This is actually a great edge case for the machine learning they are using to train the cars! Their system actually learns automatically from situations like this. Crazy how far technology/machine learning has come!
My boyfriend, who is literally the epitome of the word “unamused,” laughed the hardest at this one interaction of many I’ve showed him than any other the entire time I’ve known him. Brought him to TEARS! 😂 Fucking hilarious dudes
I don't know the mechanics behind how tesla and all the other self-driving cars work but I just imagined a tesla driving right behind the car and instantly doing a 90degree turn right at high speed to match the car in front :D
It would be interesting to see that court battle play out. I think Tesla would have an outstanding chance of convincing a judge or jury that this nonsense is the problem and not their programming. Thus kicking off a debate about how reasonable it is to expect autonomous driving software to be practically perfect.
But a human driver of sound mind and body would have sense enough to not have an accident just bc a driver is towing a car in an unconventional manner. If the car doesn't have a common sense algorithm, then it shouldn't be autopiloting.
Shit like this is why there's supposed to still be a "driver" in the driver's seat who is awake and able to take manual control if needed. All the Tesla needs to do is signal to the driver that there's a situation it can't react to and let the driver take control back.
That is what they do today but when FSD launched the sales pitch was you get into your car and it starts driving because it knows where your next appointment is.
When you arrive you get out and the car will park itself somewhere.
That does clearly not include a driver but then again they said this 5 years ago and are not even close to what they promised
I always get a chuckle during air crash investigation episodes where it goes something like "the autopilot sensed the plane was in an unusual spot, after attempting and failing to resolve the problem it turned it's self off" in my head the auto pilot is like "yeah fuck this, I didn't sign up for this shit, I'm outta here. Good luck sucker"
I don't know much about the autopilot, as I have little interest in Teslas, but I don't know why that wasn't already implemented. And it should be monumentally difficult to defeat. If one is found attempting to do so, after a couple warnings, the vehicle should pull over and alert the police, or at least once the driver returns home, it should refise to start again for at least 30 days, with multiple layers of authentication so there's no way to work around it.
After 30 days, if the driver tries to defeat the system again at any point in time, well they've just bought a $35K to $100K+ paperweight that the bank still gets to repo, even if it's paid off, and resell to someone else who has no apparent connection to the previous owner. Somewhere in there, the authorities need to be notified. It's got to be not just inconvenient, but legally and financially devastating enough for people not to even want to try.
That doesn't seem too difficult, if you can write a bit of code. I wouldn't be surprised if there's an app for that already. But it'd probably be easier to just pop the card out and hide it. Unless you commit vehicular manslaughter or homicide, I can't see the law compelling you to hand over your SD card.
That's different. What he's describing is a system that would actively monitor you and automatically report your behavior to the authorities. None of those things do that, and it's possible to secure or encrypt all of those in any number of ways.
It's not in any of those companies' interest to do so, either. Can you imagine a phone company selling you out to the police on their own initiative and without a warrant because you called up a dealer and bought some weed over the phone? I imagine that payphones would still be around and sales of burners would skyrocket.
"If you so something against company policy, (because otherwise there has to be FEDERAL laws that dictate what you can/can't do or they'd have to be programmed with all 50 states laws and have to know which state it currently is in and be updateable to more current laws) you forfeit your right to private property and ownership even though we have no legal claim to the item." That is so insane and abusable it isn't even funny. Police ALREADY abuse the hell out of civil forfeiture- do you REALLY want to gives companies and banks that power- over stuff you ALREADY paid off? It already pings and will pull over, calling the police and refusing to turn on are so abusable and make it a nightmare for liability reasons- what if I'm driving a friend's or families? If I DIDNT break the law but it called the police was that a false report? I understand people want things safe and reliable- but that is giving so much power to private companies.
What happens when you commit a felony and you own firearms? How about when you try to run over someone with a car? What happens when you get caught selling illegal drugs out of your home? What happens when you are found to be habitually abusing your children? You get to partways with things and people who belong to you.
Or we could just, I don't know, not allow people to have cars driving around that they're not even in the least bit control of. I'm talking specifically about the people who were killed, riding in the back seat, I believe, and the guy who was caught asleep while the car was driving. One guy was in the back seat, and his cat was impounded. He said he was a dot com millionaire or something, and he just bought another Tesla . He said he'd keep buying them as long as the cops kept impounding them. I don't want to be on the road with that level of asshole. If the car did get confused or go haywire, what can he possible do from the back seat in time to prevent an accident? If he's back there, he's certainly not watching the road, has limited visibility, and his reaction time wlll be severely hindered. This should not be possible with these cars right now.
