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Comment by archagon | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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 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.

> 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?

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

> 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.

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