Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/07/11/tesla-engineers-focused-on-making-full-self-driving-work-for-elon.html
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A recent article in Futurism shares that employees in Tesla’s group that review and “annotate” Tesla camera info for “Full Self-Driving” are focused on Elon’s data and the routes he takes.
oh man… no better evidence for the distortion field bubble that the uber-rich live in, and make grotesque clueless decisions from, than that little item right there
(makes one wonder if Howard Hughes ‘going nuts’ toward the end wasn’t a natural psychological progression of not being able to interact with people without a sycophantic selfish mission)
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Which sounds like Elon is using the system for something it’s not approved to be on the road for. Full self driving.
He should be ticketed. The driving records Tesla has can may be instructive.
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At one point when I worked at the “internet of things” division of a large company upper management wanted to support the concept of “guest users” that can be given access to some of a home’s devices for a limited time.
Many of the users of our software had requested a feature like that, they want to give a listing mother (or mother in law) the ability to “control stuff” in the house while she is visiting and not when she isn’t. (some people just don’t want “mom” confused by seeing all the wrong controls when she goes back home, others I guess think mom might actually turn their lights out on purpose)
So we got all rev’ed up to deliver a pretty simple feature letting people grant access to their house to a person starting on day X and ending on Y. Upper management wanted all sorts of access controls that would make the UI more complex.
Then it turned out they were intently focused on “time of day” controls.
Like they wanted “grant access to the housekeeper from 10am to 2pm”, and what they wanted most of all was “ability to unlock the house”.
Like the entire feature most people that had our system wanted was “mother is visiting for two weeks and she should be able to turn lights on and off”, but what upper management wanted was “my dog walker should only be able to get into the house from 1pm to 3pm, and if he is late getting my dog back home I guess he can go pound sand & FiFi can hang out in the backyard”.
(and the feature they wanted was far more complex, with access limited to set hours and days on days off, and all sorts of interactions with timezones and daylight savings…something people wanted and could have been delivered in a month dragged on for a year before getting canceled because nobody in the focus groups could understand the UI…or at least disliked it enough that everyone said they wouldn’t use it)
…which is still an improvement over hyper focusing on Elon’s self driving experience because hyper focusing on features only people rich enough to have daily home helpers that they trust enough to let into the house, but not enough to let them into the house “off schedule” will cost a company dollars, but hyper focus on Elon’s FSD will likely cost someone’s life. Or at least some hospital time and an insurance claim.
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I wonder if there are any large concrete abutments on any of his usual routes?
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But Musk’s personal driving habits are reportedly being sent to the front of the line, with eight workers telling BI that they remember annotating data associated with him. Other workers recalled working on labeling routes coming in and out of the carmaker’s factories in Texas and California.
Other factories of competing companies didn’t get nearly as much focus, according to BI’s sources.
Some former employees also told the publication that they were told to put extra care and time into annotating clips recorded by Musk’s car.
Oh, at last the scales fall from my eyes. FSD is something for people that only drive where Lone Skum drives. Got it. Phew!
More lives than it takes on the way to being “good eventually”? Because if FSD (with different versions from different manufacturers, each of whose ‘rules’ will be slightly different) were to suddenly be switched on for thousands or millions of cars, there would be carnage.
FSD really only works (not that it does, but bear with me) if every vehicle has exactly the same version of it. And, TBH, I’d rather have anyone’s version than Lone Skum’s.
And whatever you had switched on on your way to Chicago, it was not Full Self Driving, but some lesser automation, deliberately mis-marketed by Skum.
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Welcome back from your two year absence. Back then you were saying how the blockchain was energy expensive now, but ultimately was going to save energy. Before I trust you saying the same kind of thing about self-driving saving lives, how’d that prediction turn out?
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This smells like an example of “elite projection”:
Elite projection is the belief, among relatively fortunate and influential people, that what those people find convenient or attractive is good for the society as a whole. Once you learn to recognize this simple mistake, you see it everywhere. It is perhaps the single most comprehensive barrier to prosperous, just, and liberating cities.
This is not a call to bash elites. I am making no claim about the proper distribution of wealth and opportunity, or about anyone’s entitlement to influence. But I am pointing out a mistake that elites are constantly at risk of making. The mistake is to forget that elites are always a minority, and that planning a city or transport network around the preferences of a minority routinely yields an outcome that doesn’t work for the majority. Even the elite minority won’t like the result in the end.
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I hope those FSD programmers like Elon.
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Now that’s what I call elite projection.
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The whole (short) article is pretty wild
“We would annotate every area that car regularly drove in,” one former Tesla worker told BI after being instructed to work on “Tesla influencer” data. “We’d home in on where they lived and label everything we could along that route.”
Something, something ethics in automotive journalism. I guess that is pretty smart as a marketing/manipulation tactic.
In 2015, he reportedly stormed into Tesla’s office complaining that his car had behaved dangerously while on self-driving mode. Employees realized there was a faded line on the nearby Interstate 405 — and insteaed of fixing the software, repainted it.
Now they just need to apply that fix worldwide!
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Tsk tsk should someone place one across the road unexpectedly … with flashing lights on it…
… Boeing too, I heard 
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I was kinda thinkin’ a malicious coder could basically solve the Baldy Hitler problem by not quite steering him under that underpass correctly.
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I am all in favor of self-driving cars, as I’ve commented before, and think they’re a lot closer to saving lots of lives than most people do. They’re one of only a couple of technologies I think are underhyped relative to their TRL and potential impact. Still, the odds of me getting in a supposedly-self-driving Tesla are essentially zero.
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Oh, yeah, I’ve had to deal with such drivers on those routes. They must not realize how many times other cars have to slam on the brakes, swerve out of their lane, or otherwise work around the fact a self-driving or cruise-control car decided it was too close to the car in front of it and pulled into an already-filled lane going at least 10 mph slower than all the cars already there. So. Much. Fun.
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The thing about self-driving cars is that even if you get it to nail 99% of the situations that a competent human can handle, getting that last 1% is likely a bigger challenge than the other 99% put together. So it often seems like “we’re almost there” but we’re still reaching for an ever-more-elusive goal trying to get to the finish line because those edge cases every human has to deal with from time to time are freaking complicated.
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In other words, today’s so-called FSD is basically the automotive equivalent of a Mechanical Turk.
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