Musk admits it, and more tech news today

So here we are. The duality of Elon Musk that we know and love / dislike is ubiquitous in Tesla and Musk’s insistence that its prestigious electric vehicles will be fully self-driving.

• You have to love your trust in technology, the promise of a better future where cars really drive themselves
• At the very least, one has to be extremely skeptical of any promise made with the technology we have today.

The problem is always that the real world is strange. Roads are never normal. Add in weather, pedestrians, animals, other drivers, signs and signals, each of which could be crazier than the other, and it’s quite a tough challenge.

• But Musk has always promised more than we have: Musk had previously said that its cars would be completely self-driving by 2018. He was wrong in 2015 and said in 2016: “I really think autonomous driving is a problem that has been solved”. . ”
• In 2016 he was gone for at least “two years”, in 2017 he insisted that all the hardware and data acquisition was available, it was just a software problem.
• The amazing “Robotax” idea was slated for 2020, but as usual, Musk blamed regulators.
• Now is 2021.
• In the elapsed time, many people have crashed or had problems because when Tesla’s autopilot program for assisted driving is activated it can lull you into a false sense of security. It cannot deal with edge cases, and as constantly active @greentheonly will still appear on Twitter, strange things happen in normal situations.
• The evidence compared to Musk’s promise is pretty one-sided.
• At this point, you either have to simply accept that maybe, just maybe, old Musky is a serial liar / marketer / deluded genius, depending on your point of view.
• Or, less egregiously, but still compellingly wrong, he really believes seriously and completely in himself, his team and his cars.
• And being generous, it’s not that Musk was the only one who was extremely hopeful about autonomous driving: Lyft, GM, Toyota, and many more said they would try for 2020 or 2021.
• Although most people start thinking about their thoughts with hopes, expectations and words like, “I would be quite surprised if it hadn’t happened” [2020]“Before going back as the problem turned out to be expensive and difficult.

Musk is only now admitting:

• In response to a light-hearted tweet poking fun at Musk, he promises Tesla’s FSD beta will be released in “two weeks”. he tweeted:
• “Haha, FSD 9 Beta will be shipping soon, I swear! Generalized autonomous driving is a difficult problem as it requires solving much of the real world AI. Didn’t think it would be so difficult, but the difficulty is obvious in retrospect. Nothing has more degrees of freedom than reality. “
• … by no means does Musk only now realize that self-driving cars are a “tough problem”. The real AI is nowhere near functional; a generation away, if at all.
• But admitting it now is … interesting.
• The broad sector hopes for competence by 2025(Blümberg), and potentially a significant proportion of self-drive vehicles by 2030.
• After all, Waymo has robotaxis on suburban streets, but sometimes with considerable problems.
• That’s fine, because Waymo lowers expectations and just drives around vehicles that a fleet of sensors can’t buy, burning billions of VC cash in the process. If it works, these ambitious VC funds will be worth times of the cost.
• The point of Elon Musk’s promise is that he knows how valuable this will be. It is “only” this tiny little software “problem” that he has to solve.

• One aerospace engineer summed up some of the answers, including stating that it doesn’t matter what type of aircraft we’re really talking about, from a 747 to a 777, it’s the same type of fuselage.
• It’s pretty open: “Most impacts will be nose first. If you have a few hundred people and 2/3 of an airplane as your crumple zone, the chances of dying are much lower. Of the remaining crashes, the stern usually hits first, which is why the spike is all the way back. Since the tail appears LESS, the weighting is more backwards. “
• For us passengers this means: people in first class get on and off faster, there is less noise, a little quieter and so on. But it’s the row or two from the very back that may have to fight smoke monsters (Youtube).

Catch yourself next week

Tristan Rayner, Managing Editor