Yea, people can misjudge the height of an overpass by a few cm, that's probably less than 0.5% error. But I do not think that a lot of people tried to drive under an 18 wheeler.
Asfor the background concepts - yea. People evolved in the real world and the rain can recognize real world objects quite well, usually from any angle (even some of the optical illusions arise from the fact that the brain interprets everything based on the real world and are illusions only because they do not depict the real world).
Also, since birth, the brain processes petabytes (or more) of data related to how things look and what is "normal" and people, say, have no difficulty recognizing a picture of a cat from a picture of a gun. Even if the gun has a picture of a cat printed on it. On the other hand, an algorithm may decide that all cat pictures have pixels x,y and z that are white, while all gun pictures have pixels a, b and c that are black. And you can change those few pixels to trip up the recognition system while the picture looks exactly the same to a human.
Put me in a room and tell me to push a button when a light comes on and measure the reaction time. If the light comes on every minute or so, my reaction time will be faster than if the light came on every hour, because I would get bored waiting for the light and start thinking or doing other things.
Watching the car drive itself for an hour and being ready to take over in 1second would be too difficult for me, since I would have got bored and stopped paying attention a long time ago.
On the other hand, when I have to drive my car manually, I have stuff to do and no not have time to get bored, so my reaction time is faster.
Driving a car with Autopilot on is like being a driving instructor and the student is a very good driver, but once a month or so decides to drive straight into a lane divider with no warning, so you have to recognize that he is going to do so and that he is not going to stop before the lane divider fast enough so you can take over and stop the car.
Also, this can happen on highways with metal lane dividers. More precisely - divert the car to the oncoming lane just before the divider begins and when the Tesla sees an oncoming car, it will have nowhere to go.
Where I live, during road construction, a yellow line is painted to show how you should drive (go to an oncoming lane etc) and a whole bunch of signs get placed on the "normal" lane you are not supposed to drive on, like a fence. So, by trying not to hit the signs, you will drive correctly, the yellow line is just a guide. There are also signs 1-2km before the construction zone, warning you of the construction ahead.
When the road construction ends, the signs are removed, but the yellow line remains for a while (they do not scrape or wash it off). It seems that Tesla would follow the yellow line anyway and go to the oncoming lane when it is not supposed to.
Road construction sites, at least where I live, do not just have a single line diverting the traffic to an oncoming lane. They have multiple signs ahead of the construction, then right in front of the construction on your lane (if you didn't divert, you would run into a sign or possibly multiple signs).
The single line, on the other hand, may remain after the road construction is done and all signs are removed. They do not scrape the temporary lines from the road.
That is great until someone hacks Tesla or some other car manufacturer and uploads a "modified" firmware to all cars. It would cause much more damage than a simple bomb in a public place.
If I see a sped limit sign that says 400, I'm going to assume it's 40, but someone painted another zero on it. Especially if the road looks like "40" should be the correct speed.
I guess the machine learning algorithms do not do sanity checks: 1.Hey, look, a set of wheels followed by another set of wheels with a gap in etween. I can go right trough there. Oh, this was an 18 wheeler and the height was too low. 2.This seems like the correct direction. Oh wait this was the lane divider. 3.Looks like there are road works and my lane is redirected to the oncoming lane. OK. Oops, it seems there were cars driving on the oncoming lane.
Humans can make these mistakes too (not so sure about the first one though), but mostly if they are drunk, high or stupid.
However, the problem is that humans do not notice those stickers etc. Anyone can see a modified speed limit sign (yes, officer, the sign said 140km/h instead of the more usual 110km/h, I can show you the recording of my dashcam or we can go and look), but you need special equipment (one that works exactly like the autopilot of Tesla) to know that the road was altered enough to trip up the Tesla. Of course, the self-driving cars from another manufacturer would not operate exactly the same and would probably ignore the Tesla-specific stickers, but be tripped up by another set of stickers.
Also, this can be used without targeting. Just put some stickers on the road with frequent Tesla traffic, grab some popcorn and watch the mayhem. Bonus points for causing two Teslas to crash into each other.
A trim system adjusts a small "tab" on the control surface to apply a force in a direction to cancel an input control force needed to maintain a certain position of the control surface.
