Autonomous Vehicle “Expert” Demonstrates Industry’s Ethical and Competency Issues
Dr. Lance Eliot just wrote an article where he clearly explains the dangers of L2/3 vehicles. Only he believes it is perfectly fine to injure or kill people if the vehicles in question are designated as in development vs commercial. There is of course no actual difference. It’s negligent hype that causes false confidence and will lead to many more needless deaths.
The L2/3 vehicles being discussed rely on handover or fall back so the human driver can save the driverless vehicle. One part Elliot does not clearly state is that in complex time critical scenarios handover cannot be made safe by any monitor or alarm system or training. Most importantly he also neglects to state that the overall method for developing these systems, public shadow and safety driving, can never get remotely close to creating a legitimate autonomous vehicles and will kill thousands of human Guinea pigs when these systems learn accident scenarios. The worst part of this article though is he only has a problem when customers are the Guinea pigs in vehicles that are sold to them. This is patently ridiculous, misleading and reckless. These systems like virtually every other driverless vehicles on the roads is still in development. Still being engineered. They ALL use human Guinea pigs in and outside the vehicles. Whether they are company employees in a company vehicle or customers in development vehicles (Tesla and comma.ai) or in “commercial ready” vehicles. IT IS ALL THE SAME THING. I don’t want to single out Eliott though. Many members of the industry and press are now “woke” and are saying the same negligent, inconsistent, hypocritical, incorrect, misleading, unethical and immoral thing. The entire cast of Autonocast, Alex Roy, Ed Niedermeyer and Kirsten Korosec, Sam Abuelsamid and Pete Bigelow.
Regarding public shadow and safety driving being untenable and reckless. The FACT is it is impossible to drive the one trillion miles or spend over $300B to stumble and restumble on all the scenarios necessary to complete the effort. In addition, the process harms people for no reason. This occurs two ways. The first is through handover or fall back. A process that cannot be made safe for most complex scenarios, by any monitoring and notification system, because they cannot provide the time to regain proper situational awareness and do the right thing the right way, especially in time critical scenarios. The other dangerous area is training the systems to handle accident scenarios. In order do that AV makers will have to run thousands of accident scenarios thousands of times. that will cause thousands of injuries and deaths.
The solution is to switch 99.9% of that public shadow and safety driving to aerospace/DoD simulation technology and systems/safety engineering. (Not gaming engine-based systems as they have significant real-time and model fidelity flaws in complex scenarios).
Please find more information on this in my articles below
Using the Real World is better than Proper Simulation for Autonomous Vehicle Development — NONSENSE
Dr. Lance Elliot is talking people into fruitless Suicide as Autonomous Vehicle Guinea pigs
The Hype of Geofencing for Autonomous Vehicles
SAE Autonomous Vehicle Engineering Magazine-End Public Shadow Driving
All the Autonomous Vehicle makers combined would not get remotely close to L4
My name is Michael DeKort — I am a former system engineer, engineering and program manager for Lockheed Martin. I worked in aircraft simulation, the software engineering manager for all of NORAD, the Aegis Weapon System, and on C4ISR for DHS.
Key Autonomous Vehicle Industry Participation
- Lead — SAE On-Road Autonomous Driving SAE Model and Simulation Task Force
- Member SAE ORAD Verification and Validation Task Force
- Expert — DIN/SAE International Alliance for Mobility Testing & Standardization (IAMTS) group to create sensor simulation specs
- Stakeholder for UL4600 — Creating AV Safety Guidelines
- Member of the IEEE Artificial Intelligence & Autonomous Systems Policy Committee (AI&ASPC)
- Presented the IEEE Barus Ethics Award for Post 9/11 Efforts
My company is Dactle
