I feel like the NTSB need to draft a min spec for self driving cars and a testing course that involves some of the worst circtimstances to get approved. I feel like all self driving cars should have to have lidar, and other sensors. Computer vision really isn't working out.
this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2023
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You build a benchmark and tesla will train on that benchmark, says nothing about real world use but gets them signed off.
But yes western society is currently in a hellscape of refusing to do even basic regulation of any new technology so it'll probably be a good 20 years of murder robots on the streets before anything gets written down.
By “western society” do you mean the US? Because the EU doesn’t seem to have any qualms about regulating new technologies. That seems to be a uniquely American thing.
Which somehow means that Europeans suddenly have headlights that makes sense while we’re over here dying from aftermarket HIDs that should be treated like the VA Highway Patrol treats radar detectors ( rip ‘em out and smash them with a sledgehammer on the side of the road)
To be fair we already have giant metal murder boxes zooming around on the streets. If AI kills even a single person everyone flips out even though over 40,000 people die every year in the US from car accidents. And that is just the deaths, not including injuries. Yet I don't really see anyone calling for more regulations on driving tests for humans.
People want AI to somehow be perfect when in reality as long as AI is even 1% better than humans that's saving over 400 lives per year. AI doesn't get sleepy, distracted, drunk, etc. so it probably already is at least 1% better in most situations. Humans are horrible drivers.
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But yes western society is currently in a hellscape of refusing to do even basic regulation
US regulations are only written in blood or money. the united states was built on the backs of slaves, and then wage-slaves. literal graveyards filled with workers.
im not disagreeing with you, i just found this comically disparate to history... ie, its always been a regulation hellscape.
But yes western society is currently in a hellscape of refusing to do even basic regulation
Only the Usamerican country.
We Europeans are scratching our heads already for very long: why are they letting these guys do just everything they want?
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I don't think mandating lidar specifically by name is right, seeing as computer vision is definitely a software problem. Instead they should mandate some method to detect objects in any light condition + a performance standard, which in practice during certification could mean lidar. Regulations should be as minimal and specific as possible.
Good point. Mandate the ends rather than the means. If they get better functionality with some new tech in a few years, we don't want outdated regulations holding the industry back.
computer vision is definitely a software problem.
No, it isn't.
If it were only software, don't you think Tesla should be the best of them all, being the pure software shop they are?
But it is a real world problem. Recognizing real objects in real world conditions like weather, natural and artificial lights, temperatures (want some ice on your camera?), winds & storms, all kinds of unforeseen circumstances, other bad drivers, police and firemen...
And that's why that pure software shop is so bad at it, while all the real carmakers shrug... they are used to it since forever.
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Should a self-driving car face more rigorous tests than actual human drivers? Honest question.
Yep.
Yes, because when there’s an accident with a person driving, you usually know exactly who is legally to blame in an accident. With self-driving, if the car accidentally hits and kills someone, who do you charge for it? There’s no one person you can point to for responsibility for if something goes wrong, like you can for a person responsible for an accident.
Yes. A human brain can handle edge cases it’s never encountered before. Can a self driving car?
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Ever stop at a red light only to have a police officer wave you through?
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Ever encounter a car driving the wrong way down a one way street?
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Ever come across a flooded out stretch of road? (if the road has no lines and the water is still it can be very deceptive looking)
These are a tiny number of things I’ve encountered over the past few years. I’m sure plenty of other drivers can provide other good examples. I’d want to know how a self driving car would handle itself in situations like these.
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Human drivers should be facing more rigorous testing regardless. It’s horrifically easy to get a license… and then they never test you again for the rest of your life. That’s just insane when you think about it. My test was in 2002. Feels like I should have to retake it at some point.
And take them away for bad driving. But we don’t because our entire transportation infrastructure, outside of a few cities namely NY, is built around everyone driving a car.
Yes because each person must learn on their own and have limited experience relative to the general public as a whole.
Self driving cars can 'learn' from all self driving cars and don't get tired, forget, or anything like that. While they shouldn't be held to perfection, they should absolutely be held to a higher standard than a human.
Should a self-driving car face more rigorous tests than actual human drivers? Honest question
First: none of these automated cars would pass a German driver's license test. By far.
Second: of course you cannot compare tests for humans with tests for machines.
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Throw I some pot holes and child pedestrian crossing the street, etc and they'd even come out with a powerful marketing ad.