On most airplanes, yes. On the 737 (and probably other Boeings) trim moves the entire horizontal stabilizer and, in turn, has more authority than the elevator which is part of the stabilizer.
If a black box is 98% safe versus human counterpart that is 83%. The black box is still mathematically safer.
Depends on how those numbers are calculated.
For example, does the 83% include human drivers who are drunk or high? If so, I can increase my own percentage by never driving drunk or high.
But it's true, I'd rather crash as a consequence of my own fuckup (as I can try to reduce my fuckup rate) than as a consequence of some programmer making an off-by-one error (who most likely won't even be punished for the crash) or something like that.
The problem is that if the automated system can cause a crash, it will look bad. Just look at Boeing and MCAS - we do not know how many crashes it prevented (probably a few, since the plane could not be certified without it), but we know about the crashes it caused.
Every time a self-driving car crashes in a way that only a drunk human driver could (say, empty road, drive straight into the lane divider) it makes it look really bad because people can think "I don't drive drunk, but it looks like the AI could, I want my manual car back".
Since we trust software so much, why not have voting over the internet first? I am sure it will be secure and in no way vulnerable to hacking, since humans can write software so well.
I'd say Boeing. The airline managers may not understand such things about airplanes and only care about whether the airplane is certified, how much fuel it uses, how much training for the pilots etc. It should be the responsibility of the manufacturer to make their product safe and not disable additional safety features unless it gets an additional payment. Especially since those features most likely are software-only and do not require additional hardware etc.
But why only one was used for MCAS? I mean OK if there is only one sensor anyway, but if there are two sensors already, why not compare the data from both? If it does not match, then alert the pilots.
I prefer phone conversation over email. Since email is high latency, I have to think of everything I want to say and then write it, sometimes including some simple algorithms (check this, if it works, do this, if it doesn't then check that) which may be misunderstood etc.
On the other hand, when we are taking on the phone, I can ask you questions (does this work? ok, try it now) and finish the conversation taking up much less time and effort than with the emails.
I sent an email. How long should I wait for the reply before switching to another task? I mean I hate frequent switching, but if the sender takes an hour to reply, I'd rather do something else during that time.
There is another problem with email - it's kind of like UDP - I do not know if you read it. Let's say the server is down and it needs to be fixed ASAP. If I write you an email, I won't even know if you read it - maybe you are away from the PC. On the other hand if I call you and you do not answer, I know for sure that you did not pick up and may call someone else instead of waiting for you to get back to your PC and read the email.
The point is that if you need something right now, call. We'll talk and maybe I'll ask you to write an email with the details, but normally the urgent matters (server is down etc) do not require that. And the conversation is faster when I do not have to type everything I want to say.
If you write me an email without calling, then I'll assume that this is not very urgent. The reason is that I may not even be in the office right now (and if you call me with an urgent matter, I'll call a coworker and ask them to look into your problem or try to get beck to the office as fast as I can). I may have connected my monitor to another computer and cannot see the notification. And multiple other reasons.
If whatever urgent matter you have requires a lot of details and so requires an email (with attachments etc), write the email and then call me right after you hit "send".
If you want something from me, send me an email. I'll read it during work hours, maybe today, maybe tomorrow. If you need me to read it faster, send me an SMS. I'll read it in an hour if I am not sleeping. If you need something from me RIGHT NOW, call me. As a bonus, you will know immediately whether I can talk to you right now and whether I now know about your problem.
Email conversation is slow, even if I reply you instantly, you will probably take some time to reply, which will stretch out our conversation (say, 5 emails each) to a whole day or maybe two days. So, if you are writing an email, then it is not that urgent to you.
I can see myself buying a new pre-recorded tape, even if the same music is available on CD. Then I would not need to record from CD to tape, I could just play the tape I bought in my car or on my portable player.
You can't make your own record, but you can record your own tape with the music you like.
Also, some music was only released on cassette, so if you want that, you have to buy the cassette or find someone who has it, then borrow and copy it.
I also like that I do not get tempted to skip/choose songs when playing a cassette and can concentrate on doing whatever I am doing instead of choosing songs. It's like listening to radio, but there are no commercials or news.
