Tesla FSD can barely handle a balmy 70 degree day, so I think you'd be disappointed.
I might biased because I work on actual self-driving efforts, but nothing at all about Tesla has ever indicated they were serious about solving self driving in any capacity.
The day that Elon proclaimed they already had the sensor suite decided was the day that they openly admitted this was fraud.
My opinion doesn’t matter, but your last point resonates with me because this struck me as totally bizarre too.
I don’t work in sensing let alone using AI with sensing data, but I’m around it a lot and my second-hand knowledge kind of set off some red flags.
In remote sensing for landscape architecture, hydrography, and other similar fields (making sense of static things where no one is at risk of dying immediately, and humans review the data), the care and knowledge that goes into choosing sensor suites and processing the data properly is huge. Yet Tesla comes out saying “we’ve got some mediocre cameras and we’re gonna run with it!”
Seriously? What? I get that it’s a lot of cameras but making sense of 3d space isn’t trivial at all. It’s so bizarre.
Again, I know nothing, they know more than I do. The whole thing just doesn’t sit right.
> Yet Tesla comes out saying “we’ve got some mediocre cameras and we’re gonna run with it!”
To be fair, humans managed to solve self-driving with some mediocre cameras, some crappy microphones, and some unreliable force-feedback and chemical sensors, without (importantly) adding any new sensors to the hardware between start-of-project and successful full driving. So it's not a priori implausible that "use whatever sensors we have now, and just learn to compensate for any deficiencies in software", could work, since our only preexisting examples of full-self-driving (humans) essentially do that.
It's just kind of stupid to hobble youself that way when you don't have to.
The difference here is that our “cameras” are processed in ways we really don’t understand and at speeds we can’t seem to compete with yet (at least not with the quality of processing we have, so far).
Our sight is also enhanced by our hearing or familiarity with certain driving situations and, in most cases, familiarity with certain places we drive frequently.
If we isolated our eyes from our other senses I have a feeling we might actually be much worse at detecting things around us or making sense of what we’re seeing.
Our senses like road feel can even help us use our eyes in anticipation of dangerous conditions like loose gravel or black ice.
I know machines can do this too, but ours works so well and so quickly; it’s hard to compare with what’s on the market at the moment.
Regardless, I think we agree on the final point. Such a strange way to limit a self driving car.
Unspoken knowledge is also not one of the 5 human senses.
FSD needs the human sense that seeing a stop sign on the freeway (sticking out of the back of a highway maintenance trailer) doesn't mean what a stop sign usually means - but that stopped highway trailer, with a person holding the same sign and looking at you means you should follow it.
Should you run into a pile of gravel to avoid a baby stroller? If a loose garbage can and a baby stroller appear on opposite sides of the road and both block your path, which one do you hit? A soccer ball coming out between parked cars probably has a kid following it...
The people who have died with FSD ran into problems like these. A human would see a transport truck cab, and the wheels on the other side of the road and infer that - even though it blends into the sky - that there's a trailer in between. One of the Tesla accidents was that the side of the trailer appeared the same color and location as the sky, so the Tesla didn't see it and went under the trailer at highway speeds. The driver wasn't paying attention and didn't make it.
Sensing packages will only get you so far, human intuition for new unexpected situations is impossible to get AI to learn - at least at this point.
Agree 100% but I wouldn’t call it intuition, but human understanding. We don’t just see stuff, we understand it. We understand so much context surrounding the things we see. We can predict the weight of an object by observing it’s motion in response to wind, essentially running a physics simulation, to know that that 4x8 sheet of styrofoam blowing in our lane poses no risk. Or that an empty cardboard box tumbling in the wind is actually empty based on it's motion.
We have an incredible level of understanding.
Jeez I even put myself in other drivers’ shoes/heads so as to predict their behavior. Their subtle cues in lane positioning, distraction, etc. they’re all incredibly telling if you can model human psychology.
Not to take away from your core point, but I wouldn't say the human sensory system is mediocre.
Your eyes are sensitive enough to see a candle flame at 2.6 km away. A rod can actually be stimulated by a single photon, but the brain squelches activation that small. The human ear is sensitive enough to hear a watch tick from about 20 feet away in a quiet room. That's pretty darn good.
Sure they do. They're those two spherical mostly-white-with-colored-circles-on-the-front things embedded in the upper half of their face. (They usually tend to call them "eyes" for some reason.) They're closed-circuit and wired pretty directly into the brain, so it's not like webcams or recording cameras where you can semi-easily get the data off somewhere else, and obviouly they're kind of wet and squishy and not-easily-electronics-compatible like most human components, but in terms of actual functionality, they're cameras.
Such as rain, fog, snow, construction work, tunnels, bridges, downtown intersections, bike lanes, etc...
I wouldn't expect it to handle rare phenomena such as hurricanes, hail storms, a collapsed bridge, etc...