Tesla dropped by Mobileye for “pushing the envelope in terms of safety”
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
A more appropriate name would be co-pilot.
You are jumping too short.
In my first year studying engineering, a professor told us "Expect misuse. If you're designing a radiator shaped such that people can sit on it, expect them to sit on it. I agree that it's a radiator and not a bench, but if you don't design for this kind of situation you are a terrible engineer."
Translated to Tesla's situation: It's absolutely not enough to tell people that they should behave a certain way, and expect them to follow. Design the system such that they either have no choice but to obey, or have safe mechanisms for disobedience.
Or don't deploy the system.
If you want an automotive example, think of how your automatic gear lever is locked in P unless you have your foot on the brake. Braking when changing gears isn't just an admonition in the manual, it's enforced.
Tesla marketed their immature technology with the name Autopilot, they failed to include safety features their competitors' vehicles had and they knew how people behaved (trusted and crashed) because of it.
I find it hard to fault consumers for naively putting trust in their vehicles.
Most people don't know even 1% of the intricacies of the technology products or services that they are using. The responsibility rests almost entirely on the provider to offer a "safe" product (and that means also offering protection against the "stupidity" of users).
Because humans are flawed.
The real question is why is our regulatory framework so weak that they can ship "immature technology" that's safety critical in a consumer vehicle.
In the 50s or 60s or whenever they were first introduced, it was incredibly novel to have some portion of aircraft control handled by a machine. To go from partial machine control to fully machine control seems like a natural evolution and I think the name speaks for that evolution.
I think it is fair that most consumers think that "autopilot" implies fully autonomous driving. No one calls cruise control an autopilot when in fact it is a crude form of one.
Lots of cars have "automatic transmissions" but nobody gets upset when it fails to shift into reverse on its own based on contextual clues.
(Besides, the alternative is for the layman to infer capabilities from marketing material, which is even more outlandishly fictional)
Oh, and if you want an exhaustive list of when something appears in media, TVtropes will always deliver: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/discussion.php?id=6zj22p5kr47sfh2...
I judiciously selected I Robot and Minority Report because Audi and Lexus, respectively, had product placement for future design concepts.
I am noting that real auto companies have deliberately placed product concepts in media to prime people's expectations of what future products will look like and what they will be able to do. Independently, there are also proper level 4 systems under active development getting plenty of popular press coverage.
I also note that the very public face of Tesla frequently makes very public and (in my opinion, overly optimistic) declarations of their product's capabilities both present and future, for example (Jan 2016), "The Model S is 'probably better than humans at this point in highway driving' according to Musk." [0]
It doesn't strike me to be all that far of a leap for an average person to conclude that the future has arrived.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/11/elon-musk...
automatic login / logout / lock
automatic debit of monthly bills
automatic reply to calls / emails
automatic plant watering
Will happily flood the house if something goes wrong.
> automatic login
Frequently requires manually reentering credentials.
> automatic debit of monthly bills
Will happily send your life savings to the power company if they typo a couple of extra zeroes on your bill.
> automatic reply to emails
Notorious for massive screwups when people enable them without adequate controls, especially when multiple people on the same mailing list do it at the same time.
All of these examples seem to reinforce the idea that "automatic" does not mean "requires no human supervision."
You're exactly the kind of fanboy I accused you of being, btw. Proper rules of engagement on HN be damned: you're wasting everyone's time with goalpost-moving and dis-ingenuousness.
If you feel your time is being wasted, perhaps you may wish to consider making the choice to spend it otherwise. Were it I who felt that way, I might still hesitate to generalize from myself to everyone, no matter how justified I might imagine myself to be in so doing.
It's easier to pick up on the hostility of a sharp barbed comment than the one in a smarmy, disingenuous one, that only insults by implication, but it's still there.
Asking where people get such impressions, then mocking the first few responses citing sci-fi with a "that's a bigger problem!", then getting some current day ones, and proceeding to very weakly deflect them with excuses that don't stand up to scrutiny, doesn't seem like someone interested in understanding a situation.
It seems like someone trying to preach their opinion, while disguising it as a learning process, taking advantage of this forum's predilection for politeness.
Am I not allowed to express my reactions to new ideas now? Or is "that's disturbing" somehow considered to be an indication of dismissal or disagreement?
I don't find these current day examples to be at all compelling. You think my response consists of excuses that don't stand up to scrutiny, I think they point out how automation has traditionally never been fully autonomous. The "they're getting it from sci-fi movies" is a lot more convincing, just horrifying.