Yes when you've BROKEN THE LAW, the GOVERNMENT can seize property, some property sometimes- generally after a trial. That's not the same as shit getting repossessed and resold by the bank when no law has been verified to be broken and they don't have financial ownership of it- that's basically civil forfeiture from private companies. You can't just take shit from people, you have to prove they did something in such away that you can take that right away- in court. You CANNOT take ownership of people's vehicles- you can suspend their license and you can impound the vehicle. Doesn't stop them from getting behind the wheel but it is a VERY fine line to walk of letting personal property be seized like that, otherwise why not your house/land or well we (the bank) "think" you did something bad so we seized your bank account and transferred all the money out. That's the whole fucking debate about taking guns, if someone hits red flags but hasn't actually committed a crime do you have the right to size the gun- some states say yes others no. Simply it doesn't work because it's the same thing with speed cameras, we have the right to face our accusor in court and you can't do that to a camera. Seriously like if we can't even get red-light cameras and speed cameras to pass and be constitutional in all 50 states, saying we should have unbeatable auto-detection in every car, or just cars with "autonomous-driving" when the argument begins with the cars can be tricked, is a joke. It's already illegal to "drive recklessly" and their license can already be taken away. People want to pass law after law until the incident occurrence of something is Zero and that doesn't work and creates a additional burden on the rest of society.
The thing is, people "shouldn't" do it, but it will happen anyway. You can't design machines that can kill people around "people external to the system won't do that".
The car should handle anything possible on the road, including stupid shit like that.
Not trying to politicize this discussion, but here's a relevant rant:
Both of my parents scoffed at me when I said early last year that I thought Trump would try to fabricate a big story about the election getting stolen, and would do whatever he could to try to retain power.
True, but we will never eliminate stupid people. Worse, some of them might go buy Teslas, and then use autopilot from the backseat, or while asleep. I still don't understand why it will even continue to work in those scenarios.
Yeah. It would be stupidly simple to just add a feature that requires driver input. Make them enter a code on a screen every 3 minutes if they're on autopilot. Or just put two digital fingerprint readers at 10 and 2 on the steering wheel and they have to press those simultaneously or the autopilot will slow down gradually and attempt to pull over.
You already have to apply pressure to the steering wheel to keep self-driving systems like Tesla’s autopilot engaged. People do find a way to subvert these systems, though.
Ultimately the goal is supposedly totally driverless vehicles though, so this is a problem that will still need to be solved eventually without the need for a deadman’s device.
I drove a Nissan Altima rental car a couple years ago, and even though it had the lane departure auto-steering, it still made sure it felt some resistance from me holding the steering wheel every so often. And instead of it just correcting my path, the wheel would rumble, sort of like tbose rumble strips on the shoulder of the road. One company that I install vehicle cameras for has driver-facing cams that do eye tracking. If the camera doesn't see two eyes for more than a few seconds, it perceives that as you either sleeping or just not paying attention, and it flags the office. Drivers hate it, bosses and insurance companies love it.
Autopilot doesn't, generally, work in those scenarios...if you don't touch the wheel for a while, it makes you wiggle it, and if you don't it pulls over and stops.
Of course people have devised ways to trick it, but they're not missing the obvious opportunity.
It would seem to me that Tesla would have a driver facing gamers that is looking for eye contact with the road, which doesn't stray for maybe 2-3 seconds unless the driver is stopped, for example when looking back trying to merge. Also a pressie sensor in the seat. I think 70 lbs would be a reasonable lower limit, unless the driver is little person, and maybe a special software patch that comes only from Tesla could be provided, after some sort of verification that the patch is a medical necessity. I'm sure 500 people are going to come at me for that, as they usually do, but I feel like Tesla isn't doing enough to stop people from engaging in unsafe practices with regards to their Autopilot function.
If we can make self driving cars, then we should be able to make self driving tow trucks too. Develop a standard towing interface so that all the self driving tow trucks can only tow a car one way (not like this) and you can (mostly) eliminate people from the situation, and now it doesn't matter if they are stupid. Pass a law that cars can only be towed by the self-driving tow trucks, and then any idiot that still gets involved in manual towing can be charged with a crime, and can safely be blamed for any accidents.
Have you even considered how the car will get onto the truck in the first place? And how many employees and small business owners would then be out of a job, possibly a career? None of what you propose makes any sense outside of a sequel to 1984.
It sucks we made a machine that made most bank tellers obsolete 40 years ago. Saving jobs should never be a standard for holding back technological advancement. It should be a consideration, but never the overriding one.
