> the first-gem iPhone couldn't kill people

Indeed, it took Samsung to develop that technology.*

*Joke; in fact Israeli security services invented it in the '90s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash). Also there aren't reported fatalities from Note 7 explosions.

> Indeed, it took Samsung to develop that technology.

This is a good counterargument to anyone who says Samsung just copies Apple :D

> This is a good counterargument to anyone who says Samsung just copies Apple :D

To be fair, Apple got there first, although I doubt they're proud of it, and probably they were not the absolute first.

A very small number of iPhone 4 (or was it 4S?) had defective batteries which caught fire.

What Samsung can claim an absolute first for, though, is providing replacements which are just as dangerous.

The thing about their plan though, if you read the post entirely, is that this new car with the new sensor comes with almost all features disabled.

The reality is, with machine learning, you need a lot of data, and yes, you can send a few of your own cars with employees inside like Google, but that's slow. Instead, Tesla is using their existing brand and user base to collect orders of magnitude more data, and this way, they will be able to validate their models much faster.

Again, the thing with data and algorithms is that you can test and retest them. When you have all the data, you can see the info at time X, and also have access to the data at time X+1, so you can check if your algorithm made the right choice. Furthermore, you can actually take tricky situations and replay them thousands of time while tweaking your algorithm to do better.

So yes, while getting it right is very important, I believe their approach of collecting as much data as possible is the best way of getting there

It also couldn't save people's' lives...

Yes self driving cars could save lives, if they're working properly. That's literally what we're talking about. If they're working as good a humans, good. If they're working better, they're saving lives. If they turn into oncoming traffic like the Tesla did in the video, they can kill people.

A first-gen iPhone couldn't save people, but a first gen auto-driving car can certainly kill a lot of people if the software isn't working right.

But critically, it's (probably) impossible to get past the "good as humans" point without a huge amount of learning data. That means either a lot of time or a lot of testers.

It's interesting that the new Tesla software will be shadowing while the meatbag is driving: not just reporting back driving data, but also simulating what it would do all the time. There's going to be a lot of situations where it would be wrong, all nicely laid out for the developers, ready to fix.