Get a Tesla if you want to learn about AI trying to kill you, says Steve Wozniak

https://electrek.co/2023/05/03/tesla-ai-trying-to-kill-you-steve-wozniak/

by clouddrover • 3 years ago

131 154 3 years ago

The relevant section of the interview: https://youtu.be/OU9cKjWsvH0?t=499

gfody• 3 years ago

the very first time I tried fsd beta the car immediately tried to crash me into a lightpole. it was an unsettling experience. still the best car I've ever owned by far.

jiggawatts• 3 years ago

I love these Tesla reviews, which sound like a battered wife: "Sure, he slaps me around sometimes, but he's still the love of my life."

EngManagerIsMe• 3 years ago

Right? I sold mine, getting rid of that car was a huge sigh of relief. From parts shortages to labor shortages to weird manufacturing defects that no one could correct to the "overpromise and underdeliver" attitude of the company...

The car was cool for a few years, and then it became deeply irritating. We got a Volvo, and holy shit the Volvo had better tech.

NegativeK2• 3 years ago

Unlike an abusive spouse, Tesla's dangerous features are opt in.

I love my Tesla. I think FSD is a horseshit scam with some neat tech that's nowhere near ready for the public. Fortunately, I don't pay for it, so it doesn't affect what I do with my car.

I do find it incredibly frustrating that the vast majority of Tesla conversations devolve into screaming matches between people who are rabidly pro or rabidly con, with both sides doing a pretty poor job of representing the truth. And those in the middle generally wander off to do something far more productive literally anywhere else on the internet.

hsjqllzlfkf2• 3 years ago

That's the nature on fanboyism.

I met an apple fanboy recently. His thing was that apple is amazing because they care the most about user experience, the design is so amazing, and it's so much better than anything else! After he talked at length about how everything about apple is great, I said that I'd learned that apple made iphones slow on purpose 3 years in and when caught said it was about saving battery. I said that's not a good user experience to me, if the phone becomes slow after 3 years. He told me that _his own iphone_ is going thru that, and he still hadn't time to buy a new one but he was going to, but it was great because it was a conscious design choice by apple.

These people are just brainwashed by a brand.

strken2• 3 years ago

In fairness, if the problem is only with the self-driving, you can circumvent that by not using it. "He's a good dog, but he's completely uncontrollable if you take him to the beach because he tries to swim straight into the sea": well, if you don't go to the beach there's no problem.

adoxyz• 3 years ago

Where's the lie?

ThunderBee• 3 years ago

Musk was definitely overly optimistic on the FSD timeline but the hate is pretty wild.

Please correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t Teslas autopilot something like ~10x as safe as the average driver?

mplewis• 3 years ago

Tesla driving stats are cherry-picked, biased by the population of people with enough money to own a Tesla, biased by the locations where Teslas are driven, and doesn’t consider the failure modes that Autopilot faces that human drivers generally avoid (e.g. shearing off the side of a parked ambulance).

fsckboy3• 3 years ago

you haven't made a convincing refutation of what he asked. For example, Tesla autopilot might have failure modes that human drivers avoid, but while that could be a PR nightmare for the technology wouldn't necessarily outweigh Teslas doing other things better that humans are poor at. And if people who can afford better cars driving better is true(?), that's a fact you'd get downvoted to hell for (unfairly) around here if you just stated it in a freestanding way.

sidibe2• 3 years ago

Most importantly: biased by the locations where drivers feel comfortable using autopilot.

These numbers should only be compared to miles on cruise control in other cars.

taneq3• 3 years ago

The closer you look at those statistics the more questionable they are. You can’t directly compare ‘overall crashes per kilometre across all human drivers and conditions’ with ‘crashes per kilometre while autopilot is active’ when autopilot being active implies:

- driving on a divided highway (what’s the actual prerequisite?)

