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Comment by dqpb | Hacker News Reader

It's not a scam. A scam is a deliberate deception. Engineers working on this are genuinely trying to solve the problem.

Tesla has been collecting money for a non-existent upcoming capability for how long now?

Or did they just redefine the meaning of “full self driving” to mean something other than the car fully driving itself?

Then there is Uber. You could read HN archival posts where significant numbers of folks here drank the kool-aid and waved away the obvious holes in the Uber business model with “of course this is just temporary… robot cars will be doing everything in two years”. Listen to a Ben Thompson podcast when he devotes dozens of hours fawning over Uber.

Full self driving is tantalizing for unethical business people because it demos so well. High minded talk about the trolley car problem and liddites shut down meaningful criticism.

The engineers may be collecting big paychecks working on it, but they are hardly innocent; they are no different than employees of any other unethical corporation.

The technology has come a long way since the early days of the DARPA grand challenge. Fortunately, the technology will continue to progress, independent of your ability to comprehend it.

Your response is the playbook for these types of scams. Don’t believe your lying eyes, everything’s great.

Perhaps I’m simple, but I’m pretty sure the people who dropped $10k on full self driving “in a year” or “in the future” in their Tesla model S in 2017 got fleeced. Tesla sold access to a product that doesn’t exist, and never delivered it. Uber sold a business model to stupid investors that doesn’t exist to justify breaking other laws.

That doesn’t mean that the long running Google work in the field, etc is a scam. That doesn’t mean that working on self driving is unethical. Ripping off people is.

> Your response is the playbook for these types of scams.

> That doesn’t mean that the long running Google work in the field, etc is a scam. That doesn’t mean that working on self driving is unethical.

Seems like you're still grappling with your own stance on the issue.

[flagged]

Please don't post unsubstantive or flamebait comments.

You may not owe capitalism better but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Aw, thanks for taking the time to write a personal comment. I'll try and be less impulsive next time and make a more substantial, less flamebaity contribution.

Appreciated!

What unethical corporation do you work for? They're all unethical.

Your comment reminds me of this Dril quote: https://twitter.com/dril/status/473265809079693312

    the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: 
    "theres actually zero difference between good &
    bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron"

I sense deflection and an attempt to change the point being made above your response. It’s particularly unethical to promise a badly thought out goal that cannot be meaningfully achieved in the interests of drawing out financial support for a longer period of time.

I am reminded of the person who called their intimate partner “tomorrow” because they never came.

“Jerry, just remember. It’s not a lie… If you believe it.”

When a company asserts they will have self-driving cars in a year, and they aren't doing any on-road tests, is that assertion a deliberate deception? Or a willing self-deception?

In any case, people can work be part of a scam without knowing it's a scam. Do you think everyone at Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities knew it was a big Ponzi scheme?

Uranus makes a complete orbit around the Sun (a year in Uranian time) in about 84 Earth years (30,687 Earth days).

So you see, it's true. From a certain point of view.

I agree with your comment, there are lots of folks making real progress in this space and there are secondary industries that benefit from things like lidar which has gotten way better in large part to this work. Playing devils advocate though - Theranos had 800 employees at its peak, it's hard to think that at least a few of those people working there genuinely thought they were trying to solve the problem.

Lidar still tries to kill me on a daily basis; It doesn't like sunrise and sunset.

Very interesting. What LiDAR are you using? Does it happen if the sun shines directly into the LiDAR from the front?

Standard commercial unit, no clue. It happens as you say, with sun shining directly in front, especially when passing under bridges or when another vehicle passes the sun (but not in your lane). The stark difference of direct sunlight and long shadows triggers it the most.

I'm sure scientists and engineers at Theranos were genuinely trying to solve the problem, too. That didn't make it a non-scam.

There is nothing inherently scammy about automated blood testing, even if we currently lack the technology.

Continuing to brand something with deceptive wording does cross over into fraud.

There is room for fraud within a scope of offering undiscovered technologies, but the undiscovered technologies themselves are not fraud. Theranos isn’t comparable to self-driving cars.

So imagine I sell a future-looking feature which is incompete and unreliable, even causing an order of magnitude more fatalities per usage (e.g. mile) than the alternative. And continue to sell and offer it under a confusing name for years. What would have to happen for it to cross over from naive aspiration to fraud. I.e. for Tesla FSD to become like Theranos?

For me that line was crossed when Tesla offered FSD on public roads, to the general public, and continuing to include 'full' and "self driving" in the name. Every day it continues more non-Tesla owners are put at risk while the government is asleep at the wheel.

I think it is fair to draw some parallels between Tesla and Theranos, but the topic here is self-driving cars, not Tesla.

How is Tesla's FSD off topic during a discussion of self driving cars?

Tesla FSD is a product (or possibly a scam under the guise of a product). Self-driving cars are a concept.

Why would a real product named "self driving" not be relevant to a discussion on the concept?

The discussion isn’t about the concept. The discussion is about how the concept isn’t a scam.

IMO an example of self driving that is a scam is relevant to whether the concept as a whole may be a scam too.

Of course a counter example would be just as relevant since it could prove the concept isn't entirely a scam.

The example wasn't even that of a self-driving car related scam, but a scam found in the automated blood testing industry.

I raise Tesla as an example of a scam similar to Thermos in that it's crossed from naivete to fraud. And considering the stuttering progress of self driving by Uber and even Waymo (in adverse conditions) it may well be self driving as a concept is premature. So attempts to market and sell it as is (beta or not) are fraud.

You mean like selling realestate on the moon?

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