[colde]

It's really strange to me, that we allow this sort of beta testing on public roads. The car is doing multiple things in this video that is problematic with the driver being slow to react in order to see what it ends up doing.

This should not be something that is allowed on public roads by end-users, but rather on closed tracks by specialists. If they want to test it out on public roads, run the analysis and look at whenever it diverges from the drivers decisionmaking instead.

[chippiewill]

I work in the self-driving space. Before I did I was super hype about what Tesla were doing with self-driving and auto-pilot, but once I actually started seriously looking at the safety ramifications of a vehicle driving with these technologies I changed tune really quickly.

A massive problem, particularly with the more capable L4 style technologies is you get lulled into a false sense of security because it'll drive a decent amount of distance perfectly fine right up until it doesn't (and it's normally spectacularly bad when it fails).

Testing purely on closed track or from simulated analysis only goes so far, you definitely need to do public road testing before you can hand it to end-users. But the driver needs to do advance driver training so that they're more aware of the hazards, they need to always be ready to take over (as with an L3 system, even if you're developing L4), they need to fully understand the capabilities, ODD and behaviour of the software, you need to keep the durations/distances short to avoid driver fatigue and ideally you have a second person in the vehicle to keep them honest.

Letting end-consumers use this technology on public roads is insane. It feels to me like the reason Tesla do it is they've boxed themselves into a corner because they've already sold it.

[reitzensteinm]

My main concern is that Tesla will end up poisoning the well in a regulatory sense, and other SDCs that are focused on doing narrow verticals properly will get caught in the crossfire.

The common pro Tesla argument of delaying self driving costing lives is absolutely valid. But it doesn't follow that allowing Tesla FSD to run red lights is the best way to accelerate the adoption as a whole.

If the whole industry was as cautious as Waymo, I think the risk of regulation would be minimal.

This is orthogonal to how well done the system is. I am extremely impressed it works as well as it does. But it's not good enough.

[olliej]

> The common pro Tesla argument of delaying self driving costing lives is absolutely valid.

It would be if self driving Teslas were safer, but the evidence seems to suggest that they crash more often than regular drivers once you control for when it is used.

[zaroth]

Tesla doesn’t have to be safer now to follow this reasoning.

If Tesla’s approach ultimately succeeds in getting FSD working and into the mainstream, then for each year earlier that happens than it otherwise would, up to about 30,000 lives are saved, millions of injuries prevented, and roughly $1 trillion USD in total lifetime value is preserved as the worldwide accident rate goes to zero.

In that context, FSD should absolutely be civilization’s next moonshot.

That’s to say nothing of the other economic benefits besides simply killed and maiming fewer people and destroying less property.

[carlivar]

Interesting idea. But the only problem with it is the assumption Tesla can succeed. I am not sure about that.

The other, darker, possibility is that Tesla does so poorly in this moonshot that they poison the well for everyone else, some of whom might be more equipped to succeed.

[zaroth]

To be clear, I’m not saying they will or won’t succeed! And the converse is true too!

If through their actions FSD is ultimately delayed a year, then they contributed to extended the carnage of human driven automobiles.

The point is the scale of the problem, and how valuable it is to solve it.

[seanhunter]

There are a lot of legs to your hypothetical here. In particular assuming that Tesla's approach ultimately succeeds is a big leap.

If Tesla's approach ultimately turns into a dead end (and that is the outcome of the overwhelming majority of very ambitious tech projects) then all the time and resources spent on Tesla's approach could be seen in hindsight to have been diverted away from potentially fruitful projects and are actually making mainstream FSD happen later than they otherwise would.

FSD being civilization's next moonshot doesn't mean Tesla should necessarily get a free pass to test beta FSD tech out on public roads without scrutiny.

[Tempest1981]

How did you calculate the $1 trillion/year?

What cost would be attributed to Covid, roughly?

[zaroth]

https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

That’s just the USA

[torginus]

I find this line of reasoning strange - it's like if we only kind of figured out how to do heart transplants on pigs, and then immediately went full steam ahead operating on people - because otherwise it would've costed the lives of people who didn't receive the operation

[reitzensteinm]

Are you sure you're replying to my line of reasoning?

