Tesla insider says working for Elon Musk's Autopilot-training team is like being part of ‘dystopian company’
Savage indictment of the programming team behind Autopilot
An anonymous whistleblower has described working for Tesla’s Autopilot department as like being trapped in a “dystopian company”.
In a searing transcript published by Business Insider, the unnamed insider claims that Tesla’s management monitor their staff’s every move, severely reprimand them if they stop working in specific software for longer than 15 minutes and ignore workers’ concerns about coding the car’s safety system to ignore road laws.
The whistleblower, who said they started working at Tesla’s New York gigafactory in 2022 and whose identity was claimed to have been verified by Business Insider, said they were also concerned about footage captured from vehicles being shared around the offices — including one harrowing incident in which a boy on his bicycle was hit by a car.
Teaching Autopilot to drive
The Tesla insider said they work in the Autopilot department, which is concerned primarily with Tesla’s self-driving software that should, in theory, allow Tesla cars to drive on their own for limited periods of time in locations where such systems are legal.
The worker claimed that their job was to watch hours and hours of footage gathered from various Teslas’ onboard cameras — with the video captured for the programme filmed by both test vehicles belonging to the company and customer cars already out in the public domain — and then use that to “teach” the Tesla Autopilot to understand how to drive like a human on the road.
Despite having no background in either the automotive or manufacturing industries, the Tesla insider said they would “label everything little thing — from making sure a car doesn’t try to drive on the shoulder of the road to telling it how to react when a lane is closed due to construction or when there’s a four-way stop sign”.
The worker went on to say they there are many “hyper-focused” sub-projects in this department, which will zero-in on specific areas of driving to teach the Autopilot how to operate better in a wide variety of scenarios.
So, for instance, people in the department at Buffalo, New York, could “spend months labelling road lines” or coding the Autopilot to respond better to different weather conditions, such as identifying extreme hazards like snowbanks and snow-covered road markings.
‘Sadistic’ video-sharing
Every Tesla car has nine cameras fitted to it, all of which capture footage not only of what the Tesla itself is doing, but of the roads near the car during its filmed journey.
The whistleblower said: “When I first started at Tesla, it was common for people to share clips around the office, usually just odd things they saw. But one worker took it too far. He shared a clip of a little boy who’d been hit by a Tesla while riding his bike. I thought that was sadistic.”
The worker said that Tesla cracked down on image-sharing in the wake of this incident, after Reuters published a story about it.
The insider said Tesla began watermarking video footage to trace it to a controller and would now fire anyone who shared footage, but that sometimes workers still pass images around the office, “especially if it’s something out of the ordinary.”
Flide Time — it’s like Big Brother
The Tesla employee said it was “very strange” having an intimate view into someone’s life when watching the footage from the public-owned Teslas, but that it was important material that was used to correct and refine the Autopilot programme.
Over a working day, these Tesla workers are watching five-and-a-half to six hours’ worth of footage, and then using a software programme to feed back relevant labelling and information to the wider Autopilot project.
But the insider described an almost Orwellian scrutiny of staff on the part of the company. Tesla gives workers a 15-minute break and a 30-minute lunch break, but any delayes will be picked up by Tesla’s employee monitoring software, called “Flide Time”.
“Any time we’re making key clicks on the computer, Tesla knows what we are doing,” they said, adding: “There are cameras everywhere we work, so the only place you can really get any privacy is in the bathroom.”
Working in this way makes it “very hard to focus,” the source claimed.
‘We’re just worker ants’
The employee explained that Flide Time also tracks how long each person is working on imagery.
Even if a worker needs to use outside resources to properly label a clip — for instance, to check what the relevant traffic laws pertaining to a piece of footage are — then if they’re not clicking in the main Autopilot software programme, it triggers an alarm to their direct superiors and a disciplinary meeting with a team lead would follow, with “a point put against your record.”
Acquire three points in the span of six months and you can be fired, according to the whistleblower.
“There’s definitely a feeling that we’re just worker ants,” they added.
Safety concerns ignored
More alarming were the worker’s claims that Tesla management brushed off concerns about cutting corners on precisely what was labelled in the clips.
“There were times we were told to ignore ‘No Turn on Red’ or ‘No U-Turn’ signs. Those were the kind of things that made me and my co-workers uncomfortable. In some cases, they would hear us out, but other times the general response was along the lines of ‘mind your business and your pay grade’.”
The worker concluded by saying their experience working for Tesla was a lot different to what they’d thought when they started.
“I thought it would be a great opportunity for my career, but now I view it as this dystopian company,” they said.
Tesla has so far not responded to the claims in the article, or a request for a comment by Business Insider. Tesla GB’s press team had not responded to Driving.co.uk by the time of publication.
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