[adamjcook]

That "comparison YouTube video" is absurd and dangerous, because, at minimum...

A Level 4-capable vehicle (a Waymo vehicle) is an incomparably different system than a Level 2-capable vehicle (a vehicle equipped with FSD Beta).

The Waymo vehicle has a design intent such that there is no human driver fallback requirement within their vehicle's Operational Design Domain (ODD).

The Tesla vehicle has a de facto design intent such that the human driver is the fallback at all times - which makes the control relationship between the human driver and the automated system exactly the same as if the Tesla vehicle was equipped with no automation at all.

The risk profiles and failure mode analyses are Night and Day different and, therefore, the validation traits between these two vehicle are Night and Day different.

But, more than that, there are no guarantees that:

- The human driver of the FSD Beta-active vehicle shown in that video did not manipulate any of the vehicle controls out-of-view that clandestinely assisted the vehicle without deactivating the automated system (possible and inherent Human Factors safety issues with that aside); and

- The creators of this comparison video did not select the most visually-performant run out of several attempts.

Naturally, since we are dealing with safety-critical systems here, assumptions of "positive safety" are not compatible with any internal or external analysis.

Lastly, I have yet to see a video involving FSD Beta where indirect and "unseen" systems safety issues were satisfied. Appearances can be deceiving and deadly with safety-critical systems.

[MangoCoffee]

>The human driver of the FSD Beta-active vehicle shown in that video did not manipulate any of the vehicle controls out-of-view that clandestinely assisted the vehicle without deactivating the automated system (possible and inherent Human Factors safety issues with that aside); and

that's why i included Marques Brownlee's demo.

[adamjcook]

Respectfully, no FSD Beta video can add anything of safety value in evaluating these systems - and the only thing that these videos do these days is add a sense of complacency in most or all FSD Beta users.

Videos and personal experiences can only reveal safety issues, never positive progress.

Marques (and every other FSD Beta user) is not read into a would-be systems safety lifecycle for this safety-critical systems that Tesla should be maintaining.

Marques (and every other FSD Beta user) is entirely blind to that.

It is a complete Black Box to them.

Therefore, the assessments made are always subjective and are almost entirely based on emotions and appearances (and other hand-wavy, ill-defined aspects such as "interventions" or "disengagements") rather than a complete accounting of all relevant systems safety components.

Systems safety is about exhaustively asking questions and then exhaustively seeking quantifiable answers to those questions against established failure modes and in the context of the system and every other system that interacts with it (including the human driver in the case of a FSD Beta-equipped vehicle as a Level 2-capable vehicle).

That is the whole point of a company maintaining a robust systems safety lifecycle - to convert subjective opinions of system characteristics into quantifiable understanding.

Tesla is not maintaining that.

Throughout the video, there are several places were Marques states "he thinks" or "he believes" or "that looks good" and such comments are also prevalent in the YouTube comments attached to the video.

These are safety-critical systems where an unhandled failure can readily result in an injury or death.

Responsible systems developers need something far more quantifiable than blind opinions of run-of-the-mill consumers.

That FSD Beta-active vehicles do not appear to "run into things as often" on the roadway is not a complete evaluation of the system.

There are also very real indirect and "unseen" safety components that are inherently part of the public roadways that must also be accounted for.

For what it is worth, I touched on some examples of this recently in a Mastodon thread: https://elk.zone/mastodon.social/@adamjcook/1101629508444173...

[judge2020]

> It is a complete Black Box to them.

If you think it's a black box to the Tesla drivers, how is it not a black box to the Waymo customers in the back seat of these cars? Or how are you evaluating Tesla vs Waymo if not by how how humans subjectively feel each system is performing?

If you mean to the teams, you cannot assume that Waymo's systems are any less of a black box than Tesla's systems. And even then, they're not much of a black box at all, besides the actual object detection, as both Waymo and Tesla still have most decision-making in regular logic-based code, not machine learning algorithms; and when they do, such as with "do I need to get over now to make the next turn", it's still fed back into the "business logic" that decides what to do and thus logged and audited when it's sent back to HQ.

