Re:Tesla's “full self driving” beta is potentially dangerous
by jandrese on Friday March 19, 2021 @09:24PM
(#26519928)
The devil is always in the details.
Problems that are conceptually simple can still be very complex once all of the details are added. Theoretically landing a rocket is a simple matter of turning it into a giant model aircraft and doing the math on how much fuel you need to reserve. Re-lighting an engine is conceptually easy too. In practice we know this is a huge accomplishment.
Self driving is a problem that starts out hard. Think about how you get a computer to recognize other objects, especially other cars, based on it's fairly limited set of sensor inputs. Once you add in the details, like dealing with unexpected road conditions, detecting vehicles that are partially invisible to your sensors, etc... and it's hard to see a future where the technology is viable, at least in the near term. All computer vision stuff currently has a sizeable false positive/negative error rate that you just have to accept. But on the road a false negative or false positive can be fatal.
Problems that are conceptually simple can still be very complex once all of the details are added. Theoretically landing a rocket is a simple matter of turning it into a giant model aircraft and doing the math on how much fuel you need to reserve. Re-lighting an engine is conceptually easy too. In practice we know this is a huge accomplishment.
Self driving is a problem that starts out hard. Think about how you get a computer to recognize other objects, especially other cars, based on it's fairly limited set of sensor inputs. Once you add in the details, like dealing with unexpected road conditions, detecting vehicles that are partially invisible to your sensors, etc... and it's hard to see a future where the technology is viable, at least in the near term. All computer vision stuff currently has a sizeable false positive/negative error rate that you just have to accept. But on the road a false negative or false positive can be fatal.