this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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That’s what we were all clambering for: a self driving machine that operates like a mouth breather late for work.
Elon is a masterclass of stupid.
Perhaps you should put your hatred towards Elon aside for a while and objectively consider what actually is the better solution here.
One could argue that strictly following the rules is the right approach, and perhaps it would be if everyone actually drove that way. However, in reality, that's not usually the case. What truly increases traffic safety is predictability. If most drivers are rolling through stop signs and you're the only one stopping completely, while you might technically be in the right, your behaviour could lead to accidents due to the unpredictability. The same applies to speeding. Driving significantly slower than the flow of traffic might slow down the traffic flow, leading to unsafe overtakings and such. While you might be legally correct here too, in practice, a slight increase in speed could lead to increased road safety.
These are complex issues. A dose of humility might go a long way instead of acting like the answer is obvious.
What better predictability is there than actually following the law?
Self driving cars should be better than us, not be just like us.
Even if self driving car behaves like a human driver it still exceeds humans thousandfold in processing and reaction speed. For a truly advanced self driving system plowing thru stop signs and speeding should be non-issue because unlike humans it can pay 100% attention to its surroundings 100% of the time and react instantly when needed.
I do this kind of thing for a living, and have done so for going on 30 years. I study complex systems and how they use learning and adaptation.
Musk’s approach to these systems is idiotic and shows no understanding of or appreciation for how complex systems - animals, in particular - actually work. He wanted to avoid giving his vehicles lidar, for instance, because animals can navigate the world without it. Yet he didn’t give them either the perceptual or cognitive capabilities that animals have, nor did he take into account the problems of animal locomotion being solved by evolution are very different from the problems solved by people driving vehicles. It, of course, didn’t work, and now Tesla is trailing the pack on self-driving capabilities with the big three German car makers and others prepping class 3 vehicles for shipping.
If he is trying to chatgpt his way out of the corner he’s painted himself into, he’s just going to make it worse - and, amusingly, for the same reasons. Vision is just one dimension of sensation, and cars are not people, or antelopes, or fish, or whatever his current analogy is.
This is just Elon Eloning again. No one predicts a car coming towards them is going to do a California stop at a stop sign. If Om pulling into an intersection and I see someone rolling through a stop sign, I’m hitting the brakes because obviously a) they didn’t see me and b) they don’t know the rules of the road. Elon’s cars have a problem with cross traffic and emergency vehicles anyway, making the logic fuzzier is not going to improve the situation. If he thinks throwing video and telemetry data at a large model is going to overcome his under-engineered autonomous system, I suspect he’s going to be in for a rude discovery.
If there’s anything kids today can learn from Elon (or from Trump for that matter), it’s how to be so confidently wrong that people throw money at you. The problem is that if you’re not already born into wealth and privilege, you’re likely to merely become the owner of the most successful line of car dealerships in a suburban county in Pennsylvania, or else in prison for fraud.
If FSD is trained from billions of hours of video data then it by definition drives like an average driver and thus is highly predictable.
That’s not how it works, unfortunately. That’s how people want it to work, but it’s not how it works.
This is just more of Elon’s pie in the sky.
If you've done this kind of stuff for living for the past 30 years then I'm sure you can give me a better explanation than "that's not how it works"
It's simply solved by the fact that I, as a human driver, can recognize now when a robo-taxi is driving and change my expectations of the car's behavior. Right now it's clearly evident what an autonomous car looks like and a reasonable person will have the expectation that they follow the letter of the law.
I interact with these vehicles on a daily basis in San Francisco and it would be weird if they weren't driving perfectly.
The better solution is to not program your machine to act like a clown behind the wheel, doing all manner of illegal offences because ThAt’s HoW ReGulAr PeoPlE DrIve!
We aren’t trying to make auto pilot act like a real bonafide driver, we are just removing the inconvenience of needing to do the driving.
That depends on what you value.
If you want self driving cars that follow traffic rules to the letter even if that means more people are going to die then that's fine. I don't agree but I can see why someone would think that. Personally I would prioritize human life so if it turns out this is one of the cases when bending the rules does in fact lead to less accidents then that's what I'm voting for.
I'm not claiming either is true. Just asking to consider the fact that the right thing to do is not always intuitive.
The answer is clear and easy.
Don't let computers have full control over freely moving several ton death machines.
This is such a cop-out. "No computers!", but it's okay to let someone drive who isn't paying attention because they're deep in their phone? I drive a motorcycle and I've had people stare me straight in the eye, only to pull out in front of me and nearly kill me.
People are notoriously bad at driving. The computer doesn't have to be perfect, just better than the soccer moms or distracted dummies.
After a while the human will be the bottle neck of preventing accidents.
Computers are a lot better at following the law.