[Starknaked]

Their demonstrations of FSD like the short clip in the clip linked shows far too much easy roads like highways and "controlled" scenario to believe in their confidence of the tech.

If they put up autonomous driving videos going through a handful of major cities taking the most awkward routes through places where driving culture is typically more agressive and the narrowest of country lanes through the towns that were built for horse and cart and space is at a premium. Places like Rome, Barcelona, New Delhi. Towns that have built one way systems into their traffic management due to limited space and measures are taken to purposely bottleneck traffic like narrow road right of way signage. Show a car doing that and I'd understand their confidence.

E.g there is a town where roadside parking is allowed because it purposely bottlenecks and slows down main road traffic. You have to judge and wait by the parked cars for a space you can pass through even when their maybe cars coming towards you there is time to pass the parked cars and into space where two cars can pass eachother. How is an autonomous car going to handle that kind of senario where it has to make a judgement call that factors in a far greater amount of risk element?

[m463]

you might want to look at the youtube videos "what autopilot sees". They have videos for a lot of different cities.

[Starknaked]

I take it they aren't autonomous driving videos? My concern isn't really with what the car sees but how it reacts to unfamiliar scenarios. There are many edge case scenarios that us humans can't react to because there just isn't a logically correct maneuver. How do you tell a machine what to do when there is no correct answer? When none of the choices don't end up in catastrophe.

[zizee]

> My concern isn't really with what the car sees but ...

Many Tesla automated driving sceptics say without lidar, Tesla has a major issue with FSD.

> How do you tell a machine what to do when there is no correct answer?

Why would you expect a machine to be able to handle scenarios that humans cannot handle?

Note: I am sceptical of FSD being available this year, or even in a few year.

[m463]

Elon Musk had a very negative view of lidar, but he didn't really explain himself very completely.

Lidar sensors are around $10k and up, and the waymo cars I've seen have many of them.

Additionally, they only sort of say how far away things are, which sort of overlaps with the ultrasonics and radar.

So, maybe the roi on lidar would not be great.

That said, the engineer in me thinks lidar would be a nice add-on (sensor fusion). But it depends on someone actually shipping one of those dirt cheap solid state sensors we see in press releases (but not in real life yet).

[Starknaked]

>Why would you expect a machine to be able to handle scenarios that humans cannot handle?

That's exactly my point. Isn't that what Tesla is trying to do with FSD? It's trying to train a machine that will have to make ethical decisions.

How do you factor legal liability for a machine in the same way you would with humans in the same scenario e.g fatal accidents?

This is somewhat like the civilian version of AI military drones one day making automatic target selection.

[zizee]

I disagree that you need a machine to understand ethics for FSD to come to fruition. Most humans would not be making ethical decisions in split second emergency situations.

If humans are driving around somewhat successfully without being able to handle all edgecases, as long as the a machine can do as good a job or better it is a viable alternative to human drivers.

[Starknaked]

The important distinction though is that a human can be held liable and punished for their erroneous (re)action but a machine cannot.

Do you hold the owner, manufacturer, or insurer responsible to right the wrongs where an autonomous vehicle is at fault?

I would expect the insurers and manufacturers to use contractual terms that absolves them of all liabilities where the car's occupant isn't paying attention to the road.