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> The system isn't AI based... It's currently based on static programming. This is why a development team would have to think of every possible scenario that could happen on roads to make self driving cars really work.

I'm not really sure what this dichotomy is that you're describing. It certainly looks like they're using computer vision to detect the bounding boxes of cars, and the field of computer vision is widely described as being either a subset of artificial intelligence or a cross-disciplinary approach combining artificial intelligence with a handful of other fields.

> You'd have to ask all kinds of wild questions too like:

> "What if kids played a prank and re-painted road lanes on a highway at 50MPH?"

This sort of thing actually happens with real humans, and the legal system has to (and does) handle it. In the 1990s three people removed a stop sign as a prank and were sentenced to 15 years in prison after a human driver drove into the intersection and hit another vehicle, killing three teenagers. https://www.nytimes.com/1997/06/21/us/3-are-sentenced-to-15-.... The fact that it's possible for humans to illegally modify road markings and end up killing people is a challenge and a tragedy, but it's not anything new or particularly game-changing for self-driving cars.

> "What if a sand storm happened?"

That sounds like one of the easiest possible problems. What do humans do when they suddenly have nearly zero visibility on a road? In most places I assume they are supposed to (and do) pull over to the side of the road and stop. I've been in rain that is so heavy that all the nearby cars on the highway had to pull over.

> "What would the car do if a tire blows out at 55MPH?"

Again, that's another thing that happens a lot, and probably causes a lot of injuries and deaths. Again, I'm not minimizing that loss, but it's not some huge "gotcha" for self-driving cars. In this particular example, I would expect self-driving cars to be vastly better than most human drivers in this situation at maintaining control while pulling over and stopping.

> What do humans do when they suddenly have nearly zero visibility on a road?

They cause gigantic pile-ups, because humans are unbelievably bad at driving.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/50-people-injured-69-vehicle-pileu...

You replied to the 4 scenarios I posted, but forgot the thousands of others left while you missed my point. They were rhetorical to illustrate that nothing yet can replace a trained, experienced, and attentive driver effectively yet.

There are no simple answers to the above questions, but if a driver causes the accident, they are accountable. Companies want to launch this tech but not own accountability for accidents when it could well be faulty logic and or code that contributes to deadly incidents. In a ship... less of a risk... In a car, surrounded by 4-10 other cars, the risk is much higher.

Profit making should not drive this blatant hubris... We forget how history reminds us of an over-reliance on technology and intelligent design.

> You replied to the 4 scenarios I posted, but forgot the thousands of others left while you missed my point.

    try
    {
      while (true)
      {
         if (IsScenarioOutsideOfUnderstanding())
         {
            throw NotUnderstoodException()
         }
      }
    }
    catch (NotUnderstoodException)
    {
        SlowDownAndStopLikeAnyoneElseWould();
    }

    Patch for car stopping way too often:
        catch (NotUnderstoodException)
        {  
    -        SlowDownAndStopLikeAnyoneElseWould();
    +        // FIXME TODO let the safety driver handle it for now
    +        // SlowDownAndStopLikeAnyoneElseWould();
        }

Go watch Elon's presentation Autonomy Day. He pointedly addresses it.

Specifically, he shows an orders-of-magnitude chart, each point accompanied by a picture of a car presented at that magnitude of occurrence. At one extreme is "car" as they appear with most common frequency (in front of you, rear visible). At other extreme is "car" in an extremely unlikely occurrence (airborne, bottom view prominent). The system Tesla implements addresses such a broad range of information & occurrences.

Tesla has upwards of a million "full self driving" vehicles on the road now, all gathering video, all processing that data, all feeding what they learn & experience back to Tesla. The computers, even if not actually driving, are constantly observing situations, categorizing, and comparing to what humans do as a response. Extreme situations (crashes etc) are flagged and routed to Tesla for incident analysis; the AI is corrected & taught to handle the situations, and all vehicles updated accordingly in short order.

