There are pretty stringent laws against drunk driving in most places... if Tesla's "self driving" modes are that bad then they should be equally illegal
Genuinely curious: how would you even go about advancing autonomous driving without testing it in the streets?
I'm absolutely certain that they've attempted to simulate millions of hours of driving, yet this odd behavior happened in real life, which now can be studied and fixed.
If we never had the software on the wild, how would you ever really test it?
>Genuinely curious: how would you even go about advancing autonomous driving without testing it in the streets?
Genuine response:
1 don't let customers do the testing, especially if you don't train them (I mean real training about failures not PR videos and tweets and some small letter manual with disclaimers)
2 use employees, train drivers to test, have some cameras to check the driver to make sure he pays attention.
3 postpone testing until the hardware and software is good enough so you don't ignore static objects.
4 make sure you don't do monthly updates that invalidates all your previous tests.
IMO there is so much 'machine learning' in the tesla self driving system is there any way to know a bug is 'fixed' other than just running it through a probably totally boring set of tests that doesn't even approach covering all scenarios?
Yeah, I guess you could always be safer about it, but I'm really not sure it would be enough. If we substitute FSD for any software, you have code tests, QA, the developers test it, and bugs still go through. It's inevitable.
Unfortunately it's always about the incentives and on a capitalist society the only incentive is money. So even if they could be safer, they wouldn't do it unless it's more profitable, specially being a publicly traded company.
In a sense, a self-driving car might actually be easier to test for than complex software - at least parts of it.
After all, normal (complex) software tends to have lots of in depth details you need to test for; and a surface area that's pretty irregular in the sense that it's hard to do generalized testing. Some bits can be fuzz tested, but usually that's pretty hard. It's also quite hard for a generalized test to recognize failure, which is why generalized test systems need lots of clever stuff like property testing and approval testing, and even then you're likely having low coverage.
However, a self-driving car is amendable to testing in a sim. And the sim might be end-to-end, but it needn't be the only sim you use; the FSD system almost certainly has many separate components, and some of those might be easy to sim for too; e.g. if you have a perception layer you could sim just that; if you have a prediction system you might sim just that; etc.
And those sims needed be full-sim runs either; if you have actual data feeds, you might even be able to take existing runs, and the extend them with sims; just to test various scenarios while remaining fairly close to real world.
I'm sure there are tons of complexities involved; I don't mean to imply it's easy - but it's probably tractable enough that given the overall challenge, it's worth creating an absolutely excellent sim - and that's the kind of challenge we actually have tons of software experience for.
A law doesn't prevent anything, it only applies after the fact. You could argue that the prospect of being prosecuted might scare people into not doing the thing that they are not allowed to be doing, but with all the people doing the things they are not allowed to be doing anyway, I doubt a comparative legal argument helps here.
You could make a law that states that your FSD has to be at least as good as humans. That means you have the same post-problem verification but now the parallel with drunk drivers can be made.
Tesla’s “FSD” is only a little bit better than drunk drivers, whom we punish severely whenever caught, even before any accident occurs.
The fact that enforcement is patchy is irrelevant — drunk driving is deemed serious enough to be an automatic infraction.
Also, most of the time drunk drivers are not actually that bad at moment-to-moment driving. That’s why almost everyone worldwide used to do it! You can still do the basics even when reasonably drunk. That doesn’t make you safe to drive. It’s still incredibly dangerous to do.
This assumes FSD-to-drunk-driver analogy means FSD has to be a drunk driver (or a student driver as commented elsewhere) all the time, so always making the bad judgement and slow reaction like a drunk driver would.
I think that some form of responsibility has to be assigned to the FSD in some way (the manufacturer? the user? some other entity or a combination?) regardless but I haven't found any clear case of how that would work.
It also makes me wonder how we would measure or verify a human driver with intermittent drunkenness. Imagine 5 seconds out of every minute you temporarily turn into a drunk driver. That's plenty of time to cause a major accident and kill people, but on the other hand that would mean that the combination of a situation where that would happen and the right timing to not be able to judge that situation has to apply. We do of course have the luxury of not having humans constantly swapping drunk and normal driving, so it isn't a realistic scenario, but it would make for a better computer analogy.
Besides drunk drivers we also have just generally crappy drivers that just happened to get lucky when doing their driving test (although there are places where no meaningful test is required so that's a problem in itself).
