Scary drone footage of a Tesla in autopilot trying to make a left turn

All of them.

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It isn’t ready for prime-time yet. It will be. Once the technology is proven, it will be significantly safer than monkeys who currently drive. People already want to do everything except pay attention driving, the fact they can scoot back and play games on their computer, put on make up, shave, make coffee, sleep, beat the kids in the backseat, etc.

It will be mandatory in highways which are already highly regulated and already relatively “safe”. There could even be modifications to the road such as markings or RFID chips or other technology I am not even thinking of that helps to keep everything on track. It will alow for even faster “safe” speeds on them.

I suspect there will still be a network of “dumb” highway where holds outs driving 50+ year old cars can still drive on.

ETA - the dystopian scenario is highways are now all private, and walled gardens. If you have Honda and try to on a Chevy highway, they either ding you a usage fee, or reduce your speed compared to the Chevy owners.

There is your writing prompt for speculative fiction.

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Even if it kills a fraction of the number of people killed by shaved ape drivers, we will all be horrified if one of the people killed is a family member killed by a robot.

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It’ll make car chases in future cop shows a lot less exciting.

“The suspects are leaving the bank’s parking lot in a 2025 Lexus. Activate remote control and deliver the suspects to the drive through entrance of the holding facility. Then route the vehicle to the Police Benevolent Fund Civil Forfeiture Second Hand Car Sales’ Lot.”

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What if I stick a big sign on my hi-viz jacket that says “dump truck”?

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Mesh network where cars only trust a small group of other cars and roam the street in rival gangs?

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Very good point about doing “experiments” and “research” w/ live human subjects that have not given consent - it’s effed up in many, many ways. However, given that this tech has apparently been given the green light (see what I did there?), coupled w/ the fact that all drivers are sort-of running experiments every time we get behind ANY wheel, I am left with so very many questions. None of them good.

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Seeing these videos of Tesla in autopilot is making me extremely nervous about them being on the streets where I live, even in a testing capacity. There’s that 30 minute driving video, where during that time the autopilot drives on the wrong side of the road, misses seeing cars that are driving in front of it, fails to stop for intersections and tries to drive through a fence… it makes me despair that true autonomous cars will never be safe enough for the streets.

They’ve been talking about this for more than 60 years. The problem is, for it to “work,” all cars have to have them, and all cars need to be fully automated (and no pedestrians or bicyclists to interact with). Even with that being the case, even with no human drivers (and roads without pedestrians or bicyclists) to mess things up, it’s not clear how much safer it would make these autopilot systems (that can’t manage to consistently stay in the lane or drive at the right speed, and want to drive through walls and into rivers, etc.), even in the absence of malicious adversarial attacks.

But adversarial attacks are a significant worry. It would be pretty easy to imagine a single hack (that could be as simple as adding a bit of tape to a speed sign, something which currently works) that could have ripple effects that spread out beyond the vehicles directly effected as all the other autonomous vehicles around them are impacted by their behavior.

Tesla seems to be significantly behind any of the others in this area (so bad it shouldn’t be tested on the road), but yeah, none of them are remotely good enough.

I’m absolutely appalled at how terrible Americans are at driving, how completely unseriously they take it, so this has always been my position, too. But, frankly, I feel like the last few years of testing of autonomous cars has made a monkey out of me. These cars are grossly failing at really basic stuff, things that even a pretty dumb autonomous system should be great at. I don’t know why that’s the case, but it’s not encouraging. I don’t think I believe in autonomous cars anymore - the most difficult 1% of daily driving seems to be something that these systems currently have no hope of managing, nor do I expect them to during my lifetime.

Please prove me wrong, Silicon Valley, but in the meantime, don’t kill me with autonomous cars that act like human drivers that are dumb, distracted and drunk.

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True. Of course criminals could hack their cars. Like in the Mandalorian, where his transponder wasn’t turned on and the New Republic patrol was harassing him.

There is also another scenario I have heard about the future of cars - and that is less about ownership and more about access to use. So like if you need a car to work and back, it arrives to pick you up and take you home, and while at work it is shuttling other people around.

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Use a scare-crow first/dummy, way easier on your skeletal structure if it goes South.

Teslas are SAE 2. Autopilot, by the definition of the average person, is SAE 4 or 5. We are a long way from it being ready for prime time.

Levels of driving automation

In SAE’s automation level definitions, “driving mode” means “a type of driving scenario with characteristic dynamic driving task requirements (e.g., expressway merging, high speed cruising, low speed traffic jam, closed-campus operations, etc.)”[1][70]

Level 0: The automated system issues warnings and may momentarily intervene but has no sustained vehicle control.

