| Nobody who works on safety-critical systems is an idiot incapable of imagining or caring about the consequences of their errors. Your ignorant, fact-free fear-mongering is antithetical to saving lives. 1. An immense number of lives are being "carelessly sacrificed" right now, and will continue to be sacrificed every day until something comes along to fix the fundamental problem: People are terrible drivers.
2. Tesla's system did not override control of the vehicle. It was not presented as being safe or ready to operate without oversight. The law does not allow for it to be treated as such. The driver failed to hit the brakes despite being told by the car -- and by legal obligation -- that it was his responsibility to hit the brakes.
3. Tesla's system has proven to be safer than the average, unassisted driver, to date. If the proportion of accidents involving Tesla's autopilot remained constant when scaling up to more drivers and more miles, then it would be a net win in terms of lives saved to deploy it widely right now. Obviously though, nobody -- including Tesla -- expects that to be the case, or they'd have been touting this as something every driver should have RIGHT NOW. Tesla is doing their public beta precisely because it's impossible to design a safety-critical system with perfect foresight. More information is needed to help them build a robust system and the public beta has proven to be an uncommonly safe and effective way to get that information. If you think my rhetoric is inflammatory it's because you're blind to the logical consequences -- the human cost -- of what you advocate for. |