I recognise the risk — these days I assume that entirely innocuous facts about me today can become socially unacceptable in the future, having witnessed this happen to multiple people in my life already.
I also recognise that if Tesla doesn’t get out in front of every single incident, it may set back the replacement of human drivers with safer AI drivers.
I also also recognise that Musk is wildly overpromising on the self driving tech, and really only trust him as a rocket scientist and salesman (be the thing he’s selling cars or visions of the future), not digital privacy.
I don’t really trust any famous person for privacy, because they necessarily don’t have even close to as much of it as a normal person.
Tesla doesn't need to get out in front of every incident. Musk feels the need to because of the outlandish claims he continues to make about how close Tesla is to having autonomous vehicles. This is something Tesla's board should have reined him in on long ago.
>I don’t really trust any famous person for privacy, because they necessarily don’t have even close to as much of it as a normal person.
I agree that famous people have less privacy, and there's a lot of unfairness around that. But even if Musk hadn't chosen to become a public spectacle, that doesn't give him the right to treat others the same way.
Of course.
What I’m saying is, I don’t expect the famous to be able to empathise with the rest of us, not that it’s good that they can’t.
Tesla has been attacked in the past so maybe Elon takes such issues personally.
I also worry that mixing autonomous systems with people will result in more accidents, both in the case of drivers nodding off instead of supervising the car, and in the case of other drivers being surprised by the autonomous car's behavior. On top of this, it would not be surprising if autonomous car accidents were more psychologically devastating - they would likely commit different categories of error than human drivers.
Conversely, if the tech industry wanted to save lives on the road, easily the most impactful thing they could do is shut off any phone screen moving faster than five miles an hour. This would inconvenience passengers, but we did after all survive for many years without phones in the car.
I would be surprised if level 5 self driving requires an AI smarter than a mouse or an eagle — freeform environment, arbitrary weather, hostile others, camouflage(!), long range navigation.
The rest of your points I broadly agree with though.
I don’t think this a great comparison. Firstly, sheets of glass are not a common road obstruction, and even if they were cars have the added advantage of more sensor types (doesn’t require much more brain, it’s equivalent to just another ‘colour’); Secondly, I’ve also been hit by a car driven by a human.
The driver had stopped at a give-way (major-minor junction) [0], then failed to look in my direction and pulled out into me as I was turning into that road.
[0] right where this unrelated white van is in this Google street view photo: https://goo.gl/maps/Xe87aruFbbUazXhp7
I came to the conclusion years ago that we're going to need RFID tags on everything (or something similar) to make FSD work safely enough without AGI. We'll probably also need dedicated lanes in some places. Nothing I have read or seen yet has given me any reason to think differently.
Edit: The common counter-argument I see to this is that tags could be altered maliciously. My response is that we've already been building systems which scan for and filter out malicious changes for a long time, and we keep getting better at it. It seems to me like this kind of system would be far easier to design & update than any FSD software I know of.
If you need every possible obstacle to be tagged with a locator beacon, you’ve essentially just reinvented 1970s autonomous subway or PRT technologies that require the track to be completely fenced off from surprise animal or humans or debris ended up on the track.
And Waze doesn’t need a professional troll to go around garnering media support 24/7.
* Operates in a tiny geographically fenced area
* Despite success, has not expanded to any new areas or rolled out any further.
* As a consumer, I have no access to buy Waymo, but I can buy at least the current implementation of Tesla Autopilot.
My understanding is that Tesla is extremely behind on these fronts compared to Waymo, and that gap keeps widening every day. I know who I would bet on
I believe Waymo works better in a pre scanned area, where there are no construction sites or major changes, but in a general context you can atleast attempt to use Autopilot, which you can't with Waymo. Thus I would not say that Waymo is miles better.
I had the great fortune of living in "Old Palo Alto" (think "mega rich tech CEO paradise") for a year while my wife was at Stanford. This is a grid of low-traffic, low-speed, sidewalked residential streets, ~10 minutes on all sides from the nearest highway, with typical mid-Peninsula weather (in other words, essentially perfect driving conditions).
I would would frequently see Waymo vehicles going all through the neighborhood at 6-9AM on Sunday mornings when I was out on long runs. They would often be essentially the only cars I saw on the road.
If there is a better way to pad your urban safety statistics, I do not know of one.
Old Palo Alto on Google Maps, for the curious/unfamiliar: https://goo.gl/maps/cAqifusdRL647YgWA
I have my mom Texting me that I shouldn't drive my Tesla because of this, and I should sell it and buy something else.
How many of those people will read the follow up paper from the NTSB?
This is literally the definition of smear. Shout something bad about a successful X, and by the time the actual truth comes out, the damage is already done and people have moved on.
Tesla needs Musk to do two things: 1) Stop wildly over-promising Tesla's FSD capabilities, and 2) stop publicly posting rebuttals to any news about accidents involving Teslas. Combine this with recreating a PR team for Tesla who can work to push out real information about what the cars can do plus respond appropriately when asked to comment on any accidents, and the public and media will move on before you know it.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/07/tesla-engineer-to-california...
You seem to complain about it being more based on a PR angle rather that facts and truth, but the whole point of what parent is saying is that this is a game Musk himself is pushing.
When the truth is the PR angle, it should be pushed.
A lie shouldn't be made up to advance PR, but if someone is reporting an actual lie? Anyone speaking up their truth has my 1000% backing, even if I do not agree with that position.
I am not willing to join the post-truth era of American politics.
I agree with you up to this phrase. A company knows exactly what you purchased from them, so knowing what a certain customer bought is just a call away, and not only for the CEO.
Regarding publicizing if you bought a certain feature or not, I think withholding that information when the media, and even the police, were blaming the non-existent feature for the accident, is more than you could ask of most of us.
Choosing between risking a fine for divulging shopping data, or a costly and unfair reputation hit while the police investigates. The decision seems obvious.
What they care about is all the rage they can spark from anything seemingly bad that can be associated with Tesla and/or Musk.
I'm sure they would change their coverage if Tesla were paying billions to them through advertising. But they don't, so here we go.
However, prior to any tweets by Musk, the media already claimed that autopilot was (likely) on as there was no person in the drivers seat.
Is it possible that Tesla's response would have been different in case there were no such claims being made initially?
Musk tweeting about whether or not the driver purchased certain features is insane. He shouldn't have access to that data, let alone be allowed to publicize the information.