Upshot: Tesla DOES have a system for addressing, learning, encoding, and improving the "thousands of other" scenarios. By the time "full self driving" is unleashed, the Tesla AI system will already be trained to extremes by a million "trained, experienced, and attentive drivers"; insofar as some cases may be insufficiently covered, they will be statistically less common & dangerous than the baseline error rate of human drivers (distracted, drunk, debilitated, dumb).

As far as accountability, Tesla is working hard to build a decisive system & case that if bad happens, it is a statistical anomaly which is still better than the alternative of not using self-driving tech. There is a legal principle whereby one may violate the law when obeying it would cause greater harm; autonomous vehicles are close to crossing that line for the better.

And yes, great profit is due those who improve humanity via technology.

> Tesla has upwards of a million "full self driving" vehicles on the road now, all gathering video, all processing that data, all feeding what they learn & experience back to Tesla.

I'm curious how you square this with the fact that humans learn to drive with intermittent sensory input from only two cameras plus some auxiliary sensors. Clearly, humans can extrapolate from very limited input. Why can't Tesla demonstrate object permanence after years of development?

Takes 16 years to train a human to learn driving, and badly at that. We have a vastly larger & superior neutral net, specialized training support, swivel mounted cameras, and probably a lot more than we yet realize.

> In this particular example, I would expect self-driving cars to be vastly better than most human drivers in this situation at maintaining control while pulling over and stopping.

Cars today are vastly better at maintaining control in this situation even without self-driving. If the car has traction control, as long as the driver doesn't panic they will have a much greater chance of keeping control of their vehicle, compared to cars without a computer assisting them.

This is an area which I am interested in.

While most interest/discussion in self-driving surrounds the interpretation of the environment viz other road users, road markings and signage, I am following the (too slowly developing) Roborace, Stanford's MARTY and similar efforts to automate expert car control including handling the loss of control.

I look forward to the day when passengers can be confident that they are safer than with even the best human driver. And not just statistically safer, but demonstrably so.

> than your home computer can handle, much less the components in Tesla cars.

Ehm a recent Tesla has very powerful specialized hardware, developed in-house, which is much more powerful than a commodity home PC with expensive GPUs. You might want to do some basic research before you make such claims...

> The system isn't AI based... It's currently based on static programming

A large neural network is used to make many of the decisions, as well as to run the perception of the sensors/cameras. Unclear what you mean by "AI", but neural networks are usually covered in the "AI" term by researchers and engineers in this field.

> may never be flawlessness enough to make error free updates

It seems that you are new in this argument, because this point has been rebutted so many times in the past, but here goes: it does not have to be flawless, it just has to statistically cause fewer accidents per kilometer/year than what human drivers cause in a similar situation (which is already non-zero, and in some countries actually quite high).

There is Network Dependent AI... Not independent processing power on board each vehicle to make autonomous decisions.

I was referring to AI that operates independently of a network connection. There are multiple scenarios in which a network connection can become unavailable.

I'm not here to disparage Tesla, I really don't care what company creates self driving cars. Most people are acting like Tesla are the only ones.

Tesla vehicles equipped with the Full Self Driving package do have an onboard computer that runs neutral networks in real time to process sensor data and control the vehicle.

https://ww.electrek.co/2019/04/22/tesla-full-self-driving-co...

A Tesla autopilot works offline without any network connection. (I mean of course the driving itself, not the updates.) So what exactly are you talking about?

>it does not have to be flawless, it just has to statistically cause fewer accidents per kilometer/year than what human drivers cause in a similar situation (which is already non-zero, and in some countries actually quite high).

Says who?

The fact that you state this so confidently demonstrates a lack of understanding of both human nature and politics.

> it does not have to be flawless, it just has to statistically cause fewer accidents per kilometer/year than what human drivers cause in a similar situation (which is already non-zero, and in some countries actually quite high).

Even though it logically makes sense, there are some nuances to it, most prominent of which is: When human drivers cause accidents, they are held responsible by the legal system. Who's responsible when your car made the decision? Is it Tesla? Is it the driver? Society is probably not going to accept a small improvement over humans while all the legal burden goes up in the air. It may demand a much higher improvement to compensate.