Actually, you said "It disturbs me that all the examples so far are science fiction." which (a bit out of context and ignoring the principle of charity) could be interpreted as a cursory dismissal along the lines of, "these examples are too ridiculous to consider further".
Even with the principle of charity, I find "they're getting it from sci-fi movies" to be an unfair summary of my point, but perhaps I'm doing a poor job making my case clearly.
Thinking on it, would it be fair to expect any example of an autopilot function on a car to be from a type other than science fiction or fantasy?
You probably can't find it on a car without getting into SF, but an excessively sophisticated autopilot on an airplane could probably fit into an otherwise non-SF movie. Like the example of Airplane! but played seriously. I just assumed that's the sort of thing people were talking about with the idea coming from entertainment, since "obviously" technology in an SF movie is going to be unrealistic.
There certainly are some similar misconceptions generated by movies not usually considered to fall into the category of SF. For example, I'd wager a lot of people think spy satellites really can read a license plate from orbit, or that silenced guns just make a soft "pew" sound.
It isn't supposed to flood the house. It is designed to be automatic. Meaning no supervision. Tesla's Autopilot isn't designed this way yet carries the name.
Let's keep going.
> Will happily send your life savings to the power company if they typo a couple of extra zeroes on your bill.
This has nothing to do with automatic payment being poorly designed. It is designed to pay the balance without your intervention...hence automatic.
> Notorious for massive screwups when people enable them without adequate controls, especially when multiple people on the same mailing list do it at the same time.
Depends on how it is implemented. There are usually more knobs to this feature and it is designed to have you program it. Based on programming, settings, etc, it will do whatever you set it to without you having to be there...hence automatic reply.
Your bill and the automatic bill pay system are two different concerns here.
It works fine when the situation is good, and it can fail when it encounters troublesome situations in the real world. Since it operates in the real world, it needs some monitoring.
It seems your major sticking point is about the state of the art of autopilots in other fields.
Ironically, Mr. Sperry apparently trusted his own device too much, as he crashed a plane after accidentally disengaging the autopilot in the midst of becoming possibly the first person to have sex while airborne.
My sticking point is the state of the art of all autopilots in all fields. Fully autonomous systems are very new and still highly experimental (most drones still have human pilots, just remote, for example) and so I don't get how this popular conception that "autopilot = fully autonomous" happened. It's as if everyone thought that "boat" meant something with wheels that can drive on land.
In a world where you're constantly bombarded with press releases about self driving cars and how theyre just around the corner, its not exactly unexpected to think that an autopilot system will pilot your car automatically, especially when tesla is so heavily associated with silicon valley.
It may have a real use in planes or boats but approximately noone is familiar with that.
People invoke factoids about how autopilot for airplane pilots works (they have training!) as if it was common knowledge.
Let's be clear here: Very few people know anything about airplane cockpits. When people read "autopilot" they think "automatic pilot" ie: the thing drives itself, similar to "auto login" login you in without a click. Marketing knows this, we all know this, let's not pretend it was an innocent mistake.
Also, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/autopilot
"a device that steers a ship, aircraft, or spacecraft in place of a person"
In place of. Not under the constant supervision of.
On a ship, for example, the helmsman is steering, but the officer of the deck is in charge.
Because automatic is opposed to manual, which requires human intervention, people assume that automatic requires no intervention (of any kind whatsoever).
From there they expect an autopilot to pilot automatically with no human intervention.
You're absolutely correct in distinguishing supervision from other forms of intervention, but it's easy to see how people can merge both concepts.
Edit: To further clarify, people assume "automatic" implies "you don't need to do anything." Supervising is doing something. So it conflicts with people's idea of "automatic."
So, again, how did you get this idea?
Because, as JonnieCache pointed out, the colloquial definition of Auto Pilot is more informed by entertainment than by the aerospace industry.
What's more baffling is why anyone would assume that the average person knows what "auto pilot" means in an aerospace setting. I mean, why in the world would that be common knowledge? In fact, I've seen enough bone-headed assertions about collision avoidance capabilities of modern aircraft that I'm pretty certain even people who think they know what auto pilot means, actually don't.
FWIW you can test this by finding people outside of the tech echo chamber who don't know what a Tesla is and asking them to describe the capabilities of a car with an Auto Pilot.
I accept that people think it means it's autonomous. Stop repeating that as if it were new to me. What I want to know is why people think that. "Because everybody thinks that, if you'd bother to ask them" is not an answer to that question.
