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Tesla autopilot driver 'was speeding' moments before death – prelim report

captain_solo

Having recently been engaged in teaching 2 children to drive, I think the problem is that people think these driver assist systems are as good if not better than a human driver. When someone is first learning to drive they are having to do a serious amount of conscious multitasking figuring out how to actually control the vehicle and maintain its attitude and speed correctly, respond to traffic signals and keep an eye on other vehicles. The computer systems in modern vehicles are very good at helping with this part of driving and cars have for some time been taking on this role slowly. Even my several years old car has a drive by wire acclerator pedal that takes the input from the driver into consideration with a number of other factors to determine throttle position for example.

Once you have been driving for some time, the operation of the systems to keep the vehicle in its lane and appropriate speed envelope, obeying signals, and monitoring other vehicles around you is basically an automatic reflexive series of actions, and your higher brain functions (provided you have them...) are spent evaluating the driving environment for more subtle and distant cues. You are assimilating large amounts of input and discerning very nuanced responses at a longer range and figuring out "what" to do, instead of "how" to do it. At this point it should be obvious that this part of the driving process is not able to be reliably passed off to what is not really even a real AI, but more of an algorithmic approach that basically plays the odds and tries to come up with the best guess at how to respond to a given stimulus. This does not get you to 100% autonomy, it may never get there for all driving situations unless roadways are designed to eliminate the edge cases, and you never let a human operate a vehicle completely manually alongside the autoautos. For the most part the traditional car companies are not dragging their feet on this, they just know more about how much testing and engineering work it takes to put a huge feature change into a vehicle and ensure that is it safe in all varieties of driving situations. This is something the Silicon Valley, having in large part not enough experience building comprehensive systems for life-critical applications with complex human factors thinks should be easy if you throw enough silicon and sensors at it. Its about the real human intelligence that can't yet be matched by an algorithm - this is in effect what happened in this case, the car did what it does, but was unable to respond properly to an unforseen and perhaps extremely rare edge case.

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