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People Are Losing Faith In Self-Driving Cars Following Recent Fatal Crashes (mashable.com)
oldgraybeard shares a report from Mashable: A new survey (PDF) released Tuesday by the American Automobile Association found that 73 percent of American drivers are scared to ride in an autonomous vehicle. That figure is up 10 percent from the end of last year. The millennial demographic has been the most affected, according to the survey of more than 1,000 drivers. From that age group, 64 percent said they're too afraid to ride in an autonomous vehicle, up from 49 percent -- making it the biggest increase of any age group surveyed.
"There are news articles about the trust levels in self-driving cars going down," writes oldgraybeard. "As a technical person, I have always thought the road to driverless cars would be longer than most were talking about. What are your thoughts? As an individual with eye problems, I do like the idea. But technology is not as good as some think."
The Mashable article also references a separate study from market research company Morning Consult "showing increased fear about self-driving vehicles following the deadly March crashes in the Bay Area and Arizona." Another survey from car shopping site CarGurus set to be released Wednesday found that car owners aren't quite ready to trade their conventional vehicles for self-driving ones. "Some 84 percent of the 1,873 U.S. car owners surveyed in April said they were unlikely to own a self-driving car in the next five years," reports Mashable. "79 percent of respondents said they were not excited about the new technology."
The Mashable article also references a separate study from market research company Morning Consult "showing increased fear about self-driving vehicles following the deadly March crashes in the Bay Area and Arizona." Another survey from car shopping site CarGurus set to be released Wednesday found that car owners aren't quite ready to trade their conventional vehicles for self-driving ones. "Some 84 percent of the 1,873 U.S. car owners surveyed in April said they were unlikely to own a self-driving car in the next five years," reports Mashable. "79 percent of respondents said they were not excited about the new technology."
How many crashes happen every day because of humans? Yes I know it is sad, no one wants bad things to happen. But in the long run this is going to save far more lives than take.
Show me the statistics, not the emotion-laden stories. I'll bet money that self-driving cars are safer now and will be even safer in the future. Id love to have one, just can't afford it.
There is way too much starry-eyed magical thinking about tech in general at the moment. AI this and machine learning that...you would think people's day to day interactions with their phone assistants would get people to quickly understand things are still fledgling, but apparently not.
I'm in favour of developing the technology. And very, very much in favour of not overhyping it to destruction.
People always fear dangers that they can't control more than ones they can. This is why some people fear plane and train crashes more than car crashes, even though cars are statistically a lot more dangerous. A self-driving car will have to have a much better accident rate than human ones. It's easy for people to say "that's average but I am much better than average" if they are in control.
I was just having to tell someone the other day that "those auto pilot cars" don't just drive everywhere for you yet.
Not surprising, when news headlines are like "Yet again, people die in a Tesla with auto pilot" when it isn't even turned on.
The link is to a local file, not net-accessible....
The old stories referenced are for a Tesla on "Autopilot" (stupid name) and a pedestrian stepping out into traffic and getting (sadly but unsurprisingly) run down. In both cases the human driver is clearly at fault.
Get back to me when truly "autonomous" cars are (a) on the road and (b) killing more people than sleepy or drunk humans.
This exactly. We should almost explore the potential benefits of new technology, but also be critical of it.
If you look at how many people have smartphones now... Almost everybody. So many zombies that it is scary.
And the golden rule that all software has bugs, and commercial software in particular.
We let our customers do beta testing without their knowing about it...
When "It compiles! Ship it!" becomes "It compiles! Let it drive autonomously!" we are not doing the right rhing.
I imagine civilians lost a lot of faith in 'aeroplanes' after they dropped a bunch of bombs on them during ww2. After a bunch of test pilots died because parachutes hadn't been invented yet. After a bunch of barnstormers died pushing the limits of airplane controls. After an endless procession of adverse weather, mundane mechanical failures, and human errors.
The bugs were worked out, pilot training was drastically improved, and it was figured out what was needed for safe flight. And now commercial air travel is far safer than the automobile trip to the airport. Wait, automotives are crazy dangerous, and one of the leading causes of death, yet lots of people drive them around on public roads for fun.