> Who's responsible when your car made the decision? Is it Tesla? Is it the driver?

Any time a Tesla is involved in an accident, it seems like the company is more than happy to throw out reams of log data "proving" that it isn't their fault. But yet at the same time they maintain marketing material claiming their "auto pilot" feature is (or will be) so awesome that the human driver is only there to make the lawyers happy.

That's actually totally non-contradictory. The human is there to make Tesla's lawyers happy, and they are definitely very happy to have an easy scapegoat to blame if their tech fails to live up to the hype.

> It seems that you are new in this argument, because this point has been rebutted so many times in the past, but here goes: it does not have to be flawless, it just has to statistically cause fewer accidents per kilometer/year than what human drivers cause in a similar situation (which is already non-zero, and in some countries actually quite high).

Yes, but they need a process in place to insure that that is true, and a process in place that insures that is true with each new update. They are remarkably cagey with statistics about AutoPilot.

Elon claims that Autopilot is currently much safer than human driving, yet the only statistics released are biased comparisons between Autopilot miles, which are almost exclusively on highways, and general auto statistics (where crashes occur most frequently off highways). If Elon really wanted to show the software effectiveness of current Autopilot, he could release the crash statistics of customers who purchased Autopilot and customers who did not, as many people have requested of him. He has thus far refused to.

This is much less true than it used to be with the current rewrite of the autopilot software:

https://cleantechnica.com/2020/01/31/timestamped-guide-to-pa...

The system is absolutely AI based today. There is no hardcoding like this. Hardware 3 in Tesla cars is an ASIC meant to run neural nets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot#Hardware_3). Why are you so confidently stating things you don't know about?

I'm not really sure what the hardware link you provided has to do with anything but plenty of rule-based heuristics are used in state of the art autonomous driving systems. Machine learning systems have taken over the image processing and classification parts, semantic segmentation, object recognition and so on but traffic rules or emergency behaviour or hard speed limits are not learned.

the OP is wrong though in somehow classifying this as 'not AI'. Just because ML has become an important part of the equation doesn't mean we have thrown control theory and logical constraints out of the window.

The current AI is running rudimentary calculations based on what is truly required for flawless operation... The type of processing that is necessary to operate like a GOOD human driver is nowhere near what currently exists... Sure there are bad drivers out there, and that's why autonomous vehicles would need to be EXCEPTIONALLY good... Not just good enough for a few demos on youtube.

If a company's test cycles were good enough to warrant reliability and safety promises, the window on the CyberTruck would have never broken.... This is how companies work, they over promise and under-deliver, this time it affects everyone's safety, including safety of those who don't buy them.

I'm not saying the strides aren't impressive, I'm saying I wouldn't feel safe having this experimental technology forced upon me knowing the potential for historically complex human factors.

From your own cited source:

At this level, the car can act autonomously but requires the driver to be prepared to take control at a moment's notice.[103][104] HW1 is suitable only on limited-access highways, and sometimes will fail to detect lane markings and disengage itself. In urban driving the system will not read traffic signals or obey stop signs. This system also does not detect pedestrians or cyclists,[105] and while AP1 detects motorcycles,[106] there has been two instances of AP rear-ending motorcycles.[107]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot#Hardware_3

What does hardware 1 and AP1 have to do with the latest hardware and autopilot?

Because each individual car is not truly autonomous when it comes to learning and improving diving based on it's specific geo location. I am not talking specifically about Tesla, this goes for all automated cars...

We have to be able to admit that we aren't ready to launch thousands of these cars out on streets at this point. They have NOT been perfect.

There are tons of issues beyond just the quality of the AI. Software development and updates, vehicle maintenance, planned obsolescence of models, Legality, ethics, ownership... tons of other issues not hashed out. The combination of all of those issues makes autonomous vehicles near impossible any time soon, unless we ALL want to give up our right to own personal property and submit our safety to being test subjects. I'm not willing to do that at this point as a development manager myself.