jocker12

A different article (What everyone gets wrong about the 2015 Ashley Madison scandal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40786891) gives a lot more context to this story about which many commenters say it is no news at all. Yes, it's not, because the Israelis "have been doing this for decades".

But... (and I'll go to the other article)... "But that isn’t a new story. People have been trying to have affairs with strangers for thousands of years. Ashley Madison was never really about that. Avid Life Media, its parent company, wasn’t in the business of sex, it was in the business of bots. Its site became a prototype for what social media platforms such as Facebook are becoming: places so packed with AI-generated nonsense that they feel like spam cages, or information prisons where the only messages that get through are auto-generated ads."

Money comes from advertisement. Distribution/exposure is the problem.

"What are the steps back?" - every step forward, no matter in which direction, requires more computing power from a limited computing source that gets power from a limited power source (limited because they are mobile not plugged to a network). By using more computing, the system would prioritize towards the "step forward", allocating less resources to other processes (other sensors or the new electronic system of that vehicle). More computing power (when more essential processes get to have better performance) is requiring more electricity, from a solely electric vehicle with a limited battery capacity, that ultimately would generate shorter battery range available. The more computing power and more battery power you add on any vehicle, the more you increase the vehicle manufacturing or acquiring costs.

"the level of scientific achievement" - every single step, every single minute and every single individual (the financial input), is prohibitively expensive for this R&D project, and it is not justified by any means by the results (the financial output), Companies and investors don't care about progress. They care about profits, and, in case progress would stay in their path to make profits, they'll fight against it. You should check waymo salaries, hardware prices, operations costs, and fleet management costs. From operational POV, every mile covered by those vehicles translates into a price payed by the company, money that are not recovered whatsoever at this point. Vehicle lifecycle, insurance, maintenance, cleaning and the electricity used, adds up very quickly and could go as high as half a billion dollars per year - "Argo has about 1,300 employees and is likely burning through at least $500 million a year, industry participants say." (https://www.theinformation.com/articles/argo-ai-planning-pub...). Now remember how in business, any investor usually expects to make 10 times his or her investment, in this case (the Argo.ai example) meaning that the profits (after all expenses and taxes are substracted) to be around $5 billion per year. This is the reason why Ford decided to shut down Argo, which was burning half a Billion a year with no end in sight. To directly address your statement - the scientific level needed would require way too much money to justify the road to accomplish it. Basically, all those parts interested either do not have those money, or are part of a business model that requires substantial returns on a relatively short term, and cannot afford to finance projects with constantly moving delivery dates for fictional ideas.

"No, but it does qualify for" - please check the statement my comment was responding to. The "1 step forward, 3 steps back" way the automation sector does R&D is not moving towards reality, is moving towards confusing the public to justify their pitch to eventual investors. "That's okay." - Maybe for you, but not for investors and for the market. "Why?" - It's unsustainable, requiring resources (provided at this point by naïve investors) that commercialization can't provide. Just look at the over $100 billion wasted on this hallucination with zero actual returns. Investors expect palpable returns, not promises and delays.

What these failing companies are doing for almost 15 years now is 1 step forward, 3 steps back while promising they are 6 months away from the impossible. A.I. is only pattern recognition software statistical tool, that has zero capability of learning by itself from previous experience, and that shows you how any business designed around updating the constantly changing environmental data required to make the robots operate at a decent level, is prohibitively expensive.

"Anyone can use 3d mapping and geofencing" - that shows you their limitations and also doesn't qualify for "completely autonomous" standard. - Completely means anytime (regarding weather conditions or time of the day), anywhere (no geofencing) and completely adaptive behavior to the permanently and randomly driving conditions humans deal with while driving. Pattern recognition software alone (A.I.) would never be able to match human driving performances.

"As long as the remote operators and assistance teams are an order of magnitude smaller than putting a driver in every car" - the entire gig is way to expensive and requires "time travel" level of scientific achievements, which is 100% fiction and 0% reality.

"I have had a completely autonomous waymo come to my location, pick me up, and take me to another location." - Waymo uses 3d mapping, limited geofencing, remote operators and mobile roadside assistance teams because those cars are not even close to any type of autonomy. Those cars are "mice" in a well designed and designated (inch mapped) maze. The car without a driver in the driver's seat is like David Copperfield flying on the stage in a cheap magic show, in front of a few hundred people that paid $50 for the tickets - see https://youtu.be/qZS9maIq_Zc

This is not news. He is saying that for at least two years now - https://reason.com/video/2020/02/24/george-hotz-fully-self-d...