Public opinion on self-driving cars will change once the bugs are worked out and it's figured out how to make it safe. Just like with planes and automobiles, it will likely take a few decades to really figure it all out, though. Hint: Google has been working on their self-driving-car tech since 2009.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
The right question to ask is : would you prefer to ride in a self-driven car, or with a drunken driver ? and with a very tired driver ?
We can safely ignore this headline.
In surveys people think Facebook is evil but I don't see many of them cancelling their accounts.
Surveys also prove that people want more leafy green salads in McDonalds but nobody ever eats them if they appear.
Nope. The day people figure out they can use Facebook all the way to MacDonalds and back will be a good day to look for a second hand car.
No sig today...
I do industrial automation for a living, since about 2000. There's a certain class of automation problem where getting to a 90% solution is easy, getting to 95% takes a lot of work, and getting to 97% is extremely hard. That is, 90% of the parts coming down the assembly line are easy to categorize correctly, the next 5% you can do with a lot of effort, and so on. Unfortunately that last 2 or 3% are damn near impossible due to problems with how good our sensors are, or how good our algorithms are, or how good our mechanical sorting solutions are.
These problems are notorious for causing run-on projects that slurp up money but never end. That's because your initial effort appears to produce amazing results - 90% with almost no effort. How hard can the remaining 10% be? My first encounter with one of these problems was a barcode-reading system at an industrial facility reading barcoded tags with a camera instead of a barcode reader. The problem was that the barcodes were becoming more worn and faded over time, and management believed that if we used a camera instead of a barcode reader we'd be able to enhance the image, etc., and get a good read because clearly a human looking at the picture can clearly see the bars and the human-readable text below it. This project went on for months, and then years, always creeping closer to 100%, but never making that leap to 100%, having thrown several different engineers at the problem and bringing in outside machine vision specialists.
In most cases these problems come from over-estimating the capability of your sensors. A sensor with a little dirt on it suddenly gives the wrong result, or temperature fluctuations mess up the calibration, or the dreaded, "sensor seems to be giving valid values, but they're just wrong for no reason." Even if your sensor values are reliable, in many cases you'll end up with a measurement that doesn't fall clearly into the known-A or known-B range.
That's where "AI" is supposed to save us, but my limited experience with AI shows it falls into the same class of engineering problem: you can quickly build an AI that correctly categorizes 90% of your input correctly, and then with effort you can improve it and improve it some more, but you'll never reach that always-correct answer.
This is where engineering projects fail, because you can always find a manager or an optimistic engineer who can hand-wave away the ambiguity and say, "humans aren't perfect either" and "we can just keep making the AI better and better." That's convenient when you don't put a physical number on it. How good can you make the AI with the available sensors? We know the sensors are in some ways better than human perception, but in other ways they're worse. In what quantitative ways are they worse, and how are you compensating for that?
If I were going to tackle some problem like this, I'd start with a standardized sensor suite and data format. You can't have everyone developing AI based on proprietary sensor data because it's too opaque. You also need to standardize the system output format (accelerator percent, braking percent, steering value, etc.) Plus you need to standardize the parameters of the vehicle. Once you've got that you need to start collecting and publishing this data in this standard format - hundreds of thousands or millions of test case scenarios available for every researcher to use, and in each case you need to have an expert specify what the correct set of outputs should be (or correct range at least) for each scenario. Then you can develop your AI or algorithms and you can then run these through a test suite so your AI has to pass all of these scenarios before it can be certified. As we have crashes then we add to the list of scenarios, and if you make changes to the AI, it has to pass that new scenario and still pass all the old ones.
I get the sense this is what the companies doing research are trying to do, but how do we validate their product? If their databases are proprietary, and their sensor format and data isn't in a standard format, and we can't run the tests ourselves, then how can we trust their systems? Of course we can't.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Are these reporters pointing out that 17 gasoline cars burst into flames every hour in the USA? That non-Tesla cars are responsible for 6% of all fire-related deaths?
Nope? That's what I imagined.
https://www.nfpa.org/Public-Ed...
No sig today...
2019 will be the Year of the Self-Driving Car on the Black Top.
A few moron humans make human drivers look bad.