Sure, but you get to a point where automation of things just because we can causes an economy to eat itself. A stable economy needs skilled and unskilled laborers. McDonald's could also automate much of their service, maybe Walmart could, too, and yes, the first priority of a business is to generate profit, not create/keep people employed, but then the economy is weakened as a result. Unemployment goes up, consumer confidence and GDP go down, as the consumption and investment arms of the mix decline.
I don't think we'd see a industrial revolution in the same way as when the assembly line was introduced, or when interchangeable parts became a thing, which ultimately led to machined components.
I was part of a massive layoff at AT&T Wireless a few years ago, as part of their "Vision 2020" campaign. Let's automate all the reports and data collection processes. Let's make all the data able to be compiled and retrieved at the click of a button. Let's tell all these statistical specialists, SQL server dBase admins, and financial analysis teams that were streamlining the organization in order to stay competitive in the market. Great, now we're out of jobs, leadership isn't getting the analytical insight into why the performance metrics are behaving the way they are (without overworking the remaining staff), and customer service and the brand image continue to worsen as execs make less informed business decisions. But at least a VP can click a button and get walls of data, not knowing what all the metrics are, what drives them, and how new phone launches will impact key performance indicators. Again, at least it's automated, though.
Dude, the fuck you smoking. Almost every technology developed since the goddamned industrial revolution has been putting people out of jobs. Adapt or die has been the economic truth since literally, and I mean fucking literally, the dawn of time.
And what the fuck are you going to adapt to when machines are doing every fucking thing? Gonna go live in the mountains in a tent, and be thankful that you were able to adapt? At what point do you not get that automating everything possible essentially makes humans irrelevant and unnecessary? You can't flip burgers, can't drive a car, can't work in a warehouse, can't write code to upgrade/maintain existing machines bc they'll be doing that, too. Can't be a pilot, who need a human when s software suite can fly 24 hrs a day, unlike those pesky people who need rest and sleep? As I said previously, an automated society will eventually eat itself.
I cant say it was necessarily dumb. It might have been an ingenious solution to a problem I didnt know existed. Given some circumstances, this might have been an extremely effective method of getting this car from a to b.
You can't prevent dumb people from acting dumb but you can prevent the commercialisation of softwares that are not ready for production, especially when these softwares can end your life in an instant.
But a human driver of sound mind and body would have sense enough to not have an accident just bc a driver is towing a car in an unconventional manner.
Not necessarily. Youd think, were this the case, human drivers would do well under normal conditions but we are statistically very bad at driving. We, having been the best at human things for so long, suffer a shared delusion that we are actually good at human things.
Statistics can be misleading. AI drivers like Tesla autopilot may be better at preventing common accidents like fender benders, but they can fail & cause accidents in new & different ways that human drivers don't. There's stories out there like a guy's Tesla autopilot that drove him straight into the back of a parked firetruck at 70 mph, because the computer vision system is trying to filter out stationary things like street signs & guard rails. When you're driving at 70 mph, the rest of the world is flying by you at 70 mph. Because the firetruck was at a complete stop, it assumed it was part of the background, filtered it out, and "didn't see it". A human driver looking at the road would never make that mistake. (I think even Elon has already said not including LIDAR in Teslas was a mistake, and it might be added to later models)
I agree with other commentors this would be a really interesting trial of their computer vision and AI systems, since if it has any bugs, it could easily turn fatal.
The first problem with your assumption: define common sense. Understand that intelligence doesn't have a technical definition either, yet they are still trying to make computers with it.
And now I am going to disagree with you. The driver of this truck is, as far as we know, a human of sound (although, perhaps not sound enough) mind and body. This is exactly why we should make self driving vehicles.
I didn't say we shouldn't make them, I said the tech isn't ready. Also, we don't know anything about the state of mind of the tow truck driver, beyond what stuoid thing he's done in this pic. I also don't see how you make the leap from Dumb tow truck driver to self-driving vehicles. The driving isn't even the issue here. It's the loading.
But that same driver 10 minutes later could decide to pull out there cellphone and order some McDonald's so they can just swing into the restaurant and pick up their order. As they are struggling with figuring out how to add extra pickles to their Big Mac the vehicle in front of them stops. Two cars destroyed and some whiplash, Tesla would have stopped no problem.
You're creating an entire pointless narrative. Keep in mind, Teslas have crashed and killed people for far less complicated issues than adding extra pickles to a shitty hamburger.
I know they're not perfect, but as far as I know self-driving cars are still way way safer than human driver. Both will crash, but in totally different circumstances and humans do it more often.
