Not sure how to say it, but try to never do that going forward, please, for your sake and for the sake of the others who share the same road with you. Yes, driving "blind" for one second, maybe two seconds (even though it's uncomfortable for me at this point) from time to time is not the end of the world, particularly if you're driving straight and you had "scanned" the road in front of you beforehand, but driving while "trusting" in others will get you into accidents. Never drive faster than you can see.

So as an experiment, at 70 mph I put my face down on the gas tank: I could see the highway lines on either side, but literally nothing ahead. I wanted to see how long I could hold that position without freaking out. Answer: about twenty seconds.

This is far from the only experiment I did back then, I’m lucky to be alive.

For others left wondering what this meant, I think GP meant "I often drive with [the sun] in my eyes at dawn/dusk .."

This is still not 100% safe (especially in blind corners), but this is the minimum One should do.

And what? Be the lead car of the N-car pileup?

It's real easy to spit out idealized "never/always" type crap on the internet but meatspace is full of nuance and no rules of thumb can save you from having to make judgement calls.

I have driven on the motorway in heavy fog, and like everyone around me I slowed down, and there were no accidents.

Acting like an idiot because you think others will is not a good course of action, especially when you will cause issues to the majority who do not act like idiots.

I'm in the FSD beta and previously Tesla bounced the radar off the ground and was able to see a few car lengths ahead, vision only, not so much. The effect is when stuck in heavy traffic on surface streets FSD beta will think it should try to go around a lead car that is stopped, not knowing there is a long line of traffic ahead of the lead car. I don't see how they can overcome that issue with vision only, especially given current camera placement.

Could you do this with cameras? Possibly, but it would be a lot of cameras and a lot of mechanical parts—not ideal for a car.

Using more and better sensors is an attempt to compensate for the shallow mental model, so you'd have cars still being 'dumber' than human drivers, but if they're all-knowing, that doesn't matter quite as much.

This is a decent thread that has some visuals, some others have created 3d models demonstrating the blind spots the cameras have.

As far as Tesla goes, I disagree with their decision to remove sensors from their cars, however I also don't think Lidar, Radar, etc. would help all that much. Radar isn't high enough resolution for driving through dense fog, and Lidar doesn't work in fog. Driving in fog is just hard.

If anything, I think we've seen that computers are much better than humans at making decisions in an ever-expanding set of narrow contexts (eg.: chess, go, protein folding...). It's not so much a matter of "can a computer do it better", it's more a question of "when are we going to figure out how to break down the problem in a way that a computer can solve much better than a human".

But consider how a human or even a dog catches a ball. You can study physics and learn that a ball will follow a parabola when thrown and the the shape of parabola is determined by the velocity as it leaves the throwers hand. But none of that matters. You try and catch a ball. Miss a bunch of times. Practice. And then you get better at it. And then you can catch all manner of things coming at you at various velocities. You can unconsciously predict a ball's path accurately enough to catch it without even knowing any physics. Some people can even rely on their instincts.

This line of thought is moving goal posts, but I think even for people that have some understanding of what AI is, the current state of the art doesn't pass our intuition about all the things a human does to drive a car. And the sorts of mistakes that current self driving makes don't really seem better than a human.

The possibility is not in dispute. Billions of biological organisms do these things everyday.

But this is:

>It's pretty much how your brain solves these sorts of problems too, there's no magic to intuition or human decision-making.

Is it how the brain works?

My ball example isn't about it having a closed solution. If you throw a ball I can track it with my eyes and I know it's going to follow some path. If there is a gust of wind mid flight I can even attempt to make corrections on the fly. Someone with no notion of projectile motion can do this and never come up with the concept of projectile motion.

The "hardware" so to speak figures this out on it's own and the same "system" can be applied to infinitely many problems without prior knowledge and get results. This would be like showing a Tesla some chess games, and then the car realising, this is some sort of game, and then learning how to play or inventing something new to do with the pieces.

The results so far are really terrible compared to our intuition. We have Teslas that drive straight into road barriers and can't predict that a person might reappear after moving behind an obstruction.

This is even more goal post moving and I admit it's very unfair. But I'm not baby sitting a car.

(What is a mystery is the exact way things are wired up, but not the building blocks, and not the general organizational principles.)

Source: I did neuroanatomy in med school (but am not a doctor).

You don't think that's a lot of hand waving? Can you explain why the details wouldn't matter?

I don't want to mislead, there is an incredible amount of stuff we don't know... But we do understand more than most well-informed people think, even people in adjacent fields.

IMO, it's 16+ years of life experience that a computer doesn't get. Sure we train computers on what things likely are in pictures, and where they are on some sort of map. But that gives zero context into the 50,000 other things going on at any moment in a busy street.

I really wish transit was better. Even in cities that have what we call good transit, it is still bad enough to too many people drive. (Note, the above issues with human drivers apply to bus and tram drivers.)

there are plenty of cities with great transit, just not in the states

Even in cities you consider to have great transit there is room for improvement.