[HN Gopher] It's a truck full of traffic lights [Tesla Autopilot] ___________________________________________________________________ It's a truck full of traffic lights [Tesla Autopilot] Author : detaro Score : 203 points Date : 2021-06-03 18:42 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (twitter.com) (TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com) | samatman wrote: | This is a great example of how Tesla's strategy to build out | using real-life training data can pay off. | | Tesla now has data about what it looks like to drive behind a | truck transporting traffic lights! No team in the world would | solve this problem, in advance, in simulation. | | Not saying their strategy is going to work, not saying it's an | unbeatable advantage, but: just look at it! This is a compelling | demonstration. | gameswithgo wrote: | who isn't using that strategy? openpilot uses it. | adflux wrote: | A demonstration of why it will be a long time before it'll be | rendered safe enough to drive on its own | tibbydudeza wrote: | Clearly the probability of it happening is rather low unless you | live close to the local municipality road maintenance depot. | | But it clearly means another edge case like detecting deer | (wonder if they can handle our local Kudu) that they need to deal | with. | | They might as well develop AGI at this rate. | tppiotrowski wrote: | Who could've ever predicted this scenario? A great example of | something that's trivial for human beings to understand but where | ML training sets will come up short. | matt-attack wrote: | That's what's frightening about this. I feel not enough people | internalize just how primitive the car's | understanding/perception of the world is. A two year old human | brain would have no confusion in this scenario. | | We discount how much the concept of "understanding" is required | in visual perception. We don't just see shapes we have a | complete _understanding_ of what we're seeing. | | I might see a big rectangle flopping in the lane in front of | me. I can _immediately_ ascertain whether it's a piece of | tumbling plywood, or foam based on movement characteristics, | color, apparently size, etc. I can then use that understanding | to decide what evasive actions are required. | | A Tesla it seems has absolutely zero of this capability. | TheAdamAndChe wrote: | One time, I fell asleep as a passenger in a car. I hit a | bump, looked up, and screamed as I saw what looked like a car | coming right for me. | | It was a tow truck towing a car backwards. It was just enough | in my half-asleep state to scare the shit out of me. | | Humans have millions of years of evolution behind our visual | processing systems. We have developed hacks that prevent our | brain from getting tricked by unusual situations like traffic | lights on trucks or backwards cars being towed. We only | developed the first computers a hundred years ago, and only | in the last 40 years have a small subset of people started | learning about visual processing systems. | | It's easy to look at this video and scoff because of how | trivial it seems. But it's instead a marvel of our minds that | we can pick up on context clues so quickly and accurately | that such oddities basically never puzzle us. Given the pace | of our innovation, it wouldn't surprise me if our computer | systems match ours within a few human generations at latest. | formerly_proven wrote: | > Given the pace of our innovation, it wouldn't surprise me | if our computer systems match ours within a few human | generations at latest. | | This is not a FLOPS problem. Moore's law can't save you | here. | Syonyk wrote: | > _It was a tow truck towing a car backwards. It was just | enough in my half-asleep state to scare the shit out of | me._ | | And you're sure that it was a bump, and not the driver | pulling up rather close behind it and then giving a sharp | tap of the brakes to wake you up? ;) | belltaco wrote: | >One time, I fell asleep in a car. I hit a bump, looked up, | and screamed as I saw what looked like a car coming right | for me. >It was a tow truck towing a car backwards. It was | just enough in my half-asleep state to scare the shit out | of me. | | There are some funny(?) youtube videos of people in the | passenger seat waking up to this with tractor trailers | being towed in reverse. | hobofan wrote: | I'm very curious how a LIDAR based system would have faired | here. It very much looks like problem that would only appear | with a limited vision-only system like Tesla has. | [deleted] | mortenjorck wrote: | That the Autopilot world model is extrapolating these lights to | follow the passing geography in ~500ms cycles, similar to how | game netcode sends players running in their last known direction | when encountering packet loss, is an interesting insight into how | the system works. | [deleted] | tigerBL00D wrote: | Very interesting. There must be some kind of assumption in models | that traffic lights are stationary objects which results in them | falling off the back of the truck. | jschwartzi wrote: | I mean it makes sense. If you've never seen traffic lights be | delivered to a new intersection you'd probably blithely assume | you'll never encounter a stack of them that are unlit and | moving. | | Somewhere at Tesla there's a junior engineer who's telling a | senior engineer "I told you so!" | [deleted] | offsky wrote: | If one of the lights in the back of that truck had illuminated | red, would the car have put on the breaks in the middle of the | road? | darepublic wrote: | My God, it's full of stars | akomtu wrote: | Using