Because I'm saying just because the goal is extremely worthwhile, it's not carte blanche to move fast and break things.

[whimsicalism]

Really? That seems like a perfectly reasonable line of thinking (except of course, for uncertainty regarding pig transplant).

But lives killed by inaction should be counted!

[amelius]

Yeah, if you look at safety standards in other industries, this is really unacceptable. It should be stopped immediately.

Also, why do we allow car manufacturers to test their own software? Shouldn't it be done by a third party? And shouldn't that third party be the only ones allowed to push updates to the car?

[handol]

You don't have to look at other industries. Other auto-manufacturers do their testing on test tracks.

[tscherno]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_mule

[0F]

And their self driving is miles behind tesla

[Traster]

I remember literally over 5 years ago hearing from someone at a big auto-manufacturer, and they just explained, they can't afford to have their cars known for killing people. They sell a shit tonne of cars, and if they start running people over they're done. It'd be an extinction level event for their brand, and probably a serious knock to the entire industry. Apparantly Tesla is happy to take that risk. it's not that Tesla is more advanced, it's that they're happy making claims that no other company in an industry obsessed with safety would make.

Imagine Volvo, but instead of Volvo you have a company that distinguished themselves by their lack of interest in safety.

[stubish]

Only recently looking at cars, what I have found interesting is collision detection and automatic breaking. It seems some manufacturers have a reputation for getting it right, and other manufacturers a reputation for a terrifying feature that drivers disable due to it going off at exactly the wrong time.

[darkteflon]

I find my father-in-law’s Volkswagen T-Cross terrifying to drive. If it’s not distracting you with shrill warning beeps and bongs, it’s getting confused and slamming on the brakes at every slick or shiny surface. It is unquestionably more dangerous than if it just left the driving to me.

Hard to understand how people have affection for this brand.

[salawat]

...Because they weren't daft enough to commit to emplying blackboxes with no means of formal proofing to a safety-critical operation. Musk's approach is a massive public safety no-no. The cost of specifying and proving through trial the capabilities of what Musk is aiming for is the work of several lifetimes. Musk and Tesla just fucking YOLO it, yeeting out OTA's that substantially change the behavior of an ill-tuned system whose behavior can't even be reliably enumerated; and sinking the operational risk in drivers on the road.

Sometimes, conspicuous lack of progress is a good thing. It isn't something you necessarily appreciate until you suddenly start having to confront the law of large numbers in a very real and tangible way. Some incremental changes simply are not feasible to take until they are complete. Level 3 automation is one of those...

[0F]

There is no solution to self driving that doesn’t involve a black box. The safety of the system is easy to measure. When there are fewer interventions than accidents for a solid chunk of time, FSD will be safer. It could eventually reach 1 intervention per hundred thousand accidents, if you would just let them continue.

[FireBeyond]

> When there are fewer interventions than accidents for a solid chunk of time, FSD will be safer. It could eventually reach 1 intervention per hundred thousand accidents, if you would just let them continue.

And in the meantime, I and other drivers, cyclists, pedestrians are subject to increased danger for what? Oh, Tesla's profits? Forgive us if we don't all see this as an acceptable tradeoff.

[amelius]

> There is no solution to self driving that doesn’t involve a black box.

LIDAR greatly reduces the "black box" necessity. It basically allows you to do things like "if object is in the way then hit brake/move elsewhere", where the sensor doesn't really fail in good weather.

Given its safety over DL-only solutions, this should be step 1 to getting to FSD. Not reckless beta-testing with black box techniques.

Tesla has chosen the cheap way, which is also the irresponsible way.

[ChuckNorris89]

I'd rather my car's safety systems be later to market but proven safe, than early to market and have me and the others around me as unpaid beta testers.

