The ideas that Musk is promulgating through Neuralink are decades old; the technology he is using is hardly anything special. What scientists are pushing back on is the unrealistic timeframe Musk promises to achieve his scifi fantasies within, the consequences and repercussions of those technologies, and the short term effects of overselling and propaganda about these ideas, which are otherwise in fact valuable.
This is definitely some rewriting of history. Plenty of engineers gave a long list of reasons why reusable rockets couldn’t work. Difficulty of station keeping for the drone ships, cost of refurbishment, safety margins, etc
It is special if it was stopped right now and just given to neuroscience departments at universities.
The fire did NOT last "four hours". It was put out in 2-3 minutes.
“With respect to the fire fight, unfortunately, those rumors grew out way of control. It did not take us four hours to put out the blaze. Our guys got there and put down the fire within two to three minutes, enough to see the vehicle had occupants,”
Source (from the Fire Chief): https://www.houstonchronicle.com/neighborhood/woodlands/arti...
Moreover, it's also the same (fire lasted 3-4 hours) false narrative that many media outlets ran. Even though there was never an official report or account of the firefighting measures taken.
Stupid people doing stupid things on Autopilot (watching a film [Florida], jumping in the back seat [Texas]) would’ve died doing stupid things eventually. Can’t blame Autopilot for when the monkey tries to defeat the safety system. No system is foolproof.
That doesn’t make Musk any less of a liar (with his successes amplifying the hopium), but let’s not pretend people aren’t culpable for their failings. The nuance is important.
Or persuade a jury, if it ever comes to that.
No system is foolproof. But systems that encourage or tolerate foolish and dangerous behaviour can't be considered well-designed.
OTOH, more people have dried as a result of Autopilot/FSD failures than the entire rest of the self-driving vehicle industry combined.
And the worst part is, Tesla doesn't even know what caused the failures, since at least one of those deaths were caused by regressions to Autopilot (for example, the Bay Area incident where the car swerved into the divider).
https://i.imgur.com/3cQRMwZ.png https://www.tesla.com/models/design#overview
The fine print isn't a justification when you're saying as loud as possible that this is a magic machine that does everything. Describing it as such is misleading.
For comparison, here is how Cadillac describes Super Cruise, a comparably-rated driver assist suite:
"Super Cruise" drive assistance feature. That's it. That's all you get when picking out the car. It frames it as an assistance, not a replacement or autopilot. If you go into details, you get "A driver assistance feature that allows hands-free driving under compatible highway driving conditions"
https://www.cadillac.com/sedans/ct5/build-and-price/packages
If you search out their detailed marketing materials, the message is consistent:
"Hands off the wheel. Eyes on the road." "Adaptive cruise control". "Stay centered". "Lane change on demand". Note that none of these promise that the computer takes over everything. The closest they come is "the first true hands-free driving-assistance", and that word assistance is absolutely key in framing this as not a replacement for all driving.
https://www.cadillac.com/world-of-cadillac/innovation/super-...
Let's also thank the thousands of engineers who made both Tesla and SpaceX work. We need to stop giving one guy all the credit.