- good enough weather for autopilot to engage

- in a relatively new, high end luxury vehicle which is likely to be well maintained and have better handling and braking than average vehicles

- likely to be driven by older middle-class drivers less prone to risk-taking

- unclear what the cutoff is between ‘autopilot driving’ and ‘human driving’ during a crash, if autopilot disengaged before impact does that count as human or autopilot driving?

svachalek2• 3 years ago

I sold my Tesla last summer but as of then, my anecdotal experience is that it drove like a drunk teenager. Very uncomfortable to sit there and pray, I only used it in traffic jams (which it handled like a champ) and when the road was mostly empty (which made it a lot less stressful wondering what it does next).

bcrosby95• 3 years ago

Among what others have stated, I guess it depends upon what you mean by "safe". It's possible that Tesla autopilot avoids fender benders but increases chances of fatal crashes.

If you're looking at deaths, in the USA, there's about 1.5 every 100 million miles driven (this includes pedestrians/etc). That's a pretty high bar. Way higher than most autopilot apologists imply.

I'm not saying autopilot won't ever be safer than humans. Just that it isn't as easy as it appears.

paxys• 3 years ago

Only according to Tesla's marketing. In reality it can barely drive from point A to point B in a dense city without killing someone.

lamp987• 3 years ago

"isn’t Teslas autopilot something like ~10x as safe as the average driver? "

Bruh. 10x as dangerous would still be a low number.

wedn3sday• 3 years ago

Yes, my model 3 once tried to run me into a semi, on the other hand I watch human drivers nearly kill pedestrians (myself included) on a daily bases.

seshagiric• 3 years ago

Will autonomous driving help minimize auto-accidents? Yes.

Is the technology there yet? No.

mey• 3 years ago

My litmus test for this is simple. Has the steering wheel been removed and the manufacturer taken all liability for at fault claims? Until then, I don't want a self driving car. If the mfg doesn't believe in the tech enough to own liability, how can I?

fasthands9• 3 years ago

I also don't trust self-driving cars right now, but fwiw this would not be close to legal so not sure it makes the most sense as the litmus test.

burnished4• 3 years ago

I think assuming liability is sufficient, calling for the removal of the steering wheel doesn't seem relevant.

fnordpiglet4• 3 years ago

I use full self driving for long highway trips. I do however take the advice of the manufacturer and stay fully alert. It has caught situations where some bonehead is drifting into my lane or changing lanes without noticing me, and I didn’t notice them fast enough, and braked avoiding an accident. Like wise I’ve noticed it make mistakes and asserted control. My estimation is the joint probability of the model catching a dangerous situation and me catching it is significantly better than me alone. It also is able to navigate through confusing interchanges that I normally screw up by taking the second exit of four instead of the third or whatever.

I think a litmus test of “perfect” is a fair test, but leaves a lot of value uncounted in the mean time.

I think perhaps ignoring essentially everything Elon musk says and does and judge based on what’s in front of you is what works for me in not getting baited into the “is the Tesla FSD sentient and can do my taxes” hype cycle, with its requisite jadedness.

fsckboy3• 3 years ago

the mfer doesn't assume any liability right now, so even if their self driving technology dramatically lowers your risk, why would they assume any of that risk? I see the point you're making, sure, if they assumed all liability it would make sense for me to accept that deal, but they're not going to and it could still be a very very good idea for me to adopt the technology.

krupan3• 3 years ago

Check out the Cruise Origin

wingspar• 3 years ago

Your steed awaits… /s

Mercedes Drive Pilot was to be liability for accidents, under a list of conditions, by the end of 2022

https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a39481699/what-happens-if-...

userbinator2• 3 years ago

Will banning all human agency help minimize accidents of all kinds in life? Yes.

Do we want to? No.

fnordpiglet4• 3 years ago

Human agency to impart 782,000 newtons at will regardless of intoxication, skill, alertness, etc causes accidents that kill and maim an awful lot of people. I for one look forward to the day that idiot weaving through traffic at 80mph in an enormous SUV agency is banned for my, my families, and everyone else’s sake.

dylan6047• 3 years ago

Personally, I don't think it ever will as long as we're trying to mix human drivers with automated drivers using existing infrastructure. Seems like if it was 100% automated with a system for communication between vehicles to "ask" to change lanes of the cars around it, then we'd be a lot better off than having the car "guess" what a human is attempting to do.

lostmsu3• 3 years ago

That does not make sense for robotaxi.

sidibe2• 3 years ago

How do you reconcile your view with Waymo having really driverless cars on the road with human drivers for a while now?