Level 1 (“hands on”): The driver and the automated system share control of the vehicle. Examples are systems where the driver controls steering and the automated system controls engine power to maintain a set speed (Cruise Control) or engine and brake power to maintain and vary speed (Adaptive Cruise Control or ACC); and Parking Assistance, where steering is automated while speed is under manual control. The driver must be ready to retake full control at any time. Lane Keeping Assistance (LKA) Type II is a further example of Level 1 self-driving. Automatic emergency braking which alerts the driver to a crash and permits full braking capacity is also a Level 1 feature, according to Autopilot Review magazine.[71]

Level 2 (“hands off”): The automated system takes full control of the vehicle: accelerating, braking, and steering. The driver must monitor the driving and be prepared to intervene immediately at any time if the automated system fails to respond properly. The shorthand “hands off” is not meant to be taken literally – contact between hand and wheel is often mandatory during SAE 2 driving, to confirm that the driver is ready to intervene. The eyes of the driver might be monitored by cameras to confirm that the driver is keeping their attention to traffic.

Level 3 (“eyes off”): The driver can safely turn their attention away from the driving tasks, e.g. the driver can text or watch a movie. The vehicle will handle situations that call for an immediate response, like emergency braking. The driver must still be prepared to intervene within some limited time, specified by the manufacturer, when called upon by the vehicle to do so. You can think of the automated system as a co-driver that will alert you in an orderly fashion when it is your turn to drive. An example would be a Traffic Jam Chauffeur,[72] another example would be a car satisfying the international Automated Lane Keeping System (ALKS) regulations.[73]

Level 4 (“mind off”): As level 3, but no driver attention is ever required for safety, e.g. the driver may safely go to sleep or leave the driver’s seat. However, self-driving is supported only in limited spatial areas (geofenced) or under special circumstances. Outside of these areas or circumstances, the vehicle must be able to safely abort the trip, e.g. slow down and park the car, if the driver does not retake control. An example would be a robotic taxi or a robotic delivery service that covers selected locations in an area, at a specific time and quantities.

Level 5 (“steering wheel optional”): No human intervention is required at all. An example would be a robotic vehicle that works on all kinds of surfaces, all over the world, all year around, in all weather conditions.

In the formal SAE definition below, note in particular the shift from SAE 2 to SAE 3: the human driver no longer has to monitor the environment. This is the final aspect of the “dynamic driving task” that is now passed over from the human to the automated system. At SAE 3, the human driver still has responsibility to intervene when asked to do so by the automated system. At SAE 4 the human driver is always relieved of that responsibility and at SAE 5 the automated system will never need to ask for an intervention.

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Appreciate the sympathy. Toyota is doing road testing here. Along with some other company with small, wheeled robot-looking drones - these don’t go fast, maybe meant for Jimmy Johns deliveries or similar urban uses?

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isn’t it Driver’s Ed 101 to not crank the wheel to the left while waiting to turn left? You’d think that would be the first thing programmed into these cars.

But they probably use AI that’s determined you can make the turn quicker if you have the wheel pre-cranked, and hasn’t seen an example of being rear-ended into oncoming traffic yet.

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I agree we are a-ways off. But also, if the highways are set up to assist self driving cars, and they are able to network and talk to each other, it will hasted the adoption.

Driving in residential or busy city grids will require more work and come after highway driving - IMO.

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On a 30 minute jog the other day, I saw human drivers perform all of these items, plus driving while texting, driving while talking on a handheld phone, driving while vaping marijuana, and driving through red lights.

I’m not sure which scares me more - killer robot cars or distracted killer human drivers.

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Maybe the solution is the same as for electronic voting?

Paper cars.

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True, although, to be fair, no one asks to be on the street with a newly-licensed teenager either, and they don’t get a say about that.

This guy is still the one in control, and is the one responsible if he doesn’t brake in time.

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The corporations will push for robots to be recognised as persons. It will be easier to avoid liability if things go wrong: “you can go ahead and sue the robot, it wasn’t us”.

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Of course they will take the opposite tack if suddenly robot emancipation becomes a threat to their bottom line.

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To be fair, if that was where the car stopped to await a gap, it’s well on the correct side of the dashed line. Plenty of very competent human drivers would have stopped in the same place.

At the same time, being anything but parallel to the road risks being rear-ended into oncoming traffic. So maybe I should remove the ‘very competent’ above.