To be acceptable, a self-driving car must nor merely beat the 'average' driver. It must do better than the average of the reasonable drivers. I.e. those that aren't unusually reckless and never drive while intoxicated.
A car that merely match the 'average' driver in death count, will be horrible because a few moron drunk/drug drivers pull the average death count up a lot. Most humans drive without ever killing anybody, and their few accidents merely dents the cars a little.
Also, an acceptable self-driving car should not cause accidents that humans trivially avoid. Such as driving into a concrete barrier in daylight. (Problems with cameras, dust/glare or whatever? Stop the car, then!)
Then there are the problems with snow, mud & single-lane gravel roads.
Finally, a self-driving car should not be fooled by death-pranksters who black out the real road lines and paint new lines leading off the road & over a cliff/into a river. A human wouldn't fall for a hasty one-minute paint job. Youtube will be full of such shit if some brand of car is found vulnerable - pranksters will keep score: "My best is 4 Ubers and a Tesla...", "I got only 2 Ubers, but also a tailgating cop car..."
...people are losing faith in an overhyped, not-ready-for-prime-time technology in the development stages for a task that takes a colossal synthesis of perception, reflexes, maturity, and training (none of which we have systems capable of duplicating yet individually) for which the infrastructure (physical, legal, social) hasn't even begun to be developed, much less matured to the point of implementation?
It's almost like repeatedly INSISTING that "it's almost here" is ACTUALLY an insufficient substitute for real time in development?
Hm.
-Styopa
Two anti-Tesla articles in a row on the front page makes you look like curmudgeons.
People who believe God murders babies on purpose still believe in Jesus.
People kill themselves and others while driving every day. I have no faith in humans.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Uber got into the ride-sharing business, which has sort of morphed into the taxi business. Then along came Google with their plans to make a self-driving car. Uber saw it's future disappearing, and so got into the self-driving car game. They initially did it to give themselves a future, but quickly realised that self-driving cars are actually really, really hard. They then (secretly) pivoted to ensure that SDCs kill a few people so that the public trusts Uber's human drivers a bit longer.
When man first learned to walk someone stumbled into a river and drown, man said let's go back to crawling for a few decades just to be safe.
When man first learned to run someone ran off a cliff, man said let's stop running for a while until we understand cliffs.
When man first learned to ride a horse someone was thrown onto the ground and died of their injures 8 painful days later, man said Carl was an idiot got back on the horse.
When man first learned to ride a chariot someone was impaled on a wall of spikes, we told Carl not so fast!
When man first learned to fly... Stupid Carl! Let's do this Wright.
When man first tried to fly faster than sound... Let's not talk about Carl.
Don't be Carl, understand the statistics of small numbers fallacy.
Yes, because as we all know, airplane autopilots are totally designed to replace a pilot, and that's why we don't have pilots anymore.
Meanwhile, it's not Tesla that's calling its cars "self-driving".
Give a boy a gun and you arm him for a day. Teach him how to make a gun, and the whole metaphor breaks down.
Anybody who was developing "faith" in self driving cars was in trouble from the beginning. They are not a salvation. They are simply a technology that will soon be safer than humans at driving. Along the way they will introduce a whole host of new issues and changes in society and weighing whether the net effect is good or bad will occupy the pundits for a century. And anyone whose "faith" in this technology is strongly affected by the inevitable spurts of progress and setbacks needs to study a little history. We are starting a process that will extend over decades during which autonomous systems will take over driving duties from humans.
they're losing more than "faith"
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
You have to compare things, otherwise I can make anything seem scary dangerous.
Sharks are a great example. One movie and people are terrified of them. But they are basically the same as elephants - more likely to be killed by humans than to kill a human.
E- Cars are horribly dangerous - but they are ALREADY safer than human driven cars.
I guarantee that if you are a parent, of a teenager, or the spouse of someone that drinks alcohol, a self-driving car looks VERY attractive, even today.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
You are the moron. Put the number of deaths in perspective of the 3.22 TRILLION miles humans drive a year in all conditions. Number of deaths is relatively small. That's why people feel safe driving. Most will never see even witness an accident causing a death in their lifetimes.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
In QA circles there's a pretty standard distribution that says the first 80% of something will take 20% of your effort. Finishing the last 20% will take 80% of your effort. It's not true for everything, but it's true for quite a lot of things.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Because if you put it into perspective the number of people who die in a normal car to the number on the road, it really isn't that interesting. We might as well have news about the few ants out of the ant colony I stepped on the other day.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Ironically, while real people know this, it seems that a lot of technically inclined people can't figure it out.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
How many crashes happen every day because of humans? Yes I know it is sad, no one wants bad things to happen. But in the long run this is going to save far more lives than take.
