Great piece :)
The whole liability issue is so fraught. Will all Teslas run with the same priorities or will the owner of the vehicle be able to set them?
Maybe a guy who owns a fleet used for deliveries, would set the FSD priorities heavily weighted toward preserving pedestrian safety at the expense of driver safety. Or the other way around, depending on which of his insurances (employee injury, or public liability) offers the least onerous terms.
If Elon decides to keep all vehicles with the same priority weightings, does that leave the door open for a competitor to offer different vehicles with different priorities, or at least some way for the owner to adjust them? Either way, we're in for a crazy time.
Thank you!
I think the liability piece could potentially be infinite... Waymo has been going from city to city - so I think they're literally coding in road scenarios and have Lidar and other sensors. Tesla just has cameras and relies on massive data sets... so if a stop sign has been graffitied and an automated vehicle doesn't recognize it as a stop sign is that the manufacturers fault or the councils fault? If a Waymo still recognizes it as a stop sign (because they've coded it in) but Tesla doesn't - does that change the liability?
I honestly hadn't considered priority settings but you're absolutely right. There's already articles about people sticking their kids alone in automated taxis, they'd probably want passenger safety prioritized over pedestrian safety, it's wild to think about.
I'm all for automated vehicles, but I do think you'd ideally want all vehicles automated (which I'm not sure I can quite see happening) - especially if all vehicles could communicate with each other, it could be really efficient and safe - but the mix of human and automated vehicles sharing the roads does seem the most chaotic scenario.
I haven't looked closely at the Hivemapper project (you buy a camera from them, record your drives and upload the footage for them). Seems if a sign is vandalised now but clearly said 'STOP' a week ago, it would already be on the map.
I read a piece recently suggesting automated cars be taken over by each intersection. The intersection then appoints the car a slot, and slows it down or speeds it up, to keep it in it's own slot and avoid collisions. Imagine that. No traffic lights. I assume that'd require 100% of cars to be automated.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, that's cool... I didn't know about Hivemapper, that's a great project. I thought Tesla's neural net basically compared millions of images to what the vehicle is seeing right now to help it figure out the appropriate action, but checking historical data like what Hivemapper provides seems extremely smart too - it might all come down to processing power.
I really think 100% automated cars could be an absolute dream of efficiency - I hope someone is working on standards that all automated auto manufacturers could follow to try and get that region-wide integration.
The friction between human and AI drivers is probably insurmountable. I expect we'll see flying stuff piloted by AI and other vehicles driven by people.