I'm not really sure what this dichotomy is that you're describing. It certainly looks like they're using computer vision to detect the bounding boxes of cars, and the field of computer vision is widely described as being either a subset of artificial intelligence or a cross-disciplinary approach combining artificial intelligence with a handful of other fields.

> You'd have to ask all kinds of wild questions too like:

> "What if kids played a prank and re-painted road lanes on a highway at 50MPH?"

This sort of thing actually happens with real humans, and the legal system has to (and does) handle it. In the 1990s three people removed a stop sign as a prank and were sentenced to 15 years in prison after a human driver drove into the intersection and hit another vehicle, killing three teenagers. https://www.nytimes.com/1997/06/21/us/3-are-sentenced-to-15-.... The fact that it's possible for humans to illegally modify road markings and end up killing people is a challenge and a tragedy, but it's not anything new or particularly game-changing for self-driving cars.

> "What if a sand storm happened?"

That sounds like one of the easiest possible problems. What do humans do when they suddenly have nearly zero visibility on a road? In most places I assume they are supposed to (and do) pull over to the side of the road and stop. I've been in rain that is so heavy that all the nearby cars on the highway had to pull over.

> "What would the car do if a tire blows out at 55MPH?"

Again, that's another thing that happens a lot, and probably causes a lot of injuries and deaths. Again, I'm not minimizing that loss, but it's not some huge "gotcha" for self-driving cars. In this particular example, I would expect self-driving cars to be vastly better than most human drivers in this situation at maintaining control while pulling over and stopping.

They cause gigantic pile-ups, because humans are unbelievably bad at driving.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/50-people-injured-69-vehicle-pileu...

Cars today are vastly better at maintaining control in this situation even without self-driving. If the car has traction control, as long as the driver doesn't panic they will have a much greater chance of keeping control of their vehicle, compared to cars without a computer assisting them.

While most interest/discussion in self-driving surrounds the interpretation of the environment viz other road users, road markings and signage, I am following the (too slowly developing) Roborace, Stanford's MARTY and similar efforts to automate expert car control including handling the loss of control.

I look forward to the day when passengers can be confident that they are safer than with even the best human driver. And not just statistically safer, but demonstrably so.

There are no simple answers to the above questions, but if a driver causes the accident, they are accountable. Companies want to launch this tech but not own accountability for accidents when it could well be faulty logic and or code that contributes to deadly incidents. In a ship... less of a risk... In a car, surrounded by 4-10 other cars, the risk is much higher.

Profit making should not drive this blatant hubris... We forget how history reminds us of an over-reliance on technology and intelligent design.

    try
    {
      while (true)
      {
         if (IsScenarioOutsideOfUnderstanding())
         {
            throw NotUnderstoodException()
         }
      }
    }
    catch (NotUnderstoodException)
    {
        SlowDownAndStopLikeAnyoneElseWould();
    }

    Patch for car stopping way too often:
        catch (NotUnderstoodException)
        {  
    -        SlowDownAndStopLikeAnyoneElseWould();
    +        // FIXME TODO let the safety driver handle it for now
    +        // SlowDownAndStopLikeAnyoneElseWould();
        }

Specifically, he shows an orders-of-magnitude chart, each point accompanied by a picture of a car presented at that magnitude of occurrence. At one extreme is "car" as they appear with most common frequency (in front of you, rear visible). At other extreme is "car" in an extremely unlikely occurrence (airborne, bottom view prominent). The system Tesla implements addresses such a broad range of information & occurrences.

Tesla has upwards of a million "full self driving" vehicles on the road now, all gathering video, all processing that data, all feeding what they learn & experience back to Tesla. The computers, even if not actually driving, are constantly observing situations, categorizing, and comparing to what humans do as a response. Extreme situations (crashes etc) are flagged and routed to Tesla for incident analysis; the AI is corrected & taught to handle the situations, and all vehicles updated accordingly in short order.

Upshot: Tesla DOES have a system for addressing, learning, encoding, and improving the "thousands of other" scenarios. By the time "full self driving" is unleashed, the Tesla AI system will already be trained to extremes by a million "trained, experienced, and attentive drivers"; insofar as some cases may be insufficiently covered, they will be statistically less common & dangerous than the baseline error rate of human drivers (distracted, drunk, debilitated, dumb).

