It's little different from letting an 8 year old child take the wheel. Sure, it'd be fine most of the time but regularly, certainly, and randomly fail catastrophically.
Just why?
In both cases, AI driving and single-drink driving, the car operates in a less than optimal way. Occupants of the car are at risk. Other motorists and passers-by are at risk. In both cases, the data collection of AI-coincident accidents and drink-coincident accidents is spotty and anecdotal.
Unlike AI driving, there are lots of tests that show how human performance degrades at each level of blood-alcohol level, and that information is searchable for your average internet-inclined driver.
I would feel better if the government could be an umpire on these technologies and call out the accidents and fault with greater rigor... but I'm not sure that the lack of government involvement and the degree of lethal AI accidents has been reached for the current work, by unpaid crash-test dummies, to be unethical.
I don't see why. I would trust a road full of "I had a single drink" drivers over self-driving cars. Assuming the self-driving cars are all like the current models of trying to use vision, radar, lidar because it's assumed to be a mix of all vehicles. 100% self-driving cars with 5G and a mesh network is a different question.
It's exciting in the same setting up new software is.
At the end of the day, it requires a human to be licensed to operate a vehicle. Why should we not expect the FSD to be licensed, or have a new license category for the humans on how to operate one?
The other alternative would cost Tesla so much to hire professional drivers with full understanding of what Tesla's FSD does/does not do in large enough numbers of cars and various environmental conditions to gather enough data in a fast time frame. That is NOT an excuse on why to turn it loose to the public.
They also smelled like horseshit.
Tesla FSD is much, much worse than just driving oneself when taking into account the risk.
Similarly, 130 years from now people will ask "Why would you want to drive your self when there were self driving cars available? And someone else will have to explain that FSD required close supervision and needed interventions between 1 or 100 miles, depending on the driving situations."
We are specifically talking about people who signed up to be a beta tester.
FSD is not a rational choice over the alternative and its adoption in no way resembles the adoption of cars. The analogy is bunk. But I won't keep beating a dead horse here, I was just trying to explain why it doesn't IMO make sense.
They did not seem aware of problem with edge cases etc or image recognition actually taking some time.
None of this is ethical. At all.
And given how many people are drunk while intoxicated or using smartphones, it seems like a relatively negligible increase in danger.
The math might be something like: police departments could increase enforcement of DUI and reckless driving laws by 1% and compensate for the total increase of danger caused by Tesla's FSD testing.
And if we kill a few hundred or thousand innocent passengers and/or pedestrians along the way, that's an acceptable sacrifice to perfect Musk's software?
Holy fucking shit.
So you're just going to make up numbers to be outraged at?
As far as I know, no innocent passengers or pedestrians have been killed as a result of FSD. I imagine it would be big news as the (relatively few) Autopilot accident have been. It should be common sense to assume that FSD would be halted by Tesla themselves, or at least a government agency, if there were huge numbers of people dying.
We only have safe and cheap air travel and safe cars today because many thousands of people died beta testing them. This is basic history that everyone should know. When it comes to high speed transportation, there's simply no way to avoid significant risk while making significant progress. The best we can do is make intelligent trade offs, which is my entire point.
/s