Killing a few extra people today to bring self driving cars to market faster could actually save more lives in total. I have much more respect for Tesla for shipping something.
Their current implementation doesn't seem to be learning any higher level behaviors (there's a Youtube video of guy using it in a park where it repeatedly accelerates towards islands in the road and then flails off the road as it goes too fast around the island).
Imagine if the video didn't have the friendly European accent and patches of green. Imagine if that was a real life scenario and the greens were a hazard.
I wonder if there are more such videos that show Tesla Autopilot freaking out. It would be an eye opener, Tesla's stock price is dependent on Autopilot among other innovations.
The problem seems to be that Tesla's system is extremely dependent on a nice clear white line at the outer edge of the road. On this road, near the traffic islands, the roadside grass sometimes overgrows the road edge and obscures the white line. The white line has also been scuffed by cars near the edge of the road. [1] The Tesla runs off the road in that situation.
There are two kinds of self-driving. One came up from the DARPA Grand Challenge, which was off-road. That kind first looks at the terrain and obstacles, and figures out where it can physically drive safely. There's LIDAR profiling of terrain. Then it looks at road markings and figures out where it's supposed to go. If the road markings lead into an obstacle or drop-off, it will stop or go around the obstacle. That's Waymo.
The second kind came up from lane-keeping and auto-brake systems. Those are very dependent on highway markings, and only work right on freeways. That's Tesla's original system.
It's hard to tell about the others. Volvo has an extensive sensor suite. Otto seems to be mostly a lane-keeping system for freeways. Uber hasn't released much detail.
It may have gone the other way. Remember, the primary sensor technology in 99.999% of cars out there is two front facing visual-light cameras pointing the same way on a swivel and couple of mirrors.
There's no evidence to suggest that is the case. If anything, Tesla has made it more dangerous to assume that it's safe and falsely autonomous.
When you create new drugs, the FDA definitely doesn't look to kindly on people who think like Silicon Valley. "Killing people is product testing" won't fly in pharmaceuticals.
I'm glad that we don't have people like you designing drugs for the masses!
Not sure you can attribute that thinking to any of the actual engineers working on this.
Is there any evidence that these companies haven't gone through closed circuit tests and passed before testing in public roads?
The next step in drug trials is, in fact, testing on humans and some do suffer serious injury or death. I don't think there's any way around it and the greater good of having a pharmaceutical industry at all outweighs those unfortunate incidents.
There's little evidence that anything Tesla has deployed is an important step towards viable self driving vehicles.
They are apparently mapping the locations of odd situations, but that is pretty meh (and doesn't require the mapping system to be in control of the vehicle).
Ethic issues arise when the expectation is that the occupants will live and then your product falling short on those critical constraint.
Because when you design something for the masses, you are directly responsible for the deaths caused by your product.
This is not a matter of philosophy, from one engineer to another, it's our duty.