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Me thinks the Feds are about to start putting Elon in check a bit..

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She does not.

The OTHER person, who is not her, who is nominated to actually head the agency, does.

You're confusing 2 different people nominated for 2 different jobs (though at the same agency)
Ok - I reread the original link.


So - there is Steven Cliff who is going to be the nominee to head NHTSA. He will require confirmation.

And "professor Missy Cummings is being named a new senior adviser for safety at NHTSA". She won't need a confirmation.

BUT - during Cliff's confirmation - facts about one of his senior advisors can be brought up and debated. This will force him to either defend her or throw her under the bus to secure nomination. Long shot - but worth a try.
 
BUT - during Cliff's confirmation - facts about one of his senior advisors can be brought up and debated. This will force him to either defend her or throw her under the bus to secure nomination. Long shot - but worth a try.

Since Cliff didn't "nominate" her and has never (AFAIK) worked with her up to this point I don't see how that'd do much.

"I'm sorry senator I can't comment on an individual I have no personal experience with and whose appointment I was not part of"
 
Since Cliff didn't "nominate" her and has never (AFAIK) worked with her up to this point I don't see how that'd do much.

"I'm sorry senator I can't comment on an individual I have no personal experience with and whose appointment I was not part of"
Ofcourse he can try to dodge - but nothing stops senators from reading her tweets and asking him to comment on the tweets.

"Would you be comfortable having as senior advisor who is clearly biased against a great American company" ?
 
Ofcourse he can try to dodge - but nothing stops senators from reading her tweets and asking him to comment on the tweets.

"Would you be comfortable having as senior advisor who is clearly biased against a great American company" ?



You expect the same senate currently looking at passing an EV tax credit that specifically under-benefits Tesla compared to Union companies to ask those questions?

I admire your optimism.
 
So interesting to see the rich TSLA owners, people that have made millions on TSLA, try to cancel a professor in machine-human interaction for being critical to how Tesla designed the user interface for autopilot. I think the tweet below is interesting.

Lots of people are concerned that what’s behind the curtain is about to be revealed. That “Full Self Driving”? Robotaxi by end of 2019? That “nyc to la with no intervention by end of 2020”? Are all…to be quite honest…blatant lies.

If FSD did even 1/2 of what Elon repeatedly proclaimed? They would be zero issues right now with her role
 
Lots of people are concerned that what’s behind the curtain is about to be revealed. That “Full Self Driving”? Robotaxi by end of 2019? That “nyc to la with no intervention by end of 2020”? Are all…to be quite honest…blatant lies.

If FSD did even 1/2 of what Elon repeatedly proclaimed? They would be zero issues right now with her role
Yes, it is a thin line between brilliant innovation and being a Theranos.
 
This bunker mentality that some folks in the Tesla community have is not all that helpful: "you are either with us or against us" seldom works in the real world. She has tweets and comments that are critical of Tesla and FSD UI and she has tweets and comments that are complementary of the company and that line up with things Elon says around things like Lidar or the handling of recalls. She responded to Elon's tweet with an offer to talk and I hope he takes her up on it.
 
Because she is biased and a friend of TSLAQ.

She actually follows people like Montana Sceptic.

Who cares? It's an advisory role. She'll have no decision-making power at NHTSA.

And what does her twitter activity have anything to do with how she'll advise on AP, FSD, & autonomous driving?

This freakout seems over the top. If FSD and AP are as safe as advertised, what does it matter?
 
The concept that following someone on twitter means you automatically support or believe in them, is absurd.

I followed our prior president on twitter. Not because I supported him but because I enjoyed it due to being entertained on a regular basis by the absurdity (including routine misspellings and grammatical errors) coming from the account
 
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Missy: "Self driving without a complete rethink of reasoning under uncertainty" and (essentially) LIDAR sucks.

Notably absent in this thread? Someone who is the biggest fanboi of LIDAR.

As to the first quote from Missy, I've said this for a long time: until a car can reliably predict what unreliable biological units will do, truly autonomous vehicles cannot coexist with human driven vehicles.

A V2V network, once all vehicles are autonomous, mitigates this problem but any significant human-driven vehicle percentage will result in AVs colliding with human driven vehicles or vice versa.
 
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Sandy Munro not happy.
This melodrama is ridiculous. I'm sure his video will be a well reasoned discussion about the safety of automation and how we can ensure that systems deployed to the public will improve road safety.

Here's a good summary of Cumming's thinking:
MISSY CUMMINGS: Yes. I got into the boredom research when I was doing a lot of work for the military in their drone programs, and we just saw how operators would just be sitting for hours bored out of their minds and looking for anything to do to stave off the boredom. People can be in literal physical and mental pain when they are exposed to long boredom, vigilance, and monotonous tasking. That's what motivated me to get in there.

But then what I recognized is that the lessons learned in the driving world we are starting to see—and this has been true historically. Aviation is the first to introduce automation, and we see all these problems, and then they all eventually a few years later show up in the automotive world. You can see this in spades in all the Tesla crashes.

I am a big fan of Tesla. I like Teslas, except I am not a big fan of full-self-driving or autopilot because the systems give you the impression that they are more capable than they are, and what we know from years and years of aviation automation research is that automation just has to be good enough. It doesn't have to be great. It doesn't even have to be near perfect, but as soon as automation looks like autonomy has some competence and can do a job a little bit, humans have a tendency to get bored very quickly and then give up legitimate authority to automated systems. So we are seeing people crash.

It's almost like a day doesn't go by where I don't get somebody tagging me on Twitter that there has been some new Tesla crash where a person was on autopilot and crashed into the rear end of a fire truck, police car, or the broadside of another truck. Some have been lethal, and some people have lived through them. We have to recognize that this babysitting of automation is a problem in the aviation world, and I do know firsthand that, because the environments are so boring, many of my peers that I flew with in the military—actually I think every man and woman to a T has told me that they wish that they had one what I had done, which is move into academia, because they find that the flying of aircraft can be so boring and tedious.

We've got highly trained people who at least have somebody else in a cockpit to keep them entertained. In cars we don't have that, and people have their cellphones next to them, and they have the neuromuscular lag problem that we talked about before. So now it's like the perfect storm. People have pretty good automation but not perfect, they're bored, their cellphones are there, and "I just need to look at my phone for a little bit," and then something bad happens and I just cannot respond in time.

Boredom is important in autonomous systems because we have to recognize if we don't do something about the way we're designing the job and giving people meaningful work and meaningful activities in that job, that boredom is going to result and then bad things can happen once people are bored.
Personally I think that FSD Beta is so bad that automation complacency isn't an issue.
I am also very skeptical of Tesla’s plan to create a more and more capable automation system used by untrained customers. I think if they want to do this on public roads the onus is on them to prove that it is safe. Does that also make me biased against Tesla?