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Comment by t0mas88 | Hacker News Reader

Humans aren't designed to monitor something that requires no action for a long time and then suddenly requires attention, nor are we good at taking over control of something at the last moment. You're not in the "flow" at that point.

The article is correct that expecting average drivers to do this without training is a high risk move. I've given flight instruction, taking over a landing 20ft off the ground is way harder than landing a plane yourself. And that's with a lot of training, not just an average driver being put in a place to supervise Tesla autopilot with no training at all.

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In practice it doesn’t work like this.

Current Teslas allow Autopilot on the streets, it just tries to go forward on the intersections (with FSD it also tries to take turns). Stops on the lights and stop signs, btw. So the way you use it, you engage it on the long stretch, where it knows what to do, and monitor on the intersection. If it tries to take wrong lane on the intersection, you interfere. On simple intersections it goes through just fine. All this without FSD Beta.

Is it autonomous? No. Is it way less tiring to drive a car, when you don’t have to do lane keeping, speed control and traffic light stops yourself all the time? Absolutely.

Having to be prepared to take over at any second is more tiring than doing the other stuff myself. You have to be even more alert because you're changing mental states.

For most people, lane keeping and speed control is ingrained enough they do it subconsciously.

Have you actually tried it? Because entire point I’m making is that it’s not like this in practice. You get used to it quickly and know when you need to monitor it and be ready and when you can relax.

But "knowing when you can relax" is the dangerous part. That's what makes humans unsuitable for monitoring something that goes right 99% of the time. Tesla's can swerve into an obstacle or oncoming traffic at any moment, it only happens maybe once per 100.000 driving hours, but at that moment the human behind the wheel is probably in the relax mode and completely incapable of taking over.

That's not just theory, the article describes there have been 3 serious accidents already with "self driving" Teslas that crashed while being monitored by the driver.

But how is it deferent from humans? They make mistakes too! All that matters is rate of mistakes.

> Humans aren't designed to monitor something that requires no action for a long time and then suddenly requires attention

Isn't that exactly the definition of cruise control ?

I'm sorry but I won't be driving a car without cruise control anymore: cruise control saves oil and is much more comfortable.

With cruise control you’re still very much the one who is driving and paying attention.

Ok, I can't imagine myself dropping attention from driving. As a member of a national roadkill prevention awareness org and having lost close friends on the road: I would never had imagined that it would require you to drop attention.

I imagined it was something you could enable and then disable by just breaking like cruise control or auto parking with toyotas.

But now I see how complex it becomes because of the wheel, even tesla owners in the comments of the article don't like to let their hands off the wheel.

The more automated cars become, the more drivers will start to trust them and pay less attention - especially when it’s advertised as full self driving.

Prime example would be the Uber test driver who felt she could trust the car enough to watch a TV show on her phone, when she was supposed to be supervising it.

Plus our attention naturally just starts to wander when the talk at hand is not that engaging.

My understanding was that she was looking on a dashboard screen slightly before crashing into the bicyclist, not a cellphone?

Cruise control doesn't require you to drop your attention to driving. It simply relieves you of the need to keep your foot on a pedal.

Cruise control + lane keeping perhaps. Which is why I think lane-centering driving assists are dangerous and the limit should be lane-leaving warnings (buzz in steering wheel when close to lane edge - no steeeing to follow lane).

BMW has a good middle ground, resistance increases if you go to the edge of the lane and if you almost touch the lines the wheel vibrates. That means you're still consciously steering but it's easier because the car has a tendency to follow the lanes just as any wheel has a tendency to return to center after a turn. But if you let go of the wheel it wouldn't keep a lane.

Makes sense. Making these systems behave well doesn’t seem so hard if it’s starting from the correct principle: never encourage the driver to not drive the vehicle. Assist, but don’t take over.

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