that are quite primitive.
No, autopilot in planes does not autonomously pilot the plane. It doesn't take off or land, it doesn't fly around bad weather, it doesn't check METARs and PIREPs, it doesn't watch for other traffic, it doesn't handle radio calls to ATC when you cross into class B airspace, it just keeps you flying straight and level.
The only thing in your post that's correct is the bit about pilots being trained to use their equipment. That isn't true for Teslas, but it also isn't true for any other car either. How many drivers on the road today got explicit training to use the cruise control in their car? Cruise control has been around a few decades now too. Or how about the more advanced features we have not, like adaptive cruise control, lane-keeping, and operating the infotainment system? Every car is different, with different controls and different quirks. Airplane pilots aren't even allowed to fly a plane (solo) unless they've been specifically trained for that model and received a rating for it. Perhaps we should do that for cars....
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.
Actually, this isn't true. Pilots start out their careers as instructors ("those who can, do, those who can't, teach"), and make peanuts. After that, they might get a job as a copilot for a regional jet company. Last I heard, the starting salary for one of these guys is $18k. Yep, barely above minimum wage. It takes many years for them to work up to any kind of decent salary approaching 6 figures. Then, when they hit 60 years old, they're forced to retire.
Being a pilot is for people who are independently wealthy (e.g. trust fund, or has a spouse willing to support them), or for people who love it so much they're willing to sacrifice everything just to have that job.
They implied that Tesla is currently having people drive something that its engineers deem unsafe. This is simply not the case at all. If the engineers were complaining about selling FSD, they're not complaining about anything that consumers are actually driving.
Everyone who buys FSD does so on their assessment of how likely they think it is that Tesla will actually deliver. There is zero confusion among anyone who buys it about the fact that they can't use it right away; the option always includes the "you can't use this until it's finished and legally approved" disclaimer next to it. It all comes down to how optimistic or pessimistic you are about the technology. I'm a pessimist, and will not be buying it. Some of Tesla's engineers working on it are apparently also pessimists. I'm not surprised. It's a crazy-hard task, and very different from human-supervised autosteer / EAP.
Ever since, I've been suspicious of Jesus and very careful around chlorine.
What if there are two people on different parts of the road in front of the car, and swerving to avoid one will mean hitting the other? The car needs to be able to diagnose which of the two people has a terminal disease, in order to select to hit that one.
This space intentionally left blank
Actually that's false when it comes to new *dangerous* situations. Research has shown that most people's minds take them to what they know when their lives are on the line, even if it runs counter to survival.
Self driving with zero wireless inputs thank you very much and add in a system verify feature at startup, to ensure no hacking. So multiple systems, rather than an all in one hackathon special, that take you pick of three letter agencies, can hack to drive you straight off a cliff, or into a train or on the other side of the road towards a semi that is also accelerating because it has been hacked to kill you. So self driving, not remote, who the fucks wants to get into a remote controlled vehicle. The Tesla marketing is also pretty clear, autopilot is not installed but the system can at some time in the future be upgraded to autopilot and I am not too sure on that language as to whether or not, that is just a system firmware upgrade without any additional hardware needing to be added or updated.
What I do not, is both the fossil fuellers and existing fossil fuel auto manufacturers will attack Tesla at every opportunity because competitor and psychopathic capitalism. So crappy twisted interpretive articles, are to be expected, that is the norm for modern business. Tesla can of course counter with attacks on fossil fuel vehicles, like warnings not to start you fossil fuel motor in you garage because if you should say faint for any reason, that car will now out and out kill you, you should push you fossil fuel car out of the garage and only start it's infernal combustion motor when it is safely out in the open and of course how about taking a fuel tank, stirring it up and then igniting it and watching how it blows a car to bits, equivalating a fuel tanks explosive potential to how many sticks of dynamite you are carrying. Not to forget the pollution or the fossil fuel wars, mass murder to fill your tank with a horribly toxic product, that can quite readily kill you ;D.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
here you go.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
No.
Cruise control amounts to a throttle with a memory so you can dial in a speed until you intervene. Occasionally useful, often overused, occasionally dangerous but very rarely leads to deaths when it goes wrong.