As far as accountability, Tesla is working hard to build a decisive system & case that if bad happens, it is a statistical anomaly which is still better than the alternative of not using self-driving tech. There is a legal principle whereby one may violate the law when obeying it would cause greater harm; autonomous vehicles are close to crossing that line for the better.

And yes, great profit is due those who improve humanity via technology.

I'm curious how you square this with the fact that humans learn to drive with intermittent sensory input from only two cameras plus some auxiliary sensors. Clearly, humans can extrapolate from very limited input. Why can't Tesla demonstrate object permanence after years of development?

Ehm a recent Tesla has very powerful specialized hardware, developed in-house, which is much more powerful than a commodity home PC with expensive GPUs. You might want to do some basic research before you make such claims...

> The system isn't AI based... It's currently based on static programming

A large neural network is used to make many of the decisions, as well as to run the perception of the sensors/cameras. Unclear what you mean by "AI", but neural networks are usually covered in the "AI" term by researchers and engineers in this field.

> may never be flawlessness enough to make error free updates

It seems that you are new in this argument, because this point has been rebutted so many times in the past, but here goes: it does not have to be flawless, it just has to statistically cause fewer accidents per kilometer/year than what human drivers cause in a similar situation (which is already non-zero, and in some countries actually quite high).

Even though it logically makes sense, there are some nuances to it, most prominent of which is: When human drivers cause accidents, they are held responsible by the legal system. Who's responsible when your car made the decision? Is it Tesla? Is it the driver? Society is probably not going to accept a small improvement over humans while all the legal burden goes up in the air. It may demand a much higher improvement to compensate.

Any time a Tesla is involved in an accident, it seems like the company is more than happy to throw out reams of log data "proving" that it isn't their fault. But yet at the same time they maintain marketing material claiming their "auto pilot" feature is (or will be) so awesome that the human driver is only there to make the lawyers happy.

Yes, but they need a process in place to insure that that is true, and a process in place that insures that is true with each new update. They are remarkably cagey with statistics about AutoPilot.

Elon claims that Autopilot is currently much safer than human driving, yet the only statistics released are biased comparisons between Autopilot miles, which are almost exclusively on highways, and general auto statistics (where crashes occur most frequently off highways). If Elon really wanted to show the software effectiveness of current Autopilot, he could release the crash statistics of customers who purchased Autopilot and customers who did not, as many people have requested of him. He has thus far refused to.

I was referring to AI that operates independently of a network connection. There are multiple scenarios in which a network connection can become unavailable.

I'm not here to disparage Tesla, I really don't care what company creates self driving cars. Most people are acting like Tesla are the only ones.

https://ww.electrek.co/2019/04/22/tesla-full-self-driving-co...

Says who?

The fact that you state this so confidently demonstrates a lack of understanding of both human nature and politics.

https://cleantechnica.com/2020/01/31/timestamped-guide-to-pa...

At this level, the car can act autonomously but requires the driver to be prepared to take control at a moment's notice.[103][104] HW1 is suitable only on limited-access highways, and sometimes will fail to detect lane markings and disengage itself. In urban driving the system will not read traffic signals or obey stop signs. This system also does not detect pedestrians or cyclists,[105] and while AP1 detects motorcycles,[106] there has been two instances of AP rear-ending motorcycles.[107]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot#Hardware_3

We have to be able to admit that we aren't ready to launch thousands of these cars out on streets at this point. They have NOT been perfect.

There are tons of issues beyond just the quality of the AI. Software development and updates, vehicle maintenance, planned obsolescence of models, Legality, ethics, ownership... tons of other issues not hashed out. The combination of all of those issues makes autonomous vehicles near impossible any time soon, unless we ALL want to give up our right to own personal property and submit our safety to being test subjects. I'm not willing to do that at this point as a development manager myself.

the OP is wrong though in somehow classifying this as 'not AI'. Just because ML has become an important part of the equation doesn't mean we have thrown control theory and logical constraints out of the window.

If a company's test cycles were good enough to warrant reliability and safety promises, the window on the CyberTruck would have never broken.... This is how companies work, they over promise and under-deliver, this time it affects everyone's safety, including safety of those who don't buy them.

I'm not saying the strides aren't impressive, I'm saying I wouldn't feel safe having this experimental technology forced upon me knowing the potential for historically complex human factors.