Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

What level of autonomy does Tesla market their latest hardware as? So long as they never label it as being above SAE Level 2 (i.e. don't take your hands of the wheel or eyes off the road ever) then I have no problem with this tech. The only thing they need to fix then is the name of the product. They shouldn't be calling it autopilot as it gives the impression you can answer an email on your phone while the car is doing the commuting for you.

In my opinion Tesla and all other manufacturers should perfect their Level 2 tech (and not call it autopilot) and then jump straight to Level 5, even if it means it's 3 decades out. We can't have drivers sleeping at the wheel in level 3/4 cars with patchy software. And that's regardless of whether manufacturers can prove that their tech has markedly fewer accidents than often-failing human drivers. I'm happy to take the risk to crash with a sleepy fleshdriver, but I'm not ok with crashing due to a software bug. I think many share this sentiment - which means there is a double standard that setting the bar much much higher for autonomous systems than they will ever be for humans.

No, humans cannot operate in the way the product is advertised. It does not work and it invites the human to become complacent and not pay attention. It's a way to weasel and doublespeak your way around shortcomings in the product. A human that doesn't need their hands on the wheel and their eyes on the road 99% of the time will not have their hands on the wheel the 1% of the time that they do.

From Tesla:

> All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver.

I should note that both Tesla and you stress hardware capability, not software. Tesla mopes around the bushes with phrases like "awaiting regulatory approval".

If Tesla does actually mean "we've got all the gadgets but the software isn't there yet", they have a serious marketing issue. To the layperson, everything they say makes it sound like their car will make you breakfast, drive you to work and take the kids to school. Seems like they're not there and it's not just regulation holding them up.

At the shallow end, it's misleading advertising, at worst it means people are putting their and their passengers' lives at serious risk.

I would not be surprised if we start seeing mandated health warnings accompany semi-autonomous vehicle adverts, spelling out exactly what they can and cannot do.

I should hope that “all the hardware is there for level5” also means that it operates as a very good level 2 until Tesla enables autonomy - which happens when software and approvals are ready - which may be a decade.

If they sell something now that has hardware for level 5 but neither software nor approval for level 5, but they weasel-maket it as “autopilot” and users can enable a mode where they can let go of the wheel - then they are just criminal.

>I'm happy to take the risk to crash with a sleepy fleshdriver, but I'm not ok with crashing due to a software bug.

I find this very hard to understand, especially when you're making the choice on behalf of others. Would you drive your children to school, knowing that you're making them less safe, just so that if they do die it's your fault rather than that of some programmer?

What's the hard to understand part? The programmer is not the one facing a life-or-death decision when a driving hazard occurs -- the driver is.

Sure, which might mean that the programmer is more careless and might cause more crashes.

But if you've already stipulated that the driverless cars are safe than driven ones, then that fact is irrelevant. The program has already been written and if it is in fact safer than my own driving then I would want to use it.

It seems to me that people are actually more likely to take unreasonable risks when they have to make these calls on the spot. We often overestimate our ability to handle difficult situations and are prone to valuing "getting there in time" more than playing it safe.

NASA is known to define a set of strict and absolute mission rules before the beginning of a mission for just this reason. See for example the rules defined for various Apollo missions [1]. Note how those rules define all sorts of limits and abort triggering conditions. This is done because there is always a desire accomplish the mission even when something has gone wrong.

[1] https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/alsj-MissionRules.html

I'm not entirely sure why I accept being hit by a drunk driver but not by an AI driver. I suspect that first of all, my reasoning can not be backed up by pure reasoning and numbers, so any attempt to say that "look, our AI is safer than humans we should allow it" is probably doomed to fail (I mean I'm a bloody programmer by trade and even I refuse to accept simple statistical arguments in this case! - what will then "regular" people think?)

But perhaps the most convincing argument is that even the drunk, sleepy or sloppy driver at least takes a reciprocal risk in traffic. The one thing that makes me believe that people try their best to avoid hitting me is that we will both be in the accident.

Simply put: we are sort of fine with being put at risk by human behavior. That's part of of the risks we have already accepted. This is a new risk and even if it reduces another risk (fewer human drivers) we classify it as a "new risk" and we are risk averse.

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