I'm not the person you're replying to, but in our company we edit them in the UI but check the results into source control (so that we can re-deploy the dashboards consistently). I imagine for more complicated dashboards you could get stuck editing them manually, and it's probably the kind of thing where once you do it one time, you're stuck doing it for the rest of time.
Presumption of consent in the context of organ donation is a very complex topic[1]. Amazon stealing your network is not a profound moral quandary, and comparing the two as level ground is either an indication of lack of comprehension or intentionally being a bad faith contributor to the argument. Either way it's not a helpful avenue of debate.
Aluminum already burns up on re-entry though. The only things that typically make it through are high melting point materials (like titanium and carbon), or low ballistic coefficient objects (like spent rocket stages).
Related to this (though maybe not directly applicable), in certain scenarios there is a difference between what can be reliably detected vs tracked. For example, in the context of debris orbiting the earth, our radars can take LEO census measurements down to 3-4mm, even though we can only reliably track things on the ~10cm size range.
We can therefore semi-confidently say we know how many 1cm objects there are out there, even if we can’t predict the trajectory of any single one. (Similar to atoms, really)
You hit the nail on the head. People often jump to reactions without looking at bigger picture.
It is entirely likely that Uber engineers evaluated this scenario, and (correctly) decided that it was safer overall to turn off reactionary breaking - and have that function performed by a human in the driver seat. If they hadn't, these cars might instead have been brake-checking people at 100x the rate.
It's easy to say things like "Uber should have waited until better safety features were available", such as the eye tracking suggestions mentioned elsewhere in this thread. But features like that take time - especially if they're development-only features that would have no place in the final product. Every additional safety feature pushes FSD deployment back.
Globally, 1.25 million people die from car accidents annually. That's over 3,000 people per day. For every day that you delay mass adoption of FSD, you are accruing massive amounts of fatalities that could have been avoided.
FSD does not have to be perfect, it's development will cost innocent lives - but if you're optimizing for minimal loss of life, it's the correct thing to do. Reactionary policies do the opposite of what you intend them to do - they cost more lives in the long run.
Uber was nowhere near ready for live tests. It's that simple. Relying on human intervention for split-second decisions where no actions are necessary for long stretches of time is pure insanity.
This accident alone demonstrates just how flawed the system is. This wasn't even an emergency situation to start.
>Relying on human intervention for split-second decisions where no actions are necessary for long stretches of time is pure insanity.
This is literally how all human driving works right now.
Seriously, look around at other drivers while you're on a freeway or interstate sometime.
They're not driving, they're singing along with the radio, or shaving, or putting on makeup, or sending text messages.
They're not Luftwaffe aces with eagle eyes and steely nerves monitoring the fuel mix and oil pressure while scanning the skies for the silvery glint of the sun off the wings of a P-51 that may herald their last few moments on earth. They're bored people doing their boring commute and even when they have their hands on the wheel they're not really paying attention.
They still require some attention all the time. A sense of responsibility and for all our faults we are att least selective about when we aren't paying attention.
Yes, humans suck. But that's still
orders of magnitudes better than uber.
A self-driving car is ready for live testing under the same conditions in which it could pass a driver's test, which is the minimum standard for anyone to be allowed to drive legally on public roads.
My road test consisted of driving out of a dead mall parking lot (careful to obey the posted 15 MPH speed limit -- this is actually the hardest part of the test!) turn right onto a street, turn left onto a residential cul-de-sac, make a three-point-turn, and return to the mall parking lot.
Globally 1.25 million people die from car accidents annually, but a vanishingly tiny proportion of them would have been saved by the proprietary tech of a taxi company that doesn't even operate in many of their regions, even assuming the technology is ultimately capable of delivering a net improvement on commercial driver fatal accident rates.
Uber isn't a philanthropic research endeavour, and it can't rationalise killing people based on lives it couldn't or wouldn't have saved in the event of its technology actually working. The reason they put tech that reportedly hit things every 15k miles and had a near miss every 100 miles on the road as soon as possible has nothing to do with optimizing for minimal loss of life and everything to do with optimizing for a unicorn valuation.
Which weights off different peoples lives.