Yea. Since skipping the song takes time and makes the tape pack uneven, I don't do it. On the other hand, when playing music from my phone I start thinking about the next song, maybe I should choose another and so on. I do not do that with tapes, even if I have more than one tape in my car (expecting to drive longer than the tape plays), I listen to both sides of one tape, then insert another.
I'm passingly curious what you plan to do when it dies...
Let's say my car gets destroyed by a terrorist etc and is not repairable. Well, I'd just buy another old car (for other reasons, not just the radio slot). If the law prevented me from doing that, I'd probably mount a small tape deck (or a car tape deck) under the dash of a car that does not have the proper slot. I have a lot of tapes and most of them are either pre-recorded or recorded from radio or a record, so, if I wanted that music in a digital format, I would have to record from that tape to digital.
Nothing forces you to fiddle with them.
Nothing external. But if I can change the song or a playlist with a press of a button, I may be very tempted to do so. If I absolutely had to use digital, I would probably buy a bunch of flash drives and use them like tapes.
Also, for me, picking a tape from a set of four (say I'm driving for a few hours), removing it from the case and inserting it into the tape deck is easier and less distracting than going trough menus. I can remove the tape from its case, remove the old tape from the deck, place it on the passenger seat, insert the new tape into the deck while still looking at the road. I can even choose a tape while still looking at the road - I just bring it in front of me to see which one it is. Since I selected those 4 tapes from my collection, I already know what's on them, so I do not have to read anything - especially if the tapes are pre-recorded or of different brands and look really different.
On the other hand, if I had to navigate menus to find the next playlist or song, that would take much more concentration than with tapes.
If I am driving short distances (and it usually is 10-15 minutes), connecting/disconnecting the phone or other device when I enter/leave the car gets annoying.
I actually tried connecting my phone, it's OK, but less convenient than a tape.
On most modern cars you can skip songs using a button on the steering wheel, and you can fit a lot more songs on a modern phone than you can on a very large stack of tapes so you also avoid the distraction of changing or turning over tapes.
Great, now instead of going somewhere, I'll be sitting looking over my whole list of a hundred or more songs trying to figure out which song I want to listen to. When I do, I play it, and resume looking at the list for the next song.
Or I can put a tape in and stop thinking about the song sequence - my choice was already made at home when I took that particular tape to bring to my car.
I do not need an adapter, I modded my tape deck to have a line input. I sometimes connect my minidisc player to that.
What's even easier is to rip a new CD to your smartphone and then use that to listen to it. FAR less hassle than recording a CD to a fricken cassette tape.
Here's the problem. I have maybe 200 cassettes. If I want to get rid of the tape deck in my car and replace it with a digital player, I would have to record all of those cassettes to a digital format. It would take at least 200 hours to do that (then I would need to name the files, maybe split them by song which would take more time). OTOH, it takes about an hour to record a new CD to a tape.
Plus I've never met anyone who didn't try to fast forward tapes while driving or fiddle distractedly with changing tapes.
I sometimes rewind a tape to listen to a song a second time. When I have a convenient way to select a song from a list, I tend to think too much about it and take more time than the song plays for. I sometimes do that at home - instead of listening to music and doing something somewhat useful, I listen to music and browse directories for the next song.
If I am driving somewhere far away, I take multiple tapes, but I only change the tape when the current one finishes playing and since I only take enough tapes to last the trip, I do not need to think too much about the next tape.
My car is older and it has a slot for a tape deck or radio.
If this is your argument in favor of tapes, it's a terrible argument. If you think people didn't play with their tape decks (fast forwarding) to skip to their favorite bits you haven't driven in a car with a tape deck. People played with their tape decks while driving ALL THE TIME.
Well, maybe other did, but I do not. I very rarely rewind a tape to listen to a song a second time, that's it. When I can select a song to play from a list (be it on a phone or PC), I tend to spend too much time thinking what should I play next. When I play a tape, I listen to it from start of side A to the end of side B.
Plus you have to keep a library of tapes in your car unless you are a psycho who likes listening to the same thing endlessly.
What I do is decide what tape I want to listen to and then take it to my car. When I finish listening to that tape, I get another one. If I plan on driving for longer than one tape plays, I take two or three tapes to cover the driving time.
