[sircastor]

You don’t drive your lathe down the freeway at 80mph. And your lathe probably isn’t surrounded by hundreds of other lathes also going 80mph. And probably not being run by people only half paying attention.

Tell me about the liability laws in place related to you operating your lathe, or the state-required licensing and insurance that each lathe operator holds.

A machining tool is worlds away from a motor vehicle.

[jacquesm]

Control software for a lathe (or, in fact any industrial robot) is far more dangerous than a car. Go visit any metal workshop and take an inventory of the number of people and then count the number of digits. The fact that they don't cause nearly as many accidents is because they are not normally under manual control. But when they are better find some (preferably solid) cover.

And meanwhile, Tesla gets to beta-test their self driving stuff in public and I can't look at the source code to my ECU to figure out whether or not a certain behavior is by design or an indication that something is broken.

[adhesive_wombat]

Cars will do a lot worse than reduce your finger count. In the UK, 68 people died in work-related accidents. Nearly 1700 died on the roads. (The same figures in the US are 5k/40k, go figure).

And I agree that Tesla shouldn't be beta testing on the roads. But neither should anyone else.

[jacquesm]

The main reason for that is that there are a lot more drivers than there are lathe operators, and that lathe operators usually injure themselves.

There is a relatively low chance that you'll find a lathe on a busy intersection or on a freeway during rush hour. I thought that was obvious.