[wnorris]

This is a step in their progression toward self driving. No one should expect this to be flawless from the start, similar to Waymo's self driving work.

Tesla getting this out now should allow for the feature to begin improving at a quicker pace due to more data.

A lot of naysayers will certainly harp on the number of wonky videos to hit the web, but this will quickly decrease once the newness of the feature wears off and improves.

[CPLX]

It’s worth noting that many of us consider self driving to he essentially analogous to full AI in its complexity and difficulty, and thus believe that we are literally nowhere near anything that fits this description.

No amount of “data” is going to solve the problem. Driving a car requires making a full mental model of the immediate world you’re in and creating accurate predictions of what everything else in that world is about to do, many of those things being sentient beings with whom you’re communicating through your own actions.

Nothing that Tesla is doing is getting much closer to that. The next major landmark on this timeline is a team successfully passing the Turing test, not a car moving across a parking lot.

If you share that opinion, that makes the Tesla a lethal toy.

[bdamm]

What’s a “full mental model of the immediate world”? I’d argue that nobody has anything approaching “full”. You have “enough to get by” and that’s all computers need as well. This isn’t a full sentient AI, it’s just sensing the world and navigating a path, at an industrial scale.

[nyxtom]

You could also argue that humans create such models in a way that is automated in confidence of predictability and familiarity. Familiarity and predictability being a byproduct of how the human chooses to make certain actions and judgements routine. Given this, humans exhibit quite a lot of overconfidence when it comes to driving: see phone use. Over time a human will make many more mistakes that any amount of paying attention would of prevented them.

[kec]

If it isn’t fully functional it shouldn’t be in a consumer product which is capable of killing people when things go wrong.