Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” sees pedestrian, chooses not to slow down
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I'm city person, lived in NYC most of my life and continue to do so today, and it's pretty clear to me that the pedestrian entered the crosswalk (on the other side) before the tesla made it to the crosswalk... like... it's on video...
Kudos to them for sharing the video to begin with, but it doesn't surprise me one bit that they're trying to spin it so it's actually the pedestrian's fault, or SF's fault, or city mentality, basically anyone's but Tesla's.
Is there anyone in the Bay Area with a child who can run in front of my car on Full Self-Driving Beta to make a point? I promise I won't run them over... (will disengage if needed)
(this is a serious request)
This is a much bigger and more serious issue, dozens of pedestrians are killed by cars every year in my city.
The moment a pedestrian puts their feet on the crossing they have absolute right of way & it’s on you to stop. If a pedestrian is waiting to cross, you’re expected to stop.
If Tesla exports this self driving code to the UK it’s going to cause accidents because people will absolutely not be expecting this behaviour from vehicles on the road in the UK.
For example, in this case, even someone standing near a crosswalk might be enough for all vehicles to refuse to enter.
How many seconds is one supposed to stop at a stop sign? The law is silent on the matter. There is so much around laws or rule systems that forms as conventions around the rules that are often just as important as the text of the rules themselves.
See also solid white lines (do not cross) in the US. People cross them for pragmatic reasons in many locations all the time, often in full view of law enforcement.
There are also road users for whom laws are rarely enforced or more frequently disobeyed, such as cyclists. In many places cyclists are bound to obey the same traffic lights as motor vehicles. This plainly doesn't happen 100 percent of the time, and again is often tolerated by law enforcement. A car with an absolutist interpretation of driving regulations would therefore still have to deal with the law enforcement and others may not share in this view.
I don't see a need for the law to specify a time. You have to stop and you proceed as soon as you have the right of way and it is safe to do so.
For a working AI, it can still stop safely if the pedestrian starts moving into the street in the few seconds the car is crossing.
Computers do exactly what they are told to do and never do what you did not tell them to do. They do not have any common sense that you did not give them. As you build more and more capable computers and give them more influence and control, you damn well better have an exhaustive, complete and comprehensive set of values for it to follow.
At first this will be due to AI's one current superhuman ability: speed; a classic is the do you drive into the old couple or the little kid car scenario. It's not really an issue for humans because the situation is over before we can make more than a reflexive response, but the AI can take its time to make a concrete decision. This isn't a thing we spend a lot of time thinking or blogging about and a societal consensus probably has not formed and wouldn't show up in the data. Presumably the AI would pick at more or less random as we are forced to do, but I can see an entity capable of superspeed choosing to perform random actions as causing other as yet unforseen problems.
The big pinch is if and when we create transformational AI. We will be presented with options we had never imagined being possible. Do you keep Mars as a memory of the old days, or do you use its crust to construct interstellar spaceships and build better lives for Earth humans? Do you allow humans to live lives as they do now, or do you modify their biology and neurology to live longer lives and never engage in antisocial behavior?
These are lazy obvious examples that I came up with but there will be many less-cosmic decisions we will be presented with that we absolutely do not have an existing moral template to guide us.
What's absolutist - the driver blew right through the crosswalk while someone was literally in it...
If the pedestrian remains still, but the driver sees no reason they shouldn't cross, eventually the driver might well gesture, honk etc.
> Vehicles are required to stop when you are crossing their lane or when you are close to entering their lane.[1]
For California, I couldn't find an independent reference for the situation here but did find one saying a stopped driver doesn't have to wait until the pedestrian fully exits the crosswalk.[2]
[1] https://leddylaw.com/what-are-my-rights-as-a-pedestrian-in-s...
[2] https://www.karlaw.com/blog/do-drivers-have-to-wait-for-pede...
The Tesla vehicle violated this. subdivision (3) kinda implicitly confirms that a driver doesn't need to wait for a pedestrian to fully exit (what allows for that though is just the definition of and requirements around "right of way").
Also, since we’re being pedantic, the vehicle can’t violate the law because it isn’t a person. The driver would be in violation.
Sure, you could argue that. Were it true it'd be fine. But the pedestrian clearly slowed nearly to a stop (and shot the Tesla a disparaging look).
Unless we’re looking at different videos I don’t see either of those things happening. They don’t appear to change their pace at all after entering the crosswalk and they don’t seem disturbed in the slightest.
I'm guessing the vast majority of training data is collected in countries with right-hand traffic flow. I suspect it might not be so straightforward to adapt to countries with left-hand traffic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9S75Rfva9O8
Maybe the car knew something, eh? :)
Edit: I'm embarrassed to say that I did not watch the video. It's much worse than the description implies. The pedestrian was in the crosswalk, and crossing. FSD absolutely should have stopped.
However, as the article points out, "California law requires drivers to come to a complete stop for pedestrians at crosswalks".
I see this as a failure of the FSD development process, not of FSD. Tesla's software devs simply aren't familiar with driving laws. They may not even be drivers - it's not a requirement.
You'd expect Tesla to simply teach the algorithm to follow driving laws, but they haven't done that.
Where's the option for "stop for pedestrians at crosswalks"?
I really hope this doesn't happen. Configurable driving behaviors might make sense to a degree, but this feels dangerous. I would hope that the Department of Transportation (or equivalent in other countries) would regulate such things.
> - Improved ego's assertiveness for crossing pedestrians in cases where ego can easily and safely cross before the pedestrian.
A longer video by the same person showing FSD Beta 11.4.1 driving his car is here (40+ minutes):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAFyPqSu8Vo
---
[a] What's more, when there's a line of pedestrians about to cross an intersection, which will block it, I've seen human drivers accelerate to avoid getting stuck behind the line. Actually, I see that all the time when there are a lot of pedestrians downtown.
I think it is because of regenerative breaking and quick acceleration, which makes the cost of stopping much smaller. Or negative if you get a kick out of acceleration.
The real question is... how far off is this technology from practical human driving and when (not whether) it will surpass.
Already with the whataboutism? Automated driving is supposed to promise safer driving than humans, not bug-for-bug compatibility.
Yes, because the pedestrian slowed down when it saw the Tesla was not giving them right of way (as the Tesla is required to in the state of california).
> In my state that's perfectly legal.
In most states its illegal to force a vehicle or pedestrian or whatever that has right of way to slow to a near stop to avoid a collision with you that you could have easily stopped and avoided. I don't know of a state where a pedestrian in a crosswalk would not have right of way in this situation.
Now, there are many states where a pedestrian in a crosswalk doesn't have like right of way over everything (though, technically, not california), but for the most part this applies to vehicles that could cross the crosswalk without affecting the pedestrian.
I was reasonig about the distance between machine and humans in their driving capabilities. It is clear that there us a gap in favor of humans and the gap is narrowing. Moreso, in the future there will be a surpassing. I don't get the contradiction you see.
So you can have that, or "well humans do that too", but not both.
A story called "Teslas systemically drive unsafely at intersections", with an investigation into this kind of behavior at mass scale? That's actual journalism, not just a glorified quote retweet.
This is also assuming that FSD runs through crosswalks at the same rate as human drivers, but it might be much more frequent. If Tesla actually backed up their safety claims with data we could check and verify, but they are famously reticent to provide evidence of how their cars perform that hasn't been cherry picked.