[brooksby]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/09/tesla-autopilot-crashes-investigation-nhtsa

[quote]

US federal regulators are deepening their investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot function after more than a dozen Tesla cars crashed into parked first-responder vehicles over a period of four years.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said on Thursday it was upgrading its preliminary investigation, which launched last August, to an “engineering analysis”, which is taken before the agency determines a recall.

The investigation covers all four Tesla vehicles – Models Y, X, S and 3 – representing about 830,000 vehicles that have been sold in the US.

[/quote]

Topic

[brooksby]

Beginning of this episode:

Beginning of this episode, IIRC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sontaran_Stratagem

[AlsoSomniloquism]

That chess must be

That chess must be interesting to play with. Do the rooks on black only move if all whites pieces are looking away?

And surely white king will just disappear in space/time if surrounded. 

[hawkinspeter]

brooksby wrote:

Wasn’t that the method used by Sontaran pawns to kill off a journalist?

Can’t find that specific chess set

[hawkinspeter]

brooksby wrote:

I hope that accusation is in tin foil hat territory?

But does lead me onto something – is the Tesla software and its updates valid for the life of the car or do you have to pay a separate subscription for firmware updates etc?  Imagine being on a long journey when suddenly you’re told that your car has been bricked…

From https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/us-agency-upgrades-tesla-autopilot-safety-probe-2022-06-09/

NHTSA said its analysis indicated that Forward Collision Warnings activated in the majority of incidents just prior to impact and that subsequent Automatic Emergency Braking intervened in approximately half of the crashes.

“On average in these crashes, Autopilot aborted vehicle control less than one second prior to the first impact,” the agency added.

NHTSA noted that “where incident video was available, the approach to the first responder scene would have been visible to the driver an average of 8 seconds leading up to impact.”

The agency also reviewed 106 reported Autopilot crashes and said in approximately half, “indications existed that the driver was insufficiently responsive to the needs of the dynamic driving task.”

“A driver’s use or misuse of vehicle components, or operation of a vehicle in an unintended manner does not necessarily preclude a system defect,” the agency said.

You could argue that the Autopilot is supposed to turn over control to the driver in the event of something unexpected and certainly crashing may be described as unexpected, but rescinding control within a second of the collision certainly seems like an easy way to improve the Autopilot figures. What’s needed is to examine the whole system of car, driver and Autopilot and determine how well the parts work together.

[brooksby]

hawkinspeter wrote:

AlsoSomniloquism wrote:

It will also be interesting if they sell the service with caveats of “use of this service is at your own risk and we can’t be sued if the car decides to drive into the Thames by itself”. After all who reads the T’s and C’s of most things supplied by Google, Apple, Etc. I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that the current Tesla Autopilot usage is at own risk. 

Aren’t they accused of turning off the autopilot system just before crashing so that they can blame the driver instead?

I hope that accusation is in tin foil hat territory?

But does lead me onto something – is the Tesla software and its updates valid for the life of the car or do you have to pay a separate subscription for firmware updates etc?  Imagine being on a long journey when suddenly you’re told that your car has been bricked…

[brooksby]

AlsoSomniloquism wrote:

“use of this service is at your own risk and we can’t be sued if the car decides to drive into the Thames by itself”

Wasn’t that the method used by Sontaran pawns to kill off a journalist?

[hawkinspeter]

AlsoSomniloquism wrote:

It will also be interesting if they sell the service with caveats of “use of this service is at your own risk and we can’t be sued if the car decides to drive into the Thames by itself”. After all who reads the T’s and C’s of most things supplied by Google, Apple, Etc. I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that the current Tesla Autopilot usage is at own risk. 

Aren’t they accused of turning off the autopilot system just before crashing so that they can blame the driver instead?

[AlsoSomniloquism]

It will also be interesting

It will also be interesting if they sell the service with caveats of “use of this service is at your own risk and we can’t be sued if the car decides to drive into the Thames by itself”. After all who reads the T’s and C’s of most things supplied by Google, Apple, Etc. I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that the current Tesla Autopilot usage is at own risk. 