Tesla's "autopilot" isnt very different than working as an | unpaid driving instructor to keep an eye on the "autopilot" | trainee. To make things worse, the trainee is tripping on | mushrooms and sees nonexistent cars appearing from nowhere, trees | morphing into pedestrians and pedestrians morphing into traffic | lights. The trainee also has a problem with epilepsy and youre | expected to take control on a second notice. Edit: also, the | trainee has cognitive ability of a mentally challenged frog. | jsight wrote: | That's basically true, but there's no reason to limit it to | Autopilot. Although the high points of AP are better than any | other system that I've tried so far. I've seen it do amazingly | well in the rain at night, and in the rain on a road with faded | markings that were hard to pick out. I've also seen it | thoroughly confused by double-dashed lines at hov lanes. | | I'll still take that over the ones that beep proudly to tell | you that they are about to fail to maintain their lane (hi | ProPilot). | notJim wrote: | > I've seen it do amazingly well in the rain at night | | Not anymore, since they removed the radar. Rain seems to | really interfere with the vision based system, and apparently | auto high beams are required at night, and they flash | constantly. | bordercases wrote: | Why did they remove radar? | ffhhj wrote: | To buy more bitcoins. | timoth3y wrote: | It's fascinating to watch this technology develop, but as a | driver I usually feel more anxious using "autopilot" that not | using it. | | With one _huge_ exception: self parallel-parking. | | I don't understand why this innovation doesn't get more love. | Tesla's not the only manufacturer to offer this, of course, but | this particular innovation has increased m enjoyment of city | driving more than ... well, more than anything I can think of. | | Even if they never get anything else to work, it would have | been worth it just for self parallel-parking. lol | | From an engineering perspective, of course there are serious | problems that need attention, but sometimes it also good to | celebrate the wins. | ed25519FUUU wrote: | I actually don't want autopilot for the fast, freeway speed | driving. That's easy. I want it for the mundane, exhausting | stop-and-go, bumper to bumper traffic as we all slowly creep | through the traffic. | asdff wrote: | There are already cruise control systems that do this for you | [deleted] | slg wrote: | That's all Autopilot is, adaptive cruise control and lane | keeping. Autopilot doesn't react to stoplights, stop signs, | or basically anything else. That is a separate feature set | that they misleadingly call Full Self Driving. | cma wrote: | I think it still doesn't read speed limit signs either | like it used to be capable of, but some areas are | programmed in. | RC_ITR wrote: | You can once again - | https://electrek.co/2020/08/29/tesla-software-update- | visuall... | | It was lost due to Tesla's decision to remove MobilEye as | a supplier. | | Mobileye generally focuses on highly optimized HW/SW that | does individual things very well, in a manner similar to | how factory automation works (e.g., they basically built | a "lane keeping + auto-braking + sign reading" | appliance). | | Tesla decided that 1) It was bad to outsource automation | 2) Starting from scratch and 'learning' how to drive | using ML was better than iteratively teaching a car how | to do discrete tasks very very well (this is why | Autopilot regressed a bunch in 2016). | | In general, it's another symptom of Elon's 'I have an | extremely specific idea, let's figure out' mentality that | sometimes works and sometimes results in useless tunnels | under Las Vegas. | ed25519FUUU wrote: | They don't typically work below 25 MPH, and definitely | don't stop and go and keep you within the lane. | mbell wrote: | That was true of older systems, most newer adaptive | cruise control systems I've used have no issue with stop | and go traffic. | sarajevo wrote: | A Model 3 owner confirms this... | haliskerbas wrote: | I believe this one does all of those: | https://www.toyota.com/safety-sense/animation/pcspd | nethunters wrote: | My Toyota Corolla with Toyota Safety Sense 2.0 (fitted in | nearly every Toyota post 2018/2019) has stop and start, | either press resume if you've stopped for more than 5 | seconds or tap the accelerator, and that's with lane | tracing assist as well. I don't think there's a second I | don't have both Adaptive Cruise Control and Lane Tracing | Assist activated. | | Edit: You can also accelerate without disabling it. | belltaco wrote: | I think only the new Honda L3 system(only on one very | limited edition car in Japan) and a Subaru tech on some | mainstream cars(in the US too) have this capability. | jannyfer wrote: | Just off the top of my head - Honda Sensing works in | stop-and-go traffic and keeps you within the lane. | ipsum2 wrote: | Honda Sense lane keeping is only for > 40mph. In | addition, you need to press a button if the vehicle | completely stops. | ngokevin wrote: | Subaru Eyesight goes down to zero and handles stop and go | with lane centering. Though I guess provided you've | started the adaptive cruise control system above the | minimum speed. | spockz wrote: | Most cars support this here in Europe at least. However | true traffic jam assist seems reserved for cars with | automatic gears. | rad_gruchalski wrote: | My BMW 5 series does that. Huh. That's only when I ever | use it. | failwhaleshark wrote: | My mom's Subaru Forester does hands-off stop-and-go | traffic from 0 to 90 mph. It has 2 cameras and does lane | departure