Several problems with that argument. 1) you are assuming people are rational when they aren't. 2) People don't care much about the long run. They especially don't care when they are afraid of something (see nuclear power). 3) Your claim that it will save lives is at this point pure conjecture albeit based on reasonable logic. We don't actually have any proof that self driving tech does or will save lives. 4) Certain high profile companies are pushing the technology out there in some arguably irresponsible ways. 5) People tend to trust people more than they trust machines even when that makes no logical sense.
As someone who drives a Tesla with âoeautopilotâ features, I believe full self-drive is a long way off. For a start, from time to time, the Tesla does veer over the middle divider line, or worse, over the line at the edge of the road. On a long drive on a road with some curves, I expect this to happen once or twice. So even that stuff is not reliable. Heck if youâ(TM)re coming down a hill, the sensors donâ(TM)t even see the car in front of you sometimes because of the angles....going around a corner where there are âoesuddenlyâ stopped cars because of a traffic light is another issue....car only notices at the last moment! But the bigger is issue is anticipation. If Iâ(TM)m driving on a street and there are kids playing with a football on the sidewalk, I know it makes sense to slow down, move a little further out into the road, just in case one of the kids runs out to get the ball. Or I see a truck stopped and I know thereâ(TM)s a possibility the driver might open the door, etc. All these self-drive systems are reactive and I donâ(TM)t think thatâ(TM)s good enough for safe driving, even compared to people.
Get back to us when there are a statistically significant number of Tesla cars on the roads, you shill. Also, the statistics you cited include Tesla fires and fatalities.
We climb in a little metal box, hurtle towards another metal box at a closing speed of 200km/hr. Then, to make it safe, we paint a white line on the road and promise to both stay on one side of it. To make life exciting we then add wildlife, children playing, wet weather, tired alcoholics who have just broken up with their wives...
The system is absurd, it is mind blowing that it works as well as it does, but all the band aids like crumple zones, seatbelts and AI steering can't avoid the fact that the system we have evolved is inherently dangerous. Nobody would ever deliberately design a system like our roads and cars.
As an illustration, where I live people working on the side of the road must have a substantial crash barrier to protect them from the oncoming traffic and provide a safe working environment. That same worker can then get on a motorbike and ride home, protected only by a painted line, and nobody thinks anything of it.
Get back to us when there are a statistically significant number of Tesla cars on the roads, you shill.
Huh?
The whole point is that there aren't a statistically significant number of Tesla cars on the roads but they're making all the headlines.
2000 gasoline gars explode? Nothing to see here.
A story involving a Tesla? Front page news!
No sig today...
How about this -- 65% of all fires in waste facilities are from lithium batteries.
Those places where they pass lithium batteries though big grinding machines followed by even bigger trash compactors?
Yes, that statistic might be true.
No sig today...
Everyone understands that they would be great. The problem is how you get them good enough so that millions can be on the road and they are great, without having to worry about sensor failure, bad weather conditions, etc etc.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
And a good number of those are likely suicides. More than we can determine for certain.
Going out in an "accident" is a fairly common way to make a quick escape, and one that has a chance of letting those left back at least get insurance money.
With autonomous cars, I predict other death causes will rise, like "accidental" drowning (another big one).
I think more in depth analysis needs to be done. The numbers for gasoline powered vehicles is for all cars of any age. But most Teslas on the road are only a few years old. What do the numbers look like for gas powered cars in the same age range? What about when only compared to cars in teh same age range and price range? What portion of the car fires were set intentionally vs. which ones were the result of bad maintenance vs. which ones were the result of an accident vs which ones were just spontaneous? Just looking at overall percentages doesn't really tell the whole story. Maybe the Tesla is safer than other vehicles. Maybe they aren't. It's hard to tell without doing a huge in depth analysis about car fires, why they happen, when they happen, how they happen, and looking at these finer details.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I get it, you don't want to talk about the times that Tesla skirts or skips safety rules that every auto manufacturer adopts as best practices, and Tesla's choices lead to fatalities. You'd rather talk about indents that are mostly minor and don't involve injuries to any person.