[Rich_cb]

It’s amenable to automation
It’s amenable to automation and the potential market is enormous.

Add to that the fact that many countries are due to see rapid falls in their working age populations so there will be the political will to get these systems working and the outcome becomes inevitable IMHO.

Imagine a world with no speeding and no drunk/drugged/tired/distracted drivers.

The improvements in road safety just from that would be enormous even if the AI wasn’t actually that good at driving!

[Secret_squirrel]

I think JS is protesting a

I think JS is protesting a little too much about the area where Level 4 is used.  It’s no different to a UK human driver driving on the wrong side of the road in Europe or like we see every winter where most of the driving population are unable to deal with ice and snow. 
 

I think technically self driving  will get there though maybe not for Tesla.  Whether it will get there with an sufficiently enabling legal, regulatory and insurance framework is a different question. 
The reality is that the problem is amenable to automation just like the industrial revolution was.   Does it need to be better than a F1 driver?  No it doesn’t just a base line human. Exactly the same way as mass produced clothes on a loom we’re not better than the finest handcrafted garments.   Eventually an infinitely cloneable AI is going to be cheaper to reproduce than a human you have to teach for 6 months before they can pass their test. 

[Rich_cb]

Much like internet search I
Much like internet search I worry that one or two companies will dominate all transport in a few years.

Most current manufacturers won’t survive when transport simply becomes a service and it will be left to those few companies who have developed their own software to divide the *Dr Evil voice* trillion dollar spoils.

[hawkinspeter]

John Stevenson wrote:

Car makers should be obliged to open-source the control software for self-driving cars anyway, and offer a hefty bounty for bugs, so knowledgeable people can check it for errors.

This is an industry that’s demonstrated over and over again that it can’t be trusted, yet people think it’ll manage to create safe autonomous vehicles. Pardon the hollow laughter.

I can’t see that politicians would have much sway over the car industries, so I can’t see that happening. They’re more likely to offer driving-as-a-service (that way they could even use GPL software without having to reveal their changes):

 

[Rich_cb]

The fact(o) that it is not De
The fact(o) that it is not De Jure.

[chrisonabike]

I agree with the direction

I agree with the direction but just not the detail.  I’m kinda skeptical because “cars 1.0” proved that the technology will come in regardless of the “side effects” or ultimate necessity.  Powered by the force of human wants: power, approval and curiosity (solving problems or investigating shiny toys).  Facilitated by governments, the market and profit.

However as mdavidford has pointed out plenty of humans drive in a manner which could be improved upon by yesterday’s tech.  As rich_cb says – there are “more than proof of concept” systems in existence.  And as to the “hard problem” it seems that the real idiots are proving to be stupider* and the artificial idiots are getting smarter all the time.

You can have it both ways though – “for any given task probably an artificial system will beat a human at it at some point” and / or “tech will never be the same as humans because it won’t be having a bad day too, suggest we sack it off and go for a ride and end up becoming a pal down the pub later”.

* Or “made of tier-upon-tier of tiny stupid robots”.

[kil0ran]

John Stevenson wrote:

hawkinspeter wrote:

This is why I hope that some day we’ll have open source autonomous driving software powering (public) vehicles. Open source has the ability to go beyond just the economic needs of the vehicle manufacturers.

Car makers should be obliged to open-source the control software for self-driving cars anyway, and offer a hefty bounty for bugs, so knowledgeable people can check it for errors.

This is an industry that’s demonstrated over and over again that it can’t be trusted, yet people think it’ll manage to create safe autonomous vehicles. Pardon the hollow laughter.

For it (self-driving) to really work the control software should be standard for all cars, like the ECUs are in a lot of the motorsport formulae. That makes self-driving cars more predictable and significantly reduces the complexity of the problem. Of course, that would prevent car manufacturers from differentiating their vehicles on performance. Technically it’s possible to have a car incapable of exceeding a speed limit right now but no manufacturer is implementing hard controls in that area. I’m sure it has nothing to do with the influence that VAG, Mercedes, and BMW have over TUV and EU safety institutions.

[Author]

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