Perhaps also it is not one which is accurate. I'm not really familiar with a lot of entertainment that includes this trope, which is not necessarily a surprise; what is a surprise is that TV Tropes, which is generally very detailed on such matters, doesn't seem to have anything covering it, either. That certainly suffices to inspire some doubt in my mind as to whether "oh, it's just entertainment" is an accurate answer, or a just-so story.
So when people engage their car autopilot, they allow themselves to be on autopilot, literally and figuratively.
Re-read the first sentence of my post.
Perhaps you could answer my question: why would you assume someone with no knowledge of the aerospace industry would understand what the term auto pilot means in that context?
Why would anyone assume the TCAS specification has a greater effect on public perception than the latest comic book movie?
I'm not going to answer your question because you're trying to make me defend a position I'm not taking here.
Did you mean manual transmissions?
Why is it so surprising that people think the prefix "auto-" means automatic or autonomous.
And it's surprising because "autopilot" has been a real-world technology for about a century and that real-world technology almost never allows pilots to leave the plane unsupervised.
> Mobileye said it would no longer provide its computer chips and algorithms to Tesla after a current contract ends due to disagreements about how the technology was deployed.
But it's good to have the exact reason Mobileye decided against renewing the contract in writing. I'm still keen to see how Volvo's system ends up since they (if I recall correctly) are the only car company which has so far indicated they would accept responsibility for incidents caused by their driverless system: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34475031 -- hopefully this'll compel their engineering teams to focus more on safety rather than MVP.
I do wonder whether both Tesla and SpaceX are seeing the issues they're seeing because of the abysmal work-life balance at both companies. Great successes on both sides, but there are increases in risks of catastrophic failure in products from both companies which have already been realized. I'm sure work life balance isn't the only reason, but it wouldn't surprise me if Musk's inability to personally burn out isn't actually shared by the vast majority of his engineers.
Even if you consider it a co-pilot, unless someone is paying as much attention as if they were really driving and was right in position to take control, I don't think they could have done much to mitigate this. At best, they might have jerked the car into the next lane, but even that could cause a fatal crash of that car or surrounding cars.
My experience with the system is that it actually allows you to be more aware of things like this, because you can devote all of your attention to scanning the road far ahead, instead of switching between the distance and nearby details like where you are relative to the lines.
However, that requires using the system in a way that understands and accommodates its limitations, which not everybody does.
Are you for real? Subaru's Eyesight would have detected this, and it is much less sophisticated than Autopilot (just two visible light cameras).
In the first crash Tesla explained how it occurred (strong sunlight blocked the visible light camera, and radar failed since the truck appeared to "hover" over the road) but they haven't explain this crash. Why didn't the visible cameras cause auto-breaking?
Breaking for stationary objects is the PRIMARY purpose of auto-braking systems.
"Warning: Traffic-Aware Cruise Control can not detect all objects and may not detect a stationary vehicle or other object in the lane of travel."
"Caution: car may drive into solid objects at 70mph"
Meanwhile on the front page of HN, a system which is not calling itself autopilot manages to avoid flying a plane into the ground: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12501985
Technologies like self-driving/autonomous/autopilot cars need to be very clear about what they can and cannot do. If the human has to be paying attention and able to take over before a solid object appears within the stopping distance of the car, then it should not be marketed as any of those and should limit itself to calling itself a driver assistance device.
(This whole issue is very important for people who do want fully autonomous cars, as Tesla et al messing up the PR will get them banned if they're not careful.)
Incidentally, Mercedes does advertise some of their cars as "self-driving":
https://electrek.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/mercedes-self-d...
I wonder why we don't hear these complaints about them.
A better response to lack of driver input would be to come to a controlled stop, preferably out of the traffic lanes (since other Tesla vehicles have driver assistance technology which may not respond to a stationary vehicle in the lanes)
So it seems not only Tesla thinks Mobileye can't keep up with safety. Others noticed this too.
Maybe you should read the article (or heck even the headline).
The article never stated anything about Tesla dropping Mobileye either but implied the opposite.
The unreasonable demands Mobileye made are listed in the below article I lifted the above quote from.
https://electrek.co/2016/09/15/tesla-vision-mobileye-tesla-a...
I believe if we're going to be alert to sexism towards women we need to tune up our antennae to all sexism and have simple and clear standards that have a hope of applying cross-culturally.
I welcome your alternate views below. I am genuinely interested in learning why you think I'm out of line here. :-)
Considering that Sebastian is also credited for taking the photo, I'd speculate he approved of the caption, or even came up with it.
In short, your criticism would have been valid in many circumstances, but does not really apply to this specific caption.