Slashdot Mirror
Yea, people can misjudge the height of an overpass by a few cm, that's probably less than 0.5% error. But I do not think that a lot of people tried to drive under an 18 wheeler.
Asfor the background concepts - yea. People evolved in the real world and the rain can recognize real world objects quite well, usually from any angle (even some of the optical illusions arise from the fact that the brain interprets everything based on the real world and are illusions only because they do not depict the real world).
Also, since birth, the brain processes petabytes (or more) of data related to how things look and what is "normal" and people, say, have no difficulty recognizing a picture of a cat from a picture of a gun. Even if the gun has a picture of a cat printed on it. On the other hand, an algorithm may decide that all cat pictures have pixels x,y and z that are white, while all gun pictures have pixels a, b and c that are black. And you can change those few pixels to trip up the recognition system while the picture looks exactly the same to a human.
Put me in a room and tell me to push a button when a light comes on and measure the reaction time. If the light comes on every minute or so, my reaction time will be faster than if the light came on every hour, because I would get bored waiting for the light and start thinking or doing other things.
Watching the car drive itself for an hour and being ready to take over in 1second would be too difficult for me, since I would have got bored and stopped paying attention a long time ago.
On the other hand, when I have to drive my car manually, I have stuff to do and no not have time to get bored, so my reaction time is faster.
Driving a car with Autopilot on is like being a driving instructor and the student is a very good driver, but once a month or so decides to drive straight into a lane divider with no warning, so you have to recognize that he is going to do so and that he is not going to stop before the lane divider fast enough so you can take over and stop the car.
Also, this can happen on highways with metal lane dividers. More precisely - divert the car to the oncoming lane just before the divider begins and when the Tesla sees an oncoming car, it will have nowhere to go.
Where I live, during road construction, a yellow line is painted to show how you should drive (go to an oncoming lane etc) and a whole bunch of signs get placed on the "normal" lane you are not supposed to drive on, like a fence. So, by trying not to hit the signs, you will drive correctly, the yellow line is just a guide. There are also signs 1-2km before the construction zone, warning you of the construction ahead.
When the road construction ends, the signs are removed, but the yellow line remains for a while (they do not scrape or wash it off). It seems that Tesla would follow the yellow line anyway and go to the oncoming lane when it is not supposed to.
Road construction sites, at least where I live, do not just have a single line diverting the traffic to an oncoming lane. They have multiple signs ahead of the construction, then right in front of the construction on your lane (if you didn't divert, you would run into a sign or possibly multiple signs).
The single line, on the other hand, may remain after the road construction is done and all signs are removed. They do not scrape the temporary lines from the road.
That is great until someone hacks Tesla or some other car manufacturer and uploads a "modified" firmware to all cars. It would cause much more damage than a simple bomb in a public place.
If I see a sped limit sign that says 400, I'm going to assume it's 40, but someone painted another zero on it. Especially if the road looks like "40" should be the correct speed.
I guess the machine learning algorithms do not do sanity checks:
1.Hey, look, a set of wheels followed by another set of wheels with a gap in etween. I can go right trough there. Oh, this was an 18 wheeler and the height was too low.
2.This seems like the correct direction. Oh wait this was the lane divider.
3.Looks like there are road works and my lane is redirected to the oncoming lane. OK. Oops, it seems there were cars driving on the oncoming lane.
Humans can make these mistakes too (not so sure about the first one though), but mostly if they are drunk, high or stupid.
Yes, it's not surprising.
However, the problem is that humans do not notice those stickers etc. Anyone can see a modified speed limit sign (yes, officer, the sign said 140km/h instead of the more usual 110km/h, I can show you the recording of my dashcam or we can go and look), but you need special equipment (one that works exactly like the autopilot of Tesla) to know that the road was altered enough to trip up the Tesla. Of course, the self-driving cars from another manufacturer would not operate exactly the same and would probably ignore the Tesla-specific stickers, but be tripped up by another set of stickers.
Also, this can be used without targeting. Just put some stickers on the road with frequent Tesla traffic, grab some popcorn and watch the mayhem. Bonus points for causing two Teslas to crash into each other.
A trim system adjusts a small "tab" on the control surface to apply a force in a direction to cancel an input control force needed to maintain a certain position of the control surface.