I've said it before,the main reason I still visit /. is to laugh at the neo-luddites leaving themselves behind.
You're forgetting that self-driving companies are also pushing sensationalist headlines all the time saying self-driving cars *must* be done so we can reduce fatalities. But in the process all I see is that we are producing exceptionally bad, inattentive drivers (and will so even more than people simply using their phone and driving), making more hazardous conditions. I've seen really bad inattentive drivers the last couple years, and I can't help it is the generation coming that have been addicted to "smart" phones, not knowing what it is like to drive without a connected device on you.
So if you think this marketing is beneficial and will save lives, bow down to your electronic god. Or you can take it from me who works in the industry and even know all the "smart-car" developers admit behind closed doors the technology doesn't actually work and they don't think it will be possible for a long time, and I might add, if ever, since the concept of having people behind the wheel not knowing how to drive, relying on the car to figure it out all the time, and /will/ fail (BSOD will take a new meaning). This dumbing down will not solve anything.
Read the page he linked. It says "automobile fires", without a qualifier for fuel type. Tesla shill added that himself, hoping that people won't remember all the data fires that have happened in Tesla cars.
It's not Luddite to ask that cars stop pretending they have level 4 or 5 autonomy when they don't.
I'll never trust a machine to think for me. AI today isn't even close to earning the "I" in the title, it's a neat collection of heuristics, nothing more. The issue with it is that I took years to get to a level of driving aptitude suitable for me to feel safe after growing out of my more reckless years, no AI is close to that current ability. To compound that, I'm intimately familiar with the software development lifecycle, deadlines, and the drive to portray your product in the most ideal light to clients (more or less in an identical manner to a hooker spraying perfume on her diseased body.) At the end of the day I'm going to trust me being invested in ensuring I don't die a Hell of a lot more than some unknown 9-5 code monkey's heuristic network, that division of trust will only grow wider once regulations get in place to determine the car should preserve the most life (not necessarily mine,) open itself to exploits due to the existence of any networking capability (that one already exists,) or gets abused by governments to clean up dissenters under the radar (e.g. Michael Hastings.) The fact we don't even have anything approaching Human-level artificial intelligence certainly compounds this issue, but in truth I wouldn't trust it any more if it were as smart as me.
TL;DR: Machines are tools, if AI reaches the stage that it is composed entirely of truly autonomous free-thinking entities then I'd trust it to drive, but at that point it won't want to so the point is moot.
Maybe this stat will be relevant when there 10s of millions of electric cars 10-15 years old without adequate maintenance.
Wait until the Millennials find out the AI hype is overblown and they will have to work! [gaspy woke emote]
Get back to us when there are a statistically significant number of Tesla cars on the roads, you shill.
Huh?
The whole point is that there aren't a statistically significant number of Tesla cars on the roads but they're making all the headlines.
2000 gasoline gars explode? Nothing to see here.
A story involving a Tesla? Front page news!
1. Gasoline cars exploding is largely movie fiction.
2. "Most car fires aren’t caused by accidents, but by bad car maintenance. According to the National Fire Protection Association, collisions or turnovers caused only three percent of vehicle fires. Leaks, breaks in parts, electrical or mechanical failure and even worn-out parts are the more common causes of car fires."
In other words, older poorly-maintained cars. It will be interesting to see if we see the same statistics with 2nd and 3rd hand Tesla vehicles when they get old enough.
As for the coverage, it because it's new tech that isn't fully accepted or understood yet and people are interested in it. It's kinda like asking why the Volcano in Hawaii is getting so much coverage given that there are about 50 eruptions per year...
.
