So much for no new hardware required for L5
Early autonomous test vehicles used LIDARS because camera and compute tech are not at the same level they are today. It's a legacy system and more of a shortcut. In essence, Object recognition > LIDAR judging distances.
Yeah it's true that a vision based system is much harder to solve. However if Tesla cracks it, it will pay dividends.
As has been discussed in some depth here before you commented, computer vision hooked up to some ML doesn’t come close to human eyes controlled by a human brain trained for many years.
Early autonomous test vehicles used LIDARS because camera and compute tech are not at the same level they are today. It's a legacy system and more of a shortcut. In essence, Object recognition > LIDAR judging distances.
Waymo is the cutting edge if you believe what people here say on thread after thread about them, and the raw stats. I’m sure they’ll be interested to hear your view of their “legacy” tech.
Yeah it's true that a vision based system is much harder to solve. However if Tesla cracks it, it will pay dividends.
Finally, reality. Yes, if they do something they’re yet to do, and their cars stop ramming stationary objects, then maybe something else will happen. No one is contesting that, there are just doubts given the state of Autopilot vs. leaders in the field, not to mention Tesla’s dodgy PR in general, and in the face of fatal incidents in particular.
Even if they "crack" it, they will just be spending much more money to get the same benefits as a $100 mm wave system.
In the future, vision systems will only be seen as a gimmick of this era.
Radars beat both ladars and vision systems at phase, speed, and distance estimation.
In other words, you get everything that vision systems would offer except color, without having to do any processing to calculate depth, so you can go straight to the object-recognition and navigation processing.
LIDAR > vision systems.
Maybe driving on the roads we have now with computer vision alone needs strong AI, maybe simpler standardized roads and vehicles are needed, who knows. I think that strong statements about this should be backed by evidence, not gut feeling. And I'd like to see that evidence coming from the company that promises their customers their cars have all the hardware they need.
Same age for walking around town unsupervised: the Japanese do and don't seem to lose many.
My original point was focused on the technical feasibility of driving with limited sensor input, which is physically possible.
Whether or not it takes a week, a month, or a million experience-years is a computational and algorithm problem.
All of which (based on previous technological progression) appear to be tractable.
E.g. the disaster that is the first major snowfall, every year, or automatic transmissions, antilock brakes, and traction control systems becoming standard
The human can only reliably be trusted to keep the car between the lines, stop appropriately, and occasionally make turns. Which is something much simpler to compete with!
https://hips.seas.harvard.edu/blog/2013/01/30/what-is-the-co...
Our intuition about the future is linear. But the reality of information technology is exponential, and that makes a profound difference. If I take 30 steps linearly, I get to 30. If I take 30 steps exponentially, I get to a billion. - Ray Kurzweil
People once said the same thing about fire lances.
The current model makes assumptions that sometimes turn out to be false. So yea it's not going to get to perfection, but level five only needs better than human not perfection.
* Granted I am likely a bad driver, but I don't think I could do this well.
See you can try to move the goal post, but as soon as they would be saving lives by taking tired or drunk drivers off the road that's very useful.
I am curious on what numbers are you basing this on, the Tesla PR numbers are not valid statistics.
I trust insurance companies to have good data, they think it improves safety when you compare rates.
This cars require the driver to pay 100% attention, by law and by Tesla agreements so isn't obvious that driver+drive assist+expensive car has better average numbers then driver + average (maybe old) car ?
I would like to see the numbers of how many times a driver had to intervene to save the situation
In terms of paying attention I really doubt most people are doing this very well. I am going to be stuck in the car either way so by default I am going to be watching the road, but as long as my relative stress level drops that's a huge win.
PS: You can make your own estimates. If people pay attention sufficient to avid accidents 99% of the time the car might be in 100x more accidents without drivers assuming those drivers where perfect. Drop that to IMO more likely 75% and it's closer to 4x at the absolute best case.
Same with Tesla, this is why I would like to see the number the drivers had to intervene and prevent crashes, without this number the only conclusion is about driver asist and not autopilot/self driving
Further, the difference between OK and an accident is normally fractions of a second. So, my suspicion is humans are really bad at this role and only catch the most obvious cases. AKA crap I am an a corn field, not hmm it's not slowing down enough I need to apply slightly more breaking power or I am going to hit that guy simply because you don't have time to react with the second situation.
Having said that, humans may be preventing a lot of issues well before they turn into accidents. The 'wanted to make a wrong turn down a one way street' is something a person can deal with easily, though it's not necessarily going to cause an accident.
Anyway I am waiting for some government institution or maybe the lawsuit to get more data then we can use that to make informed conclusions.
IMO, the largest risk is an over the air update killing a large number of people.
You can't invent numbers and statistics.
Remember the Tesla that crashed in a side barrier and killed the driver, people could reproduce the incident in the same spot , you can see it on youtube, so without a driver and with say 1000 Teslas driving trough that section in the problematic interval you would get at least 1000x more deaths.
Only if you include the people that reproduced the incident mentioned above you will get the Tesla stats much below human drivers.
Computers fail in different ways than humans do. But, that does not mean you can't reason about failure modes. If you ask someone to pay attention to something for an hour without doing anything most people are just really bad at this. Based on that I am rather shocked how well Tesla's systems work as I was expecting vastly more problems.
Could I have flipped to far in the other direction probably. But, I base things on my experience and the data I have available not just unchanging gut feelings.
If you pay for self-drive you will get an update.
Elon has always said it should be enough and if not you get an upgrade.
But some nuonce is lost in all his statments ofter it got threw the hype and couter hype cycle.
The benefit of high margins and sophisticated engineering is you can get away with a lot of unknowns and promises.
Its only Elon Musk haters that somehow want to proclaim every mistake of him as some sort of fall from grace where finally his auro of diseption will be lifted from his victims.