[Veserv]

Waymo customers in the back seats of cars are not testers or operators; they are cargo. These are fundamentally different roles with fundamentally different requirements with respect to the safety lifecycle.

[judge2020]

So are we just as much in the dark about how much progress Waymo could be making? given "Videos and personal experiences can only reveal safety issues, never positive progress" is the argument and yet Waymo doesn't exactly give us access to their bigquery to perform our own qualitative analysis.

[Veserv]

Yes. As a member of the general populace you have no idea how much progress Waymo is making and are unqualified to "test" their systems. However, you are not being asked to "test" their systems and you are not involved in the operation of the systems, so the point is moot. This is in contrast to Tesla where you "are" both of those things which is the problem.

Also, I just realized that the systems safety engineer you responded to has also posted a reply, so you should look to their statement for a more in-depth analysis as they are a expert on the subject.

[adamjcook]

> If you think it's a black box to the Tesla drivers, how is it not a black box to the Waymo customers in the back seat of these cars?

The general public (as a vehicle occupant) only interacts with a Waymo vehicle as a passenger with no vehicle control responsibilities.

That is in stark contrast from the integral human-machine relationship that exists in a Tesla vehicle.

> If you mean to the teams, you cannot assume that Waymo's systems are any less of a black box than Tesla's systems.

True.

Waymo's internal processes are a Black Box to me (and anyone external to Waymo) because we are not read into their systems safety lifecycle, whatever it may be.

Hopefully and presumably, Waymo is maintaining a Safety Management System (SMS) with their test operators and other internal teams, as they have claimed in the past.

Of course, since there is little-to-no regulatory oversight of this in the US (at the moment, perhaps)... Waymo's "word" is really the only thing the public has to go by.

That is not acceptable, in my view, in constructing a novel transportation system that ultimately relies on public trust to be economically viable... but that is the regulatory reality right now.

In the case of Tesla, it is definitive that they are not maintaining a SMS, in large part, because Tesla's (untrained) customers utilizing the system cannot be sufficiently read into a lifecycle. There is simply no way to do that without maintaining a highly-controlled, continuous relationship with the test operator.

For example, the "release notes" (sprinkled with some Tweets from Musk) that Tesla issues with some of the FSD Beta updates are simply too puny relative to the complexity of not only the vehicle system, but the larger complexity of the roadway.

> And even then, they're not much of a black box at all, besides the actual object detection, as both Waymo and Tesla still have most decision-making in regular logic-based code, not machine learning algorithms; and when they do, such as with "do I need to get over now to make the next turn", it's still fed back into the "business logic" that decides what to do and thus logged and audited when it's sent back to HQ.

As I stated elsewhere, these are physical safety-critical systems where the totality of the systems safety components cannot be expressed in software alone.

Remote vehicle telemetry is valuable of course, but as a tool to serve the validation process... not the validation process itself.

Vehicle telemetry cannot be a complete accounting of all of the interacting systems safety components involved here.

For that, like all other safety-critical systems, one needs exhaustive, controlled and physical validation.

[valine]

That’s a lot of words, but at the end of the day the NHTSA allows FSD beta on the roads. Someday in the distant future Tesla will likely use the data they’ve collected to make statistical inferences to regulators about the safety of the system as a whole. Design intent doesn’t matter now, and won’t matter in the future when the system is retroactively validated for level 5.

[froh]

yah, I'm amazed how humongous piles of paper analyses are considered more safe than evidence that stuff works in the real world. I get statistics are hard. It took 30 years to bust p-value hacking and much longer to get Bayes inference widely accepted. some of us would.love to _understand_ how neural net based automation makes it's decisions. how do you deal with the observable fact that these robots indeed in the real world make the right decisions more often than humans? but we can't explain why, because we didn't construct the robots controls, at least not in the traditional way?

[ClumsyPilot]

Speculation. Lynching was also allowed at one point, and then it wasn't

[valine]

Did you really just compare Tesla’s driver assist to lynching?

[ClumsyPilot]

Doesn't matter - something that used to be common, used to kill people, and eventually society decided it shouldn't be allowed. Asbestos might be better comparison.

Point is, you are assuming a certain legal outcome, and there is no reason to believe it won't go the opposite way