Self-driving cars involve you entrusting your life to software that:
1. Should be able to determine the best route from your location to your destination, with any intermediate waypoints, and maintain a speed in compliance with local restrictions. For travel on common roads, software is getting pretty good at this.
2. Must identify potential hazards correctly, including changes in weather conditions, road conditions (including melted tar, black ice, floodwater), signage, and all types of traffic, and take appropriate action every time, weighing priorities where multiple decision branches exist. Despite what marketing material you may have seen, no software in the world can actually do anything close to this in anything other than the most useless contrived, controlled, conditions. Of course, humans often get it wrong too, but they tend to fail in mostly predictable ways.
Of those two aspects, which do you think is more important?
There's more to driving than Gran Turismo, you know.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
The author is confusing Enhanced Autopilot (EAP) with Full Self-Driving (FSD).
Every single person I talk to, who only casually observes Tesla-related news, assumes that EAP == FSD. Every friggin single one. Usually in knee-jerk comments, when I mention something about having to drive my car somewhere. (I have a Model S /w AP v1... Love it in stop-and-go highway traffic and long highway trips, but I'm quite well aware of its capabilities and limitations.)
Might be useful, actually. You pull over and the hooker gets in. Car scans for disease and automatically hits the eject button before you pay.
OK, so you have no evidence for motorcycles being missed 10 times as often as cars of pedestrians.
The first two were stories about collisions. So what? Human drivers often miss motocycles and hit them. You've presented no evidence that Autopilot does it more often.
None of that reflects the post you were replying to, which was about the fact people want autopilot, just as they wanted cruise control in previous decades.
And the Gran Turismo jibe - I've been driving for 30 years. I never play driving games. So duh!
Aeronautical autopilots are not safe, precisely because they have significant nuances and problems which have resulted in numerous crashes through misuse and over reliance. You do not turn on an aircrafts autopilot and then sit back and relax for the rest of the flight.
Which is pretty apt considering what we are discussing and what is being claimed on all sides...
Now you've got me curious - what exactly do you think "autopilot" means, when applied to cars and not aircraft?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Whenever someone starts getting sanctimonious about safety I ask them if they fit the best possible tyres to their car for the next journey. If not then they are prepared to sacrifice safety for cost or convenience.
They Write the Right Stuff
I'm not a software engineer, just the old fashioned brick and mortar kind (the ones who build physical systems for the real world that people depend on for life). But this was required reading when I started my job.
Brilliant read, thanks. I loved reading the part about how errors that slip past are meticulously analyzed. When a bug is found and fixed, the entire process is looked at to discover *why* the bug slipped past in the first place.
This is something I instinctively do as a developer, but have never really heard formalized. When I see a mistake that was made, I like to take a step back and ask "was there something I could have done to prevent that mistake from occurring in the first place? What part of the process can be tweaked for fixed to guarantee it doesn't happen in the future?" Essentially, turn each bug into a positive feedback loop for making your software better.
Also, as a bonus, I think we just figured out how to get women back in the tech industry:
Otherwise, the hour-long meeting is sober and revealing, a brief window on the culture. For one thing, 12 of the 22 people in the room are women, many of them senior managers or senior technical staff. The on-board shuttle group, with its stability and professionalism, seems particularly appealing to women programmers.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I think the "on it's own" it really the thing.
If a driver can detect 95% of hazards, and the car can detect 70% of hazards, then there is improved security, because they both would have to miss a hazard. But switching completely from the driver in charge to the car in charge decreases security.
Kinda reminds me of some people I encountered in IT back in the 90's. "Hey, I don't need to backup anymore, I have RAID now"
Better yet don't call it autopilot. Even if you try to explain it, there are plenty of fools who won't get it. Call it "drive assist" and people might be a little less foolish. Some assholes will still misuse it, but you can't stop someone hellbent on stupidity.
