Related, "Tesla FSD Timeline":
> September 2014: They will be a factor of 10 safer than a person [at the wheel] in a six-year time frame
* https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38625380 (earlier today)
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/truth-advertising
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/investor_protection_guide_py...
You could just prosecute a politician if he didn't deliver what he promised, you know.
Outside politics (and depending on the context) this is called breach of contract, fraud, misrepresentation or, say, false advertising or consumer protection violation.
It's also colloquially called "holding someone accountable".
What you’re asking for is a dictator. Politicians can’t unilaterally decide what happens by design. I think what you mean to say is that you want to prosecute politicians if they don’t vote in alignment with their stated goals, but even that is loaded in the US.
Let’s assume we’re talking about a liberal politician.
If he or she ran on banning guns, introduced legislation to ban guns, but some conservative added a rider to ban abortion, should he or she be prosecuted for voting against their own bill? Because that kind of nonsense happens all the time.
No, I'm asking for the judicial system to prosecute politicians who make promises that they don't keep. Like they prosecute politicians in other instances of illegal behavior.
To be clear, I'm not saying that currently, it is illegal for politicians to make promises they don't keep. I'm saying it should be, in some form.
> If he or she ran on banning guns, introduced legislation to ban guns, but some conservative added a rider to ban abortion, should he or she be prosecuted for voting against their own bill? Because that kind of nonsense happens all the time.
Obviously not. I'm not advocating for putting politicians in prison willy nilly. But we should at least prosecute the obvious, egregious instances of the kind of wrongdoing I'm talking about.
Besides, the whole concept of a "rider" is stupid, corrupt and should be illegal as well (just like it is in other areas of the law). Then you wouldn't have that problem.
but please, keep defending in bad faith
When asked the question "At what point will "Full Self-Driving Capability" features noticeably depart from "Enhanced Autopilot" features?"
Elon responded "3 months maybe, 6 months definitely"
Also, lots of examples of "this year" stated in various Januarys, and multiple instances along the lines of "complete autonomy in 2 years" going back 8 years.
I suspect his statements are carefully made to not technically meet the legal definition for fraud, but colloquially he's absolutely a liar.
They did in fact diverge, no where was that a statement that FSD would be complete by then.
It's ironic you are calling him a liar when your response seems to either be completely dishonest itself or you are not aware of the subject at hand.
> By the end of next year, said Musk, Tesla would demonstrate a fully autonomous drive from, say, a home in L.A., to Times Square ... without the need for a single touch, including the charging.
So you're technically right- he said three months, not six.
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/driverless-tesla-will...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5SfDmL0sv3w
At ~6:20.
So clearly didn't say that it would happen for certain
If you have proof of a direct quote where he says that FSD will be done withing 6 or 3 months for certain than please post it.
Otherwise, attacking me is dishonest
They're probably not carefully made, but fraud requires knowledge of falsity, and short of an internal report saying "this feature won't be ready before XYZ," it is going to be extremely difficult to prove Tesla knew the claims were false.
The other thing you'll run into is reasonability of reliance--at this point, with so many deadlines repeatedly blown through, it would be hard to demonstrate that a reasonable person could rely on a representation that a promised deadline would be met.
Somehow, this sounds like shifting blame from the liar to others ...
People are not complete fools and can learn to discount over-the-top rhetoric; sure, some people are harmed by believing everything verbatim, but those people also fall for scams, etc, etc.
His statements are parsed as statements of intent more so than actual timeline commitments. We'll have FSD in 6 months = FSD is our main priority at the moment. And sure it also makes for PR/free advertising. Is it scammy? Probably. But he likely got more out of people by pushing this false narrative than would have been otherwise accomplished.
> Is it scammy? Probably.
It's the behavior of a con artist.
> But he likely got more out of people by pushing this false narrative than would have been otherwise accomplished.
Even if that's the case, he could have had the same, or better, effect without the lying. The lying is clearly aimed at gaining investment money and preorders, though, not at some bizarre attempt at motivating engineers.