__loam2• 3 years ago

The technology is there. Waymo and Cruise have been testing self-driving cars in various US cities for years, and putting thousands of engineering hours into safety. You can take a driverless ride in a Waymo in Pheonix right now.

The problem with Tesla is that it was a rushed system built on the whim of a 50 year old nepo baby, and that real safety requires holistic sensor suites that include LIDAR and RADAR, as well as a fuck load of redundancy, in addition to cameras, which is the only thing Teslas have.

infradig• 3 years ago

What's your evidence that Elon Musk is a "nepo baby".

jltsiren• 3 years ago

There were a bunch of articles a couple of days ago how emergency responders are having an increasing amount of trouble with Waymo and Cruise. The root issue seems to be that the cars can't handle exceptional situations on their own, and there are not enough human operators to deal with them quickly enough.

quonn2• 3 years ago

I wouldn‘t call it rushed, it works far better than most assisted driving systems. It will probably soon be rolled out as that and I would not be surprised if, eventually, it becomes good enough to be fully self driving.

wudangmonk• 3 years ago

"I think his point might be valid for gpt3.5 but has he tried 4.0? its on a completely different level, a game changer!."

This is pretty much what I have come to expect from any post that has the words "AI" attached to it.

As far as the tesla is concerned, its fun watching the screen to see what it identifies, and its cruise control works pretty well but the FSD should NEVER EVER be used. I test it every now and then against some freeway separators, and 5 years later its still trying to crash into them because somehow the road markers trump over the side collision detectors that are telling it there is a wall on that side.

stefan_• 3 years ago

It's funny how all the grifters have moved on. Okay, the cars still can't drive themselves, but now surely AI is a year away from being conscious!

fnordpiglet4• 3 years ago

Or, in a slightly less jaded take, the dreamers. Maybe not everyone excited by technology is trying to cheat you?

lostmsu3• 3 years ago

Frankly, it is 1 script away. GPT-4 + a self-feeding script is conscious (obviously). Just not as conscious as a human being (but much more conscious than a sleeping human being).

robotresearcher4• 3 years ago

There's known value in autonomous driving.

Susan Blackmore observed that you can implement all the known functionality of human consciousness by answering the question 'Are you conscious?' with 'yes'.

We don't have any broad agreement that it does anything else, and we know that we do lots of things unconsciously despite our commonplace beliefs to the contrary.

resters2• 3 years ago

I’ve driven a few Teslas lately and have been extremely impressed by the performance and comfort. But the auto steer and fsd preview are definitely underwhelming.

It can’t see a red light that is 120’ away to begin slowing down, nor does it consider that the navigation calls for a right turn at the light!

My theory is that the camera array needs to be larger and potentially much more data needs to be integrated into the decision making.

Even the fsd preview is scary when semi trucks seem to bounce left and right by about five feet per second while I pass them on the highway.

This is not a criticism of Tesla - the cars are a superb experience overall — just a note that the idea of self driving working on normal city streets or even suburban roads is pretty far fetched and will require significant enhancement to the tech that is in the 2023 vehicles.

notshift• 3 years ago

Before long OpenAI will be able to implement FSD by trivially handing the video feed and API calls to GPTX and asking it to drive.

I think the Tesla AI team is just unserious about the problem, probably largely because of Musk being a poor leader for the project.

CSMastermind• 3 years ago

My theory is that the camera array needs to be larger and potentially much more data needs to be integrated into the decision making.

Or they could just use radar/lidar like everyone else.

omgwtfbyobbq• 3 years ago

There were a couple releases that were bad when I first got access, but the last couple have been good for me.

It is excessively cautious, but that's better than the opposite and I take over whenever it could annoy other drivers.

