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Comment by llamaimperative | Hacker News Reader

Umm, yeah. Maybe I wasn't clear.

MB Drive Pilot is designed not to attempt to operate outside of a well-defined domain.

It will, by design, not operate in a way that is unsafe or in a context in which it's unsafe.

You are arguing the system would perform worse in contexts in which you have not seen it perform (because its designers decided to prevent it from such attempts).

What evidence do you have for your argument?

Restated: You are assuming that if Mercedes engineers had a similar appetite for putting millions of innocent people at risk by operating in unreliable contexts, that their system would perform far worse than FSD does. On what basis do you make that assumption?

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> What evidence do you have for your argument?

The fact that their software is written only to just follow the car in front, and completely and immediately give up if there's no car in front or one cannot be seen due to it being dark or bad weather, on premapped roads.

Meanwhile FSD has repeatedly shown that's it's capable of driving without a car in front.

You can watch YouTube videos of FSD driving without a car in front for thousands of miles on non-premapped roads.

What makes you think Mercedes would be better at doing that?

What makes you think that MB doesn't have the same capability, but they aren't willing to ship a half-arsed highly dangerous, people killing feature like some other companies do? Unlike any of their competitors, they assume full legal liability for their car's behavior while Drive Pilot is enabled.

MB also has a luxury brand reputation to maintain. When they ship a major feature like that, it absolutely has to work 100% as advertised.

> Unlike any of their competitors, they assume full legal liability for their car's behavior while Drive Pilot is enabled.

Source? If someone gets killed when the system is driving, there is no legal framework for you as a driver to escape criminal penalties. Who at MB are they going to jail for it?

Can UPS indemnify their drivers from involuntary manslaughter charges?

I've worked on competitors to the mb system from legacy auto; generally the way we work is make the best possible system for the long term, then limit the odd to meet safety, regulatory, and brand risk requirements.

So there will be a system happily running producing target driving paths, but some monitoring system disables in the case with no car in front.

I would guess that the mb system is in fact ok without a car in front, but didn't hit their appetite for risk yet.

> What makes you think Mercedes would be better at doing that?

I didn't say they are. You're the only one making assumptions here :)

> You are arguing the system would perform worse in contexts in which you have not seen it perform (because its designers decided to prevent it from such attempts).

Should we also assume that Mercedes cars can fly better than a plane, because we have not yet seen them fly?

What kind of logic is that?

In other news, OpenAI has solved AGI last year, but is keeping it a secret because it's too dangerous.

I have solved self driving, how can you say I didn't if you haven't seen it perform?

No, but generally you should assume a system with near-100% performance within a well-defined ODD doesn't fall off to near-0% performance immediately adjacent to that ODD.

Here's a better example: let's say by law Mercedes has to restrict their cars from exceeding 80mph. They have a car that can reach 80mph in 2 seconds. Is it therefore credible to claim that the car is actually incapable of driving at 81mph?

Or is it more credible to say, "we don't know much about its performance beyond 80mph, but it can probably achieve something outside of that."

A car not being in front means more data for cameras because they can see more of the road ahead if the system can actually do proper road navigation.

The fact that it shuts off immediately shows that they're just copying what the car ahead does.

The system is unable to function on a pre-mapped highway on a clear day with lane markings if there is no other traffic on the road. What does that tell you?

What kind of messed-up logic is that? How many products do you think you own that contain hidden features that you're not supposed to know about? Just about everything with at least a microcontroller inside has extra software modules that you never learn about as the end user (e.g. service modes and factory calibration routines).

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