Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by NamTaf 1429 days ago
To some degree, that doesn't matter. An underlying feature of a competent approach to safety in design is that the design must take maximal ownership of eliminating risk to all people in all scenarios that can be reasonably expected to result from the design.

The moment Telsa set expectations by proclaiming it as autopilot, they took the corresponding responsiblity to make sure it did not generate any scenarios which were unsafe. The moment they implemented features that allowed the attention of drivers to drift more than standard driving, they also took responsibility to make sure that the drifting attention of drivers did not place the system in an unsafe state.

This same issue applies to touch-screen interfaces in modern cars. Drivers could always stare down at their radio when there were tactile knobs and dials, but touch-screen interfaces now expect that because they've eliminated tactile feedback. Telling drivers 'just don't look down' misses the point, because it's the responisbility of the car manufacturer to not create a system where that added safety risk is not controlled appropriately.

2 comments

Pretty much this. They could have called it Super Cruise Control or something and I'm pretty sure nobody would have anything to say, because it is expected that cruise control be supervised, but, I think people wouldn't be quite as willing to pay a lot of money for a feature that didn't sound so remarkable.
Self driving technology did seem to reach human parity in 5 years back in 2010s, and the growth was later revealed to be logarithmic than exponential, and Elon doubled down on a bad bet on it.

It’s not about whether they should have clarified the scope, the scope did include a completely automatic driving. It just that they failed to deliver(tbf no one truly made it).

I really don’t see how anything could matter more than “does it save lives, on balance”. If it saves thousands of lives annually, then why would we let tenuous marketing grievances forestall its deployment? How many lives should we sacrifice over branding concerns? Of course, if the technology doesn’t save lives on balance, then that’s reason enough to restrict deployment, but in any case marketing issues don’t seem like they should factor into the calculus.