too. It will even activate antilock breaks if | it needs to panic stop. | | Hyundais have exceptionally-good lane-following. | codeulike wrote: | My Kia EV does exactly this, and is fairly competent at | it. | runarberg wrote: | May I ask, is traveling through a bumper to bumper traffic a | frequent occurrence for you? If so, are there options for you | to avoid it (e.g. change commuting times, work from home, | walk, bike, or use public transportation)? If also yes, why | do you tolerate it? | | Personally I see bumper to bumper traffic maybe 3 or 4 times | a year (when driving home from a vacation or being forced to | a doctor's appointment during rush hour). And I honestly | don't get why anyone would subjugate them self to this kind | of traffic as part of their daily commute. | kbelder wrote: | "Nobody drives that route at that time; it's too crowded." | industriousthou wrote: | Lot's of people have to be at particular places at | particular times. Hence, the rush hour. | greenyoda wrote: | Consider yourself very lucky. Not everyone has the luxury | of working from home, choosing their working hours or | living close to public transit or within walking/biking | distance from their job (in many areas, the farther you get | away from city centers, the cheaper the real estate | generally is). | | In the NYC area, bumper to bumper traffic is common. It can | be caused by an accident or construction that blocks one or | more lanes, cars merging on to an already congested | highway, etc. These conditions frequently happen even | outside of rush hour. | goldenkey wrote: | Try living in New York City, the whole tristate, not just | Manhattan. 3 to 4 times a year is laughable. Try 30 to 40 | times a year if you take the Belt Parkway. | | I used to live in LA where Santa Monica Blvd was always | backed up. I doubt LA traffic has gotten better either. | | I'm surprised by your insolence with regard to how shitty | traffic circumstances are in big cities. Simply changing | one's commuting times doesn't failsafe the issue. | runarberg wrote: | This question was specifically addressed to those that | have the option of avoiding it and still don't. I was | under the impression that there were several options of | escaping bumper to bumper traffic on your daily commute | in the New York City area. | | In fact I've often heard people from that area complain | more often about lack of parking near their commuter rail | station. Which indicates that people do rather tolerate | circling the parking lot in their park-and-ride rather | then risking stop-and-go traffic jams. | oh_sigh wrote: | 30-40 times a year _if you own a car_ and drive it | regularly. That 's why > 50% of households in NYC don't | own a car. | greenyoda wrote: | Large parts of NYC (much of the outer boroughs) are not | near the subway, and not within walking distance of a | supermarket (especially if you're carrying groceries for | an entire family). Millions of people live there because | they can't afford Manhattan rents, especially for a | family-sized apartment. | | Also, transit lines tend to connect well to mid-Manhattan | but poorly between other locations. So if you live in | Queens and work in Brooklyn, good luck getting to work | reliably by public transportation. (Before you object to | that arrangement, consider: If you own a house and have | kids in school, you're not necessarily going to uproot | your family and move just because your new job is further | from home.) | | Thus, many ordinary New Yorkers rely on cars to commute | to work. | runarberg wrote: | I did a quick google map survey and found that it can | take about an hour to commute on public transit between a | residential area in Queens and to a commercial area in | Brooklyn[1]. Not ideal until you see that driving the | same route takes about 40 min. So not a huge different | and definitely passes as an alternative to avoid the risk | of stop-and-go traffic jams. | | If you need to drive to the supermarket you should have | the option of choosing a time and route with minimal risk | of traffic jams. I find it hard to belief that many | people are frequently hitting bumper to bumper traffics | on their way to or from the supermarket. Occupationally | yes, but frequently no. | | 1: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/84-25+168th+Pl,+Jamaic | a,+NY+... | ska wrote: | > I honestly don't get why anyone would subjugate them self | to this kind of traffic as part of their daily commute. | | You may have trouble understanding it, but empirically a | huge number of people see this extremely regularly, if not | daily. | | It's not even necessarily a feature of horrifically long | commutes. For one example, lots of places that have | basically ok traffic have bottlenecks at bridges, you may | be stop and go for a little while every day getting across | that. | danw1979 wrote: | The first thing that crossed my mind when I saw the clip of | autopilot hallucinating flying traffic lights was that it was | clearly DUI and there's no way I'm getting in the car with that | guy. | [deleted] | lifeisstillgood wrote: | I am fairly confident that the autonomous car business model is | pretty dead. Electric cars - that's great ! But self driving is | waaaay harder. And self driving has a inbuilt expectation of | nearly perfect. It's not that if we swapped to self driving cars | today we would halve car deaths (which would be something like | 500k people pa - which would be a huge very important thing) but | it would not be perceived as robots save 500k people a year, it | would be instead "robots kill the