“ you'll always end up with idiots.” - so hardcore ‘self driving’ cars believers, the people that actually put their money where their mouth is, those that purchase and are eager to use and test the Autopilot and the FSD are - and using your word here - always idiots? Like pipe dream religious cult world saving idiots?

You should try this https://www.radzone.org/nukemap.php. Move the map on your location and see the impact radius.

The self proclaimed "Robocar Specialist' is no specialist, is an investor - see the bottom of the article "I founded ClariNet, the world's first internet based business, am Chairman Emeritus of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a director of the Foresight Institute. My current passion in self-driving vehicles and robots. I worked on Google's car team in its early years and am an advisor and/or investor for car OEMs and many of the top startups in robocars, sensors, delivery robots and even some flying cars. Plus AR/VR and software. I am founding faculty and computing chair for Singularity University, and I write, consult and speak on robocar technology around the globe."

And, by the way, in 2020 he was writing .... New Tesla Autopilot Statistics Show It’s Almost As Safe Driving With It As Without - https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2020/10/28/new-te...

These guys (pay attention to who they are), when referring to the same calculation but regarding deaths per 100 million miles, disagree with your opinion:

Chris Urmson in his Recode Decode interview – “Well, it’s not even that they grab for it, it’s that they experience it for a while and it works, right? And maybe it works perfectly every day for a month. The next day it may not work, but their experience now is, “Oh this works,” and so they’re not prepared to take over and so their ability to kind of save it and monitor it decays with time. So you know in America, somebody dies in a car accident about 1.15 times per 100 million miles. That’s like 10,000 years of an average person’s driving. So, let’s say the technology is pretty good but not that good. You know, someone dies once every 50 million miles. We’re going to have twice as many accidents and fatalities on the roads on average, but for any one individual they could go a lifetime, many lifetimes before they ever see that.” – https://www.recode.net/2017/9/8/16278566/transcript-self-dri... or Ford Motor Co. executive vice president Raj Nair – “Ford Motor Co. executive vice president Raj Nair says you get to 90 percent automation pretty quickly once you understand the technology you need. “It takes a lot, lot longer to get to 96 or 97,” he says. “You have a curve, and those last few percentage points are really difficult.” Almost every time auto executives talk about the promise of self-driving cars, they cite the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration statistic that shows human error is the “critical reason” for all but 6 percent of car crashes. But that’s kind of misleading, says Nair. “If you look at it in terms of fatal accidents and miles driven, humans are actually very reliable machines. We need to create an even more reliable machine.” – https://www.consumerreports.org/autonomous-driving/self-driv... or prof. Raj Rajkumar head of Carnegie Mellon University’s leading self-driving laboratory. – “if you do the mileage statistics, one fatality happens every 80 million miles. That is unfortunately of course, but that is a tremendously high bar for automatically vehicle to meet.” min.19.30 of this podcast interview – http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/if_then/2018/05/self_...

"That’s 1 injury every 1M miles driven." - so if the driver covers 10.000 miles per year, that driver needs to drive 100 years for him/her to be injured in a crash.

You should put that "100 million miles driven" from your charts in perspective.

Do you really understand how much is that 100 million miles in order to comprehend how rare such events occur in real life?

Autopilot creates a false sense of safety, as long as the people that payed for it and are eventually using it, are (by their own standards that made them buy it) not good at driving and not interested to get better at it.

But the fallacy stands in the numbers where Autopilot “safety report” is presented by Tesla and compared to average drivers performances.

Why a fallacy? Because the human driver drives everywhere, at any time, in any weather conditions and on all drivable roads. The Autopilot goes on and off based on how drivable the environment is by the Autopilot system detection done by the sensors involved. In addition to that, up to this point, almost all of its errors where caught and corrected by its users, so no one could actually estimate what would happen if Autopilot owners would let the software do the driving for 100%, same thing the humans do.

Also, once disconnected from the driving system (feet off the pedals and hands off the steering wheel) the driver would need up to 20 seconds (or even more) to reconnect and fully understand what the car does and what the traffic around is like. That is a recipe for disaster while every second the situation changes inside and outside the car.

"That should be the question."

No. That is NOT the question... because... Autopilot and FSD software suite users are required to remain attentive and ready to intervene in case o a software failure (often seen in many YouTube videos). But because they obviously, become inattentive, Autopilot usage is actually much more dangerous than having the drivers drive their cars by themselves.

It creates complacency because the moment a driver physically removes feet from the pedals and hands from the steering wheel, his or her mind cannot maintain focus on two things at the same time.

