When a civil engineer designs a structure that fails and kills people, not only are they held liable for the deaths, they stand to lose their licenses. In civil engineering, there is a culture of ensuring it never happens again after engineers design something that kills.

Who at Tesla was held liable for designing a system that failed and resulted in death? Who at Tesla lost their licenses in the wake of deaths caused by their self-driving systems? Where is the culture of ensuring that their cars don't kill anyone again?

These are great questions and I’m glad you’re bringing ethics in. But the parent posters context was that the “solid engineering” by google === faster delivery. I think that’s backwards. If you are an advocate of being more conservative with engineering to be safer - then you can’t have your cake and eat it too, you should hope it goes slowly. That’s literally the whole point.

I’ll be the first to criticize Tesla for the shoddy, dangerously worded rollout of Autopilot. Totally. Has it saved more lives than lost? Who knows.

But to argue that googles more conservative approach should somehow deliver FSD faster is just a contradiction. Perhaps they brute force it like I said already. But the fast rollout by Tesla == more dangerous == more data. If you’re talking engineering delivery time, then yea Tesla is taking a calculated risk of getting much more data much faster. They should be able to deliver faster, engineering-wise.

Yeah... Real engineers would call that an engineering problem. Like the kind who have stamps that can cost or preserve lives.

You're just showcasing the immaturity of most software "engineers", yourself included.

Oh boy, a real engineer is here to tell the immature ones what’s what.

First, you made a huge assumption. I never said I approve of how they are doing it. Engineering at the highest level encompasses morality, obviously.

But you wooshed real hard on the context of this thread in your rush to get that sweet feeling of moral superiority.

I’ll rewind it for you.

I was replying to someone claiming they hope Google delivers self-driving first because they see them as executing better at the engineering portion of doing so.

Do you see now? If they had said they see them as engineering more ethically and so they hope they win, fine. But they didn’t. Read it again.

The context is: is Google’s engineering strategy going to deliver self-driving first?

I replied to that. I even called out that you can totally disagree on moral grounds, and I do disagree with much of what they do, so it’s funny to call me out on something I was leaving purposely open as a further topic to discuss.

But the context was who would deliver self-driving faster, due strictly to their engineering strategy, I made the case that real world data trumps artificial data. And it does.

> Sure, but that’s a moral problem not an engineering one.

I'm pretty sure "don't kill user" is not only an engineering requirement, but the most important one.