other 500k per year" | | Liability, insurance, legal minefields and plain old marketing | would never allow cars ,that perform as well as the best | performing cars do today, to be on the roads in "every day" | conditions. | | My conjecture is we end up building AV only roads. initially one | lane of a highway, then ring roads round cities and major | warehousing hubs, then across urban areas. Walled off in some way | they simply become _railways with benefits_. | | At that point every business model ever written with Self Driving | in the title goes in the bin. | | I am not saying the tech is useless - frankly it's fucking | awesome that this is happening in my lifetime. But fucking | awesome tech and workable business model aren't always the same | thing. | | Not sure where I am going with the rant but I sure hope we get | more out of the billions spent here than Teflon. | propogandist wrote: | you can skirt all regulation and set false expectations by | simply calling your driver assist feature "autopilot" | exporectomy wrote: | It doesn't need to be almost perfect. Waymo, for instance has | remote human assistance when it gets stuck, and even a human in | a normal car drive to the scene and to get it unstuck if it's | really bad. There could well be a point where those humans plus | the tech are cheaper than a traditional full-time-per-customer | human taxi driver. | | You might say people don't want those delays but we tolerate | delays in normal commuting. An unattended bag on a tube station | stopping trains, a car accident blocking traffic, traffic jams | blocking traffic, mechanical breakdowns, etc. As long as | they're infrequent enough, it should be OK for riders. | AbrahamParangi wrote: | You'll know self driving is almost here when it works in | simulation at non-interactive framerates. | separateform wrote: | Railways with benefits aren't good enough and would be an even | worse business model. | ctdonath wrote: | Au contraire, seems we're mostly there. It's incredible having | watched self-driving, and neural networks, go from new concepts | and barely functioning to "order here" and public use (tell me | the numerous YouTube FSD videos aren't what they are). Insofar | as there are still serious edge cases to address, they're being | solved. | | Time and again I've watched "ain't happening" technology become | the preferred norm practically overnight. Eagerly awaiting my | FSD CT, and making long trips without having to micro-manage | every foot across thousands of miles. | failwhaleshark wrote: | Nope. You're just not patient enough. ACs will come, but very | gradually. They're already (mostly) here but it will take | another decade or two to be completely A. | treeman79 wrote: | So between "not invented" and "not proven impossible yet". | | https://xkcd.com/678/ | failwhaleshark wrote: | Lol, I guess. ACs aren't the same as the Moller Skycar. | It's a very, very complicated "DARPA Grand Challenge" where | the goal is to not get sued by Ralph Nader into oblivion | because the algorithm went MCAS and killed grandma. Waymo | or someone will need to do racing and the Gumball 3000 | first before people will accept anything more than semi-A | (glorified cruise control and lane following). | erikpukinskis wrote: | Doesn't "I'm fairly confident" kind of imply you're not | actually confident? | Doctor_Fegg wrote: | It's common British English idiom. | ajross wrote: | I see this rather differently. In fact AI is already as good as | human drivers, statistically. Only a few years back, we could | point at people getting killed by software bugs like the Tesla | path-under-semi-trailer issue (not a lot, but it did happen and | they were real bugs). | | That's not happening any more. All we have left is laughing at | stuff like this, where the visualization (not even the | autopilot!) gets confused by seeing real (!) traffic lights on | a truck, so it paints them in space, but then has to re- | recognize them because they are moving. | | At some point, the luddites will just run out of ammunition. | It's sort of happening already. | akersten wrote: | > where the visualization (not even the autopilot!) gets | confused by seeing real (!) traffic lights on a truck, so it | paints them in space, but then has to re-recognize them | because they are moving. | | Just my hypothesis: but I think the autopilot _really did_ | see them as traffic lights, and just got lucky that they | weren 't powered and ignored them as out of order. Were there | a cross street, I suspect the car would have stopped and | treated it as an uncontrolled intersection... | lstamour wrote: | > AI is already as good as human drivers | | But the AI drives slowly and gets confused easily. Regular | drivers routinely have to go around self-driving cars. Not to | say they won't improve, but it seems like current AI is | assistive to the point where it might be harmful when drivers | rely on it in speeds and situations where they shouldn't. I'm | sure it will keep improving, but I feel like this is one of | those situations where the amount of data and training | required, and the amount of iteration on the software | required to handle edge cases is not impossible but is | exceptionally difficult. | cvak wrote: | Do you have source for the statistics? I remember reading | somewhere that it was just a number one of the AI projects | said, with no verification, also with no knowledge of the | setup. | lvs wrote: | I think the issue is bigger than just self-driving. AI/ML is | wildly oversold as an engineering solution to real world | problems. In the best case, it's solving easy