Would you ride in Elon's robotaxi

[clyde]

Originally Posted by rumatt

I'm not sure if you misunderstood what I was saying, or you're just being difficult.

On the off chance that it's the former, I'll clarify one more time. I believe it's safe to use "Because I'm still 'driving' and I can override it any time I don't like what it is doing."

But you're a smart guy and I know you know exactly what I'm arguing. So unfortunately, I'm pretty sure it's the latter.

Honestly, I did not think that was an answer to "what convinced you to turn over your responsibilities to the car?" but okay. In that case, I guess my question wasn't specific enough and that's my bad.

To borrow from your cruise control analogy, what makes you believe you will be able to override it any time you don't like what it's doing? Because Musk tells you you can? But, whatever. You've made it clear where you are.

On to cruise control...

Traditional cruise control exists to do one thing: maintain a set vehicle speed. Full stop. Its inventor was a blind guy who did not like how his lawyer was jerky on the gas for no apparent reason. He wanted his lawyer to have an easier time holding a constant speed. (Google "Teetor cruise control" for a more nuanced version.)

Autopilot exists to do many things such as choose and then adjust vehicle speed, position, and heading as it sees fit on a continuous basis. It exists, according to its chief proponent and his company to be a means to an end; that of fully autonomous driving.

Traditional cruise control has two potential points of failure: runaway acceleration and an inability to disengage that could create a need for the driver to recognize the failure condition and take significant corrective action, likely with significant time afforded, to avoid catastrophic results.

Autopilot has, um, I have no idea how many potential points of failure, but I'd wager "a fuckton" (not sure if SAE or metric) covers it. I suppose they all boil down to improperly responding to stimulus (taking action where none was necessary, taking the wrong action, or taking no action at all when it should have) with no time for the driver to recognize and respond before catastrophic results.

If traditional cruise control works as designed, it will drive a vehicle into something unless the vehicle runs out of fuel and coasts to a stop first.

If Autopilot works as designed, it can drive you where you want to go or tell you to take over if it thinks it can’t.

Successful (let me know if we need to define “successful”) use of traditional cruise control requires the driver must make continuous manual steering inputs, manually apply the brakes to reduce speed, and therefore also requires an attentive driver.

Successful use of Autopilot requires the driver to make physical contact with the steering wheel once every 1-5 minutes depending on environment and speed (most recent info I found, but perhaps not up to date? https://electrek.co/2018/06/11/tesla...g-hands-wheel/ ) while the driver does whatever else that may or may not include paying attention to what a driver normally pays attention to.

If Autopilot doesn’t belong in a conversation about full autonomous driving, I completely fail to see how injecting traditional cruise control fixes that. Traditional cruise control is barely Level 1 and Autopilot is Level 2 certainly, and arguably quasi-Level 3 (save for Tesla saying it’s not) and Level 3 is fully, if conditional, autonomous driving.

I don’t see how pressing cruise control as a comparison point to Autopilot it as you have will help you make your point. They exist to do totally different things and their regular operation have vastly different requirements.

But, you seem to see them as equals, I’ll play along to help things move along.

As for my own use of traditional cruise control…

I used cruise control for the first time in 1986. At that point, cruise control had been available on production cars for nearly 30 years. My assumption today, perhaps faulty, is that if there were significant issues with the safety of cruise control systems by 1986, they would have been identified and addressed through court cases and/or regulation due to the volume of time and use of the system (see JST's tort post up thread) in nearly all possible environments by people in nearly all or nearly all parts of American (and many non-American) society. At the time, I doubt I gave its safety more than a passing thought if that much.

In those first few years of driving, I suspect that almost every time I used cruise control, I presented less of a risk to myself and others compared to the times I was not using cruise control given how I often drove back then.

“Almost every time.”

A time that doesn't qualify was in 1988. I had the cruise control set while traveling southbound on the NY Thruway (I-87) in Saugerties, NY, fell asleep, drifted through the right shoulder, woke up, overcorrected, and spun through the Number 2 and Number 1 lanes into the median before crashing into the guardrail separating me from northbound traffic. There are many ways that could have turned out so much worse than it did that I can't count them all. No one got hurt. Only my car and a couple reflector posts and sections of guardrail owned by New York were damaged.

Since then, there’s been another 30+ years of cruise control use. I’m guessing significantly more use than the previous 30 years with cruise control making a nearly universal switch from the option sheet to standard equipment by the early 1990s. More importantly, over the past 30 years there has been an ever increasing portion of the driving segment of society that has never known the absence of cruise control. It’s just been there and part of the regular driver environment no matter what car one may be sitting in with the only difference being where the buttons are.

This compares to the early cruise control using population that was probably of a higher income and education level with some years of previous driving experience. That’s not unlike the current Autopilot using population. On the other hand, many things related to safety and risk tolerance or perceptions of acceptable risk are different today than they were in the early days of cruise control. Back then, everyone smoked, we used leaded gas, scoffed at helmets, and barely tolerated seat belts being present in our cars. Even when we knew better, we acted like we didn’t. I’m probably digressing.

In 60ish years of traditional cruise control use, documented failures of the system to operate as designed and intended (dismissing cases where it won’t engage) are so rare it is hard to find any cases at all. Society, particularly American, has also become so much more litigious in the past 30ish years that even if there was a semi-solid reason to argue against the safety of traditional cruise control hadn’t been explored or tested by the late 1980s, it’s all but inconceivable that it would not have been tested by now—and been successful if even dubiously meritorious.

So, today, why do I believe using traditional cruise control is safe to use? 60 years of demonstrated global use of safe cruise control operation.