On most airplanes, yes. On the 737 (and probably other Boeings) trim moves the entire horizontal stabilizer and, in turn, has more authority than the elevator which is part of the stabilizer.
If a black box is 98% safe versus human counterpart that is 83%. The black box is still mathematically safer.
Depends on how those numbers are calculated.
For example, does the 83% include human drivers who are drunk or high? If so, I can increase my own percentage by never driving drunk or high.
But it's true, I'd rather crash as a consequence of my own fuckup (as I can try to reduce my fuckup rate) than as a consequence of some programmer making an off-by-one error (who most likely won't even be punished for the crash) or something like that.
The problem is that if the automated system can cause a crash, it will look bad. Just look at Boeing and MCAS - we do not know how many crashes it prevented (probably a few, since the plane could not be certified without it), but we know about the crashes it caused.
Every time a self-driving car crashes in a way that only a drunk human driver could (say, empty road, drive straight into the lane divider) it makes it look really bad because people can think "I don't drive drunk, but it looks like the AI could, I want my manual car back".
Since we trust software so much, why not have voting over the internet first? I am sure it will be secure and in no way vulnerable to hacking, since humans can write software so well.
I'd say Boeing. The airline managers may not understand such things about airplanes and only care about whether the airplane is certified, how much fuel it uses, how much training for the pilots etc. It should be the responsibility of the manufacturer to make their product safe and not disable additional safety features unless it gets an additional payment. Especially since those features most likely are software-only and do not require additional hardware etc.
But why only one was used for MCAS? I mean OK if there is only one sensor anyway, but if there are two sensors already, why not compare the data from both? If it does not match, then alert the pilots.
I prefer phone conversation over email. Since email is high latency, I have to think of everything I want to say and then write it, sometimes including some simple algorithms (check this, if it works, do this, if it doesn't then check that) which may be misunderstood etc.
On the other hand, when we are taking on the phone, I can ask you questions (does this work? ok, try it now) and finish the conversation taking up much less time and effort than with the emails.
I sent an email. How long should I wait for the reply before switching to another task? I mean I hate frequent switching, but if the sender takes an hour to reply, I'd rather do something else during that time.
There is another problem with email - it's kind of like UDP - I do not know if you read it. Let's say the server is down and it needs to be fixed ASAP. If I write you an email, I won't even know if you read it - maybe you are away from the PC. On the other hand if I call you and you do not answer, I know for sure that you did not pick up and may call someone else instead of waiting for you to get back to your PC and read the email.
The point is that if you need something right now, call. We'll talk and maybe I'll ask you to write an email with the details, but normally the urgent matters (server is down etc) do not require that. And the conversation is faster when I do not have to type everything I want to say.
If you write me an email without calling, then I'll assume that this is not very urgent. The reason is that I may not even be in the office right now (and if you call me with an urgent matter, I'll call a coworker and ask them to look into your problem or try to get beck to the office as fast as I can). I may have connected my monitor to another computer and cannot see the notification. And multiple other reasons.
If whatever urgent matter you have requires a lot of details and so requires an email (with attachments etc), write the email and then call me right after you hit "send".
If you want something from me, send me an email. I'll read it during work hours, maybe today, maybe tomorrow.
If you need me to read it faster, send me an SMS. I'll read it in an hour if I am not sleeping.
If you need something from me RIGHT NOW, call me. As a bonus, you will know immediately whether I can talk to you right now and whether I now know about your problem.
Email conversation is slow, even if I reply you instantly, you will probably take some time to reply, which will stretch out our conversation (say, 5 emails each) to a whole day or maybe two days. So, if you are writing an email, then it is not that urgent to you.
I can see myself buying a new pre-recorded tape, even if the same music is available on CD. Then I would not need to record from CD to tape, I could just play the tape I bought in my car or on my portable player.
You can't make your own record, but you can record your own tape with the music you like.
Also, some music was only released on cassette, so if you want that, you have to buy the cassette or find someone who has it, then borrow and copy it.
I also like that I do not get tempted to skip/choose songs when playing a cassette and can concentrate on doing whatever I am doing instead of choosing songs. It's like listening to radio, but there are no commercials or news.
