YouTuber Mark Rober has kicked the hornet's nest with his latest video. But are Tesla fanboys right mistakes were made?
In the piece — titled "Can You Fool a Self Driving Car?" — Rober found that a Tesla car on Autopilot was fooled by a Wile E. Coyote-style wall painted to look like the road ahead of it, with the electric vehicle plowing right through it instead of stopping.
The footage was damning enough, with slow-motion clips showing the car not only crashing through the styrofoam wall but also a mannequin of a child. The Tesla was also fooled by simulated rain and fog.
For the record, I do want the bar for self-driving safety to be high. I also want human drivers to be better... Because even not-entirely-safe self-driving cars may still be safer than humans at a certain point.
Right, those were the failures that really matter, and Rober included the looney tunes wall to get people sharing and talking about it. A scene painted on wall is a contrived edge case, but pedestrians/obstacles in weather involving precipitation is common.
Have you ever seen examples of how the features that ai picks out to identify objects isn't really the same as what we pick out? So you can generate images that look unrecognizeable to people but have clearly identifiable features to ai. It would be interesting to see someone play around with that concept for interesting ways to fool tesla's ai. Like could you make a banner that looks like a barricade to people, but the cars think looks like open road?