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Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving linked to hundreds of crashes, dozens of deaths
(www.theverge.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Humans are extremely flawed beings and if your standard for leaving companies alone to make as much money as possible is that they are at least minimally better than extremely flawed, I don't want to live in the same world as you want to live in.
Having anything that can save lives over an alternative is an improvement. In general. Yes, we should be pushing for safer self driving, and regulating that. But if we can start saving lives now, then sooner is better than later.
I'm not sure if that was supposed to be in agreement or countering what I said.
Over the past few decades, some people have noticed and commented on the enormous death toll that our reliance on driving and the vast amount of driving hours spent on our roads and said that that amount of death is unacceptable. Nothing has ever been able to come of it because of that aforementioned reliance on driving that our society has. Human nature cannot be the thing that changes, we can't expect humans to behave differently all of a sudden nor change their ability to focus and drive safely.
But this moment in time, when the shift from human to machine drivers is happening, the time when we shift from beings incapable of performing better on a global scale, to machines able to avoid the current death tolls due to their ability to be vastly more precise than humans, this is the time to reduce that death toll.
If we allow companies to get away with removing sensors from their cars which results in lower safety just so that said company can increase their bottom line, I consider that unacceptable even if the death toll is slightly lower than human driven cars if it could be greatly lower than human driven cars.
One company says they can build FSD with 15 sensors and sensor fusion. Another company says they can build FSD with just cameras. As I see it, the development path doesn't matter, it's the end result that matters.
It is not my place or yours or the governments to tell people how to spend their money or not. It IS our place to ensure that companies aren't producing products that kill people.
Thus money doesn't matter here. What matters is whether or not FSD is more dangerous than a human. If it is, it should be prohibited or only used under very monitored conditions. If it is equal or better than a human, IE same or fewer accident / fatalities per mile driven, then Tesla should be allowed to sell it, even if it is imperfect.
In the US we have a free market. Nobody is obligated to pay for FSD or use it. People can vote with their wallet whether they think it's worth the money or not, THAT is what determines if Tesla makes more money or not. It's up to each individual customer to decide if it's worth it. That's their choice not mine or yours.
As I see it, in a free market what Tesla has to prove is that their system doesn't make things worse. If they can, if they can prove they're not making roads more dangerous IE no need to ban it, then it's a matter between them and their customer.