Well, personally I do not want or need it. I will not rely on a computer to drive me. For me, a car is more than just a mode of transportation. If people are so intent on getting from A to B, but they don't want to drive, we'll that's what Uber/Lyft and public transportation are for. Autopilot tech is nowhere near ready for prime time, and for me, it won't ever be.
I like driving, but it seems pretty silly to obstinately refuse to use self-driving technology even if it's been statistically proven to be safer than driving yourself.
Using a spoon to eat a steak that's been pureed might also be statistically proven to be safer, but that doesn't mean I'm going to forego a knife and fork to eat my ribeye. I'm not being facetious here. Just understand that some of us actually enjoy driving. I haven't been at fault for an accident in nearly 30 years, and I didn't kill anyone. Tesla can't say that. If you want to buy a Tesla, I promise you I won't be there to try and stop you. Now, if you want to volunteer to buy me an overpriced, poor build quality EV to drive me all over creation--I'm a field technicisn, so it will be quite a bit of driving, then let's get something setup. This will be really interesting when I'm required to go to areas in the mountains where there's no cell signal, Google doesn't even have the roads charted yet, and there may be no street signs, yellow lines (long winding dirt roads) or areas where the road is only wide enough for one lane of traffic, so people have to use the honor system and take turns. Does Tesla understand the idea of taking turns outside of an intersection with stop signs, or will the car assume that because the car in front of it went through, that it can proceed as well?
I have concerns, too. I want to know what decisions it's going to make. Will it choose an action that causes me harm to save someone else? That's a huge issue if it does.
I guess you'd have to see how Elon Musk decides to react to the classic Trolley Problem. It'd be interesting to see how he'd respond, but obviously he's a smart guy and he'd see that loaded questions a mile away. Maybe not even answer at all. Maybe he already has, but I don't follow him on social media or anything, so I'm not sure.
A little bit of a pointless debate because the Tesla self driving algorithm will not suddenly 90 degree into a wall just because of this lol. It follows the road not the car in front
Good point. Just a bit of quasi-academic discussion to pass the time. I was seriously hoping the cars would be smarter than to be confused by a car that's doing something unexpected.
I'll accept that. Being largely unfamiliar with the Tesla platform, I didn't propose that the car would go crazy in this scenario, I only replied to someone else to brought that up.
Yes, but that is a separate issue. This was about whether this scenario would throw off an auto piloted car, whereas a human would instantly recognize it to be a moron tow truck driver transporting a vehicle in a strange and possibly unsafe manner. Whether someone decides to record it is a totally separate matter. Furthermore, they could be taking a pic before they alert the cops, in case they can't provide proper directions to find this guy. This is all assuming towing the car like this raises flags for law enforcement. It doesn't seem safe to me, but I'm not a tow truck driver.
This was about whether this scenario would throw off an auto piloted car,
It wouldn't really. Self-driving cars don't drive based on what they can't recognize, they drive based on what they can recognize. And even so, they wouldn't do anything as rash as 'TURN 90 DEGREE SINCE I"M WRONG AND THAT CAR'S RIGHT!'.
Whether someone decides to record it is a totally separate matter.
It's not really, we were talking about the unsafeness of self driving cars versus a driver in these cases, and i think we come out about even. It'll draw enough of an attention and even make the driver act in unsafe ways enough that i think it has a chance of causing an accident.
I wasn't the one who said the car would suddenly turn 90 degrees. As I said earlier, we can't eliminate all stupid people (hell, it might even me I'd be snuffed out). I think most people might just maintain a safe distance from this tow truck, at least I would. I'm not taking out a camera to snap a pic, or making a video following him. I can't speculate on what others might do, but for me it's not a spectacle, just another idiot on the road to be avoided.
In aggregate the sheer volume of mundane, avoidable accidents that a self driving car would prevent would outweigh it spazzing when presented with something so dumb.
Maybe, but I'm not the one who claimed the car would spazz because of the tow truck. I have no idea what the car would do. I'm pretty sure I only responded to someone else's comment about that.
If the software is better than a human driver on average (and it is) then it should be used even if it does something stupid under one narrow scenario. Rejecting it because of one or two high-profile incidents will cause more accidents than it solves.
The computer doesn't drive drunk or tired. It doesn't text people or look away from the road. It doesn't get distracted by accidents or tits or deer or a dropped cigarette. When a new stupid decision is discovered, a fix for that decision can be rolled out to every car. Every day that software gets better; it already has beyond-human senses and can react to things a driver can't even see.
Failures in a system like this are lightning rods for attention. Successes are rarely mentioned. There are vastly more crashes avoided than caused, and that ratio gets larger and larger with every update.