[mindslight]

This isn't even beta testing, it's closer to development. The driving shown in the video is that of a drunk or texting driver. For at least half of those turns it couldn't even pick a line and stick to it, instead swerving haphazardly as it became more aware of where the lane was. Never mind the constant turns into bus only lanes. I'd love to see municipalities start writing tickets on all the well-documented violations in these videos, citing Tesla itself as the driver.

[PinguTS]

Well said. I agree up to one point, I know that beta software is also tested on public roads in the industry, but only by trained drivers. As of some project I did in the past, I was drivenin in such a car, when I got a lift by a collegue to the meetings. It was about 15 years ago. From outside it was an old model, but inside the electronics where all new.

[llampx]

Move fast, break stuff (literally)

[yumraj]

you forgot, kill people

[lamontcg]

some of you may die, but it is a sacrifice i'm willing to make.

[shukantpal]

Good thing it’s not up to you solely

[SAI_Peregrinus]

That's a quotation from Lord Farquad, the villain in Shrek.

[lamontcg]

It is not up to me at all.

[Salgat]

As long as the accident rate isn't worse than human driving, I only see this as a good thing towards future safety.

[randyrand]

“Fake Cities” don’t have nearly enough complexity.

I agree they could start there, but you’ll graduate quickly without having learned much.

The main question is, are we willing to put people in harms way today for the benefit of future humans? The answer seems pretty obvious to me. Drunk humans are considerably worse than this and are not going away anytime soon. If we can solve self driving just 1 year earlier it’s equivalent to saving 30,000 American lives.

Put another way, if you want rules that delay the advancement of self driving driving cars, you're effectively murdering 30,000+ American lives every year.

[ChuckNorris89]

> If we can solve self driving just 1 year earlier it’s equivalent to saving 30,000 American lives.

That strawman argument works if you completely ban all human drivers the moment we solve self-driving.

The big question is, when exactly do we consider self driving solved that it can ban replace drivers? All current evidence points it's very, very far away, if ever.

[salawat]

Uh... You'll never stop running into problems that require a driver to take conttol. Automation is only as reliable as the sum of it's parts. Can't wait to see the first set of failures that prevent automated driving back of defective units under their own power without a human backup option.

[ChuckNorris89]

>You'll never stop running into problems that require a driver to take conttol.

That's pretty much the nail in the FSD coffin.

[Jasper_]

There's no guarantee that computers will end up being any better at driving than humans.

[erulabs]

I'm not trying to defend self driving to Tesla here, like, at all, but I don't agree with this statement.

Evolution has gifted us with a phenomenal device, the brain, but evolution is extremely cautious and conservative. There is very little reason to expect that human innovation won't catch up and surpass evolution. 10,000 years from now, I expect self-driving will work perfect. 10,000 years from now, our brains will (unless modified by our technology) largely be unchanged.

[CheezeIt]

Every day you slow down FSD development with this kind of safetyism, a hundred people die in car accidents (in the USA).

[arcticbull]

If safety is your #1 goal, you should be advocating for busses and trains. Those are infinitely safer than cars, self-driving or otherwise.

[edit] Transit is 10x safer than private cars. [1]

> The effects extend beyond individual trip choices, too: the report notes that transit-oriented communities are five times safer than auto-oriented communities. Better public transportation contributes to more compact development, which in turn reduces auto-miles traveled and produces safer speeds in those areas. On a national scale, too, the U.S. could make large advances in safety if each American committed to replacing as few as three car trips per month with transit trips.

[1] https://mobilitylab.org/2016/09/08/transit-10-times-safer-dr...

[ajross]

Busses and trains are safer than cars, but certainly not infinitely so. Nonetheless the infrastructure we have isn't built for them, and that won't change any time soon. If you want a suburban house with a yard, you need a passenger car. If you want to pick blackberries at the local farm, you need a passenger car. Making passenger cars safer through autonomy is clearly a good thing.

By all means, advocate for more transit friendly urban centers. I'm with you. Just don't take away autonomy out of spite. Better cars are still better, even if they're not the solution you want.

[Volundr]

> Making passenger cars safer through autonomy is clearly a good thing.