__loam2• 3 years ago

It's excessively cautious until it drives you under a semi trailer and decapitates you.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF• 3 years ago

I know someone who was rear-ended on the freeway because he had to hit the brakes hard and the driver behind didn’t react in time. Thankfully nobody was hurt. Just pointing out that “excessively cautious” can carry its own set of dangers, even if it’s ultimately safer.

cypress66• 3 years ago

Have you tried FSD beta 11.3.x?

nunez• 3 years ago

Disagree about FSD not being used. I've used FSD for thousands and thousands of miles without incident.

lajosbacs• 3 years ago

I disagree on the cruise control, especially in Europe where the streets are narrower, it constantly thinks that it will crash and applies brakes. I sold my Tesla because of this

drcongo• 3 years ago

I try to avoid driving near a Tesla these days as I've seen so many do incredibly stupid things in front of me.

rvz• 3 years ago

He's right you know. Installing Tesla FSD puts your car on LSD and hallucinates the moon as a yellow traffic light to slow down in the middle of the high way and runs into bright red emergency cars on the road.

Nothing short of AI snake oil that puts the lives of drivers on the road at risk.

m4632• 3 years ago

autopilot 1 is actually not that bad - if you understand the limitations.

Just don't use it in town, and do your own steering on extremely curvy roads.

I don't think it's any different from understanding the limitations of cruise control. If you stay aware, it can do a lot of work for you.

(autopilot 1 is the first mobileye version)

Waterluvian2• 3 years ago

If you can’t use it in town or on curvy roads, how is it better than my base model Forester’s lane/distance keeping?

Every time someone explains the features to me, they all sound cool and my interest is piqued, but I never quite grok what it practically does that would change daily driving for me.

I think lane changing might be neat but I just don’t do that much on the highway?

For me the massive advancement was getting a car with EyeSight and now it keeps me in the lane and evenly spaced and makes stop and go traffic painless. Oh and all the safety stopping systems. Every car should have those!

Beyond that feels like diminishing returns until we get to some new level of autonomy which no car currently has.

burnished4• 3 years ago

Does EyeSight do everything except change lanes/make 90 degree turns? Like, to the extent that it requires human oversight for safety reasons but is practically sufficient on its own? Because what you are describing is 100% of what I liked about the Tesla's capabilities.

m4632• 3 years ago

I should qualify my statement about tesla autopilot 1.

extremely curvy roads. curvy roads are fine, but really tight turns it hunts a little and it's just easier to steer yourself.

And I should be clear this is a corner case at the edge. On the freeway, even curvy mountain freeways, it does very well.

and in town, I haven't had any issues, but it doesn't stop at stop signs, so I like to drive myself.

this is just common sense to me, sort of how you don't use (old traditional set-one-speed) cruise control in heavy traffic.

this_steve_j• 3 years ago

Get a Volvo if you want to learn about cars trying to not kill you, says Steve Notwosniak.

The Volvo Cars Safety Centre crash lab opened in 2000 and contains two test tracks of 108 and 154 metres long respectively. The shorter of the two is moveable and can be positioned at an angle between 0 and 90 degrees, allowing for crash test at different angles and speeds, or to simulate a crash between two moving cars. Cars are crashed at speeds up to 120 km/h.

Outside, there is room for performing tests like roll-over crashes and run-off road scenarios, whereby cars are launched into a ditch at high speeds. Here, Volvo Cars also offers rescue services opportunities to hone their life-saving skills, as it did earlier this year when it dropped new Volvos from a height of 30 metres to simulate the heavy damage found in extreme crash scenarios.

https://www.media.volvocars.com/global/en-gb/media/pressrele...

badwolf• 3 years ago

Volvo really is impressive with how much they put into safety and testing.

As for self-driving, I've had great driving experiences with their Pilot Assist.

testfrequency• 3 years ago

If Volvos are supposed to be the safest cars, why are they often not given top performance marks by the IIHS?

I get that Volvo’s whole image is their safety, but real world data does not back that up entirely

digdugdirk• 3 years ago

I would be interested to see actual "real world" data vs "standard crash test" data. It's much easier to design something for excellent performance on a small subset of rigorously defined tests, vs designing for any/every possible outcome.

nickvanw• 3 years ago

They do generally receive favorable marks by the IIHS: https://jalopnik.com/volvo-is-the-first-carmaker-to-receive-....

Even updated tests (released post-launch of the car) tend to treat them pretty favorably: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/most-small-suvs-fail-insurance-...