problems under | narrowly defined conditions. It's not really solving hard | problems robustly under real conditions. | ajross wrote: | This genre of posts is so tiresome. | | As the second video in the thread demonstrates, the truck is | _literally hauling traffic lights_. The AI recognition is | correct, the only thing worth complaining about is that they 're | displayed as static objects for the user after recognition, just | to be re-recognized a few seconds later in a different place. | Note that the car is correctly not detecting they are lit, so not | inferring direction (though AP isn't engaged, so I guess we'll | never know what it would have done). | | No doubt you could play the same game by putting a traffic cone | on your bike. The car wants to see important traffic objects, | it's literally what it's trained for. | theamk wrote: | And that illustrates the important problem with self-driving | car: if you want L5 autonomy, you need to be handle all the | weird cases. | sfblah wrote: | I recently test drove a Tesla just to see how the autopilot | system works. The way they handle traffic lights is pretty | entertaining. It seems them, particularly yellow lights, in a lot | of situations that are truly perplexing. It also had a tendency | to turn trees into traffic cones and to be truly impressive at | detecting garbage cans. On some level it's hard to understand | exactly what they're trying to do there. | | I also remember being at an intersection where I was turning left | and was waiting behind another car. The display repeatedly showed | cars the cars crossing in front of us crashing into the car in | front of me. Not sure why. | cs702 wrote: | Well, of course. This is probably the first time the car has come | across a truck carrying multiple street lights, without cover, | stacked on the back of the truck, well above eye level. It's a | rather unusual edge case. | | It's only a matter of _time_ before the software in these cars | can handle the vast majority of edge cases as well as or better | than human beings. Human vision isn 't exactly reliable.[a] | | In the meantime, someone should make a playable game in which | trucks throw street lights at cars. Maybe someone at Tesla is | willing to make this game in good jest? | | [a] See, for example | http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/index-e.html | failwhaleshark wrote: | Did they get to level 17? I hear you get an extra car. | etaioinshrdlu wrote: | As an ML engineer I'm a little bit baffled that Tesla has not | solved this by now. It's not like they lack data or ML knowledge. | | It seems like they should have a million hard test cases that | must pass in simulation before releasing a new model. The | simulations should be harder and more extreme than anything | encountered in real life. | | I think the real problem is obvious. They're trying to rush the | work because Elon said so. | fsh wrote: | I've never understood this argument. Isn't the main bottleneck | that you need well-labeled data for training the neural | networks? How is having tons and tons of random camera footage | going to help? | ampdepolymerase wrote: | For a lot of problems, clean data labeled data is no longer | the bottle neck, or in some cases, there are ways around it. | The bigger issue is dealing with the "long-tail" of unknown | new scenarios. This is a currently unsolved challenge. | unoti wrote: | > How is having tons and tons of random camera footage going | to help? | | One way to think of this is that that the footage is | implicitly labelled: we have the benefit of hindsight: we | know what the state/location of the vehicle was going into | the future. That benefit of hindsight also can serve as | implicit labels by knowledge that the vehicle did not crash | or collide with something immediately after the footage. | stonemetal12 wrote: | Fairly simple, they have footage from every time a person had | to correct AP's driving. Take that footage label it. Train | some of it, save some for test cases. Finally don't release | an update until it drives better than the current system. | Havoc wrote: | > they should have a million hard test cases that must pass | | Move fast and break things [like tests] | ModernMech wrote: | Right? This should be trivially solved with some sort of | temporal filtering on detected objects. If you detect a traffic | light at (x,y) in one frame, and it disappears in the next, but | there's a new one at (x+dx,y+dy), then you shouldn't place a | new one down in the world frame. You should only place a | traffic light down if you're confident it exists and is | operational. At the very least, the lights should be detected | on the back of the truck, but they should move _with_ the | truck. At least that matches what 's happening. | | I don't understand why this is hard for Tesla engineers -- I | was doing this kind of thing in grad school a decade+ ago and | it worked fine. I've seen it in other demos where object | classifications rapidly cycle between person, bike, car, etc. | Are they not filtering anything? Is this a symptom of "AI-ing | all the things"? Because we did it with bog standard computer | vision techniques back then and never got behaviors like this. | nmca wrote: | Did any of your grad school work make it into the real world | at all? Typically I'd suggest that such ideas are simple in | theory and difficult in practice. | ModernMech wrote: | Yes, there are real systems out there working off of the | techniques we used back then. I didn't work much in theory | at all. | AceJohnny2 wrote: | Years ago, a friend worked in the