Comment by willidiots | Hacker News Reader

Comment by willidiots | Hacker News Reader

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I've been driving a rental Model 3 with FSD for the past day - for the first time - and totally agree. And after a day's experience, it's obvious it needs to be watched. It's an amazing capability but there are clearly still corner cases, and it makes you very aware of them.

I liken Autopilot / FSD more to a horse at its current state. You keep a firm but gentle hand on the rein and let it find its way. Sometime you have to check it.

If you get complacent (which the screen explicitly warns you against), yeah, things could go wrong. That's also 100% true when driving a normal car.

Edit to add: I think a lot of criticism focuses on the term "Full Self-Driving" which implies "Full Self-Driving". That's fair, but I think it misses an important point. ("Autopilot" made a lot more sense to me: real autopilots can't do everything either. They can't even taxi.)

When you're actually IN THE CAR, enabling this functionality for the first time, you have to enable three separate toggle switches. Each one pops up a progressively longer, more dire WARNING dialog, emphasizing the software's primitive state, the importance of paying attention and keeping your hand on the wheel. It also demands your constant attention while engaged.

> It's an amazing capability but there are clearly still corner cases, and it makes you very aware of them.

The thing that most of these companies are failing to grasp is that the whole endeavor is like 99% corner cases. It's corner cases all the way down. The hope was that there was this big chunk of the problem space that could be handled in a tractable way, and that would hopefully account for ~80% of driving conditions. Then corner cases could be handled on an as-needed basis to fill in the gaps, and slowly you could handle more and more scenarios.

The problem is that the reason for so many corner cases in this domain is that driving is a social activity. The rules of the road actually belie how much communication between humans goes on when they are driving. Driving has its own norms, its own language, culture, emergent behaviors, and traffic exists as a crucial force that must be balanced in a city ecosystem. But autonomous cars aim to solve the driving problem by ignoring the social, and reducing it to an optimization problem. Autonomous cars are blind to the larger world around them except to recognize colors and the nearness of physical bodies.

They miss social cues, they lack higher order reasoning about traffic patterns, they can't negotiate with pedestrians or other drivers, they are unable to weigh the ethical considerations between when following a law is actually worse that breaking it.

As of now I consider them menaces on the road, and that pains me as someone who got to play with some of the first driverless car technology in the lab. I had such high hopes for it, and what I hoped was not... this.

It's like a teenage driver. You have to keep an eye out for developing situations you know it's too stupid to handle elegantly.

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