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Comment by soperj | Hacker News Reader

Don't do beta testing with machines that can kill people in public. End of story.

Any person can get distracted and kill people in public. Most of the cars doesn't have distraction mechanisms like FSD Beta. e.g. if you're on the phone, FSD will not work. Lets ban people from roads according to your logic. FSD Beta killed 0 people since 1 year of program, humanity killed and made millions people injured due to human mistakes. Any Level 4-5 system deployed on a large scale with save millions of people, prevent even more people from been disabled in the future.

This is some of the most twisted logic I've seen, kudos to you.

According to you, as long as a piece of software isn't killing millions of people, it's totally A-ok because human are worse?

This requirement is impossible to fulfil because there are no cars that can't kill people on public roads. Regardless of means of driving.

Thousands of people die every year because of human errors. Do you think this should continue forever? If not how do suggest we create software without testing it in real world conditions with a safety driver who can monitor and take over at any time?

Do you know how many people have died because they had a medical emergency while driving? Do you think that should continue forever?

If you actually want to save lives, you might start at the top. Driving is hazardous for operators and for bystanders, and kills 40,000 people in the US alone every year. Build cities such that the majority of people don't need or want to drive, and viola, you're saving lives.

And the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars worth of human effort and engineering put towards making cars that drive themselves can go to something else.

Most deaths from driving occur outside of cities.

could you clarify what you mean by 'outside of cities?'

It would probably be more accurate to say ‘outside of city streets.’ The threat of death tends to scale with vehicle speed.

a very good joke, what's your estimate to rebuild every city and road in the world lol. Billions of dollars it's a very tiny small fraction of this money.

It's a matter of priority. Many people have this concept of Amsterdam and Utrecht as having forever been a cycling paradise, but the reality is that they were choked with cars and smog until the 70s. The political will existed to prioritize non-automotive modalities, and a few decades later you have what we see today.

I think testing these systems on public roads is 100% reasonable if we all have open access to data. I’m not talking about raw driving data, but aggregate metrics about how well the system is operating and limitations are clearly communicated.

Selling a customer a car with a “full self driving” feature while burying the actual functionality in a legal agreement displayed on screen in the vehicle.

That misrepresents how Tesla sells FSD. The actual current functionality is shown in clear bullet points at the time of sale. It is not buried in a legal agreement.

FSD? Tesla sells full self-driving? Does Tesla have a product that does actual full self-driving?

Given that “full self driving“ isn’t a formally defined term, your question is not one with a concrete answer. It’s just a name. It’s clear to anyone buying the product what it does. Nobody need to explain that Starburst candies don’t literally cause stars to burst.

(For what it’s worth, while I think criticism of the “autopilot” name is patently absurd, I do agree that FSD isn't a very good name and it would have been better if it were something else.)

> Given that “full self driving“ isn’t a formally defined term, your question is not one with a concrete answer.

Don't make me laugh. Everyone knows what it's supposed to mean and Tesla hasn't delivered it. It's embarrassing to witness you even trying that on.

This [1] is a screenshot I just took from the "build your vehicle" section of Tesla's website. It took me one click, and scrolling down one page, to get to this point.

How is that "burying the actual functionality"? It's right there!

[1] https://imgur.com/9IUJW1B

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