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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

Would you describe Tesla's tendency to crash full speed into stopped emergency vehicles during highway driving as "excellent"?

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/16/business/tesla-autopilot-fede...

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While controversial, we tolerate a great deal of casualties caused by human drivers without trying to illegalise those.

While we can (and should) hold autonomous vehicle developers to a much, much higher standard than we hold human drivers, it is precisely because of excellence.

We actually do "illegalise" casualties by human drivers.

I'm sure the grand poster meant banning human driving entirely in order to prevent human driving casualties.

The failure modes are going to be very strange and the technology is not strictly comparable to a human driver. It is going to fail in ways that a human never would. Not recognizing obstacles, misrecognizing things, sensors being obscured in a way humans would recognize and fix (you would never drive if you couldn't see out of your eyes!).

It is also possible that if it develops enough it will succeed in ways that a human cannot, such as extremely long monotonous cross-country driving (think 8 hour highway driving) punctuated by a sudden need to intervene within seconds or even milliseconds. Humans are not good at this but technology is. Autonomous cars don't get tired or fatigued. Code doesn't get angry or make otherwise arbitrary and capricious decisions. Autonomous cars can react in milliseconds, whereas humans are much worse.

There will undoubtedly be more accidents if the technology is allowed to develop (and I take no position on this).

That's autopilot, not FSD beta though, at this point it's probably 10 generations old

Ah yes, because "autopilot" is not autonomous.

Well yeah, it's like other autopilots:

An autopilot is a system used to control the path of an aircraft, marine craft or spacecraft without requiring constant manual control by a human operator. Autopilots do not replace human operators. Instead, the autopilot assists the operator's control of the vehicle, allowing the operator to focus on broader aspects of operations (for example, monitoring the trajectory, weather and on-board systems).

That's just devious marketing on Tesla's part. They can always excuse customer misunderstandings with the original meaning you explained, while normal people can be savely expected to interpret autopilot as full self driving (and I'd be surprised if they didn't have actually tested this with focus groups beforehand). So not really lying (great for the lawsuits), but constructing misunderstanding on purpose (great for the brand image).

Except for the manual and all the warnings that pop up that say you need to pay attention.

3000 people die every day in automobile accidents, 10% of which are from people who are sleepy. Even standard autopilot is better than a tired driver

I would say it's better then the Human's tendency to drive full speed into anything while impaired by a drug. Especially since the bug was fixed in Tesla's case but the bug in Human's case is probably un-fixable.

Drugs (or alcohol)? There are so many more failure modes that drugs are the least of my concerns. Especially of unspecified type. I'm not the least bit worried about drivers hopped up on tylenol. Humans get distracted while driving, by texting, or simply boredom and start daydreaming. Don't forget about driving while tired. Or emotionally disturbed (divorce or a death; road rage). Human vision systems are also pretty frail and have bad failure modes, eg the sun is close to the horizon and the driver is headed towards the sun.

Computer vision systems also have bad failure modes. The camera sensors typically used today have better light sensitivity but less dynamic range than the human eye.

They fixed driving into stationary things? That's news to me. What's your source?

It's not an easy problem to fix at high speed without false positives, and they seem to really hate false positives.

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