Call me crazy, but when it comes to products that could so easily cause death, a barrier to entry is a good thing.
The problem with regulatory capture and arguing it's a good thing, is that there's a downside/cost to the barrier it creates. And often that downside outweighs the upside.
To be clear, no one is arguing regulation shouldn't exist. Just that the nature of regulation is to be captured by incumbents and serve a purpose orthogonal to protecting the people.
I can't speak for insulin injectors, but I know for a fact that the reason Indian pharmaceuticals are often times massively cheaper is because they ignore patents by which the majority of the world abides.
Now in many cases, the patent system is set up for incumbents who have enough legal muscle to develop and patent isomers, metabolites, or "extended release" versions of successful drugs which are losing their patent privileges. But that's not the whole story. We know that some patents and copyrights are needed to encourage investment in R&D.
India (used to?) just blindly copy drugs, ignore paying royalties, and take the profits. I haven't ever been on any blockbuster meds developed natively in India. Have you?
(I’m actually fairly bearish on level 5 self-driving being “close”, but if it was, speeding that up would almost surely be worth throwing the switch on the trolley tracks for both the lives saved and the reduction in wasted attention of those who would have otherwise used a lot of their lifetime driving.)
Regulatory capture is a thing. Regulators, at least in part, exist to maintain a barrier to entry for any new players trying to enter a field dominated by large players.
Several major tech companies only exist because they broke rules in their early days. And most people agree the outcome was a net benefit to society.
Which makes it a ton safer than '''autopilot''' because by the time those users are done installing it they have a pretty clear understanding of its capabilities and limitations.
vs. the endless videos of morons driving tesla in '''autopilot''' mode with hands off the wheel because it's an incomprehensible black box of magical self-driving capability for them.
The regulator hasn't stopped tesla autopilot from causing accidents. It's just a competitive moat.
Sort of proving the point that the resource pool of the incumbent doesn't necessarily translate to the value of the product.
None of those specs give any indication to the relative safety of the two systems though. And this is exactly what incumbents want. They want a small player to have to match their massive cash holdings to enter their market, even if the small player has a better product.
Here's some food for though: Tesla has been slapped with multiple lawsuits for misleading advertising of Autopilot. Regulators all agree that Autopilot is just an SAE level 2 system, same like those found on much cheaper cars with far less hardware and none of the marketing oversell.
I also listed the number and type of inputs each system has. This might correlate with money, but it clearly also correlates with safety. One simple example, it is impossible for the Comma system to have 360 degree visual coverage of what is around you with just two cameras in the locations they are in.
Humans have two eyes, a pretty narrow field of view, no radar, no sonar. By your logic they're even worse, yet theyre so much better than Autopilot that it's unattainable for it to match.
>Humans have two eyes... yet theyre so much better than Autopilot that it's unattainable for it to match.
These two statements are pretty ironic back to back.
I'm not sure if we are ever going to convince each other of anything if we can't agree that there is a clear difference in track record when one product has been used for 2 billion miles and the other for 6 million.
Fun story: I wanted to build a hypermilling coach/trainer system about 10 years ago and got to the point of having a poor mans ACC in a Scion. It didn’t brake though, only coasted to lose speed (thus requiring driver input). So I got the wild idea of tapping into the electronic brake distribution system to apply brake pressure when I needed to slow down. I figured out the system and was ready to tap into it when I had a dream that night. I was on the highway and all of a sudden two wheels decided to lock up from braking too hard. I stopped all testing on that car on public roadways after that.
My current car is hacked to provide lane centering when lane assist is on, but it’s still operating within the bounds of the factory electronic steering (so it can’t self drive/make 90 degree turns)
I’m okay with enthusiasts repairing and modifying their cars and driving them on public roads, because I’d rather have that than a world where only certified cars, maintained at certified dealers, using only certified parts are permitted on the roads.
Maybe you're not a "car person". Apply the same principles to whatever field you have passion for. Only certified Intel parts may be added by Intel technicians to Intel computers, which must run only certified operating systems. Or only certified Edison lightbulbs may be added to certified Edison light fixtures by certified Edison technicians. Only certified firmware may be run on devices you're being allowed to rent from the certified manufacturer.
The reason I ask is because there is a general topic of whether we should preemptively block new technology based on hypotheses, whether we should seek supporting evidence, or whether we should wait for confirming data before blocking freedoms to experiment. Said differently, do we ban everything until “proven” safe, allow everything until “proven” unsafe, or something in middle.
That's Comma AI's approach. Their hardware spoofs the stock computer so it can send commands to the car's active safety systems. So there are some stock limitations, like the steering torque, that openpilot doesn't bypass.
(Hint: I hope you have good insurance)
Most things in a modern car are controlled by software that's far more opaque than OpenPilot. Don't get me wrong, a lot of their software and hardware architecture choices scare the heck out of me, but at least it's transparent.
Air BnB is not a tech company, it is in the holiday let's game.
The stuff required to pass the regulators is the long, slow, boring process of pushing reliability and failure modes into "safe" territory, while documenting the fact. This is the 'engineering' part. Making a system that works (probably, most of the time) isn't engineering, it's hacking.
... doing their R&D on public roadways, with unwitting / unwilling participants.