Yea. Since skipping the song takes time and makes the tape pack uneven, I don't do it. On the other hand, when playing music from my phone I start thinking about the next song, maybe I should choose another and so on. I do not do that with tapes, even if I have more than one tape in my car (expecting to drive longer than the tape plays), I listen to both sides of one tape, then insert another.
I'm passingly curious what you plan to do when it dies...
Let's say my car gets destroyed by a terrorist etc and is not repairable. Well, I'd just buy another old car (for other reasons, not just the radio slot). If the law prevented me from doing that, I'd probably mount a small tape deck (or a car tape deck) under the dash of a car that does not have the proper slot.
I have a lot of tapes and most of them are either pre-recorded or recorded from radio or a record, so, if I wanted that music in a digital format, I would have to record from that tape to digital.
Nothing forces you to fiddle with them.
Nothing external. But if I can change the song or a playlist with a press of a button, I may be very tempted to do so. If I absolutely had to use digital, I would probably buy a bunch of flash drives and use them like tapes.
Also, for me, picking a tape from a set of four (say I'm driving for a few hours), removing it from the case and inserting it into the tape deck is easier and less distracting than going trough menus. I can remove the tape from its case, remove the old tape from the deck, place it on the passenger seat, insert the new tape into the deck while still looking at the road.
I can even choose a tape while still looking at the road - I just bring it in front of me to see which one it is. Since I selected those 4 tapes from my collection, I already know what's on them, so I do not have to read anything - especially if the tapes are pre-recorded or of different brands and look really different.
On the other hand, if I had to navigate menus to find the next playlist or song, that would take much more concentration than with tapes.
If I am driving short distances (and it usually is 10-15 minutes), connecting/disconnecting the phone or other device when I enter/leave the car gets annoying.
I actually tried connecting my phone, it's OK, but less convenient than a tape.
You should have sold them ior given them away to someone who would appreciate them. It makes me sad when I see working equipment thrown out.
On most modern cars you can skip songs using a button on the steering wheel, and you can fit a lot more songs on a modern phone than you can on a very large stack of tapes so you also avoid the distraction of changing or turning over tapes.
Great, now instead of going somewhere, I'll be sitting looking over my whole list of a hundred or more songs trying to figure out which song I want to listen to. When I do, I play it, and resume looking at the list for the next song.
Or I can put a tape in and stop thinking about the song sequence - my choice was already made at home when I took that particular tape to bring to my car.
I do not need an adapter, I modded my tape deck to have a line input. I sometimes connect my minidisc player to that.
What's even easier is to rip a new CD to your smartphone and then use that to listen to it. FAR less hassle than recording a CD to a fricken cassette tape.
Here's the problem. I have maybe 200 cassettes. If I want to get rid of the tape deck in my car and replace it with a digital player, I would have to record all of those cassettes to a digital format. It would take at least 200 hours to do that (then I would need to name the files, maybe split them by song which would take more time).
OTOH, it takes about an hour to record a new CD to a tape.
Plus I've never met anyone who didn't try to fast forward tapes while driving or fiddle distractedly with changing tapes.
I sometimes rewind a tape to listen to a song a second time. When I have a convenient way to select a song from a list, I tend to think too much about it and take more time than the song plays for. I sometimes do that at home - instead of listening to music and doing something somewhat useful, I listen to music and browse directories for the next song.
If I am driving somewhere far away, I take multiple tapes, but I only change the tape when the current one finishes playing and since I only take enough tapes to last the trip, I do not need to think too much about the next tape.
My car is older and it has a slot for a tape deck or radio.
If this is your argument in favor of tapes, it's a terrible argument. If you think people didn't play with their tape decks (fast forwarding) to skip to their favorite bits you haven't driven in a car with a tape deck. People played with their tape decks while driving ALL THE TIME.
Well, maybe other did, but I do not. I very rarely rewind a tape to listen to a song a second time, that's it. When I can select a song to play from a list (be it on a phone or PC), I tend to spend too much time thinking what should I play next. When I play a tape, I listen to it from start of side A to the end of side B.
Plus you have to keep a library of tapes in your car unless you are a psycho who likes listening to the same thing endlessly.
What I do is decide what tape I want to listen to and then take it to my car. When I finish listening to that tape, I get another one. If I plan on driving for longer than one tape plays, I take two or three tapes to cover the driving time.