this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024
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[–] dream_weasel -1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

There is no obligation to sacrifice anybody. This is a question of risk vs law vs driver requirement which has got to be sorted out. Sure, point out that musk is shit and his factories are shit, it's true. He's also a liar. All true. What I take issue with is saying that the cars are 4 wheeled death machines killing everyone in their path. That is not true. It is also not true that other companies are solving the same problem without risk. They are solving a different problem of highly mapped cities and solutions for specific scenarios.

It's a people problem and drivers (people) are irresponsible. I bet lift kits have killed more people than Tesla has had autopilot accidents by people not adjusting headlights. People are gonna fuck up. It has to happen, then laws have to be implemented and revised. There's no hop skip and jump that solves autopilot on a closed course and has zero incident in practice. Conditions on the whole are just too varied. Of course, machine learning is my job so maybe I'm just a pessimist in this regard.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

What I take issue with is saying that the cars are 4 wheeled death machines killing everyone in their path. That is not true. It is also not true that other companies are solving the same problem without risk.

I never said that. It isn't black or white. I said musk creates a culture that despises safety engineering. Other companies like Volvo embrace it. Different companies embrace it to different degrees. As a result, you have wildly different fatality rates. Teslas happen to be the worst (although, like you said, it's impossible to get good data that accounts for all the factors).

Yes, it is a people problem, but it is also a systems problem. Volvo has aimed for zero fatalities in their cars. They engineer for problematic people. They went 16 years without a fatality in the UK in one of their models. Tesla simply doesn't care about problematic people. In fact, problematic people may even get a boost from a Musk re-tweet.

I agree, zero incidents may be impossible and people are problematic. But attitudes, practices, cultures and systems can either amplify those problems or dampen their effects. Musk and Tesla amplify the negative effects. It doesn't have to be that way.

[–] dream_weasel 2 points 7 months ago

On all of that we can absolutely agree.