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Comment by TheDong | Hacker News Reader

> Tesla has actually installed hardware in cars and locked it behind software paywalls, multiple times (battery capacity, rear heated seats, "acceleration boost", maybe more I'm unaware of).

The most vaunted feature of teslas, "Full-Self-Driving" (note, not actually full self driving) is also a clear example of this.

It's $10k, and it's a 100% software update for all modern teslas. The FSD stuff, as I understand it, is all on-car (i.e. no remote tesla-run service involved), so you really are just paying to unlock use of hardware already there.

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This is equivalent to saying that Microsoft shouldn't charge for Office because "you really are just paying to unlock use of hardware" to do word processing.

It's not immoral to charge for software. There's a difference between charging money to add a toggle button for already existing heated seats on the touchscreen vs. charging money to license the most advanced driver assist software available to the public, still under development.

See, your statement of "charging for software not being immoral" is still a hotly ongoing topic of debate. It's just that the economic architecture that carried us out of a world primarily constrained by material scarcity is being naively applied to an area of one which does not.

Introducing scarcity dynamics where none exist, is to me, one of the most immoral of willful actions to undertake.

Isn't the scarcity dynamic simply... shifted left? Your point is that it's trivial to duplicate software and distribute it and there's no (or extremely low) incremental cost in doing so, but we both know the cost of software comes from, you know, people who have spent time to learn how to write software and then dedicating their waking hours to do so for years on end. There's scarcity in the number of developers available to perform that job.

Now, a situation where I agree with the core thesis of "to introduce scarcity dynamics where none exist" is around, say, virtual real estate, or the most obvious one of them all: NFTs.

I am actually sympathetic to this view somewhat. Copyright is not an inalienable right, it's something that we decided as a society to grant to people because we think the benefits outweigh the costs, and that may not be true. Personally I would be in favor of radical changes to copyright such as reducing the duration to something like 5 years. Artificial scarcity is useful but life+70 years of artificial scarcity is far beyond reasonable.

It would be similar to Microsoft offering Office in the Start menu, and when you try to run it, it says you need a license.

That’s pretty close to what they do with their 30-day trial of Office 365 installed on a lot of PCs.

Oh buddy, it's _$12k_ now.

And yeah, the calculus here was to outfit every vehicle with the hardware, whether purchased or not, because the cost of the hardware is made up for not merely in potential future conversions/purchases, but in the ability to collect reams of data from a fleet of vehicles constantly annotating and sending back information to their model.

To wit, the FSD stuff is indeed all on-car, but the FSD-as-a-work-in-progress-constantly-evolving requires significant tesla-run services: they ML work is being done centrally, and then updated models are pushed down to the cars to, hopefully not run down innocent pedestrians in the street.

The difference there is that Tesla still gets value out of putting FSD hardware in cars that don't buy it because they can collect data. You can't say the same about an air conditioner.

I don't have a Tesla, but the hardware side of things is probably not close to $10k, and probably already being used in a multipurpose fashion. What I'm saying is, aren't you paying the $10k to use the self-driving model?

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