I'd actually disagree with this stance. Making passenger cars safer through autonomy is probably a good thing if we can actually make it safer than human drivers. I've yet to be convinced we are anywhere close to meeting the bar on that if. I assume we will eventually, but I'm not even sure I'll live to see it.

It also ignores potential knock on effects, sure in isolation safer cars are better, but the reality is nothing exists in isolation. Could we save more lives if instead of spending the money we are on self-driving cars we instead invested it into our transit systems?

As an example of knock on effects, affordable cars feels like an easy win right? Makes travel easier for everyone. But by and large affordable cars are what has allowed suburbs to exist, but there's an argument to be made that urban sprawl is far from ideal and that we'd be better of with denser communities and public transit.

[ajross]

> I've yet to be convinced we are anywhere close to meeting the bar on that if.

What would convince you? Data from 60k cars isn't sufficient?

[Volundr]

> What would convince you? Data from 60k cars isn't sufficient?

It would be if the data showed they were safer than human drivers, and was independently obtained. I have yet to see any data that suggests this or anything close to this.

[olliej]

The Tesla data shows that they are less safe than regular drivers

[arcticbull]

> Just don't take away autonomy out of spite.

It's not a question of taking away autonomy, and there's certainly no spite about it. If you want to get around town, you have bikes or e-bikes. If you want to get out of urban centers, you can always rent a car at the periphery.

I've lived in SF for 10 years with no car and have never felt unable to do anything I've wanted at any time.

> If you want to pick blackberries at the local farm, you need a passenger car.

Not really, the farm can have a bus with regularly scheduled pick-ups or routes like a lot of the Napa wineries do.

[orev]

You seem to be ignoring the last and most crucial point:

> If they want to test it out on public roads, run the analysis and look at whenever it diverges from the drivers decisionmaking instead.

It would be trivial to analyze the data after the fact to see where the AI model diverges from the human driver’s actions, decide which one was right, then implement the correct action. That wouldn’t slow down testing at all, as the only difference is who’s controlling the vehicle. In any beta test, someone still has to analyze the data.

[ChuckNorris89]

So, for the sake of progress, we should let FSD also kill people because people die at the wheel anyway?

[ajross]

How about we measure and see if FSD is killing people at all first? It's not an unanswerable problem, after all. There are 60k+ of these devices on the roads now. If the statistics say it's unsafe, pull it and shut the program down.

Do they? If they don't, would you admit that it's probably a good thing to let it continue?

[ablekh]

You can't measure that without stopping all Beta testers' interventions, which implies allowing the system to actually kill people.

[ChuckNorris89]

>How about we measure and see if FSD is killing people at all first?

We just saw a FSD car run a red light and nearly hit pedestrians if the driver hadn't intervened.

[ajross]

Exactly. Let's measure. Is that rate higher than seen by median cars in the environment? I'd argue no, given how distressingly common that kind of incident is (certainly it's happened to me a bunch of times). But I'm willing to see data.

I think where you're going here is toward an assertion that "any failure at all is unacceptable". And that seems innumerate to me. Cars fail. We're trying to replace a system here that is already fatally (literally!) flawed. The bar is very low.

[ChuckNorris89]

>I think where you're going here is toward an assertion that "any failure at all is unacceptable". We're trying to replace a system here that is already fatally (literally!) flawed. The bar is very low.

Failure is not the issue when it comes to Tesla FSD, accountability is.

For any mistakes human drivers makes, they have to pay up with money, have their license suspended, or with jail time, depending on the severity of their mistake.

You fuck up, you pay the price. That's the contract under which human drivers are allowed on the road. Humans drivers are indeed flawed, but with our law and justice systems, we have accountability to keep those who break the law in check, while allowing freedom for those who respect it. It's one of the pillars of any civilized society.

In my country, running a stop sign or a red light means you get your license suspended for a while. When a self driving Tesla does the same mistake, why doesn't Tesla's FSD AI have its "license" suspended as well? That's the issue.