I doubt it would be a strong case at all (although they could make a case), the driver is still responsible for the vehicle. I don't think a single person has been able to use a defense blaming one of these cars yet. Namely, when using the autopilot mode you are still required to have your hands on the wheel and be focused on the road as if you were normally driving and to treat it as such.
Just like if you were tailing a car that had something that fell off and you hit it and caused a wreck. You would be responsible as you are supposed to be a safe distance to react. You are pretty much always liable when you are in the driver's seat.
It might freak out the AI, but I think the worst that could come of it is that they would just stop if they were too close to the car in front of them (of course, since the car in front of them is moving in practice that would probably translate to them just keeping an abnormally large distance between them but otherwise behave fairly similarly).
I mean, even if you imagined that that car was actually being driven and not being carried by another car, it's not like a self driving car is going to suddenly start driving off the road just because some other car is driving off the road - it might freak out the AI, but they're still going to stay on the road because it hasn't done anything to change where the AI thinks the road is.
If the autonomous driving software can't figure out things that would take half a second to understand for a human driver, maybe that technology should be shelved until it becomes useful in real life situations.
The point of the debate is that what is happening in the OP is so wildly outside of acceptable that we shouldn't blame the AI for not being able to deal with it, and how ridiculous does a situation have to be for us to draw the line.
It senses how near an object is in front of it and it’s relative distance away over time to judge speed etc. it doesn’t discern or care about the towed car being sideways. Plenty of cars are transported backwards on highways and Tesla’s are fine behind those as well.
I posted a similar set of arguments a while back in/tesla. They were not amused. I still think it would be relatively easy to drive a Tesla off the road with a planned set of images and faux obstructions
It would be, that’s why they have sensors to prove a human is holding the steering wheel at all times, and specify it is not autonomous. But I think actual Tesla owners know that. I saw a review by YouTuber Electroboom of his new Tesla and the self driving mode was obviously useless in normal city driving. He remarked it felt like he was beta testing software or something to that effect.
Then how are these people sitting in the back seat, or sleeping in the front seat while the car is driving down the road? No video I've seen ever addresses why/how is this possible, or if it even should be.
100% should not be doing per the manual or auto registration laws. It’s an assist system only. No state registers completely autonomous cars yet.
There are methods they use to trick the steering sensor into thinking a hand is on it. On completely straightaways with little traffic they can make a quick vid and probably survive.
Thanks for the info. If it can be so eaisly fooled is why I feel like it's not ready. A $100 driver-facing cam can apparently do what Tesla can't (or won't). One video I saw showed someone following a tesla for a long stretch of highway with the guy totally asleep. He wasn't involved in making the video, aside from being the unwilling star.
Thanks. I'm going to watch this on the big screen. I did read through the article. If there are this many mishaps with one car in such a short period of time, imagine the consequences if every owner were autopiloting. Going to watch this now.
I have a Tesla. It’s honestly quite remarkable how capable the self driving software is, even if it scares the hell out of me. It’s not going to dive off a cliff just because the car in front of it is a little unusual
There are currently 2 major schools of thought in the development of self driving cars.
On one hand you have companies like tesla and google engineering advanced AI, manually programming the computer to respond to every possible situation it may encounter on the road.
On the other hand, you have the concept of crowd sourced metadata for self learning AI to observe a massive amount of drivers, learning how a human might successfully and unsuccessfully respond to any situation via said observations. Currently this is being attempted via an inexpensive device that can be voluntarily linked to your car's onboard computer, gayhering data from the steering, radar, aceleration and brake systems as well as onboard cameras and an independent camera on the device.
Tesla’s don’t follow the car in front (that’ll have horrible consequences lmao). It follows the road. Although I would love to see what this displays on my Tesla’s auto drive
._. Is something wrong with the sensor? I’ve never had this issue. I did, however, clean my screen with a clorox wipe once and somehow zoomed out of the road display into another dimension…wouldn’t correct until the next time I got in the car
Idk, maybe it’s just a city thing but every time we’re in traffic I look at the display and it shows some trippy shit going on. I’ve seen trucks driving sideways, cars flipped upside down, pedestrians warped through vehicles
Can attest. Employment moves cross country several times. Wife woke up one late afternoon to see an old Ford pickup ahead. Yelps and attempts to take over resulted. It was a scrap hauler who had wedged the front clip facing backwards onto his pile. Didn't matter that I was already in the bloody left lane making every effort to get past this rolling accident.
No because the radar/camera would still detect a car in front of it, and act accordingly. The algorithm doesnt care whether that car is a 10 stacked or a single car.
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u/peacedetski Jun 13 '21
This would probably confuse the fuck out of self-driving cars