Autopilot group. It took them | _a year_ to procure servers to store the telemetry of the | existing cars, and then weeks to have them setup. | | They don't work there anymore. | | From their experience, I know one thing: I will never work for | Elon Musk. He may be a great visionary and salesman, but he's a | _horrible_ manager. | etaioinshrdlu wrote: | This is fascinating, but what caused the delays specifically? | AceJohnny2 wrote: | Server procurement was a CFO thing, and their specific | requirements didn't fit under the existing buckets, so it | took them a long time to get it approved. | | It was stunning to see the complete disconnect between | Musk's grand declarations and what the organization was | actually setup to deliver. | | Frankly, it just gives me more respect for Tim Cook, who as | COO at Apple made his company able to turnaround and | deliver HW in record time. | | Edit: in retrospect I wonder if Musk's grand public | declarations were actually a way to control and pressure | his own organization. Remember, Musk didn't actually found | Tesla, he rescued it from bankruptcy after the Roadster | didn't return as much as needed, so he inherited an | existing structure. | systemvoltage wrote: | Just like your anecdote, I have one to share as well: I know | a close friend that works on space lasers at SpaceX and has a | blast, best job ever according to him and he thinks Elon is | _an excellent_ manager mostly because there is zero | bureaucracy and people are not afraid of "Do nothing" option | as well as removing complexity. In fact, he wouldn't work | anywhere else after seeing the company culture. | | I know it's cool to hate Elon. | AceJohnny2 wrote: | I dunno, "move fast and break things" works for rockets | [1], not so much for cars. | | [1] https://youtu.be/bvim4rsNHkQ | ipsum2 wrote: | I don't think Elon has a day-to-day role at SpaceX unlike | at Tesla, right? From what I've read, Gwynne Shotwell is | the main person in charge there. | simondotau wrote: | Elon spends nearly as much time at SpaceX as he does | Tesla. There's no question that Elon regularly mucks in | at the lowest levels of engineering at SpaceX. | | If you want evidence from a reasonably neutral observer, | take Sandy Munro (himself an engineer who has worked on | everything from cars to aeroplanes). He recently | interviewed Elon, ostensibly about Tesla but the | interview was in a meeting room at SpaceX. After the | interview he was invited to a two hour design review | meeting and was "blown away" at Elon's depth of | involvement. | | https://youtu.be/S1nc_chrNQk?t=370 (6:10 to 8:45) | Geee wrote: | He is very much involved at actual day-to-day engineering | at SpaceX. He is the CEO and the chief engineer there. | | Sources: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k | 1e0ta/eviden... | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1nc_chrNQk&t=377s | kempbellt wrote: | I'm curious what the issue is here that seems unsolved? It's | unconventionally displaying what it is recognizing, but the car | isn't doing anything janky. | | The car is properly recognizing traffic lights pretty darned | well, considering the circumstance. It looks like it has a | built in understanding that traffic lights are "always" | stationary - hence, assigning them static locations on the 3D | map - but it keeps having to update the model because the | lights are actually moving. | | This seems like a very non-obvious edge case that I wouldn't | expect an ML team to even consider as a possibility. Now they | need to program into the ML model an understanding that traffic | lights are _typically_ stationary. Which seems even more | difficult to me, from a technical perspective - you don 't want | false negatives... | | The car isn't braking or making any strange maneuvers from what | I can tell. I'm actually impressed that it's handling it this | well. | simondotau wrote: | I'd go further and predict that the stationary traffic lights | are just an artefact of the visualisation and not the vision | system itself. | [deleted] | sabhiram wrote: | So you are impressed that they ran headfirst into a bunch of | traffic lights because they did not know what to do? | | When you don't know what to do - do nothing. What if it was a | traffic light on roller skates? Or a kid, dressed as a | traffic light, on roller skates? | tshaddox wrote: | They're unlit traffic lights. Would you rather the car slam | on the brakes? | | But seriously, I'm inclined to be charitable here and | assume that this is merely a quirk of the UI display. | There's no evidence that the autopilot did anything unsafe | (apparently it wasn't even engaged?), and until I see | evidence of that I'm willing to withhold judgment. (I have | seen evidence of other situations where Tesla autopilot did | unsafe things and I'm in no way apologetic about those | situations.) | jschwartzi wrote: | I just figured out how I can make sure self-driving cars | stop for me when I'm trying to cross a street. Dress up as | a red light. | kbelder wrote: | Or wear one of these t-shirts: https://www.spreadshirt.co | m/shop/design/stop+sign+mens+premi... | comradesmith wrote: | Stopping would be a form of action too. -\\_tsu_/- | kempbellt wrote: | I don't know exactly how Tesla's safety systems are | designed, but this is my guess. | | Collision detection systems (radar) are accurately _not_ | detecting an impending collision because the lights are not | actually on a collision course with the vehicle. | | Object recognition systems (computer vision) are working | very well, because they recognize the lights and