You do understand that people are concerned about setting these cars free on public roads, right, where they can kill unwilling participants? I don't think the concern here is about your freedom to choke on billionaire boots.
Elon is a bit of a monster (personal opinion), but regulators have the final say. When they force FSD to be pulled, then there is weight behind the argument, but this hasn’t happened and that sends signal.
You already share the road with inattentive drivers and drunks, so the risk acceptance/appetite benchmark has been set. FSD is arguably better than both cohorts, considering number of deaths caused.
As always, nuance. More people will die in the next ~10 minutes from traffic deaths than have ever been attributed to Tesla’s autopilot or FSD (33 total, as of this comment).
(Again, not a billionaire simp, just a rationalist; booo on Elon, but props to Tesla engineers in the aggregate; personally, I hope he gets blown out the door and JB Straubel takes over as CEO)
This is true.
> When they force FSD to be pulled, then there is weight behind the argument.
Well, I suppose that it is pretty hard to dispute this, but it should be recognized that the NHTSA (the theoretical regulator of vehicle and highway safety in the US) is extremely weak and virtually non-existent.
The NHTSA lacks anything close to the skill sets necessary to independently, proactively and robustly scrutinize even rudimentary mechanical issues (which has been confirmed by several USDOT OIG reports over the years).
With opaque, complex automated systems and software... the NHTSA stands no chance.
The NHTSA lacks the internal skill sets to understand any of the comments that I have made elsewhere on this post.
Again, you are not wrong per se, but again, it should be recognized that the NHTSA is concerned primarily with establishing plausible deniability to protect the agency and with headlines rather than protecting the public with solid regulatory processes and oversight.
(Coincidentally enough, yet another USDOT OIG report was buried in a Friday afternoon release: https://www.autoblog.com/2023/06/02/nhtsa-fails-to-meet-inte.... I kid you not, every four years or so the USDOT OIG releases another critical report on the NHTSA that focused on issues not rectified in the previous report. It is like Groundhog Day.)
> You already share the road with inattentive drivers and drunks, so the risk acceptance benchmark has been set.
This is true.
Because the US public does not demand change and because roadway deaths are high, but distributed across time and space... the NHTSA remains weak and overall US transportation policy remains dreadfully poor.
> FSD is arguably better than both cohorts, considering number of deaths caused.
Unquantifiable.
There is no way to accurately and independently quantify the downstream safety impact of FSD Beta.
Sure, perhaps the NHTSA believes that (because they must given their structural issues), but we should recognize why such assumptions are flawed.
> More people will die in the next few minutes from traffic deaths than have ever been attributed to Tesla’s autopilot or FSD (33 total, as of this comment).
There is the possibility for "indirect" incidents caused by FSD Beta where the FSD Beta-active vehicle is never physically impacted.
We cannot assume that those do not exist.
And we also cannot assume that the media is able to pick up on every Tesla vehicle-related incident - even as well-followed as Tesla, the company, is.
In fact, other than the automaker's word, in many cases, safety investigators like those from the NTSB cannot independently and forensically establish specific root causes.
The second is a crime and I believe the first is a misdemeanor. Getting caught in either scenario repeatedly will cause you to lose your license.
So we may share the road with dangerous drivers, but we don't accept it. So it isn't grounds to accept more danger.
Really this line of argument is always wrong. The presence of danger should make you less comfortable accepting additional danger, not more. It's not like they cancel out, they sum. (One might say that mature and accessible self driving technology would take these drivers off the road, but the situation today is immature technology and high end vehicles.)
As a self described rationalist, I think you should take another look at that - to me, it reads like you're saying that because it doesn't feel like we're taking on additional marginal risk in comparison to the risks we've already taken on, we don't need to worry about how we're actually doing so, so I was caught a bit off guard when you said you were a rationalist.
I'm skeptical of any digital technology use case where the analogies/comparisons tend to be:
a) to non-digital things, when there are perfectly decent digital comparisons to be made (e.g., autopilot in the airline industry)
b) to conspicuous non-digital things, here drunk or inattentive humans
c) more or less a $small-human-scale-X improvement on the performance/efficiency/safety of the non-digital thing, often implying a future $unspecified-X improvement that, say, Moore's law would suggest (not saying you're doing the latter here, btw)
Those last two especially. I'm just imagining someone hawking a newfangled realtime audio system, claiming that it outperforms hand-punching a player-piano score. It's a silly example for sure; but on a regular basis on HN I read how Bitcoin is no worse than fiat in terms of global energy use, how crypto scam rates are roughly equivalent to wildcat banks in the old west (and hey, we eventually improved on those, so...), and how many more humans cause car deaths than these intractable systems which are "arguably" better than drunks.
My experience with FSD is it’s a terrible autonomous system and anyone who uses it as such is a fool, and a fool with a car is dangerous no matter what. However the joint probability of my driving awareness and skill and the cars combined is greater than mine alone. I’ve had it suddenly brake when a car I didn’t notice was drifting into my lane and had it not I would have been in an accident. Likewise it made mistakes and I took control.
I personally don’t care if it ever is able to take me from point A to point B without my attention or assistance. I value its ability to navigate with my assistance especially on long trips, reducing my overall fatigue and taking me through confusing sections of urban interstate without errors - when I always make a wrong turn. The fact it’s 360 aware and I’m not and it’s indefatigable and I’m not is valuable.
In the last year it’s become remarkably more capable. I don’t know if they can continue this rate of improvement but if they can it’s about as good as I would expect from todays technology on a consumer car. That’s a decent bar for me. I think it’s also something valuable on the roads - as a driver assistance tool. The folks who turn it on and get in the backseat would do something just as bone headed without FSD. Rather I notice enormous number of Tesla cars on the road not being drive by total idiots, and presumably quite a few using FSD without issue. And, as I assert above, I believe the joint probability of the aware driver with FSD having an accident is lower than either alone.
I don’t care what hyperbole a bipolar nut job spouts, but I do appreciate him setting an unreasonable goal and failing halfway there while the rest of the world seems content with stagnating. Tesla created the EV movement in the mainstream, SpaceX created the space revival we are experiencing.
Fwiw, I think the choking on billionaire boots comment is not a particularly high value contribution.
I do appreciate him setting an unreasonable goal and failing halfway there while the rest of the world seems content with stagnating.
I feel the same way about teenagers, grandmas, and grandpas, and yet here we are.
FSD does not have rights.
And yet, the average driver kills 0 people. It’s in the far margins where deaths occur - a fraction of a fraction of a percent.
This is in comparison to the arguably singular entity “Tesla Autopilot” which has already killed several.
And we hold them responsible for the humans in their care.
[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...
The fact that Tesla does not put their money where their mouth is says all you need to know.
Wake me up when someone is willing to take on liability. Until then automated driving does not exist.
FSD with a safety driver does not pose a threat to public safety. That’s not coming from me, it’s coming from the NHTSA.
Although, I guess my bigger issue is actually with the government that takes no action about false advertising.
I would have thought that something called Full Self Driving would be capable of fully driving by itself.
Sarcasm aside, that’s how most people use it.
The NHTSA hasn’t regulated it, but that doesn’t mean it’s an endorsement. It just means that they haven’t found anything within their legislative mandate that they can regulate here. US agencies are largely reactive, and I’m not sure I trust them with my life to get this right.
No one who has used the software for more than a minute has any misconceptions about FSD.
But people who have heard the name might. Honestly, it's a ridiculous name. Just "Self-driving" might be arguable. What are they going to call it when it's really fully self driving? "Literally Fully Self Driving Totally Serious"