What Google is trying to do is an actual autopilot, which is much more difficult, I suppose.
When flying on instruments, air traffic control keeps planes apart. It's up to the pilot to program the autopilot correctly. (There are other collision avoidance systems but planes can fly on instruments without relying on them.)
But in the end they're not really comparable. Collision avoidance for airplanes is a different problem.
As long as they are telling people they have to be alert while using autopilot I don't see a problem with it. The 'common sense' assumption then would be that autopilot = assisted driving rather being an autonomous self-driving car. Therefore Google et al shouldn't be using the term autopilot when they mean autonomous self-driving vehicle.
Eventually as this tech becomes wide-spread the distinction will become common knowledge to people.
This is mostly just semantics... context is everything. The important thing is preventing people from dying. Which means looking beyond marketing material to educate people.
Driving already leads to mind wandering states; it is overwhelmingly likely that the passive aspect of autopilot will lead to mind wandering at even higher rates. Asking a less practiced driver to shift attention from internal to external states very quickly and then make complex judgments is simply not fair. A simple physics and statistics based model will be far more reliable. If it isn't, then Google's strategy of shooting straight to level 4 makes sense.
> The public's perception and 'common sense' understanding of technology is sadly very limited
Common sense is contextual and one of the more complicated aspects of cognition; it depends on the level of detail in the model being used to make inferences. A model's sophistication is dictated by internal preferences and goals. If most people's understanding of a technology is limited, then they're going to be doing what looks like averaging over distinct possibilities to a more informed model.
It doesn't help that if you know nothing about technical uses of the term autopilot but do know something about words (which will be the case for most) then in truth, it is the aviation industry that has misnomered.
It's not a matter of 'educating people', merely so they can use a popular term. It's just plain the wrong thing to do.
Doesn't this support my argument that this is the real meaning of the term? Which makes 'autopilot' distinct from 'self-driving' or 4th gen?
If you as a sailor can understand this then why can't drivers understand autopilot as a glorified cruise control?
The car issues obvious and repetitive warnings about what the technology is capable of and what the driver has to do, and turns off the Autopilot if the driver doesn't pay attention. I wouldn't call that "fine print".
Either I can fully rely on the system to get me from point A to point B, or I have to fully concentrate on driving. People aren't robots - they can't go from half-assed sorta-paying attention to a split-second life-saving reaction.
Why are you assuming that other manufacturers are not working towards full autonomy? I strongly doubt that everyone at Ford, GM, VW, Toyota, and Honda is asleep at the wheel... Especially when their luxury vehicles are all incrementally moving towards autonomy.
They certainly have a lot fewer PR pieces about how amazing their autonomous-but-not-really lane assist is.
Of course not, since only Tesla AutoPilot lets you sleep at the wheel
I think it's a fair call using this term.
By the way, I'm pretty sure completely autonomous parallel parking is already available retail.
I bet if I asked ten people in my office right now, less than half would say confidently that airplane autopilot is a turnkey solution.
"Less than half" is way too much.
Like I see Belgian drivers driving terribly every day and I'm pretty certain that they're much worse than British and German drivers in every way. But the only statistical thing I can go back to is the number of deaths [1], which could include other aspects rather than just stupid driving.
My brain wants to shout out that their's clearly a problem, but that 'clearly' is only on the stretch of road I see. It could be that Belgian drivers are really good everywhere else in Belgium.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rateit is. Tesla was also beta-testing (last I saw a few months ago anyway) completely autonomous head-in/rear-in parking including finding the spot in a crowded parking lot.
I resent that you're accusing Tesla of intentionally misleading the public on what the feature does.
The car issues very obvious and repetitive warnings to the driver to explain the shortcomings of the technology and what the driver has to do to compensate. If the driver fails to act in accordance with the warnings, the car turns off the feature.
I mean, I dunno. To me, it looks as if Tesla has already gone above and beyond to communicate accurately, and the main reason they're pushing things even further is because of the intense media scrutiny on Tesla accidents (which the incumbent manufacturers probably love).
Whether or not they intend to mislead, in practice the name is misleading, and I think it is a mistake they could easily fix.
For example 'copilot': a competent, capable partner, but the ultimate responsibility still rests with the pilot.
They are both fully aware of the importance of the human awareness implications not expecting continuous input from the human driver and choosing to encourage it.
Humans fundamentally can't stay attentive when their attention has no reactive feedback loop and they're only using the "stay attentive" (even though we know that it's essentially impossible at a psychological level) argument to shield themselves from legal liability.
It's both fair play because they knew in advance (and have since proven) that they can beat the odds against a human driver, and have simultaneously built in their legal defense to mitigate their downside. "We told you to pay attention. Your death is not on our hands."
[1] there are examples where this did not happen, but they're considered a failure.
You can still use an autopilot when flying visually but then it's up to you to watch for traffic. This is using it like cruise control.
Yes, perfectly fine. If Teslas autopilot can rely on external traffic control to provide that information, call it autopilot. As long as it can't don't.
CMU is working on this (seriously).
Some can land, in optimal conditions, but can't taxi.
If you put a plane on autopilot and then go read a book for some hours, most likely nothing bad is going to happen (particularly on IFR, but even on VFR, realistically).
Tesla's autopilot is more advanced than aircraft autopilots, I'd say, yet more dangerous (for now) because of all these darned cars and trucks and pedestrians.
In that sense, "Autopilot" was an unfortunate and overly ambitious name.
Autopilot (before Tesla) is a feature on modern aircraft. If you'll notice, aircraft always have an attentive person behind the wheel (if it's a commercial flight, two).
A plane can fly itself under normal conditions (highways for Tesla) and many can land themselves now (Model S can park / summon feature).
Autopilot couldn't be more apt.
> "oh, crap, there is a truck stopped 20 feet in front of you that I failed to detect at highway speed.
To appreciate your differences in measurement. 5 seconds in a plane is something about a mile away. A high performance car can still stop from 60-0 at 110ft; which is about 1 second. In context of time; it takes at least .7 second for the human to respond.
(The car or terrain monitoring autopilot can react in <.1 s; which means if the car sees the obstacle at 110 feet away it can stop in time, while, if a car pulls out in the highway in front of a human it would take closer to 200ft to stop.)
What happens if the driver expects the car to react upon seeing the obstacle but it fails to do so? Will the driver have enough of the remaining time to react?
The >=.7 second human reaction time (with a planned/known reaction such as brakes or jerking steering wheel) is the very reason why Autopilots are safer.
> TCAS Resolution Advisory will give an attentive pilot a good 5 seconds to react in the worst case
5 seconds in order to avoid violating intruder's airspace, not to avoid actually hitting the intruder. AFAIK there's even then some additional buffer zone.
Also, reading the list of actual TCAS advisories sheds additional light of the substantial differences:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision_avoidance_sy...
Differences from Tesla / cars:
1. Almost all advisories actually tell the pilot what the problem is and what to do, not just that there's a problem. Tesla Autopilot basically has one advisory: "TA".
2. Almost all of the advisories resolve collisions by making one-dimensional maneuvers. Having an extra dimension allows you to substantially simplify the collision avoidance problem.
3. It's a safe bet (although not assumed) that both planes involved in a TCAS event are receiving advisories and cooperating with ground ATC.