Yeah, good idea to hide the crash data.
I find it laughable that there still are Musk fanboys who after a decade of lies about this still believe in "Robotaxis". 90% of them clearly have never tried to drive a Tesla in a scenario where the minimal protections for kids to use public street space is not "kids should get a SUV to not get killed".
It is also amusing to watch videos of Tesla fanboys on YouTube who proudly show that their Tesla now can use FSD for up to 500 miles without a single crash (or "critical disengagement)". A human driver statistically causes a crash every 500,000 miles.
But yes, we will have flying Robotaxis in 2 weeks from now, that will solve this problem. Musk said so.
:)
Not sure what's your argument here. The visualization you get using "Enhanced Autopilot" is completely different to the one you get using "FSD Beta" because the software you are running is completely different as well.
What you see is what you get.
- Do you think that a Tesla with an enhanced Autopilot would hit a kid because you don't see it in the visualization?
- Or do you think that a Tesla with FSD Beta would hit a kid because it uses "the same data" as the one without it?
It's not like they could simply copy `detect_children()` from FSD to Autopilot and call it a day.
I'm no Tesla fan - but it would be real-world obvious if even 0.1% of Teslas actually were that "eager" to kill children. In most western countries, covering up child-killing accidents scales very poorly.
On a more serious note: Where do we as a society put the bar? What are the numbers, at which we accept the risk? Do we put the bar higher than for humans? Or same level? Or does the added convenience for car drivers tempt us to accept a lower bar?
Safety implementation is never objective. You can only implement a system by subjecting it to context. Traffic safety is a world of edge cases, and each driving implementation will engage with those edge cases from a different subjective context.
We are used to framing computation as a system of rules: explicit logic that is predictably followed. Tesla is using the other approach to "AI": statistical models. A statistical model replaces binary logic with a system of bias. A model that is built out of good example data will behave as if it is the thing creating that data. This works well when the context that model is situated in is similar to the example. It works poorly when there is a mismatch of context. The important thing to know here is that in both cases, it "works". A statistical model never fails: that's a feature of binary logic. Instead, it behaves in a way we don't like. The only way to accommodate this is to build a model out of examples that incorporate every edge case. Those examples can't conflict with each other, either. The model must be biased to make the objectively correct decision for every unique context it could possibly encounter in the future; or it will be biased to make the wrong decision.
The only real solution to traffic safety is to replace it with a fail-safe system: a system whose participants can't collide with each other or their surrounding environment. Today, the best implementation of this goal is trains.
Humans have the same problems that statistical models have. There are two key differences, though:
1. Humans are reliably capable of logical deduction.
2. Humans can be held directly accountable for their mistakes.
Tesla would very much like us to be ignorant of #1, and to insulate their platform from #2.
Could not agree more.
You have to seperate those. And the default in car nations like Germany or the US has always been to ban the humans. After having seen how other nations are handling it, and what it does for quality of life, whenever I see how German cities look like (and of course most of US cities) it feels totally alien to me.
Anyway: No, Robotaxis clearly are not the solution to the problem. In school kid vs. Tesla, the car always will win. And this includes even if you blame the kid for having made a mistake according to road regulations - making mistakes in regards of traffic rules as a young human should not be punished by death.
What I have seen in my German home town also is a downward spiral: Hockey mums thinking it is safer for their kids to come pick them up with their SUVs. But because those are so big that it is impossible to see the other kids, risk of accidents is actually rising, causing more mums to driver their kids in SUVs etc.
Also, due to the narrow roads it's standard practice to be in eye contact with other users of the shared space to make sure who drives/walks next.
Car AIs can not hold eye contact, so this is where the problem starts.
And, this one of course is very very specific just to Germany: On parts of the Autobahn you have to always expect another car approaching on the left lane with 250 km/h / 155 MPH, so you really have to use the rear view mirror very early to get an idea at what speed that car may be moving. The reach of the Tesla back camera is far too low for another driver at that speed being able to break so to not crash into your back.
So, when it comes to Germany even if the system worked better, there simply is no place where you could really make use of it without either killing people or getting killed.