Everyone would build to pass the test track. This does get at the problem though: the permutations of scenarios an L5 system has to correctly process is a huge number. Trying to build a system that can do that appears to be beyond anyone’s av system right now. This is why the most advanced deployments are all geofenced. That way at least the traffic signs and signals, lane markings, etc all understood and tested. Even then ‘shit happens’. Untested scenarios still occur. Also the maps are always out of date.
The problem really requires AGI, and nobody has one of those, or if they do it’s a secret.
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Still pushing full self driving even while they are dodging lawsuits by claiming it's just highway cruise control that customers are abusing
People commonly confuse Autopilot and FSD beta. One is the advanced cruise control and comes on all models while the other is supposed to be autonomous driving and costs $15k extra.
When I found out teslas don't have LiDAR I nearly shat myself.
Yeah, fun stuff happens when the AI tries to interpret vision of sunlight shining straight into the lens.
Don't you know those things cost money!?
Sadly cost cutting MBAs seldom concern themselves with silly things like function or necessity.
That wasn't an educated MBA who cut them it was a stupid CEO who felt it was an unnecessary crutch (his words).
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Have you seen how much these cars cost? For that amount of money it should personally serve me breakfast in bed, let alone having a scanner
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They did but then Musk had the genius idea to stop installing them. I still have it in my older model but they changed the software not to use them anymore. Like I said, genius....
Which car do you have that has LiDAR in it? Maybe you’re thinking of RADAR which is different.
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Yeah I'm not getting in a car driven by AI. The tech ain't where it needs to be for that.
It needs to be regulated to hold manufacturers responsible when their software isn't good enough. My understanding is that there already probably is enough regulation and government agencies just need to hold Tesla accountable.
Personally, I'm all for cars driven by AI iff it's better and safer than a human driver. Human drivers make a lot of mistakes and driving is the most dangerous everyday activity many people do. But if the AI isn't better than a human, that's a problem. I don't need AI drivers to be flawless, as that's an unrealistic bar. I just need them to be undeniably better than humans. Everything I'm hearing about Tesla's self driving is that they aren't.
Especially Tesla. I am very into computer vision research but I would never trust a vehicle that relies on only that with 0 LIDAR or other sensing technologies in place.
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Unfortunately you can still be hit by cars that idiots let the AI drive.
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I'm convinced that the self-driving AI from competent companies is better than human drivers already. The bar isn't perfection, the bar is the average driver, and the average driver is bad.
Having said that, I'd never get in a car with Tesla's self-driving solution. Musk polluted the term "full self-driving" to cars that definitely weren't.
No, the bar is accountability. If the FSD screws up either:
- It's claimed the driver was responsible, in which case it's absolutely not FSD
- Someone other than the driver is investigated and cleared/convicted of wrong doing.
It absolutely does not matter that it's better than an "average" driver. If the best driver in the world screws up, they are still held accountable.
When a service is willing to take responsibility for collisions and driving violations, then we know it works. If the guy asleep at the wheel (which he allegedly can do in an autonomous car) is still the one held responsible, then were not there yet.
That said end-to-end AI totally sounds like equivocal marketing buzz.
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You wouldn't let chatGPT drive a car would you?
DriveGPT. Written by chatGPT proompted by chatGPT. Powered ny Nvidia^tm©®.
Gonna take the concept of AI hallucinations to a whole new level.
You mean LLM hallucinations?
Typical ML models are not hallucinating in the same manner.
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Not a fan of Tesla or Musk, but can we differentiate the broad public understanding of the term AI from machine learned control systems? People anthropomorphize the situation into thinking there is an I, Robot style driver enough as it is.
Counterpoint, though, maybe doing so encourages skepticism of Tesla's capabilities.
It's not AI it's VI.
Virtual intelligence is not artificial intelligence.
That's right, all the mistakes it makes are now powered purely by AI. Isn't that fantastic?
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As a cyclist I really do look forward to the day where good AI is consistently better than the average-to-worst drivers out there; the bar is depressingly low and the stakes are high.
I write (and test) software for a living and my experience with Tesla as a consumer device is that it's many generations away from being something I would trust.
Also, I've seen what happens to product quality when management overrides its engineers in the way elon does- we get pre-alpha quality out there in the wild, being tested on a public that didn't sign up for that shit
That title and thumbnail are pure poetry.
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