See, what I hear you saying is "Other people will needlessly die, but their sacrifice is a chance I am willing to take".
The public takes risks every day, but it rarely gives companies a free pass to move fast and kill people.
The public takes risks every day, but it rarely gives companies a free pass to move fast and kill people.
This has nothing to do with sacrafice. The government necessarily makes life and death trade-offs in setting regulatory hurdles. It’s entirely unconvincing to argue that the beta driver assistance and beta self-driving technology should be banned from roads because it can’t guarantee someone won’t die.
Because in fact automobiles are killing over a million people per year. Self driving automobiles are responsible for exactly 1 of those 1.25 million deaths, and driver assistance technology have contributed to about a dozen more.
What is indisputably moving fast and killing people are... people driving cars. The singular solution to this ongoing bloodbath may be only a few years away. But you seem to want millions of people to continue dying because of a misappropriated Facebook slogan?
I’m not a big fan of populist outrage in the best of times, but when it seeks to perpetuate the status quo of 1.25 million annual auto fatalities I think we owe it to ourselves to elevate the discussion to the point where you are actually considering the implication of your proposed solution.
Every year you shift the self-driving adoption curve you are killing hundreds of thousands of people. But in the real world today this technology could arguably share the blame for about dozen deaths. Should the government ban the technology from public roads and force companies like Tesla to recall their existing functionality? There’s a hysterical appeal to emotion be made, but nothing close to a cogent logical argument.
If anything, government should be pushing self-driving requirements harder than carbon limits. Instead of municipalities claiming they are going to be banning gas engines by 2030 they should be claiming they will ban steering wheels. The steering wheel is far, far deadlier.
The blowback here is in reaction to what appears to be objectively bad software. Irresponsibly bad. Maybe even negligently bad.
Look to drug trials & the FDA. We take risk to test possibly life-saving drugs. But, we don't let just any whackjob take his unproven mad science experiment to clinical trial and inject people with mantis DNA.
I don’t think it’s a strawman at all to observe that greater regulations and restrictions on public testing will delay wide-spread self driving. Nor is it unreasonable to surmise a multi-year shift in the adoption curve could cost millions of lives.
I mean, argue that public mistrust of the technology due to sensationalization of the highly public (yet rare) failures is more likely to delay rollout worse than stricter regulations. There’s a reasonable rebuttal I could engage with!
But what I got instead was... mantis DNA?
"Those of you who volunteered to be injected with praying mantis DNA, I've got some good news and some bad news. Bad news is we're postponing those tests indefinitely. Good news is we've got a much better test for you: fighting an army of mantis men. Pick up a rifle and follow the yellow line. You'll know when the test starts." -Cave Johnson
The strawman is you're the only one talking about banning self-driving test mules from the road.