[0des]

I take it you're the person who answers 'neither' when asked do you send the train left and kill 1 person vs sending it right and killing 100.

[ChuckNorris89]

What's the trolley problem have to do with this situation?

Are there accidents where death is unavoidable? Yes, they happen every single day, but after the investigations and trials are over, the parties found responsible pay up for those deaths in either money or jail-time, or both.

Does that mean we should we allow machines to make deadly mistakes, especially when death IS avoidable? Absolutely not. We sentence humans for such mistakes. Machines (either their operator or their manufacturer) should also have the same liability.

Those are two different things which you're trying to spin into a strawman.

[0des]

Even this response is 'neither' :) I love it. Have a good weekend Chuck

/me roundhouse kicks out of the thread

[Msw242]

Right, this is closer to the following scenario:

Let's say you are on an overpass above a train, and a very fat man is in front of you. The train, if it isn't stopped, will kill 10 people on the tracks. But, if you push the person in front of the train, it will kill 11 people, and one of those would be you committing homocide.

What do you do?

[CheezeIt]

Yes, exactly!

[ChuckNorris89]

Even if it means that a loved one of yours would get run down by one of these, it's ok in the end, because it helped improve some billionaire's beta tech-demo?

[yumraj]

Chuck Norris should know better than to feed the trolls :)

[0des]

I appreciate this playful response. Have a good rest of your weekend.

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

FSD isn’t a monolith, where speeding up one company gets us to the goal faster. We don’t even know if it’s possible with current tech, let alone with just cameras. Slowing down tesla might be just making a dead end safer. We don’t know, which is why we need safety standards.

[fassssst]

That presupposes that FSD is some major societal advancement.

[cheeko1234]

Exactly! I expect to see nothing but negativity here regarding this.

Making intelligence out of silicon isn't easy. Let the computers learn this way during the transition period, and finally we can remove human drivers from the road.

More than 38,000 people die every year in crashes on U.S. roadways. And Tesla makes the safest cars:

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), the main independent organization that conducts crash tests on vehicles in the US, released the result of its latest tests on the Tesla Model Y and confirmed that it achieved the highest possible safety rating.

[Volundr]

>Tesla makes the safest cars:

>The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), the main independent organization that conducts crash tests on vehicles in the US, released the result of its latest tests on the Tesla Model Y and confirmed that it achieved the highest possible safety rating.

That doesn't mean that Telsa makes the safest cars. There are roughly ~100 cars with that rating, and nothing suggests the Model Y is safer than any of the others. It's also important to note that that rating isn't based of real world data such as how often drivers actually crash and hurt other (ex, how often FSD fails), but rather how well the occupant is protected in the event of a crash.

[TomVDB]

Making a car that has the highest crash safety rating has nothing to do with the safety of their FSD solution.

[kukx]

It is faster this way. And anyway it would be impossible to simulate the real world scenarios in the synthetic environment. One of the potential benefits of FSD is that it will save lives, hence should we go slow about it or take a reasonable risk and get it done. There is a risk in going slow too.

[pengaru]

I find it hard to believe Tesla has remotely exhausted their "dry-run" training options considering how much like a drunken 8 year old their cars behave on FSD.

The FSD AI shouldn't be connected to the real-world controls until it very rarely substantially deviates from what the human drivers do in their cars while controlling a virtual car from the real-world sensor inputs. And in those cases where it deviates, the devs should manually dig in and run to ground if it would have hit something/someone/broken the law. Not until that list of cases stops growing, particularly in your dense urban areas full of edge cases, do you even start considering linking up the real car.

From what I'm seeing they're instead turning Tesla drivers into training supervisors with the real-world serving as the virtual one, while putting everyone else on/near roads at risk.

It's criminal, and I expect consequences. It's already illegal to let a child steer from your lap, and that's without even handing over the pedals. People operating "FSD Beta" on public roads should be at least as liable, where are the authorities and enforcement?

