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Comment by leobg | Hacker News Reader

You have your hands on the wheel at all times. You’ll already have an intuition of situations in which the autopilot might make a mistake, and you viscerally “feel” the car’s decisions, as well as its level of confidence. In tight situations, where you cannot afford an inch of a steering mistake, you’ll grab the wheel harder, in a way that if autopilot does try to deviate from the path you deem safe, it will disengage itself against the pressure of your hand.

I very much feel like an airplane pilot must feel using the “autopilot” in a Boeing 747: The system helps me reduce my cognitive load, and allows me to focus more on situational awareness versus micromanagement (e.g. staring at the taillights in front of me and missing the motorcycle coming up from behind). But at no point would I ever delude myself into thinking that the system absolves me of responsibility.

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That makes it even more scary. In an aircraft, you usually get a few minutes to determine the problem, disengage autopilot and correct it manually. Autopilot is also disengaged during periods of uncertainty like takeoff or landing (unless it's very well proven). In case of a car, you get mere seconds to react. And that reaction should come from your intuition or mental model of the autopilot. That implies that you should have faced a similar dangerous situation before hand, so that you know what may go wrong.

Another way I read it, it's like you being a standby driver ready to take over when the inexperienced driver makes a mistake. I've been in a similar situation with a driving instructor before. While nothing bad happened, the time it took for him to react convinced me that humans are bad at this. The only reason I find autopilot justifiable is if it's quantitatively better than the human driver.

Have you ever used Autopilot yourself?

I agree that if somebody played with their phone while on Autopilot, it would be dangerous. If you have to context-switch and put your hands and feet back into position, it might be too late.

But Autopilot is designed for you to keep your hands on the wheel at all times. I use it on a daily basis. And while I have not measured my "Autopilot disengagement reaction time", I am sure it is in the range of mere milliseconds.

If you had to react to a notice on the screen, or even just to warning sounds, it all would be horribly slow. But when you use Autopilot, it all works through tactile feedback. You feel each tiny movement the car wants to make, be it steering left or right, braking or accelerating. And while a driving instructor has to reach over to take the wheel, all movements the car makes are "piped" through your own muscles.

> The only reason I find autopilot justifiable is if it's quantitatively better than the human driver.

That's the point. And to make that happen, Tesla needs this current generation of "supervised Autopilot". Because somebody's got to train and fine-tune that neural network. You need humans to make the system super-human.

> I agree that if somebody played with their phone while on Autopilot, it would be dangerous.

I know people who use auto-pilot like this. The technology enables it.

> while I have not measured my "Autopilot disengagement reaction time", I am sure it is in the range of mere milliseconds.

That seems impossible. The human reaction time to decide the appropriate response to driving stimulus is 500 ms (when an engaged driver). The human reaction time to apply a change once the decision is made is 200 ms. Add to that however many ms it takes to notice that the Tesla is not responding the way you want (say it's as immediate as any other stimulus, so another 500 ms) and you can see how it's not as safe.

> to make that happen, Tesla needs this current generation of "supervised Autopilot". Because somebody's got to train and fine-tune that neural network.

I see no reason why my commutes should be more dangerous or my driving should be made riskier to train an AI I am not being compensated for nor consenting to improve.

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