Tesla: The Car Is LEARNING!

          A few weeks ago, I talked about TeslaOS 7.0, which released a beta feature that allowed the car to self-drive itself. Once the user is, say, driving down a road at 55mph, the user can click the "Cruise" control button and take their hands completely off of the wheel. The car will stay in its current lane and continue the same speed at the same time. If a deer pops out infront of the driver, the car will auto-brake, and if a car is driving slowly upfront, the car will adjust its speed. It takes cruise control to a whole new automated level. If on the interstate, and the driver turns on the left turn signal, the car will automatically switch lanes to the left when deemed safe, and then continue in that lane at that speed while the driver relaxes, sipping away at their coffee and chatting on the phone as if their car driving itself was no big deal.
         However, there is a caveat to the whole experience. While Telsa's engineers have spend years on this project, there are still certain risks, and since self-driving is still, Tesla's CEO Elon Musk pulled a smart liability claim by making the statement that,"We’re advising drivers to keep their hands on the wheel. The software — it’s very new,” he said. But he added: “In the long term, people won’t need hands on the wheel.” Backing this up, Musk announced that the car had self-learning capabilities programmed in, a smart artificial intelligence that, over the course of hundreds of millions of miles, would learn from driving habits, and, like a real teenage driver, learn from its mistakes, and correct them. Musk stated,"When one car learns something, the whole fleet learns something. The network uploads “data to the central server, where it can be collected, do system analysis, and then feed that back into the cars. That’s the next level — and far beyond where other car companies are. Any car company that doesn’t do this will not be able to have an autonomous driving system,” Musk also said that updates will happen regularly and the “car should improve each week…you’ll probably notice difference after a week or a few weeks.” Sure enough, users flocking to this Reddit post have reported that they have witnessed this improvement. One man stated that his car used to take one turn near his house way too fast, and would have to hit the breaks mid-turn to slow down. However, over the next two weeks, he noticed that the car was changing, and eventually, it slowed down far before the 90 degree turn, and now takes it like any other safe human driver would. The Skynet of a system is working, and with over a million miles being logged a day, Tesla and its engineers have done a great job. One team cannot program a car how to perfectly drive, but, like a human, if they program an ability to learn from mistakes, well, practice makes perfect, and the car is practicing, and its learning! Yeah, I wouldn't imagine saying that growing up without thinking full Transformers.

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