It would be dumb to be caught "lying" over and over and Musk is not know to be dumb. Consider the possibility Musk is using reflexivity to accelerate progress. When people become convinced something is possible and work towards that goal their strong belief changes reality because there is a feedback loop between reality and beliefs.
Any normal person that manages to earn themself what Musk has earned might that affect their personality? Maybe make them more narcissistic etc? Large wealth would not affect your psychology?
Regarding bipolar: It would not surprise me but is there evidence? Did he admit it?
Also “earned” is a bit generous, he’s had a lot of “right people, right time, right place” in his life (not to mention a great start from the emerald mines).
Also why look at dumb things per day when what matters (to me) is the enormity of dumb actions? He bought Twitter for way more than it was worth because he had a hissy fit. He’s “concerned” that AI isn’t allowed to say the n-word. He did a live public call with Andrew Tate, Alex Jones, and Vivek Ramaswamy. I could do one simply dumb thing every day for my entire life and not live up to the sheer stupidity of this man’s actions.
Elephant does what elephant does and ants complain. What do you expect?
> He bought Twitter for way more than it was worth because he had a hissy fit.
You don't make mistakes? Your ability grow wealth is superior? How then do you judge?
> He’s “concerned” that AI isn’t allowed to say the n-word.
Might he be concerned about censorship in general? If something against the law it is against the law but what gives you the right to impose your notion of "proper" speech on others? Do people have a right not to be offended? The attack on the Charlie Hebdo newspaper office in Paris by Islamic extremists you think they were justified due to being offended by cartoons?
> He did a live public call with Andrew Tate, Alex Jones, and Vivek Ramaswamy.
Now you want to impose rules on others about who they are allowed to talk to in public?
> I could do one simply dumb thing every day for my entire life and not live up to the sheer stupidity of this man’s actions.
Elephant does what elephant does. Ant does what ant does. You can not compare them. I believe strong feelings cloud your view.
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The reply you've presented suggests a debate about the intentions behind Elon Musk's public statements, specifically regarding whether he's misleading people for financial gain or using a strategy known as "reflexivity" to motivate progress.
1. *Lying for Financial Gain*: The first part of the reply posits that Musk might be making false or exaggerated claims ("lying") to attract investment and preorders for his projects. This view implies that Musk's primary goal is to secure funding by convincing investors and customers of the feasibility and near-term success of his ventures, even if those claims are not entirely grounded in current realities.
2. *Reflexivity to Accelerate Progress*: The second part of the reply introduces a different perspective, suggesting Musk might be employing a concept known as reflexivity. This idea, often associated with financier George Soros, posits that market participants' beliefs can shape market realities. Applied here, it means Musk could be making ambitious or seemingly unrealistic statements with the intention of inspiring his teams and the broader public. The underlying belief is that if people are convinced that a challenging goal is achievable, their collective effort and belief can actually bring that goal closer to reality, creating a positive feedback loop between belief and outcome.
The reply seems to be wrestling with the notion of whether Musk's statements are purely manipulative for financial gain or part of a sophisticated strategy to create self-fulfilling prophecies that drive technological and scientific breakthroughs. It reflects on Musk's reputation for not being "dumb," suggesting that his repeated bold claims might have a deeper strategic purpose rather than just being simple falsehoods.
------
The reply you've presented suggests a debate about the intentions behind Elon Musk's public statements, specifically regarding whether he's misleading people for financial gain or using a strategy known as "reflexivity" to motivate progress.
1. *Lying for Financial Gain*: The first part of the reply posits that Musk might be making false or exaggerated claims ("lying") to attract investment and preorders for his projects. This view implies that Musk's primary goal is to secure funding by convincing investors and customers of the feasibility and near-term success of his ventures, even if those claims are not entirely grounded in current realities.