I think of the IIHS as a sort of benchmarking organization - not representative of the real world like any microbenchmark, but also correlated with production performance on some level. They seem to do quite well in their microbenchmarks.

chasing• 3 years ago

My Tesla erratically turns the bright headlights on at seemingly random times like when I’m pulling into my covered driveway when it’s cloudy or at night when I’m driving right behind someone. I figure this is actually a good thing: Reminds me to not turn on any other more potentially-destructive AI-powered features.

robotresearcher4• 3 years ago

My Tesla consistently believes there's a big rig parked next to it in my garage. Not kidding.

givemeethekeys• 3 years ago

Is there a way to calm it down by turning off some features? I ask because I'm in the "hey, I love the range, and simplicity.. would buy one as soon as I can afford it.. just don't care about anything beyond cruise control" camp.

qwerpy• 3 years ago

Mine too. It also thinks my partially raised garage door is a truck, when the door is about 3 ft in the air, where a truck's tailgate would be. When actually on the road it's decent at identifying things without false positives.

schappim• 3 years ago

FYI, there's actually a big rig parked next to my garage. Not kidding.

sashank_15093• 3 years ago

Lots of “Tesla FSD Beta almost killed me” in the comments here but then I see hundreds of videos like this: https://youtu.be/Mj6vXnEYAUg

I choose to believe my eyes, it seems like FSD Beta can see almost everything a human sees. In fact in the latest version I don’t think I’ve found a single example of it missing something clearly visible to a human.

It’s planning needs some work, it seems to lack longer term planning, frequently putting itself in positions where it needs to do 3-4 quick consecutive lane changes. You may hate Elons politics, but the FSD Beta has been released to 100k+ Tesla owners and it’s not inconceivable that no one will be in the drivers seat in the next 5 yrs.

Edit: as mentioned in the comments below FSD can’t handle parking lots which is annoying because that was the one place I hoped it would work the most.

ra7• 3 years ago

In fact in the latest version I don’t think I’ve found a single example of it missing something clearly visible to a human.

Is this from personal experience of using FSD Beta or are you relying purely on YouTube videos to assess its performance? Because not everyone drives around recording videos for YouTube.

sashank_15093• 3 years ago

I use it every time I take my Tesla out unless I feel like driving. I rarely intervene on my drive to work. But honestly I’m not impressed by this because this was true a year ago, FSD has no problem with the light traffic roads of the Bay Area. FSD also I’ve found rarely has issues in SF, it can infamously do the Lombard Street in SF with no problems but I’m guessing it’s overfit to SF at this point since the FSD team is in the bay area. I’m more intrigued by the YouTube videos of people trying it out in Florida, Texas etc.

fiddlerwoaroof• 3 years ago

I’ve been using FSD in my 3 for months now and I’d miss a car without it. It’s still definitely beta quality, but it’s a clear step up from enhanced autopilot and can take me from the on-ramp to my office without intervention (about thirty miles in California’s central coast). It would be door-to-door, but it doesn’t work well in parking lots and there’s a couple complicated intersections in my small town that it can’t handle yet.

invisible• 3 years ago

I recently did a 70 mile drive on FSD with no interventions from local suburb roads, to highway, to urban roads, to some odd roads near a zoo.

That being said, often times I've had to intervene going <10 miles on local roads because it's so cautious that I'm afraid other drivers may react poorly and cause an accident. Rarely, it has done some dangerous actions that I'd characterize as "bad driving." So no, it's not there yet and it is dangerous because of the rare situations, but it's also occasionally perfect and usually "okay."

sashank_15093• 3 years ago

I agree, many of my interventions are because:

1. It hangs at an intersection too long that the person behind honks at me

2. It refuses to lane change out of fear leading me to miss highway exits or turns (sometimes but rarer, it tries a turn from the wrong lane)

3. It just gets bumpy some rides with a lot of phantom breaking that can be dangerous at times (I’ve seen the phantom breaking reduce in V11 though)

I don’t think the standard fear of if I didn’t intervene I would hit so and so obstacle is something I ever experienced in my FSD, though I did start using FSD in the much later versions of FSD 10+ where a lot of kinks were ironed out

jillesvangurp• 3 years ago

Lots of anecdotes, not a lot of bad accidents. But lots of miles driven. And lots of incidents involving people getting killed by other cars. Many of which incidents involve non artificial intelligent drivers being impaired by stupidity, alcohol, distractions provided by their phone or onboard infotainment system, or the fact that they just aren't very competent drivers. Or all of those combined.

