[skybrian]

The irony is that people think autopilots work this way but they don't. A simple one might just keep the plane flying in a straight line. So "autopilot" is a better metaphor for what Tesla is doing than what Google is doing.

When flying on instruments, air traffic control keeps planes apart. It's up to the pilot to program the autopilot correctly. (There are other collision avoidance systems but planes can fly on instruments without relying on them.)

But in the end they're not really comparable. Collision avoidance for airplanes is a different problem.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopilot

[afterburner]

They're toying with public perception and they know it.

[dmix]

The public's perception and 'common sense' understanding of technology is sadly very limited. So it wouldn't be difficult to 'toy' with it. But I don't think that's the point here.

As long as they are telling people they have to be alert while using autopilot I don't see a problem with it. The 'common sense' assumption then would be that autopilot = assisted driving rather being an autonomous self-driving car. Therefore Google et al shouldn't be using the term autopilot when they mean autonomous self-driving vehicle.

Eventually as this tech becomes wide-spread the distinction will become common knowledge to people.

This is mostly just semantics... context is everything. The important thing is preventing people from dying. Which means looking beyond marketing material to educate people.

[Cybiote]

Telling people to remain alert will do no good because it is simply asking for too much. A person is supposed to sit still, not driving but maintaining their full attention while being ready to automatically take over in an emergency situation. This will lead to the same failure of vigilance over time we see in guard duty and it really can't be helped. Task unrelated thoughts crop up more frequently for simpler tasks; with few stimuli, low surprises and little to attend to, the brain will begin with experience replay (this is actually more a machine learning term but it's appropriate here).

Driving already leads to mind wandering states; it is overwhelmingly likely that the passive aspect of autopilot will lead to mind wandering at even higher rates. Asking a less practiced driver to shift attention from internal to external states very quickly and then make complex judgments is simply not fair. A simple physics and statistics based model will be far more reliable. If it isn't, then Google's strategy of shooting straight to level 4 makes sense.

> The public's perception and 'common sense' understanding of technology is sadly very limited

Common sense is contextual and one of the more complicated aspects of cognition; it depends on the level of detail in the model being used to make inferences. A model's sophistication is dictated by internal preferences and goals. If most people's understanding of a technology is limited, then they're going to be doing what looks like averaging over distinct possibilities to a more informed model.

It doesn't help that if you know nothing about technical uses of the term autopilot but do know something about words (which will be the case for most) then in truth, it is the aviation industry that has misnomered.

[vacri]

It's a straight-up terrible misappropriation of the term, and it's clearly done for marketing purposes. Taking a word that the public thinks means one thing, then telling them that technically, they're wrong in what they think... that's just terrible.

It's not a matter of 'educating people', merely so they can use a popular term. It's just plain the wrong thing to do.

[drcross]

As much as it pains me, you are right. As a sailor I would never rely on my autopilot to get me anywhere except in a straight line. The term has a connotation of coolness because it directly references similar features in the airline and yachting industry, if you understand what it means but the unwashed masses don't comprehend this.

[dmix]

> As a sailor I would never rely on my autopilot to get me anywhere except in a straight line.

Doesn't this support my argument that this is the real meaning of the term? Which makes 'autopilot' distinct from 'self-driving' or 4th gen?

If you as a sailor can understand this then why can't drivers understand autopilot as a glorified cruise control?

[darawk]

They're telling people that essentially in the fine print. If they wanted to be transparent about it, they'd have called it something like 'Assisted driving', which unambiguously requires your attention. 'Autopilot' could mean assisted and it could mean full autonomy.

[enraged_camel]

>>They're telling people that essentially in the fine print.

The car issues obvious and repetitive warnings about what the technology is capable of and what the driver has to do, and turns off the Autopilot if the driver doesn't pay attention. I wouldn't call that "fine print".

[MichaelGG]

Good thing all that matters is the actual drivers. Tesla's system tells you (and now going to be clearer) to stay at the wheel and alert.

[vkou]

What's the point of using it, when I have to stay at the wheel and be alert, and be ready to steer at a moment's notice, while driving a dumb car?

Either I can fully rely on the system to get me from point A to point B, or I have to fully concentrate on driving. People aren't robots - they can't go from half-assed sorta-paying attention to a split-second life-saving reaction.

[drcross]

That's not a fair argument, 1. Cruise control makes cars easier to drive, adaptive cruise control even more so. 2. The end goal is full autonomy anyway; Tesla seems to be the only manufacturer to release incremental updates towards reaching that.

[vkou]

Cruise control is as far from autonomous driving as a piece of graph paper is from being a computer. Nobody has ever described it as a paradigm shift, and its invention did not prompt unsubstantiated speculation about how driverless taxicabs are literally two years away. And yes, from a safety perspective, Tesla's autopilot is no different from cruise control. Keep your hands on the wheel, your feet on the pedals, and constantly pay attention.

Why are you assuming that other manufacturers are not working towards full autonomy? I strongly doubt that everyone at Ford, GM, VW, Toyota, and Honda is asleep at the wheel... Especially when their luxury vehicles are all incrementally moving towards autonomy.

They certainly have a lot fewer PR pieces about how amazing their autonomous-but-not-really lane assist is.

[kalleboo]

> I strongly doubt that everyone at Ford, GM, VW, Toyota, and Honda is asleep at the wheel

Of course not, since only Tesla AutoPilot lets you sleep at the wheel