Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

This was about what I'd gathered.

He's been reckless and made some huge errors in judgement over the past year, but despite it all I hope he succeeds. I don't think he's a hero or a saint like some people do, but his endeavors are having a very real and tangible positive effect on civilization.

Most chiefly, as bad as the climate change situation looks right now, it would be so much worse without the insane amount of 1) change in the public's and the auto industry's perception of electric cars, and 2) innovation in battery technology (especially applied to solar arrays), which Tesla has accomplished. Seriously. We would have zero chance without those two hills having been crossed.

Character flaws aside, Musk is the only billionaire alive (or even in recent memory) whose business ventures are netting any actual positive effect on society whatsoever. Heck, he might be the only one not having a seriously detrimental effect on society right now. You don't have to like him to acknowledge that.

Yeah I agree. Don’t understand why people are so pissed off by Musk, but seem happy to give a free ride to any number of cut and dried vile megarich dynasties like the Koch brothers or the crown prince of Saudi Arabia or whichever asshole owns Elsevier. Consider that these villains are quite literally destroying the planet, impeding scientific progress and manipulating societies for their personal profit.

You may be surprised to learn that the Koch Bros. and the Saudis do, in fact, receive enormous amounts of criticism for their behavior.

But I think with Musk the answer is that people respond extra harshly to perceive hypocrisy. The Kochs are almost cartoon corporate arch-villains and the Saudis are brutal theocrats. No one has any illusions that they are good people trying to help the world. Musk, however, has been presented as a Good Guy by both himself and a largely fawning press, set up as some kind of technology messiah. I think people therefore react strongly when, of course, this proves not to be true and that he's just another businessman, albeit one who does genuinely seem to want to help people.

The Kochs/Saudi’s actually receive very little criticism in tech circles. In any case, if your point is that they are actually bad, and Musk is good but a hypocrite at times, then are we not agreeing that the level of criticism he receives is unjustified?

> The Kochs/Saudi’s actually receive very little criticism in tech circles

They get very little tech-circle-specific criticism, because that's not where they operate (and because they have little in the way of tech-specific cult of personality, to provoke domain specific response expressing the general criticism.)

But they get a lot of criticism from non-tech-specific groups that themselves substantially overlap tech circles.

Thanks for the ELI5. But since I am commenting on HN, implicitly my point is about the unmoored proportionality of criticism in the tech community.

> Character flaws aside, Musk is the only billionaire alive (or even in recent memory) whose business ventures are netting any actual positive effect on society whatsoever.

Wait, what? How can you possibly justify that?

> Heck, he might be the only one not having a seriously detrimental effect on society right now. You don't have to like him to acknowledge that.

What about all those recent self-driving crashes? At best, they're poisoning the well for sensible self-driving legislation. At worst, they're killing people for no reason other than corporate hubris and greed. Then there's the matter of creepy corporate policing, such as the remote lockouts whenever somebody tries to examine the firmware, or the humiliating public accident reports whenever something goes wrong with one of the cars, or the forced corralling of all self-driving taxi business into a Tesla-exclusive service in the future.

> How can you possibly justify that?

Rockets! Cars propelled by faraway vibrations! Is there no room in our world for the brilliantly mad?

Sure, but it's almost absurd to argue that Musk is the only billionaire alive whose work is a net positive on society.

> that Musk is the only billionaire alive whose work is a net positive on the world

No. But he’s a better bet than many. Including network effects, his work has added value, if only by accelerating retroactively obvious ideas.

Name another billionaire, other than maybe Bill Gates, who's presently doing anything good, at all.

I think this list of philanthropists[1] contains quite a few billionaires. That counts as "doing good" in my book.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_philanthropists

To be fair, OP said "billionaire's business venture". So philanthropic work might not apply.

Bezos. Amazon has revolutionised the way we buy things, meaning land is no longer needed for strip malls, oil isn't burnt driving to them, people aren't having inferior things pushed on them by dodgy salesmen, or wasting an hour to buy a single item, or buying the wrong item because the right one is out of stock.

I think there's still quite a significant difference between "popularizing something that may save the planet from extinction from global warming which could have been pursued for quite a while by other large companies automotive and otherwise but hasn't been" to "people prefer shopping with them over how they used to shop". But I can see that the net gain of the time saved using Amazon could be argued as a good for society.

Has Telsa really popularised it? Or is this looking at things from an SV perspective?

Certainly in the UK it's a minor player compared with the Nissan Leaf, and plugin hybrids are even more popular

Well, anecdotally, I'm from the UK, and hadn't heard of the Nissan Leaf until you mentioned it. Tesla, on the other hand... Although yes, actually that's very impressive.

With regards to Hybrids, my (limited) understanding is that they are part of the problem - they're better, but only better by half. From what I'm reading about global warming, we need to push as far as possible towards a fully electric, mostly renewable future as quick as possible.

Plug in hybrids mean you get to pootle around on battery power for local trips to the shop/school/etc, but have a car for long trips

I didn't appreciate that difference in them, thanks.

Add onto that Amazon's systematic, abhorrent treatment of its employees that was required to achieve "more efficient shopping" and the whole thing shows itself as banal, and honestly evil.

I would rephrase as: Who has the guts today to break technological boundaries as strongly as Elon?

... all of them that haven't retired yet?