2. *Reflexivity to Accelerate Progress*: The second part of the reply introduces a different perspective, suggesting Musk might be employing a concept known as reflexivity. This idea, often associated with financier George Soros, posits that market participants' beliefs can shape market realities. Applied here, it means Musk could be making ambitious or seemingly unrealistic statements with the intention of inspiring his teams and the broader public. The underlying belief is that if people are convinced that a challenging goal is achievable, their collective effort and belief can actually bring that goal closer to reality, creating a positive feedback loop between belief and outcome.
The reply seems to be wrestling with the notion of whether Musk's statements are purely manipulative for financial gain or part of a sophisticated strategy to create self-fulfilling prophecies that drive technological and scientific breakthroughs. It reflects on Musk's reputation for not being "dumb," suggesting that his repeated bold claims might have a deeper strategic purpose rather than just being simple falsehoods.
The final 11 seconds of a fatal Tesla Autopilot crash: A reconstruction of the wreck shows how human error and emerging technology can collide with deadly results
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/t...
Does it? Is there no "average person should be aware" level?
The civil tort of fraud (criminal fraud is different) generally requires either knowledge of falsity or reckless indifference to the truth.
Or recklessness as to falsity - like not caring whether the statement was true or false.
That enables fraudsters, of course. Also, what about people who don't spend all their time on the Internet, on HN, reading about Elon Musk? They buy stocks and cars too.
2017 was before the infamous "funding secured" tweet, so I imagine there was no care in crafting his statements.
Of course, if one were to define FSD in terms of being so capable that it could also likely pass the Turing test (or whatever better replacement we come up with as a measure of AGI), then, by definition, it would be close to as hard a problem as AGI itself.
Either Elon is aware of the fact that FSD is really hard and he's lying repeatedly about being able to deliver it "later this year". Or he is not aware that FSD is as hard as you say and needs to "hit the books" and understand the problem better. I don't really see an "out" here after so many missed promises.
So you look at what's left to do and as long as you don't run into any unforeseen issues you say, looks like about six months from now.
Sometimes you don't run into any unforeseen issues and it turns out to be about six months.
Sometimes you do, and then it takes longer. So a year later you found an unexpected problem that delayed you by a year. Someone asks you how long you think it will take again, that issue delayed you by a year but that was a year ago, so you say, looks like about six months from now.
Eventually the estimate will be true but nobody knows when because nobody knows how to make an accurate estimate. Because you have to know how hard it is to do in order to know how long it will take, which nobody knows until after somebody has actually done it.
- less than 3 months
- 3 months
- 6 months
Anything less than 3 months - is an accurate estimate. Otherwise, 3 months is the amount of time it takes to do _anything_, right? If it's a really hard problem, then we say, okay, it's 6 months. At the end of the day, those 3 months and 6 months means "NFC", which goes back to the estimation technique that everything is either a "1", "TFB", or "NFC". 3 months = TFB, 6 months = NFC
On a more serious point, we (as software engineers) generally feel we can solve almost any problem with 3 months worth of resources and effort. 3 to 6 months sometimes (IMO) can be a bit of the scariest estimate to give or receive.
For reference & more on NFC/TFB/1 estimation technique: https://pm.stackexchange.com/questions/26218/how-to-implemen...
Perhaps. Of course, we all know for a certainty that this had almost nothing to do with you're describing. The people how were actually designing the software knew that it won't happen in six months. I doubt Musk wasn't aware of that, so the only alternative that he was lying.
How do we know this?
Waymo has had this "almost" working for years. In theory you could get from the status quo to actually working in a short period of time, if you're sufficiently smart or lucky and have the right resources.
Or you could hit a wall for years.
The things currently happening with LLMs and image generation were the sort of things many people said were many years away, if not impossible, but we got there by basically throwing a lot of compute at some clever but relatively simple ML algorithms. Nobody knows until you try.
It's obvious that his estimates are optimistic, but optimism isn't inherently malicious.
Some life experience + common sense?