are | updating the 3D map accordingly, but the traffic light 3D | model is not designed to be a moving object - unlike | vehicles, which frequently move. Which is why we see the | car "passing through" them. | | What we are likely seeing is simply a weird edge case in | the output for the user-interface. I'd imagine if an object | was actually flying at the car and the car could see it, it | would brake accordingly. | | Also, the map is two-dimensional. The car frequently drives | _underneath_ traffic lights that I 'm sure also appear "on | top of" the car in normal cases. | | Object recognition and collision detection, from what I | understand, are two very different systems. | SahAssar wrote: | Tesla is not using any radar/lidar systems for | FSD/autopilot (anymore), it's all visual. It might be | that there are completely different systems for | recognizing obstacles and what is shown on the map, but | this still raises the question why and why one of those | systems seem to act like this. | [deleted] | codeulike wrote: | The car is not under autopilot. The driver is driving. (the | grey steering wheel icon would be blue if autopilot was on) | lvs wrote: | Working-as-intended certainly isn't an argument I was | expecting to see in this thread. | olyjohn wrote: | It's a feature, not a bug! | Syonyk wrote: | > _I think the real problem is obvious._ | | Yes. The human brain and visual systems aren't nearly so | trivial to replicate as a lot of people in the tech industry | seem to think. | | Tesla is just one of many case studies in the paired tech | industry arrogance seen so frequently: | | - "A human is just a couple really crappy cameras and a neural | network, we know how to do better cameras and neural networks, | how hard can it be?" | | - "We can do anything we dream with 99.995% reliability in the | synthetic, computer-based world of the internet because we know | code. Therefore, we can do anything we want in the physical | reality with code!" | | Both are far from evident in practice, but the belief in them | continues, despite it being increasingly obvious to everyone | else that neither one is true. | | Human vision and world processing is quite impressive - and, as | pointed out elsewhere in this thread, a two or three year old | would have no trouble working out that the obstacles were some | things on a truck. I've got a nearly three year old, and I | guarantee he wouldn't confuse those for stoplights in the | slightest. I also wouldn't let him out on the road, though he | does well enough with a little Power Wheels type toy. But there | is _far_ more going on in the visual processing system than we | even understand yet, much less have the slightest clue how to | replicate. | | And while code may be fine on the internet (where you can retry | failed API calls and things mostly make sense), the quote about | how fiction is constrained by what's believable and reality | sees no such restrictions is very true. Out on the roads, all | sorts of absolutely insane things can and do happen on a | regular basis - and you can't predict or plan for all of them. | But the car has to handle them or it crashes. | | As a random example, a year or two ago, I was behind a car that | had poorly strapped a chunk of plywood to their roofrack with a | good chunk hanging forward, and the front end of it was | starting to oscillate awfully hard. I had a good clue that it | was going to come apart sometime in the very near future, so | backed off from a normal following distance to quite a way | back. Sure enough, half a mile later, it failed, went flying | through the air, slammed into the road a good distance behind | the car, and tumbled a bit. Had I been using a normal in town | following distance, it would have either hit me or tumbled into | me, but using a human visual system, it was obvious that my | existing following distance stood a good chance of being a bad | idea. | | Stuff like this happens on roads _constantly._ Meanwhile, state | of the art self driving can 't tell the difference between | stoplights and some poles on a truck. You'll excuse me if I | don't think the problem is anywhere remotely close to solved | for a general case Level 4 purpose. | ve55 wrote: | Personally I view the problem here not as a failure of object | recognition or what would be considered a visual system, but | of abstract reasoning (or lack thereof, of course) | | Aritical neural networks are pretty good at object | recognition, among hundreds of other things, and even better | than humans at some of them. They are, however, generally | pretty bad at abstract reasoning, critical thinking, | 'understanding' concepts in-depth, and so on, and I think | that's a more constructive way to phrase the problem we see | in this video. | | When a problem is fully redicible to a simple vision problem, | modern neural networks are a great choice, but being a good | driver involves much more than just the visual cortex. | simondotau wrote: | The problem, to the extent there is one, is certainly with | the visualisation; it's not so clear if there's any problem | with the underlying vision system. | blhack wrote: | Is the car trying to stop? The visualization here is for | autopilot (which ignores traffic lights), so even if the truck | driver was trying to do something malicious, the car would ignore | it. | codeulike wrote: | The car is not under autopilot, the driver is driving. The car | is just displaying what it thinks it can see. | | (the grey steering wheel icon means autopilot is not engaged, | it would be blue if it was on) | schmorptron wrote: | I don't