I get it, it's easy to make fun of Tesla and the plenty mess-ups and incidents. But the argument that those incidents add up to super dangerous situations seems to consistently not translate into a whole lot of real world injuries and deaths. You'd struggle to make that point. Teslas continue to have excellent safety metrics. And the more people they roll this out to and the more these metrics fail to degrade, the weaker that argument gets.

Nice little thought experiment: Ask yourself would you rather have an AI drive your car than any random owner of a US drivers license (you don't get to choose)? IMHO The barrier for AI is pretty low if you think about it like that.

senectus1• 3 years ago

I have a 2023 Rav4 with lane assist and adaptive curise control. these "AI" or simple self driving features are really showing me the fallibility of self driving.

the car panics at silly things, and is entirely too aggressive with braking.

Its also quite daft in the times when it just wont use braking like going downhill in adaptive cruise control, the car will not use brakes to stay within the speed limit when going downhill. It will just beep really annoyingly (no it cant be turned off). but if a car in front of it starts slowing down it will be quite happy to heavily slam the brakes on (nothing dangerous, just that its either on or off.. it wont graduate the application).

I know Tesla's version is an order of magnitude better but i can easily see how it can be fooled or do the wrong thing. I wouldn't trust it un attended.

antipaul• 3 years ago

It looks like Woz is not scared of Tesla’s “hardcore litigation” team, which has been a bit trigger-happy when it comes to suing people for defamation lately.

Anyone can expand?

hn_throwaway_99• 3 years ago

That quote has links in the article. Following it has lots more detailed information.

yalogin• 3 years ago

Oh no! I have a lot of respect for Wozniak. Now I have to watch musk call him all kinds of names. I shudder to imagine how nasty and petty musk will get.

floatinglotus• 3 years ago

I tried the self driving mode and it couldn’t handle a very popular and common road in Pennsylvania.

I have a friend who had his Tesla in the shop for 2 months and literally had no alternate car for this period.

Autonomous driving is not real. Do not believe Elon-hype.

The cars have a surprisingly high number of defects and bizarre issues.

machdiamonds• 3 years ago

For people that care about statistics rather than anecdotes: "In the last 12 months, a Tesla with FSD Beta engaged experienced an airbag-deployed crash about every 3.2 M miles, which is ~5x safer than the most recently available US average of 0.6M miles/police-reported crash" - https://twitter.com/Tesla/status/1631063252875505669?lang=en

TheAlchemist• 3 years ago

If you really care about statistics, you will look into how biased their data is.

It's intentional and very misleading. As per your own link - it's comparing apple to oranges (airbag-deployed crash vs police-reported crash). It's not accounting for different drivers or road profiles.

Check some independent reviews of the data - it paints a very different picture from what Tesla would like us to believe.

clouddrover2• 3 years ago

For people that care about statistics rather than advertising:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2023/04/26/tesla-...

calvinmorrison• 3 years ago

I saw steve Wozniak speak at a business event less than two months ago. I was falling asleep after hours of business boring. When asked about - in regard to AI - how these technology leaders should be held accountable, he quoth Dr. Ted Kaczynski and mumbled something about execution. After a brief pause he walked it back but it sure woke me up!

dietsche• 3 years ago

My Tesla has been great. It saw a pedestrian in all black at night in a cross walk that I didn’t see. The car stopped, and I think it saved a life. Auto pilot is super nice on the Highway and in stop and go traffic. FSD drives like an 8 year old stole the car and is driving for the first time :)

TLDR we’re going on a road trip next month and taking the Tesla. When taking the jeep was mentioned, no one wanted to drive, lol!

Tommstein• 3 years ago

Rented a Tesla for a day back in 2021 and tried to let it drive itself, can confirm it spent the day trying to murder me.

Get a Tesla if you want to learn about AI trying to kill you, says Steve Wozniak

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