Tesla is ordered to turn over Autopilot data to a federal safety agency

Re:Tesla is ordered to turn over Autopilot data to a federal... by jerf on Thursday September 02, 2021 @09:37AM (#28391816)

I, and many others, take the position that there really isn't any practical gradation between more-or-less conventional driving, maybe with light lane switching assistance or something, and full on "Level 5" autonomous driving, because the idea that human brains can watch something for hours at a time only to take instant, sub-second actions every few hours is an insane model of human cognition.

I don't disagree with the idea of having a gradient to measure our progress up to full autonomy, but I haven't seen much to say that we should deploy the intermediate stages. Until autonomy can be reasonably guaranteed at at least human levels of safety under the assumption of no human control, it really shouldn't be deployed. "But the human had 673 milliseconds to take control and avert the accident! It's their fault!" is simply not a reasonable defense.

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Re:Tesla is ordered to turn over Autopilot data to a federal... by joelwilliamson on Thursday September 02, 2021 @10:35AM (#28392594)

Shouldn't the objection be to anything less than Level 4, rather than Level 5? Level 4 requires that the vehicle can safely stop itself and wait for a human to take over when it is faced with a situation it can't handle.

(There's an argument that if you take away the routine parts of driving, humans won't be able to deal with anomalous situations, but that's a different argument than the attentiveness one.)

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Re:Tesla is ordered to turn over Autopilot data to a federal... by jerf on Thursday September 02, 2021 @10:48AM (#28392731)

If that is possible, yes. I'm not convinced it is possible to create an autonomous vehicle that only panics in situations where there is a safe pull-over, or, if such a vehicle exists, that it'll be considered "autonomous" when it can't go past 25 or 35 mph or something. There's plenty of driving situations that may be confusing where pulling over and stopping isn't possible.

(And, to be clear, I'm not asking for perfect safety, I'm asking for "human or better", and also understand that there may be some interesting fuzziness near the border where the two have different strengths and weakenesses but come out statistically the same. However, I don't feel like we're there yet.)

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