Agreed, this was a marketing fiasco of Tesla's making. The technology is good, but they marketed it as something it wasn't, and at least one guy died.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
Agreed that Neural Nets are not "rule based", but I do think they need far higher level of intelligence than anything we've seen to date. The car is going to need to identify traffic police and follow instructions, they need to interpret human instructions. If they get on the loud-speaker and say "pull-over" vs. "pull-over at the next exit", they'll need to understand that. Not saying it's impossible, just many years off.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
I don't think the problem is wasting talent, the problem is wasting goodwill. If Tesla continues to act recklessly, pushing products that are not quite ready for market, and people get hurt, they may delay the development of self-driving cars altogether. I want to see them as much as anybody, but if they keep making dubious claims about the technology, people will lose interest, excitement will ebb, and funding and development will slow.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
What if there are two people on different parts of the road in front of the car, and swerving to avoid one will mean hitting the other? The car needs to be able to diagnose which of the two people has a terminal disease, in order to select to hit that one.
What if the two people are healthy, but the car can quickly identify which of the two has a higher net worth, so it can hit the poorer one. No moral problems there at all.
I know it's a currently an absurd result, but eventually, the computer will have to decide, or decide to ignore their net worth and use other factors, or to just flip a coin and hit one randomly. Every decision comes with it's own set of moral issues.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
It won't matter because AGI will mark the extinction of humans.
I'm pretty bearish on AGI. To get it in our lifetimes, it'll require continued exponential increases in processing power, i.e., it requires Moore's law to continue. However, many signs currently indicate that Moore's law is dead. It's entirely possible that our civilization may be hitting a technological plateau and that real AGI is not a few or dozens of years away, but hundreds or thousands.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
If the complexity of the tax code keeps increasing then yes, AGI will mark the extinction of Americans, at least, due to how long it will take to actually compute that number.
The tax code is large and opaque to most, but it has a bit of organizational beauty to it. Most people don't understand it because they never studied it. But if you can write software, you can understand tax law.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
licensed engineers may be need for autodrive software or something like it. The FAA does code audits on autopilot software.
It's not exactly a code audit, it's more like the FAA certifies code to a certain level of robustness. For commercial airline software to get certified, they generally have to prove that every line of code has been covered by tests, and every branch has been taken and not taken. There are even higher levels of certification (usually for the OS), where the code must be symbolically expressed, and mathematically proved to be correct. Not an inexpensive undertaking.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
Autopilots in planes have been able to land and exit the runway for quite a while. I'm pretty sure they should be able to take off as well if the plane is well aligned at the start of the runway, but they can't taxi (drive the plane on the ground to the start of the runway).
If they are well trained on a dataset that covers all the relevant situation, they can interpolate, but they cannot really extrapolate all that well. No known machine learning technique know how to deal with a completely new and unexpected situation.
In other words we don't know.
More specifically, they are indeed rule based, but the rules are learned, not engineered.
Self driving with zero wireless inputs thank you very much and add in a system verify feature at startup, to ensure no hacking.
Yep. I'm not getting into an AV without a glass break tool. At least that way if someone tries to use it to kidnap you, you might be able to escape. I'm not particularly worth kidnapping, but lots of people who aren't really worth kidnapping get kidnapped anyway because it's cheap and so many people have nothing to lose. AVs will make it both cheap and easy.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Agreed, this was a marketing fiasco of Tesla's making. The technology is good, but they marketed it as something it wasn't, and at least one guy died.
Actually, they marketed it as what it was, and that was confusing for people, and at least one guy died expressly ignoring the warnings of the manufacturer, of which he literally could not possibly be unaware since he had to attend a safety lecture before he was allowed to use the feature. He ignored the warnings of the people who produced the system, and that is what killed him.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
In Tesla's case, one could argue Musk was encouraging them to take risks based on his early descriptions of its capabilities.
Every owner that wants to enable the autopilot functionality is required to attend an orientation in which the limitations of the system are explained in some detail, so there is literally no valid argument in that direction.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm a bit worried by their FSD technology. The current auto-steering/speed control needs to use map data to work, i.e. its maps tell it where sharp bends are so it can slow down, that sort of thing. For full self driving it needs to be able to work without accurate maps, e.g. there might be some roadworks or a new road layout that isn't on the map yet.
At best the car would be forced to stop, possibly stranding the passengers if they were unable to legally drive it. At worst it might not slow down in time.
Maybe they will get rid of this requirement before release. The fact that they are selling the feature right now is worrying though, because either it's screwing people over with something that won't be released for years, maybe even before they sell/scrap the car, or because they are planning to release it way too early.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Motorcycle riders don't given they miss motorcycles at a rate 10 times higher than cars or pedestrians...
