| I have empathy for the ~33,000 people that die every year because humans are terrible drivers. You do not. You want to take a moral posture that condemns thousands of people to needless deaths because you're so caught up in emotion you can't see the harm your position would cause. Wallowing in your own emotions is selfish and immoral when it costs actual lives. Your entire premise is based on the false assumption that this system was making all the decisions. Tesla's "autopilot" does not override the driver. It does not replace the driver (yet). That's explicitly because everyone involved knows it's not ready for that responsibility yet, no matter how much they've tested it. Tesla knows they cannot possibly anticipate everything -- the whole point of this "public beta" is to gather more information and help them make a better, safer system that eventually is trustworthy enough to consistently make decisions better than people. You posit that human decision-makers behind the wheel are an important thing we should be wary of giving up but you have ignored one simple fact: There WAS a human behind the wheel, expressly charged -- both by law and by Tesla -- with maintaining control of the vehicle. The driver had the responsibility of hitting the brakes, and did not do so. That's an error that plays out dozens of times per day without AI drivers being involved. But instead of recognizing that this is a case of not just a piece of software failing, but also of a human failing -- and instead of recognizing the cost of lost and shattered lives borne by society every day -- you resort to ill-conceived hand-wringing in an attempt to convince others to follow you down a path that would continue condemning untold numbers of people to needless deaths. |