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

> One of the potential benefits of FSD is that it will save lives

But that doesn’t mean that tesla will save lives. Maybe they do a bunch of this and learn that cameras alone aren’t sufficient, and then waymo wins. Tesla wouldn’t have saved any lives, only killed a couple people unnecessarily.

Medicine is the classic example of applying this kind of thinking. You could do all sorts of unethical medical testing to speed up medical research, saving countless lives down the line, but we don’t because it doesn’t make it right.

With another medical example, you could roll out snake oil without testing it thoroughly because it’ll save lives if it works. But maybe snake oil doesn’t work, and it’ll be some other thing that works, and by rushing the snake oil, you just made things worse.

[geoduck14]

>Medicine is the classic example of applying this kind of thinking. You could do all sorts of unethical medical testing to speed up medical research, saving countless lives down the line, but we don’t because it doesn’t make it right.

Bringing up medicine for your stance might back fire. There are tactical examples where policies to "go slow and reduce risk" have cost lives. For example, testing some medicine on pregnant women is bad for the fetus - so there are policies to "not test on anyone who might be pregnant", and as a result, there are few studies on women between the ages of 20 - 80, and women's health has suffered as a result

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

The point isn’t “go slow.” The points are “this area of ethics is well studied and much more complex than ‘wild west research saves more lives’” as well as “society has rejected this particular form of utilitarianism.”

[lamontcg]

There's a lot more examples from medicine where "move fast and break stuff" has cost lives and compromised public trust.

[kukx]

Why do you discard the possibility that Tesla will save lives in the long term? You may say it is unlikely, but it is not like Musk did not deliver world scale breakthroughs.

Also, regarding the medicine, do you really believe we do not do "unethical" medical testings? I guess it depends on your ethical standards and how high they are :)

But let's get back to cost benefit trade off. COVID vaccines tests were rushed. So it is obviously sometimes worth it.

There is a risk in not taking a risk.

[ChuckNorris89]

>One of the potential benefits of FSD is that it will save lives

When does it plan to start doing that? Safety features in cars have come for decades without trying to kill people first. Just ask Volvo.

The general non-Tesla-owning public, including pedestrians and cyclists, have not given their consent to be part of Elon's public beta test.

[kukx]

> without trying to kill people Do you suggest that Tesla is trying to kill people? That would be a ridiculous statement.

I bet the risk of getting injured by Tesla beta version of FSD is miniscule compared to a risk of getting into accident caused by a human driver. I am not for banning either of them. Even when we get to the point where FSD is much safer than drivers I would be against of banning humans.

[ChuckNorris89]

>I bet the risk of getting injured by Tesla beta version of FSD is miniscule compared to a risk of getting into accident caused by a human driver.

You can bet all you want, but human drivers, as flawed as they may be, are all fully liable by law for any mistakes they make at the wheel and have to pay with money or jail time plus losing their license.

Who is liable for the mistakes FSD makes? Who goes to jail if it runs down a pedestrian by mistake? Elon? The driver? Can the FSD loose its license like human drivers can for their mistakes?

You can't compare a human drivers to FSD safety when FSD has zero liability in front of the law and all the blame automatically goes to the driver.

[falcolas]

> Who is liable for the mistakes FSD makes? Who goes to jail if it runs down a pedestrian by mistake? Elon? The driver?

Yup. The driver. Aside from image, there appears to be few if any incentives for FSD to improve beyond the “it does the right thing 80% of the time” mark.

[kukx]

> there appears to be few if any incentives for FSD to improve beyond...

I think it is simply not true. Creating a FSD that could replace human drivers eg in case of trucks is potentially highly lucrative and it would make the economy more efficient.

[alamortsubite]

Perhaps, though, there should be some minimum bar before we allow testing on public roads. The Tesla FSD beta videos I've seen thus far are truly alarming. The system is nowhere near ready for testing in the real world, where it poses significant danger to many innocent bystanders.

[AlexandrB]

> One of the potential benefits of FSD is that it will save lives

Continuing this line of logic, the most advanced FSD would save the most lives. Thus the argument could be made that Tesla should abandon their research and license Waymo FSD.