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Comment by darkwater | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a Elon fan but the autopilot in a plane does basically the same (if we are saying that planes and cars do the same thing, which is transport people) that Tesla's or many more manufacturers "autopilot" does on highways. Not an aviation expert but I don't think AP is controlling take-offs and landings. It controls cruise speed, altitude and direction. A car AP on a highway does the same (minus altitude).

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Also a plane's autopilot has situations where it will yell at you to take over; and have situations where it's expected that the pilot recognizes problems and overrides the autopilot.

It's a good analogy from a technical standpoint, with the "minor" difference that in most situations pilots have a lot more time to react than the driver of a car. Which makes it very different from a consumer standpoint

and pilots have a lot more training

> I'm not a Elon fan but the autopilot in a plane does basically the same (if we are saying that planes and cars do the same thing, which is transport people) that Tesla's or many more manufacturers "autopilot" does on highways.

Even if true, when you talk about consumer marketing, none of that matters.

I don't have name for it, but there's a whole class of bad-faith, deliberately misleading statements that exploit the difference between common and technical understandings (e.g. say something you know most people will inaccurately interpret as X, then fall back to the much narrower Y when challenged).

I think it is pretty well understood, for example if you look at something like the IEEE code of ethics, that technical professionals have an obligation to honesty beyond just not lying; a requirement to communicate in a way that helps the general public clear up likely misunderstandings.

I call it "lying". It's a special subset of lying, but the intention is to be deceptive, so it's in that category.

I’m pretty sure this would match Harry G. Frankfurt’s definition of “bullshit”.

Yes, like GP said: "marketing"

But there is a very important difference, and that is that airplane autopilots are certified with extremely expensive years long tests to demonstrate failure rates of 10E-9 (once in a billion hours) or even stricter. Whereas a computer vision model is considered “good enough” by the car industry after just a few hundred hours of “self driving” without major accidents, and this is in spite of the fact that roads are full elements that are definitely a lot more unpredictable (eg. other drivers) than what airplanes usually encounter during landing (that is, a mostly empty runway)

If a plane's autopilot steers the plane into a cliff (and such cases have happened many times, 'controlled flight into terrain' is a thing and in quite a few of those cases the autopilot was involved - for example, in both cases here https://www.boldmethod.com/learn-to-fly/aeromedical-factors/... it seems it was turned on during impact), we don't consider it a fault of the autopilot, it's working as intended, as it's effective job is to keep the plane straight and level, not to make smart decisions about how to fly - that's up to the pilots.

In a similar manner, if some computer system in a car holds the steering wheel straight and the speed constant, it's working just as well as a plane's autopilot even if it crashes into a parked car at full speed.

True, but that's where the difference in intended usage is problematic. In the sky, autopilot can't accidentally hit another plane or barrier because it got confused about the road paint or construction signs. The stakes are a lot higher on the ground, even though it technically controls less of the vehicle than autopilot in a plane does (acceleration, braking, and steering compared to elevator, trim, roll, pitch, throttle, vector) since cars don't have to worry about 3 dimensional movement much while airplanes do.

Also not an aviation expert, but it looks like airplane autopilots can do everything except taxiing and taking off (they can do landings now I guess, in fact, just looking on Wikipedia it sounds like they are preferred in low visibility situations for some airports, because they have more sensors and the airports have maps/beacons to help them out).

Apparently it also must be engaged above 28000 ft. Imagine if autonomous vehicles were so good that they were required to be used while going at speed on the highway.

While that’s true (on a plane, I’ve seen simply keeping the wings level labelled “Autopilot” without it even maintaining altitude), it’s still a travesty.

a) Pilots have certification and training which includes proper use of whatever ‘autopilot’ that plane has.

b) Even so, the name still “over-promises” in an arena where doing so risks lives. So it should never have been called that even on a plane. Let alone on a car sold to consumers with little regulation.

Autopilot was not a consumer feature but a professional one where the understanding of the system comes with multiple certifications.

Isn't the bigger problem the one they called "full self driving"?

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