Elon Musk just now realizing that self-driving cars are a ‘hard problem’ | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk just now realizing that self-driving cars are a ‘hard problem’

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24 pointsjocker1215 comments

What Elon Musk actually realizes and what his fan base thinks he realizes might as well be two disjoint sets.

Well,

"Generalized self-driving is a hard problem, as it requires solving a large part of real-world AI. Didn’t expect it to be so hard, but the difficulty is obvious in retrospect. Nothing has more degrees of freedom than reality."

is a direct quote from him, and is quite explicit. So there's that...

I love that quote. Like, Elon, dude, it was definitely obvious at the time, too. At least to anyone not cloistered in the techno-utopian echo chamber that is SV.

>it was definitely obvious at the time, too

Well, if you admit it as obvious you don't get to make billions selling the idea of it arriving shortly...

In another 12 months, Elon will realize that it is an _incredibly_ hard problem -- particularly the bit about liability transferring to Tesla for accidents that occur while Full Self Driving (FSD) is engaged.

Unless Tesla continues to use the crutch that FSD is driver assist and you’re still responsible for the vehicle at all times, which is a reasonable path for them to take.

“The car drives itself, but you’re still liable. Press accept to continue.” I tell you what, everyone is going to hit accept all day long like an iTunes agreement.

The acceptance of some sort of agreement by the driver wouldn't protect Tesla from liability claims by injured third parties. Depending on the facts of a particular case a court could determine that Tesla's driver assistance technology was defective and find the company at least partly at fault.

Asserting it doesn't make it so.

Tesla can defend themselves longer than most will remain solvent ($20B cash equivalents on hand), and I don’t see any case law where driver assist places liability on the manufacturer when it’s clearly communicated the driver is still the final authority (even with Subaru and Cadillac lane assist similar to Tesla).

This isn’t supporting Tesla, just an observation of the judicial and regulatory landscape. NHTSA and the states are still allowing end users to run Full Self Driving revisions as we speak. Until a regulator issues a directive or a court an injunction, Tesla will continue in this fashion. Court cases can take years to resolve.

Maybe I’ll fork out for an attorney opinion letter on self driving assist feature liability and post it for funsies. Will report back if I do!

FSD is going to need more than just automakers - it will need roadbuilders.

Specifically, building the roads, signs, and traffic lights to be machine-readable, not just human readable.

Imagine if we could recreate the road network in software, with realtime status of traffic lights. There would be much less reliance on cameras and image recognition.

This probably already occurs in some control centre somewhere, it just needs to be made available over the air for vehicles to access.

Yeah. We should build lots of enhanced roads. Add in automatic signaling so that the cars know all of the intersections and crossings. Oh, and let's have some bars that come down so that pedestrians don't walk around the path of the cars. And maybe even add little walls around done edges so the cars can't veer off to where there isn't any smart road infrastructure. And since all of this is expensive, let's try and recoup the costs by making the cars much, much bigger and carry lots of people.

You mean like ... railways? only much more expensive and with much more concrete covering the soil?

Like railways, but that need to be built all around the place, disturbing (or well, continuing the disturbance) of the landscape, having us build our lifestyles around them (like hour+ long commutes and suburbs with no communal center), and for vehicles that need expensive battery infrastructure from non-renewable materials, and that usually catter to 1 person.

Roads, signs, and traffic lights are all pretty standardized. They're not the hard part.

The hard part is road conditions, which can't be standardized unless you completely separate them from humanity. No human drivers, no people walking in the street. Also no trees, no weather, and no potholes.

The hard problems are all AI-hard. Compared to those, deciphering the standardized parts with machine vision is already long since solved.

I personally think that humans are already intensely bad drivers, easily distracted and unreliable. I'd replace them with AI drivers right now, using existing tech, and the net number of deaths would go down. (It's tens of thousands per year in the US, and that's been falling only because the passengers have become better protected.)

Actually it doesnt need any of the above, or if it does it cannot be called full SELF DRIVING.

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