When the AI is 100% certain in what actions it needs to take, this is good. When it has a varying probability driving all its actions the driver must be alerted so they can be aware of the situation and ready to take the wheel. If the AI is not capable of knowing it is being fed bad data or that components of the system are starting to fail, then this system should not be driving any more than you or I should be driving while down and out with the flu. For AI to be successful at something like driving the system must be "self aware" enough as to know if they are "sick" (bad data, failing components) or not. The term "self aware" in a loaded statement, but anything less than a full "self assessment" mode and we will continually be discussing AI's failures to match our expectations.
The sad thing in AI at the moment is that even with complete "Safety aware" feedback in our systems, a properly trained Neural-Net model simply can not tell you why it made a bad decision, and we need to solve that problem before we rely on that technology for the protection of a human life. Redundancy with parallel use of other technologies for self assessment of boundary conditions could go a long way.
Maybe this stat will be relevant when there 10s of millions of electric cars 10-15 years old without adequate maintenance.
I can't imagine the number of spontaneous fires from car batteries will be very different than for all the inadequately maintained laptops and smartphones out there.
No sig today...
Nope. The day people figure out they can use Facebook all the way to MacDonalds and back will be a good day to look for a second hand car.
Well that, but I also think you'll have a rapidly accumulating statistic. Like if you can get 1000 daredevils to buy version 1.0 you'll have no problem convincing 10000 tech-fans to buy 1.1. And once they have it, they'll convince 100000 tech-curious to buy 1.2. So people are worried now... well they won't be as the owner of the 746252th self driving car in America. Like, by the time you care what the "mass market" thinks they'll have a completely different statistical basis. And this isn't even like "do cell phones cause cancer" scary, if you can walk away from your self driving car trip it went well so you don't need long term studies just bulk volume. Basically if you deliver it, they will come. And they will come in droves.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Really? How many 10-15 year old laptops and smartphones are in use? Of the ones that are, how many have been subjected to 10-15 years of baking in the sun, freezing in the cold, vibration, jolts, etc? How many laptops and smart phones have high-current connections that can develop resistance and become very hot?
well the question is how do we go about naming anything. Because people are stupid. Assist, Help etc... all wind up meaning "do everything for you and you don't need to check" to an idiot that hopes it is what he wants it to be. People interpret things the way they want to interpret them... and not needing to pay attention is cooler than needing to pay attention.
Any time new technologies are deployed there are problems.
Consider how many deaths have been caused by the deployment of horseless carriages? Probably over a million fatalities worldwide.
An analogy comes from software systems -- one could easily keep software in beta forever because bugs are difficult to anticipate. Only actual use will turn them up to be fixed. Similarly, airplanes. How many crashes due to unknown problems that became known only because of careful investigation of crashes.
The salient numbers for autonomous vehicles are not the number of crashes nor the number of fatalities. The salient number is the number of crashes per vehicle mile as compared to the similar figure for human controlled vehicles.
Yes, they're big news, but big news is not always informative and is often misleading.
"The Public" is deficient in their ability to evaluate risk, and the "If it Bleeds, it Leads" news cycles don't help.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
It's one thing to risk your computer or phone being hacked and all your data/comms getting stolen. But with a self driving car, you're putting your life at risk if you're an important person, such as a political leader, CEO, etc. And it's not just the vehicle you're in you have to worry about, you have to worry about all the other vehicles around you being compromised. Too much risk as far as I'm concerned.
Surveys also prove that people want more leafy green salads in McDonalds but nobody ever eats them if they appear.
It's funny that you bring that up because what I took away from the "documentary" Supersize Me was that the McDonald's Rep explained how they tried selling healthier burgers in the 70's and nobody bought them.
People are really bad at statistics and logic. It's just human nature. We get bombarded with stories about the one time things go wrong, but hear nothing about the thousands of miles driven without incident (or where the vehicle prevented an accident). Same reason why most moms feel like their kids are growing up in a more dangerous place, despite FBI statistics proving that the opposite is true.
Had there been a 24-hour news cycle during the nascent days of flight, we never would have had commercial airlines. Maybe we need a self-driving version of barnstormers. Somebody car surfing on one, maybe?
every auto manufacturer adopts as best practices
Not a Tesla apologist butt FFS conventional automakers skirt regulations all the time
love is just extroverted narcissism
3.22 trillion miles driven / 37461 = 859,56,061 miles driven without a death. That's pretty safe.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
85,956,061*
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I should't be able to steer your car into a rock face by painting a QR code on it.