The self-driving crashes have mostly been users using autopilot irresponsibly, from what I've read. Still, I'm not arguing the finer points; both Musk the person and Tesla the company have made some bad, sometimes even ethically dubious decisions. My point was that, for all of today's Captains Of Industry "solving problems" that's don't actually exist, dismantling democracy and privacy and destroying millions of people's livelihoods in the process, Musk stands out for funding and directing actual, honest-to-god human progress, despite everything else he and his companies may have done.

> The self-driving crashes have mostly been users using autopilot irresponsibly

Tesla has been advertising the autopilot capabilities irresponsibly. With advertising like that on their website[0] they should be held accountable (at least partially at fault) for crashes resulting from autopilot failure.

[0]: https://www.tesla.com/autopilot

This is one of my few bugbear's about Tesla - other than this I think they're doing a fine job making EVs seem cool and changing perceptions[0]. I just wish they'd not have named it "Autopilot". That is such a loaded term that to me it's exceptionally disingenuous to claim it implies anything other than self-driving.

I work in marketing, I'm always looking for the best spin to put on an offering, but I shake my head every time I see "Autopilot" used when they actually just mean "better than average driving assistance".

[0] whether or not they succeed as a company is a different point, their importance to me is wider than their actual business and whether they flame out or not is, presently, neither here nor there.

And yet it's your responsibility to read through marketing bullshit, understand that "only 99,99$" really means 100$, crack the manual open and make sure you read all the "caution" boxes.

It's a running joke here in EU when reading absurd warnings in manuals, to think "oh, an American must have tried that and sued!"

> All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver.

Wow, this is a ludicrous claim without providing any evidence.

> What about all those recent self-driving crashes?

What about Apollo 1? There is a difference between a civilian and military death. But they are both pursuing progress. One can’t discount the costs without any concept of the potential benefits.

The Apollo 1 astronauts were willing participants and very clearly knew the risks. With poorly-designed self-driving cars, everyone is an unwilling participant.

Has a Tesla ever killed a non-driver/passenger (like Uber has)?

Thus far, Autopilot has only killed individual drivers.

Not yet

I wouldn't include the self-driving tech among the world-changing progress. Climate change is a pressing disaster for our whole species; self-driving cars are not urgent enough to be pursued with the same intensity, and are dangerous enough to deserve more rigour.

Automobiles cause over 1,000,000 deaths globally per year. Not to mention the number of human hours used to drive. Elimination of the need for people to drive and reducing auto deaths by, say 95%, I think would be world-changing.

What ratio of lives saved to extra deaths while creating self-driving tech would you accept?

You know the answer to that: zero. In the court of public opinion, existing risks are internalized and heavily discounted while new risks are always perceived as gargantuan no matter how small.

It's basic human psychology, it's why some people prefer to drive long distances instead of flying, and why a flu pandemic is conducive to mass hysteria, while the obesity and diabetes prevalence, orders of magnitude more deadly, barely appears on the radar.

Plus there's no way I'm trusting my life to some idiot programmer.

3.5 million new cars are registered every year in Germany alone. If we can replace a significant amount of that with cheap, shared, swlf-driving electrics it'll be a massive step towards carbon neutrality.

>3.5 million new cars are registered every year in Germany alone. If we can replace a significant amount of that with cheap, shared, swlf-driving electrics it'll be a massive step towards carbon neutrality.

Sell the electic cars today and sell the autopilot extension hardware and software where actually works, pushing the hype can have a huge negative impact like very strong autopilot testing regulations. because of dreedy corporation pushing things that are not ready or over the air updates that are not tested.

Honestly, in the world that you are imaging we never would get any kind of self-driving ever.

What about the thousands upon thousands of people killed by human drivers? Not newsworthy because it is normal and the brain can grok numbers of that magnitude. 40200 estimated in the us in 2017 which amounts to 110 people a day.

I'd argue that it was mass-production hybrids in the late 90s that moved us towards the renewables-based future. People could buy them without fear of running out of charge, yet they gamified energy-effiency for drivers who had never really considered that beyond the price of petrol at the pump.

Without hybrids having shouldered the door open, I doubt that pure EVs would have fared much better than in previous decades.

Do remember that Tesla was founded to build hybrids.

Before Tesla, electric and especially hybrid cars were (needlessly) seen by society as dorky and lame. In a culture like America's, for a category of cars, that's a death knell condemning them to living in a niche forever. Silly as that barrier was, Tesla managed to change it.

Yes, I think it’s largely thanks to Tesla that conventional automakers are finally starting to create EVs that aren’t bizarre space bug things and have a reasonable range.

Tesla is still lightyears ahead in terms of charging stations, though, which is mind boggling — charging infrastructure is easily the biggest bottleneck in mass EV adoption at this point, yet the traditional automakers are doing jack shit about it. They could be setting up a brand new market for themselves, but instead they’re willingly handing this advantage to Tesla. It makes no sense.

I would credit the Prius with this shift in attitude. The Prius wasn't cool, but it was cool enough, and more affordable with a reputation for reasonable resale value.

Somewhat OT, but I wouldn't say hybrids came in the late 90s, more like the mid 2000s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_electric_vehicles_in_th...

There's a nice inflection point around 2003-2004 where they really became mass-market.

Before we go ahead and give Tesla the moral high-ground here, let's not forget that Teslas are black boxes that pose immense privacy concerns.

Tesla surely created a hype about electric vehicles that has prompted mainstream car manufacturers like Volkswagen to step up their electric vehicle game, which is a net positive, but they also started the trend of including data-reporting black boxes, and they're one of the worst offenders in my view.

https://electrek.co/2017/06/14/tesla-autopilot-data-floodgat...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/02/19/the-big-...

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