Evidence?
No, hyperbole!
Evidence would require research:
Number of Tesla cars on the road. Number of non-Tesla cars on the road. Number of motorcycle accidents involving a Tesla. Number of motorcycle accidents involving a car that wasn't a Tesla.
And some basic understanding of statistics:
Given the proportionally low number of Tesla vehicles compared to total vehicles you'd probably want to limit data to particular locales (i.e. continental USA), and, further, correct for 'error magnification'
Based on my observations there's little evidence GP is engaged in anything other than anti-Tesla FUD.
I will say that I tend to agree with thread parent though. By all means, Tesla, continue the research into fully autonomous driving but a little more focus on production of a reliable electric vehicle, and the scaling up of that production process, without sacrificing quality, would probably be sensible right now. The vehicles Tesla makes are already desirable, the bells and whistles they already incorporate are more than sufficient for 99% of their market. Full on autopilot, while being "the-time-is-right-sci-fi", and thus a draw to potential customers, is not the main reason most people are ordering and buying your cars (I'd actually go as far as to say that were it included as standard it'd put off as many people as it would attract - I love driving, I dislike, intensely, being driven).
The Tesla forum discussion (3rd link) makes it clear that the the Tesla software is not properly aware of overtaking motorcyclist and is actually confused by them into thinking that the *car* ahead has accelerated. Which causes the Tesla car to accelerate in turn, when there is a very real slow car ahead. This is a known issue which at the time of the forum had not been fixed (July 2015). Since then, Tesla Motors has parted ways with MobileEye and reports are that the newer software is not as good.
I think the "on it's own" it really the thing.
If a driver can detect 95% of hazards, and the car can detect 70% of hazards, then there is improved security, because they both would have to miss a hazard. But switching completely from the driver in charge to the car in charge decreases security.
Kinda reminds me of some people I encountered in IT back in the 90's. "Hey, I don't need to backup anymore, I have RAID now"
Agree. That last part, the human factor element, is the hard part. As people feel safer they naturally take greater risks. We all do it, some more than others. Its those 'some' that do it more that we have to worry about.
In Tesla's case, one could argue Musk was encouraging them to take risks based on his early descriptions of its capabilities.
Every owner that wants to enable the autopilot functionality is required to attend an orientation in which the limitations of the system are explained in some detail, so there is literally no valid argument in that direction.
Oh, there is. There were plenty of videos out there that showed T drivers doing amazing no hands driving. Did Musk make ANY attempt to warn folks that such driving was not responsible, or did he happily enjoy the PR attention that came along with it? So those classes you talk about clearly were not sufficient.
Well that's debatable, and I would come out on the other side of that debate.
But it's neither here nor there, because GOFAI is specifically done with Human readable rules. And there's no one suggesting Neural Nets can be interpreted as that. That is not debatable.
Any issues with MobileEye is irrelevant now, as current AutoPilot is completely different. Yes in some ways it's still catching up on features. But you don't know from that old source that there is any motorcycle problem in current Teslas. And it certainly does nothing to confirm LynwoodRoosters fabricated claim that they miss motorcycles 10 times more often than human drivers.
Autopilots in planes have been able to land and exit the runway for quite a while.
Some can, many can't. It's just like cruise control in cars: some can detect cars in front of them and slow down ("adaptive cruise control"), most aren't at all that advanced.
I'm quite sure that all the people with 60s-era Cessnas do not have autopilots capable of auto-landing.
Good post. Except for the last paragraph. Because you personally love driving, I think you are underestimating the number of people that don't take any pleasure in driving - at least real driving, much of which is stop/go taking place in congested traffic, down the same route twice a day every working day.
If cost wasn't an object I'd say most people would want a system that could driver the commute for them. And inevitably cost will not be an object for long.
15 miles on a bicycle when it's 104 out? During Rush hour on a freeway? I don't think so, I'm not interested in a quick and painful death, even at this age.... I did the no AC thing for over a decade in my 65 VW Beetle, back in the days I couldn't afford more than a $600 car and now you suggest I ride a bike?