We can't build AI that relies on special signs or road markings or vehicle-to-vehicle communication. That's a terribly brittle approach, and way too easy to maliciously or accidentally defeat.
We need to build AI that relies on sensing its environment and behaving safely in all situations, including by pulling over and handing control over to a human when it gets confused.
Self-driving doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than humans. I don't know of too many humans with lidar.
and it's trying to solve a really stupid problem. For some reason people are convinced that a lot of accidents could be avoided if car A zigged while car B zagged.
In nearly 100% of cases the right answer is for car A and car B to hit their breaks and stop. If how you react is based on how some other car is telling you it's planning to react then that's a very brittle scenario.
The potential for corner cases in a distributed V2V protocol, including the cars getting confused about which car they are talking to, older cars with buggy non-updated firmware, and outright malicious actors. It's a bad engineering solution.
There's no reason you can't go on a joyride with the top down on the weekend, but self-driving frees you from having to drive to get from point A to point B.
think about that for a moment. You are describing a set of incidents, some of which are also being experienced by thousands of other Teslas. Those will all get fed back into the AI development and added to the test suite of millions of driving situations they use for validating their autopilot SW. When there's a bizarre accident, that gets added to the test suite.
Engineers debug those problems and make sure every test passes for the next round of the SW. That updated SW then gets uploaded to every Tesla on the road. Your car has gotten smarter because somebody 2,000 miles away hit a squirrel 2 weeks ago. As it gets smarter, more people buy Teslas. The dataset gets bigger, and so on.
That's an optimization algorithm with exponential convergence.
I've seen two vehicle related deaths. I saw a car get T-boned about 150 feet away from me, and later on I found on the person who was broadsided died. I also was about 70 feet from a pedestrian getting rolled over and crushed by a vehicle as the person was jaywalking.
I hate the term "car accident". Many times it's one or both parties being irresponsible, distracted, etc. To me a car accident is when say.... the brakes fail unexpectedly on a well maintained vehicle. Making a choice to look at a cell phone while driving and hitting something is a remarkably poor decision, not an accident.
Tesla's defense of every accident that makes the headlines is that their system is not fully autonomous and requires constant driver input. (wahhh it's called autopilot - Arguing over the meaning of their marketing name is semantics.)
People get confused because Tesla and Waymo try to have it both ways. They frequently talk about how in the not-too-distant-future no one will drive a car anymore. Think of all the stuff you could get done! Hell, you won't need parking because you can call your empty car to drive itself to you. The perfect solution for the inebriated guy who needs to drive home. All of these stories Tesla hypes up because they want us to be hyped up about the future. The future of autopilot. Arguing about the name is not semantics if the name is legitimately confusing.
... but I definitely feel less safe crossing the road in front of one. The passengers will be fine but not the poor saps getting run over!
I wish I had a lawn.
Assist, Help
Your average person knows what "assist" means. It means, "I'm going to do something, and this other person or thing is going to help me out with some parts of it." They know that assist does not mean totally hands-off. Autopilot has the opposite connotation in popular consciousness.
You are correct in that it's better to be proactive instead of reactive with safety. What gives me hope is that auto-pilot might enforce some proactive safety measures that most people ignore throughout the day, like safe following distance. I was taught in driver's ed that you should never follow so closely to a car that if it it had to stop suddenly, that you could come to a complete stop without rear-ending them. Meanwhile on the freeways around here, no one does that. No one leaves a "safe" following distance if there's any traffic around. Leaving that sort of distance means you're leaving space for someone to merge into your lane and get ahead, and we can't have that.
"go fast and break things"
I think that's a perfect statement - cars are really good at both, right?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
incredible
It's not Luddite to ask that cars stop pretending they have level 4 or 5 autonomy when they don't.
AP is Level 2. Something Tesla goes to great lengths to explain to owners.
The problem is Level 2 AV systems themselves. Either you are in control or not, Level 2 AV is difficult as it requires you to take control in a short period of time. Anything that includes an explicit warning that it might stop working for safety reasons at any time and you need to take over isn't something the general public should be using. But its hard for Tesla to get the necessary training data with all the weird exception cases that need to be accounted for without letting users try it out for themselves and recording issues for later analysis.