think autopilot is actually enabled in this clip, the | steering wheel icon is greyed out. | detaro wrote: | At least in the clip it's accelerating, so it doesn't seem to | take them into account - which would make sense for non-lit | traffic lights anyways? | nucleardog wrote: | I'd wager the average case of a non-lit traffic light is more | likely to be a traffic light that's... out (at least around | here newly installed ones are covered until they're | activated) so no, I wouldn't say ignoring them would make | sense. | | It would generally be a clue that there's an intersection | busy enough to require signals that now lacks signals or | signage which would warrant extra caution. I'd expect the car | to at least slow down significantly, if not come to a | complete stop before proceeding. | a3n wrote: | That is effing hilarious. | | Except we're trusting ML to perform surgery, choose conviction | sentencing, evaluate job CVs, determine acceptable marriage | partners (why not?), determine who can have kids (why not?), | determine who gets into college (why not?), determine who gets a | loan (why not?), determine who gets to work on ML (why not?). And | drive cars. | david_allison wrote: | Not if the GDPR has anything to say about it | | > The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a | decision based solely on automated processing, including | profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her | or similarly significantly affects him or her. | | https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL... | codeulike wrote: | In this video, I dont think the car is actually in autopilot. Its | just displaying what it thinks it can see, while the driver | drives. | | (the steering wheel icon at the top of the screen is grey, not | blue) | dylan604 wrote: | Hopefully, an image of this truck never shows up in a captcha | challenge. | mikewarot wrote: | Tesla clearly needs to hire a "Red Team" to find weaknesses of | their autopilot (and other systems). | | The odd thing is that even a randomly stupid AI for self driving | is statistically safer than most drivers. Clearly there is a ton | of room for improvement in both AI and Humans. | bigdict wrote: | > Red Team | | I'm sorry, did you mean customers? | falcolas wrote: | He didn't. Telsa did. | ModernMech wrote: | Why hire a team to beta test your AI self driving car when you | have customers willing to shell out $10k for the privilege? | darepublic wrote: | > even a randomly stupid AI ... Is statistically safer than | most drivers | | the fact that people still trot this out every Tesla thread is | super annoying. Sorry to break it to you but this is a 100% | false claim | Closi wrote: | > The odd thing is that even a randomly stupid AI for self | driving is statistically safer than most drivers. | | This hasn't been shown yet at all. Statistics showing autopilot | have less crashes per mile always ignore that Autopilot is | doing the type of driving that has the least accidents per mile | (motorway driving). | mikewarot wrote: | I was wrong, it's almost as safe, not safer. | | https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2020/10/28/new-te... | Syonyk wrote: | > _The odd thing is that even a randomly stupid AI for self | driving is statistically safer than most drivers._ | | A strong claim, lacking actual evidence for it. All we have to | go on are some Elon tweets (rather the definition of a biased | source) and the actual crash rate. Without a _lot_ more data | (which Tesla steadfastly refuses to release) about | environments, corrections, etc, it 's quite impossible to make | that sort of statement with any confidence. | | The Tesla hardware is a weird combination of capable and | insanely dumb, and it's far from obvious which it will be in | any given situation until it's gone through it. | | If an honest statistical analysis of the data indicated that | Tesla's automation was better than human drivers (or better | than other driver assist systems), I would fully expect them to | have released the values. Since they haven't, and only hint at | it and make statements that _sound_ statistical but really aren | 't, I assume they've done the numbers internally and know it's | not nearly as good as they like to imply. | | If I drove in a city like their "self driving" beta was a few | months back, I would be hauled from the car on suspicions of | driving while hammered. | alkonaut wrote: | > The odd thing is that even a randomly stupid AI for self | driving is statistically safer than most drivers. Under sunny | highway conditions? Perhaps. In a night snowstorm? Probably yes | - because the AI would be at the side of the road waiting for | the human to drive. | | I think self driving is a typical 80/20 problem. We won't have | "full" self driving because the costs are exponential for each | step closer to it. But driving on 80% of roads on 80% of days, | with supervision? That could happen. | | But that said: we won't accept AI that just makes traffic safer | "on average". I'm fine with human shortcomings causing | accidents. People will not accept car manufacturers cutting | corners and causing accidents, even if statistically it's | safer. So the very high bar for self driving isn't just "as | safe as humans". | nullc wrote: | I saw a good recent youtube video showing numerous concerning FSD | failures in urban driving: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=antLneVlxcs | dawkins wrote: | I saw the video and it is crazy that they think it is even | close to production. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-06-03 23:01 UTC)