Get off my lawn! {-smile-}
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Also, as a bonus, I think we just figured out how to get women back in the tech industry:
Maybe this explains why I've not personally experienced a lack of women at the places I've worked. Of the last three companies, the one with the fewest women engineers had about 1/3 women.
But I am extremely picky about where I work. If I get a hint of poor management, or I disagree with their engineering approach, I pass.
It is a good read, but there are a couple things worth noting. The process described in the article isn't really a description of software engineering - it's a description of how aerospace engineering is done, period. It's also a description of why the U.S. spends a ludicrous amount of money on defense. At the end of the day, you've always got a balance between risk and budget. Risk will never reach zero, and for any substantive piece of software it will never be perfectly tested and perfectly bug free. So the question is, what's your risk tolerance? And even more importantly, can you afford to pay down the risk to that level?
At these aerospace places, the risk tolerance is very, very low. So they spend 100x as much to get something that fails 10% as often, typically. You have to pay for an army of requirement jockeys and endless layers of bureaucracy and auditing to try to control that process. And since the risk tolerance is so very low, change is extraordinarily painful.
And the unfortunate truth is that, at least in some areas of testing and product assurance, you can easily spend 100x as much money but get no real improvement to your risk profile. There are a ton of consultants out there that will invent fake problems, and then come up with "solutions" to the fake problems that require hundreds of thousands of dollars to implement. How do you know, when you spend that money on testing or product assurance or adding checks and balances to the process, that you have actually caught the biggest risks? Or that you've improved the risk at all? You really don't.
So what ends up happening is that it's easy to point at how some of these engineering groups do a really amazing job with process control and they catch a lot of bugs. But then you also get less talented groups that try to emulate the same approach, and superficially they add the same bureaucratic checks and religiously follow Process, but they don't really understand that process or they don't know how to apply it in the right place, and so you can end up with all the inertia and cost and dogma of a strictly controlled engineering environment, but without any of the actual benefits to the project.
Actually I think you just need to be able to recognise emergency vehicles that have their flashing lights on. Pretty easy as they have lots of markings in addition to their lights.
When one of them is behind you, as a human driver you find a safe place to pull over and slow down so it can pass. If instead of passing it keeps following you, then you know you are the one they're after and if you;re law abiding, you come to a stop.
Automated driving can do the same.
And yet there are not an undue amount of people getting hurt due to AutoPilot. i.e. There are not more people being killed or injured in Teslas with AutoPilot than in cars without AutoPilot.
And there are no shortage of people interested in AutoPilot.
Being a pilot is for people who are independently wealthy (e.g. trust fund, or has a spouse willing to support them), or for people who love it so much they're willing to sacrifice everything just to have that job.
Or for people who are willing to do a stint in the military. That's the best route to becoming a commercial pilot: Join the Air Force and let Uncle Sam pay for your training and flight hours. If you're smart, go for cargo jets rather than fighters, because after an eight year hitch as a C-5 pilot (for example), you'll have lots of heavy multi-engine hours which are very expensive to buy.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Wow, wait until SpaceX's man-rated rockets.
Customers of those do not take recklessness well.
Kriston
"No known machine learning technique know how to deal with a completely new and unexpected situation."
Neither do humans, at least in car-operation time.
Try turning your head upside down and looking at the world. Hard to interpret, isn't it.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Did Musk make ANY attempt to warn folks that such driving was not responsible, or did he happily enjoy the PR attention that came along with it?
Yes, the car nags you not to do no-hands driving, and in the post-one-drove-under-a-truck-crash software updates have made it more aggressive about annoying you.
The only way to no-nag drive a Tesla hands free now is to hang your water bottle off of the side of the steering wheel.
Publicly he didn't. He issued zero statements when all those videos were coming out. It wasn't till after he started getting blowback that he toned things down.
Maybe the musk could define what his autopilot is?
Also various critters.
I want a self driving car. I'm a terrible driver. This could literally save my life.
I've had three at fault accidents in twenty years of driving, and was lucky enough to walk away from all three.
For some of us the "overall lifesaving potential" isn't a hypothetical concept.
Actually, they marketed it as what it was, and that was confusing for people, and at least one guy died ....
If a company markets something that confuses people, it's the company's fault.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates