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Comment by psunavy03 | Hacker News Reader

> Last year, the Department of Justice launched an investigation into Tesla and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) found that 322 frontal and other collisions resulted from Autopilot disengaging. As the recall mentioned above highlights, it was too easy for drivers to leave Tesla's Autopilot on its own and completely relinquish control.

We need less technical fixes for things like this and more legal consequences for drivers who are found to have used the system negligently. Want to act like a clown in your self-driving Tesla? Great, you're still responsible for what it does and now you can deal with a criminal conviction, same as someone driving drunk.

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This will not help. Humans are fundamentally incapable of babysitting repeptitive boring tasks that require interaction only in failure cases. Expecting humans to do so is expecting superhuman capabilities and no amount of threatening the drivers with legal consequencces will change the outcome. All you'll achieve is punishing the poor sobs that trusted teslas marketing stunt. If you want this to change, make Tesla liable and they'll quickly fix this, one way or another.

Making Tesla criminally liable (in a tangible, punitive sense, not just a $5000 fine per infraction) for every instance of an individual being directly harmed by a Tesla's self-driving mode would be a huge win for society as a whole, but Tesla and their supporters and apologists seem to have this idea that "hey, it's software, it's buggy but we'll fix it and iterate and then it'll be great" without realizing that we're not just crashing and losing the last ten minutes of someone's essay, we're crashing and killing human beings.

It would be an uphill battle for sure, and that's incredibly depressing.

The autopilot is adaptive cruise control + lane keeping. It’s abundantly clear and on top of this plenty of other cars have both features. The only difference is that the wheel is kept more steady.

Why would you make the manufacturer liable for this?

> As the recall mentioned above highlights, it was too easy for drivers to leave Tesla's Autopilot on its own and completely relinquish control.

(From the top post). If other manufacturers show the same flaw, make the liable, too.

For marketing it as „autopilot“ and not „adaptive cruise control“ like every other manufacturer.

And yet airliners fly across the world constantly without crashing into things. That's literally the job of an airline pilot . . . babysitting repetitive boring tasks that require significant interaction only in failure cases. I was military aircrew, so I know this. Sure actually operating the aircraft is a hell of a lot more complex than a car, but there are also fewer safeguards than they're talking about putting in cars to "keep people's attention." This doesn't require superhuman skill.

Different contexts and not really comparable.

1) The whole airspace environment is heavily regulated (ATC, rules, etc), cooperative (think transponders or TCAS for example) and usually quite sparse (several miles between planes).

2) Pilots are regularly trained and evaluated for these kind of take over in case of emergency.

3) You have two pilots monitoring each other.

4) The development cycles for these automations are far longer, and the QA a lot stricter.

5) At least in the most critical phases (take-off, landing), the automation is not exactly end-to-end. It's more the case of grouping batch of steps together into bigger actions to reduce the load on the pilots. The pilots are still quite busy during these periods and very much in the loop.

Perhaps the pilot licensing/training process filters out those who can't babysit? I would assume though that this versus the car licensing/training process (low bar of required training) is where the difference lies?

Apart from the training and the fact that pilots work in pairs, there’s a host of differences that make a planes autopilot task and behavior fundamentally different from what Tesla misleadingly labels autopilot:

Planes operate in a space with good visibility, any obstacle will be visible with ample lead time.

Planes operate in controlled space, with dedicated and verified spacing between traffic participants, allocated by an external traffic control. Collisions are not rare because pilots jump in within split seconds to avoid them, but because traffic control routes planes away from each other if they converge.

The planes autopilot is in fact less capable than what the teslas autopilot pretends to be. Its limitations are fairly well understood by pilots.

A planes autopilot doesn’t dump the pilot into a “you’ll crash in a second” situation. Handover from autopilot is a different process than what Tesla expects. The planes systems are designed with human psychology and limitations in mind, because of the comparatively high regulatory bar.

You gotta be pretty unlucky to "crash into things" while in the air with autopilot at cruise altitude.

Autopilot on cars is a MUCH harder problem than on an airplane. Plus you're taking about trained professionals and liable companies vs average Joe and negligent developer.

Punishing “poor slobs” is the cornerstone of deterrence for most crimes, why doesn’t it apply here as well?

It depends on what you want to achieve.

If all you want is revenge, then by all means, punish them as hard as you wish. Make them listen to tesla autopilot advertising until their ears bleed. The harm is done by that time.

If you want to avoid harm, then you're well served to take the failure mode into account - it's not a conscious decision to take attention away from the autopilot. It's a fundamental psychological mechanism and we're all prone to fall victim. The only way to avoid the trap is to not use autopilot - or change how it works and adress the need for changes to the party that (mis)designed the feature and has power to change it.

Humans are fundamentally incapable of babysitting repeptitive boring tasks that require interaction only in failure cases.

Read this repeatedly until you've answered your question.

That would require a complete revamp of US law and culture. As it is now, you are not a criminal if you stop paying attention and run someone over. Your actions have to rise to a much higher level of wanton criminality before you are ever at risk of a criminal charge. People kill people on sidewalks, in cross-walks, in their living-rooms (!!!) and face nothing more than a $1000 fine for failure to yield.

This kind of change isn't impossible. Drunk driving was once in this same category -- I.e. considered an unfortunate accident rather than a crime. Then Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) ran a 30 year campaign to change the law, change enforcement, change prosecution, and finally (partially) the culture.

But I guarantee the NHTSA has neither the mandate nor the capacity to lead that change.

Like my wife always says (whenever a cyclist is killed or maimed in an entirely preventable traffic "accident"), "if you want to kill someone, do it in a car".

Is this true? I'm pretty sure being caught looking at your phone while running someone over will get you a criminal charge in most states.

The law might say that (that's step 1 in the culture change). But the police won't arrest. And if the police arrest, the prosecutors won't charge. And if the prosecutors charge, a judge/jury won't convict. Every one of those people along the way think "there, but for the grace of god, go I". They all drive to work, fussing with their phones while doing it, and just can't bring themselves to consider it a crime. It really is very much like drunk driving in that way.

https://www.dailynews.com/2014/08/27/no-charges-for-lasd-dep...

https://www.scribd.com/document/237940150/Official-document-...

I don’t doubt what you say, but I’m flabbergasted that phone use really is that common.

I’ve probably used my phone 5 times while driving in the last two years, and I can’t imagine why anyone would need to do it more than that. I do rely on CarPlay and Siri massively.

Dunno where you live, but if you are in North America: take a look around next time you are waiting at a red light, or stopped on the highway in traffic. Look for all the people staring at their laps -- they are not contemplating their navels.

Being stupid is not a crime. America doesn't have enough prisons were it otherwise.

We might be in the very beginning of a change like this phone-use while driving. It's already been 10 years of killing by distracted phone use, the laws are starting to change. Enforcement is limited, and the average person still does not give two shits -- in their minds they're just checking their texts, and are totally still in control of the situation.

It will take another 10 years of concerted effort to actually change behaviour. It took MADD 20 years just to get the legal alcohol limit down from 0.15 to 0.08.

This is a general problem in the US because we're so dependent on cars. We're very lax on car deaths / injuries caused by negligence.

I think the saying goes "If you're going to kill someone, do it in a car"

Then outlaw the system. The entire point of the tech is to make it so I don't HAVE to drive. If I still have to have my hands on the wheel, I still need to be paying so close attention that I can take over in the half a second I get to react, then I'm not actually having anything automated. I'm still driving the car.

Either we have to accept these systems, or we need to ban them, but this goofy waffling where we just cripple them to be useless makes no sense to me.

The entire point is that you don‘t have to constantly center the car in the lane as well as having it perfectly centered.

How is that wrong?

That's absolutely not what's advertised, described, or purchased. Nobody is buying "lane-centering software", which has been around for like a decade now in some form or another.

At best, I would accept that this is blatant false advertising on the fault of all car manufacturers who offer anything with a name akin to "autopilot".

Serious question... What does this actually free you from? Is the occasional adjustment to keep in your lane that much? It's not like cruise control where after holding my foot in the same position for hours my ankle is damn near locked up, and the occasional adjustment helps keep focus.

I just can't figure out what lane centering is supposed to free me up to do instead.

I just drove 2000km in the last couple days. I have a car with level 2 driver assistance (ADAS). This includes lane assist.

I keep my hands on the steering wheel virtually at all times. I say virtually because I might let go for 2-3 seconds to untwist a bottle cap if everyone else in the car is asleep, not any different than the “knee steering” I did before. However, the car follows the curvature of the road without a problem.

The main benefit of ADAS, to me, is greatly reduced driver exhaustion. Yes, I am paying attention and actively driving the car, however I can focus on the important things.

The ACC ensures I don’t need to worry about fines for speeding due to a heavy foot. It also ensures that I’m “far enough” from the car in front to keep me (and them) safe. Lane assist means I can spend 20% more focus on understanding what shenanigans are going on 5 cars ahead instead of worrying about drifting in another lane.

Do I rely on it continuously? Nope. Do I trust it completely? It’s bad enough that I can’t. However, after driving 2000km, I’m still fresh enough to engage in a conversation in a foreign language with the in-laws, whereas in my prime, 15 years ago, the same trip would’ve put me to bed instantly.

It reduces the cognitive load of driving. It doesn’t make driving easier, however it reduces the mental burden of being a defensive driver.

It’s not unlike ABS. Could I achieve a lower stopping distance by carefully surfing the grip/skid brake pressure? With practice, on a track, absolutely. Do I get greater peace of mind knowing that at any time a computer is checking 500x per second whether my tyres are losing grip, regardless of my state of mind, whether I’m paying attention, am distracted, the road conditions, or which pair of shoes I’m wearing? Undoubtedly.

I've used pro pilot on a Nissan on the highway, mostly because the steering felt too light otherwise.

In general, that analogy applies, though. Just like cruise control allows you to effortless maintain a speed, autosteer makes lane centering effortless.

It is basically like power steering that reduces steering effort to exactly zero. The benefit is greater than I thought it'd be, tbh.

Tesla positions FSD as much more than an automatic lane keeper.

I‘m not taking about FSD, I am talking about autopilot.

Fine! Same objection. https://www.tesla.com/support/autopilot

> In addition to the functionality and features of Autopilot, Enhanced Autopilot also includes:

> Navigate on Autopilot: Actively guides your car from a highway’s on-ramp to off-ramp, including suggesting lane changes, navigating interchanges, automatically engaging the turn signal and taking the correct exit.

> Auto Lane Change: Assists in moving to an adjacent lane on the highway when Autosteer is engaged.

> Autopark: Helps automatically parallel or perpendicular park your car, with a single touch.

> Summon: Moves your car in and out of a tight space using the mobile app or key.

> Smart Summon: Your car will navigate more complex environments and parking spaces, maneuvering around objects as necessary to come find you in a parking lot.

Who'd have guessed it is hard to safely transition from not driving/inattentive to driving in an instant while in traffic.

We threaten people with death or life in prison and they still do things. I'm skeptical of the ability to prevent bad behavior in this fashion - especially when it's a much greyer area of culpability.

That’s not really how this works?

The biggest reduction in drunk driving happened because of ride sharing.

The biggest reduction in piracy was because of availability of legal content.

The biggest reduction in car deaths is going to be creating an alternative to cars.

Human error is a valid defense because humans make a ton of errors, all the time.

I can bet that punishing people for human errors in this context will have a net negative consequence on society as a whole.

But Tesla sells a system which lulls the human brain into involuntary complacency. A mind cannot babysit a machine. Here, Tesla is the bartender.

The only way to change this is to affect corporate shareholders, not punish users.

Pushing responsibility onto individual drivers for misusing automated systems is not the answer.

Making it painful enough to progress to the technology closer to infallibility is the way forward.

As always it comes down to the incentives and desired outcomes argument.

We aren’t trying to incentivize good behavior. We are trying to close the distance between technical promise and genuine achievement. You, in general principles, have to build the incentives around negative or positive consequences to manufacturers, not punish technology users for not using the half-ass implementation properly.

Top management is almost always most concerned with an innovation’s likely effect on the bottom line and they are accustomed to receiving market feedback, proposals and regulatory guidance that in turn help them prioritize resources to optimize for a return on investment and payback. We want to leverage that decision system to fix self-driving not engage in punitive end-user punishment because end users can’t do anything to change it.

TLDR; Right instinct, wrong clowns.

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