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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

> From my perspective, everything went right here.

Did you miss the part where the autopilot steered straight toward a clearly visible cyclist?

If the autopilot is so unreliable that it requires lightning-quick reflexes to override, it's going to lead to a lot of accidents from people who don't happen to be paying perfect attention at the time. I know the whole story is that drivers are supposed to be 100% engaged, but realistically that's just not going to happen when you literally market something as "full self-driving"

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I would add that it's human nature to fall into a mode of complacency when it works 99% of the time. We've got a story on the front page about "the rock says" heuristics working 99% of the time. The rock says TESLA DRIVES CORRECTLY, and it's mostly right. So we relax, and there's a dead cyclist.

The name is stupid and should be changed, but I also don't want people to be absolved of responsibility because they bought into marketing. "But they said the ship couldn't sink!" Doesn't matter, you're still on the hook for the hundreds of people who drowned. Due diligence is a part of responsible adulthood.

The airlines that got fucked by Boeing's MCAS still had to send payouts to families who lost loved ones, because it was ultimately their decision to buy and operate a 787 MAX. They can (and certainly should) sue Boeing for the losses, but it doesn't change the fact that the crashes are theirs to own. You don't get a get out of jail free card for being gullible.

This comment is factually wrong. The airlines did not pay compensation to victims families, Boeing did. Boeing accepted full responsibility for the crash, for providing an unsafe system. Ethiopian airlines did their "due diligence" by purchasing an FAA approved aircraft, by Boeing. They weren't to know that a serious case of regulatory capture was happening. https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.theguardian.com/bus...

Huh, TIL (and relevant username). Thank you for the correction. I noticed the article says they only admitted fault for the second crash, do you know what happened with the first? Did Boeing admit fault for that too?

I'm not sure actually. There was a lot more attention to the second crash after it became apparent that Boeing had sold an unsafe aircraft.

I believe that GP's point is that it demonstrably did not require lightning-quick reflexes to override: a normal human driver with normal human response times prevented the accident. No one was hurt or killed. Presumably this incident is an important bug that will now be fixed.

That's the best possible outcome, no?

> No one was hurt or killed.

This time...

> Presumably this incident is an important bug that will now be fixed.

What gives you this confidence? Tesla started decapitating people in 2016, and 5 years later it's still lunging toward cyclists, running over pedestrians, running into parked cars, running into barriers, running stop signs...

Tesla has a fundamental perception problem. Teslas fundamentally have blind spots due to their perception stack. The way this gets better is that Tesla:

- admits its perception system is a bust, and it goes for a more robust system which takes into account over a decade of industry wisdom as to how to properly engineer a potentially life-threatening system with safety-first engineering practices

- starts emphasizing a safety-focused company culture that doesn't use the general public as a beta testing playground.

I predict neither of those things will happen.

The best possible outcome would be "the cyclist was not at additional or different risks".

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