I think you’ve missed my point, while adding some additional information.
- drunk drivers are also not uniformly awful drivers: they can drive OK for the most part
- they still drive unacceptably poorly
- we strictly punish them on detection, before any potential accident
- drunk drivers and FSD have more in common with each other than competent drivers and FSD
- why is FSD not held to such a preventative standard?
One can argue that FSD is like a drunk driver driving a student training car with two sets of pedals and two steering wheels, and the Tesla owner/driver is like a driving instructor. But driving instructors are trained and paid to be quite vigilant at all times. Tesla play a sleight of hand and say it’s a labor saving technology, but also you need to be able to behave like a trained and paid driving instructor... that is a conspicuous contradiction.
And I’m ignoring future FSD capabilities because while I’d be happy for it to come about, we should discuss the present situation first, and I don’t believe it’s a good example where sacrificing lives now is acceptable in order to potentially save lives in the future.
Perhaps it is lost in translation; I'm not saying the fact that someone is driving drunk only matters when an accident happens, I'm saying that right until the moment a driver decides to get drunk, the law doesn't do anything. If at the beginning of the day someone decides to start drinking and when they are drunk they get in to a car and start driving, that's when the violation occurs. Not before that like PreCrime would.
The same can't apply to FSD because it isn't consistently 'driving drunk'. That analogy doesn't hold because it is not fixed software like a GPS-based navigation aid would be. Just like humans it does have more or less fixed parameters like the amount of arms and legs you have, that doesn't tend to change depending on your intoxication.
One could make the argument that it's not as much the "haha it is just like a drunk driver zig-zagging", but the uncertainty about the reliability. If a car with some autonomous driving aid drives across an intersections just fine 99 times out of a 100, and that one time it doesn't, that doesn't mean the car software was dunk 100% of the time.
Why FSD is not held to some standard, I don't know. I suppose that depends on how it is defined by local law and how the country it is in allows or disallows its use.
The problem with prevention and detection here is that like humans, the system is not in a static state. The trained neural network might be largely the same with every release, but the context in which it operates isn't, unless the world around it stops completely in which case two trips can be identical and because the input is identical the output can also be identical. Humans do the same, even if well-rested and completely attentive, knee-jerk reactions happen.
Holding FSD to a standard of a drunk driver isn't a valid comparison due to the non-static nature of the state it is in. This isn't even FSD-specific, even lane guidance/keeping assistance and adaptive cruise control isn't static, and those are based on pretty static algorithms. Even the PID-loops used on those will deliver different results on seemingly similar scenarios.
Perhaps we should stop comparing technology to humans since they are simply not the same. The static kind isn't and neither is a NN-based one. We can still explore results or outcomes because those are the ones that have real impact. And let's not fool ourselves, humans are far less reliable in pretty much every man-machine combination. But in human-to-human contexts we factor in those unreliabilities, and with machine-to-human or machine-to-machine we seemingly don't, which is pretty much the same problem you're describing.
This will be an interesting field of development, and if we simply take death toll into account, keep in mind that for some reason seatbelts were thought to have 'two sides of the story' as well when they were first introduced and later required. As with car seats for children and infants, a good idea might start out one way and over time (with the accompanying bodycount) it gets shaped into whatever we expect of it today. Same goes for aerospace, boats and trains, and that's even without taking software into account.
> It also makes me wonder how we would measure or verify a human driver with intermittent drunkenness. Imagine 5 seconds out of every minute you temporarily turn into a drunk driver.
Certain medical conditions are analogous to this. This is handled in various ways, including doctors reporting you to the state DMV and suspending your license if your condition is not very well controlled.
The key difference is human drivers have independent software, whereas the same software powers all FSD Teslas. One human driver getting drunk/otherwise impaired doesn't affect the software of any other human driver; but if your FSD software is as good as a drunk human, then every single one of your FSD vehicles is a road hazard.
That difference is also a benefit, fix one problem, and it's fixed for every instance.
On the other hand, it's not like the software is always bad and always in the same situation. That is a big difference with a human analogy; a drunk driver taking a trip in the car is drunk for the entire trip (unless it's a very long trip etc..), so would be impaired for the entire duration.
There are plenty of people and vehicles that are road hazards and are allowed to drive (or be driven) anyway, so if we really cared about that aspect on its own we could probably do with better tests and rules in general.
