Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent Among Its Engineers

Re:Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent A... by contingencies on Thursday August 24, 2017 @06:57PM (#15094794)

Wiener's Eighth and Final Law: You can never be too careful about what you put into a digital flight-guidance system. - Earl Wiener, Professor of Engineering, University of Miami (1980)

It seems that we are locked into a spiral in which poor human performance begets automation, which worsens human performance, which begets increasing automation. The pattern is common to our time but is acute in aviation. Air France 447 was a case in point. - William Langewiesche, 'The Human Factor: Should Airplanes be Flying Themselves?', Vanity Fair, October 2014

Eventually mean/median system performance deteriorates as more and more pure slack and redundancy needs to be built in at all levels to make up for the irreversibly fragile nature of the system. The business cycle is an oscillation between efficient fragility and robust inefficiency. Over the course of successive cycles, both poles of this oscillation get worse which leads to median/mean system performance falling rapidly at the same time that the tails deteriorate due to the increased illegibility of the automated system to the human operator. - Ashwin Parameswaran (2012)

... from my fortune clone @ http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

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Re:Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent A... by terravion on Thursday August 24, 2017 @10:35PM (#15095713)

That said, aviation accident rates have been falling asymptotically while this "troubling trend" has been going on. In the US we've had no fatalities on domestic commercial flights since like 2009, and only the two at SFO a couple of years ago on international flights to the US. This is on a couple of billion flights with hundreds of billions of passenger departures.

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Re:Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent A... by jacquesm on Thursday August 24, 2017 @11:56PM (#15095997)

Airliner pilot discipline is orders of magnitude better than your average driver.

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Re:Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent A... by maxcan on Friday August 25, 2017 @02:08AM (#15096479)

I'm a private pilot (general aviation, single engine cessna's). For the most part, our discipline is orders of magnitude higher than all but the best drivers. Airline pilots are orders of magnitude better than us. You are absolutely correct.

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Re:Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent A... by doingmything on Friday August 25, 2017 @12:11AM (#15096059)

Not to mention the myriad of safety and control mechanisms in place on the aircraft (redundant systems etc) and away from it (air traffic control, IVR etc)

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Re:Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent A... by tim333 on Friday August 25, 2017 @04:55PM (#15102167)

Airline pilot discipline was also probably pretty good fifty years ago yet the accident rate has dropped as the tech has improved.

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Re:Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent A... by jacquesm on Friday August 25, 2017 @06:46PM (#15102874)

A good pilot can sometimes recover from being given a bad aircraft. If the aircraft get better of course the accident rate will improve.

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Re:Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent A... by reacweb on Friday August 25, 2017 @05:20AM (#15097164)

airline pilot selection plays also a role.

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Re:Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent A... by itengelhardt on Friday August 25, 2017 @12:38AM (#15096151)

That's why at current we have 1.3 million people dying on the road in the US alone. It might make the matter of transitioning to self-driving worse, but it also makes manual driving worse.

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Re:Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent A... by alanh on Friday August 25, 2017 @02:42AM (#15096621)

The WSJ article includes NHTSA data indicating 'only' 35,000 traffic fatalities per yeah. Where are you getting this 1.3 million number from? That would be equivalent to a full 1% of US population dying on the road every 2.5 years

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Re:Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent A... by itengelhardt on Friday August 25, 2017 @07:39AM (#15097690)

you're right. I googled for "number of car deaths in US" (or so I thought) and that number came up. 1.3M seems to be the number for world wide fatalities.

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Re:Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent A... by ericd on Friday August 25, 2017 @02:48AM (#15096647)

That number sounds like the worldwide number, not US. Many places have much, much worse road fatalities per capita.

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Re:Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent A... by portman on Friday August 25, 2017 @01:06AM (#15096251)

Commercial air travel will serve just shy of 4 billion departures this year, with about 40 million flights.

You are correct in the ratio (1:100) but I think you mistook departures for flights and extrapolated 2 orders of magnitude too far.

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Re:Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent A... by aerlinger on Friday August 25, 2017 @12:58AM (#15096224)

> This is on a couple of billion flights

You sure about that number? Seems incredibly high to me.

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Re:Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparks Dissent A... by Tempest1981 on Friday August 25, 2017 @01:55AM (#15096418)

"Airlines are expected to operate 38.4 million flights in 2017, up 4.9%."

Maybe 3 billion passengers/year?

From http://www.iata.org/pressroom/pr/Pages/2016-12-08-01.aspx

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