What are those two things an Autopilot user needs to perform simultaneously? First is watching the car's surroundings, the traffic around the vehicle. Second is watching and trying to understand software behavior in those constantly changing traffic situations.

No average Joe, college kid, grandma or grandpa is capable of focusing on two things at the same time in constant life and death environment.

Airplane pilots are not average Joes and they are constantly trained to understand flying Autopilot software limitations and capabilities in a lot less stressful and busy traffic environments, two of their main job requirements being discipline and responsibility. That is not the case with the average driver on the road.

Look at their statement and realize how Tesla is intentionally misleading their shareholders.

If Tesla is so impressive, why do they need to do that?

"has taken the lead"

Has taken the lead on the "premium sedan" category market, where less and less people are buying "premium sedans".

What scare quotes?

"is... somewhat weird."

No, it's not. If you sell more horses worldwide out of the “four legged category” it has no relevance as long as less and less people are buying horses for transportation.

Selling more of the less selling cars is not an achievement by any means.

All the other companies are changing production towards different other categories, but the “achievement” Tesla wants their shareholders to be happy about is that they sell more of the cars less and less people are buying.

If you sell more horses worldwide out of the “four legged category” it has no relevance as long as less and less people are buying horses for transportation.

This is a very tricky presentation of the larger image. The document mentions the "Premium Sedan" category market, not the entire market.

So looking at the Premium Sedan market share in the US (which is arguably the most important market in the world) the numbers show a 1% decline in sales for 2020 - "The midsized car segment continues to lose share in the US car market in 2020. Sales were down 22% in an overall market down 14%. As a result the share of midsized cars drops by 1 percentage point to 10.2%, and in absolute numbers, the 1.5 million sales make this the lowest year of this millennium and long before it." - from https://carsalesbase.com/us-car-sales-analysis-2020-midsized...

So while the premium sedan category (including Tesla 3) is declining overall, Tesla is reporting to its shareholders the "great achievement" of winning that sales declining race.

No infrared illumination makes this camera completely useless if the manufacturer intends to use it in the future as a Driver Monitoring System component.

"The simulations were not conducted independently of the company, nor were they reviewed by any third-party for verification prior to the company making them public." from https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/8/22315361/waymo-autonomous-...

Not excessive considering this happened before, see - He Flew a Drone to Take Photos for a Friend. Now He’s Facing $55K in Government Fines. - https://www.dailysignal.com/2016/06/12/he-flew-a-drone-to-ta...

Correct. But distracting driving is happening today without allowing the driver to physically disconnect from the driving system. The manufacturers, willing to sell the new Advanced Driver Assisting Systems (ADAS) are saying that it would be safe for the drivers to actually disconnect from the driving systems (hands off the steering wheel and feet away from the pedals) which is simply insane.

ADAS are designed as an additional safety level for ACTIVE driving, when the driver is 100% driving the car, and not for a potentially much more dangerous situation, when the driver (as encouraged by the manufacturer) is completely disconnected but supposedly "alert" at all times.

Under a new proposal from the UK‘s Law Commission, the “user in charge” of the vehicle would not be prosecuted for careless or dangerous driving, speeding, or breaking red lights when the car was in self-driving mode, the Telegraph reports.

The Law Commission instead suggests that responsibility should fall on the developer or manufacturer of the hardware that enables self-driving functions on the vehicle.

see https://thenextweb.com/shift/2020/12/18/autonomous-vehicle-m...

When you look at the numbers, you actually see how Uber actually paid Aurora to take ATG.

"If we are not tied for first, then the person who is in first, or the entity that's in first, then rolls out a ride-sharing network that is far cheaper or far higher-quality than Uber's, then Uber is no longer a thing," Kalanick said." - https://www.businessinsider.com/travis-kalanick-interview-on...

"If we are not tied for first, then the person who is in first, or the entity that's in first, then rolls out a ride-sharing network that is far cheaper or far higher-quality than Uber's, then Uber is no longer a thing," Kalanick said." - https://www.businessinsider.com/travis-kalanick-interview-on...

"but it has the opposite effect." - so you think the reduction of engine/power units usage from 2 to 3 per race to 3 per season had an opposite cost effect? Or limitation of tire sets that could be used over a race weekend had an opposite cost effect?

Or do you want to remove the regulations and have only 4 or 6 cars (Mercedes, Ferrari and possible McLaren) racing for 21 races instead of 20 to 22 cars for the same amount of races every season?