Google/Waze doesn't have this issue (they employee their drivers for now) but because of this perhaps they will gather better data (or perhaps worse data). Its hard to say, but I'm sure there are plenty of warnings and legal disclaimers built into the car to prevent successful lawsuits.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
Really? How many 10-15 year old laptops and smartphones are in use? Of the ones that are, how many have been subjected to 10-15 years of baking in the sun, freezing in the cold, vibration, jolts, etc? How many laptops and smart phones have high-current connections that can develop resistance and become very hot?
Consider how your average teen treats their phone. Now consider how many times you read about a phone catching fire (one specific model of phone not withstanding)?
The battery in your car is much better pampered than a cell phone battery. Its kept warm by an internal heating system controlled by electronics, its covered with a heavy protective layer, and its never bent in the same way as a cell phone battery. And when it is, the car would be so mangled as nothing would survive anyway.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
Over 500,000 miles per crash for human drivers in USA. That's all crashes, not injuries or fatalities. The fatality rate is 1.18 per 100,000,000 miles
Self driving cars have only gone a few million, and already killed people.
Non-self-driving cars are orders of magnitudes safer according to the stats.
In 2010 there were 5.4 million crashes (less than half caused injury) and nearly 3 trillion miles travelled.
No one is reporting that people in USA drive on average half a million miles between traffic accidents.
No one is reporting that the 37461 deaths in 2016 were accumulated over 3.2 trillion miles, that's 1.18 per 100 million miles.
How many miles have Tesla cars driven while on autopilot? Less than 100,000,000. Already several fatalities.
Yes, because as we all know, airplane autopilots are totally designed to replace a pilot, and that's why we don't have pilots anymore.
The problem is that the general public isn't thinking DC3 when they here the the word "autopilot." They are thinking about the glass cockpit and automation of a 21st century jumbo jet.
In addition to battery failures, add corrosion, shorts, rodents chewing wires, nesting in electric motors, etc.
the AI is so completely backwards, that it's not just broken, it's completely fraudulent. Pattern-recognition isn't a valid method of vision. It just isn't. I really don't care what it looks similar to, a stop sign is very clearly defined; no amount of "similar" pattern is valid. It either is, or it is not a red octagon in a reasonable location. Yesterday, I saw a small-ish stop sign on a barricade on the side of a highway. Would a tesla have hit the brakes from 140kph in full-speed traffic?
But hey, if this were at all possible with current systems, wouldn't we start with much simpler vessels? Like trains and subways? You know, that never turn, rarely change lanes, and have infinite knowledge of all other vessels on the track?
Alas, we don't have self-driving trains, because it doesn't even work there.
Vision has never been computed in any capacity. It's been faked, it's been estimated, and it's been random, but it's never been certain. Think about it this way. How certain would you be that a stop sign is a stop sign? What if you slowed down, stared at it, looked at it closely, for twenty minutes? Would you then be certain that it is or is not a stop sign? How many AI systems can check their own conclusions to become increasingly certain to that extent?
None.
That's the problem. There's no way for any current AI vision systems to "look closer", to double-check, to second-guess, to become more certain.
Because pattern-matching isn't definitive, it's heuristic. Heuristics are beneficial within ranges of certainty, but they can't ever be the end-game.
Yeah, I lost faith in human drivers when I heard about the 3,200+ fatal crashes that occur every day.
It's almost like driving when it has snowed out. I'm a very competent snow/ice driver. However the guy in the other car may not be. In fact chances are that someone I meet on the road has next to no experience with ice and snow.
Same problem here. People can be really stupid and do really dumb things. They love to lie to themselves. I don't look like a fat slob or I'm glad I don't look like that person and they look worse! Likewise we have people that will not pay attention and intentionally do stupid things and cause accidents because they're not watching the road like they're supposed to. Turning off safety mechanisms and we see this with E-cigarettes as well. Accident is one thing, I don't read about many minor accidents with these cars. I'm seeing where they're plowing into a concrete barrier at 60 MPH or a truck at highway speeds. Things that can kill you easily.
Probably need a monitor in the car to make sure they're watching the road and not doing their make up, shaving or something else.