I dont see how developing a technology factoring in unrelated people getting killed could ever get past a ethics board. Especially if the victims are unrelated to the technology to start with and didnt volunteer to be test subjects.
People getting killed by drunk drivers didn't volunteer for it either. It doesn't matter how you spin it, the metric that matters (there is nuance, but put bluntly) is "How many innocent lives are lost in traffic related accidents from now until [year X]?".
If, given two scenarios:
1. We develop FSD very carefully. 0 lives are lost during FSD development. Ten million lives are lost by the time that FSD sees 100% adoption.
2. We develop FSD less carefully. 100,000 lives are lost during FSD development due to suboptimal performance before it is perfected. Five million lives are lost due to human drivers by the time FSD sees 100% adoption.
Would you really choose the former option? If your ethics board refuses option 2 in favor of option 1, it is they that are mistaken.
> 2. We develop FSD less carefully. 100,000 lives are lost during FSD development due to suboptimal performance before it is perfected. Five million lives are lost due to human drivers by the time FSD sees 100% adoption.
How can you know the future in this case, I would not believe Tesla/Uber (the others) predictions , "trust us, let us kill 1 million people in the next 10 years but after that the number will go down to 100, trust us, we software developers are very reliable at predicting things and our mathematical skill are so great we can be sure even when we use NN that are unpredictable. And if we fail then the next startup will appear, promise the same thing and you have no choice then to give them also a check for 1 million lives to not discriminate between startups.
The difficulty is, you don't know the 100 thousand number is lower than the 10-5 million number in advance. An estimate can be made, but humans have a
not unreasonable status quo bias in case like that. Come to think of it, status quo bias on risk is the opposite of the planning fallacy.
That is, without proof the new way will be safer in future by a specific proportion, how many excess deaths can the ethics committee sign off?
(You can make a similar, better founded argument for mass train transit. It is about 10 times safer than driving per passenger mile. So, reductions in safety that moves people from car commuting to train commuting (I imagine safety is expensive and cheaper transit would be more popular) might be worth it. No-one seems to advocate them though.)
>People getting killed by drunk drivers didn't volunteer for it either.
Its not a numbers game. Those are likely two different sets of people. You are saving some people by calculating in, that others get killed instead. It is different to for example, using an experimental treatment option on terminal patients. That would be, saving some of the dying patients but some might die regardless. The scenario is much more similar to the trolley problems cousin the transplant problem. Having someone else, uninvolved killed to save a larger group of people.
Seeing as the automatic emergency breaks were disabled, it seems the product wasnt good enough to detect false positives and was rushed by cutting the safety measure, accepting that putting it in live traffic the car would likely kill people unrelated to the research. It was a trade off between slower development and killing people.
I dont think you will find any ethics board that will green light you killing uninvolved people to save how ever many people. Of those i can think of who did that, quite a few ended up being wanted for crimes against humanity. We have ethics boards for a reason. Without them the ends can quickly justify the means.
I study orbital debris for a living - I'd like to assure you that you don't need to feel too worried about that. Orbital debris is generally consolidated in very thin altitude bands. Rockets on an escape trajectory spend very little time in these shells, only in passing. Compare that to satellites with lifetimes of 15 years.
Niel's statement is analog to saying "The LHC could create a black hole that kills us all". Yeah... I guess on some theoretical level it's possible... but it's extremely unlikely. Same concept applies here. I'm quite disappointed in him saying "There's a very good chance", because that is far from true.
Here is the clip from when they start speaking about the space junk. My memory did not quite remember the exact words Neil used so what I wrote was not entirely accurate. Apologies.
True enough, but it's going an awful lot faster since it's aimed for orbital trajectory to inject the 2nd stage. So, it has tremendous horizontal velocity. Shepard, by comparison, just goes straight up (vertical only), so it's total velocity is far lower.
Falcon is in a totally different class of difficulty and complexity. I mean, the grid fins caught on fire and began to melt. That gives you a good idea of what sort of forces are involved in the descent.
Stage I is capable of reaching orbit with a small payload, adding stage 2 dramatically increases how much mass you get to orbit. However, stage I is expencive enough they are not going to waste one without an upper stage.