> In theory you could get from the status quo to actually working in a short period of time,
In theory we could build a rocket that would fly a person to the moon in 6 months.
> if you're sufficiently smart
If that's the case, you wouldn't be making such bold claims (or rather actually believing in them yourself)
> LLMs and image generation were the sort of things many people said were many years away,
Does that include the people who were actually working on them in OpenAI?
> It's obvious that his estimates are optimistic, but optimism isn't inherently malicious.
In some cases it's either malice or stupidity/delusion.
If you asked people with "life experience + common sense" if generative AI would soon be possible six months before it actually was, they'd have said no and been wrong.
> In theory we could build a rocket that would fly a person to the moon in 6 months.
Kennedy said it would be done by the end of the decade, people called him crazy, and then it happened. The people saying it couldn't be done were still saying it right up until the day it happened.
> If that's the case, you wouldn't be making such bold claims (or rather actually believing in them yourself)
I don't think he, or anyone, believes that it will definitely happen in six months. He's giving the optimistic end of the range, but everybody knows that.
> Does that include the people who were actually working on them in OpenAI?
Before they had them working internally? Yeah, it did. Nobody knew it would work until it actually worked.
GPT 3.5 / 4 were an iteration of previous models, their performance wasn't that exceptionally surprising if you were working in the field.
Also, these are fundamentally different problems. Self-driving requires massive amounts of real-world testing and then you have all the regulatory and safety/legal stuff to do. That's simply infeasible in 6 months no matter what. Generative AI has no such constraints.
> Kennedy said it would be done by the end of the decade, people called him crazy, and then it happened. The people saying it couldn't be done were still saying it right up until the day it happened.
So? I don't see any link to what we're discussing. Kennedy didn't really have that much direct involvement in the moon program.
What we're discussing is an equivalent of the head of NASA, in ~1966 or so publicly declaring that they'll send a crewed mission to the moon in 6 months (even though everyone knew that wasn't possible no matter how hard everyone worked).
> He's giving the optimistic end of the range,
He's just saying random unsubstantiated stuff because that's just what he does all the time (or because he wants to sell more cars IDK).
> Yeah, it did. Nobody knew it would work until it actually worked.
I'm pretty sure that was an iterative process, so they knew quite a while before it actually "worked" (could be released to the public).
The experts had a clear view way back then, the CEOs just don’t want to listen.
- even human drivers cannot safely operate in all locations/conditions
- all self-driving cars will need a mechanism for cops to talk to a human
Are you suggesting that Waymo is there? I don't think the evidence would support that. Even if we relax that goal a bit so the self-driving car can disengage and refuse to drive in, say, the most difficult 20% of situations, I don't think we can say Waymo is there, either.
One can quite reasonably point out that level 5 autonomy has not yet been achieved without moving the level 5 goalposts.
IMO the truth is more with the experts. Each new location seems to require a lot of tuning to get right and function in a way the company is happy with. If a "self driving car" is one we can drop anywhere and have it drive we are still waiting on that.
There is a universe of difference between something like ParkShuttle (its own right of way, using magnets in the road to detect position) and modern autonomous vehicles. Saying modern autonomous vehicles have environmental constraints is valid, saying that makes then no different than a "people mover on wheels" is not.
The point is that "deployed to a limited area" is not what people are thinking when they talk about a "self driving car." Of course ParkShuttle isn't the same as Waymo (or any other modern self-driving car) - but the question is how far we've come!
Are you claiming Waymo is ready to drive anywhere in the world? I do not think that's Waymo's position. So where are we? Cut through the rhetoric and tell it like it is - or join the rest of us who are speculating from the sidelines with incomplete information.
Just like with IoT we'll eventually arrive at a boring, useful state...it will just take a while.
With something this hard it's extremely tough to tell for sure when it will happen and often progress goes in chunks where it seems like it's going to happen but then doesnt.
citation required
Although one should never believe the ravings, useful work does surprisingly often nucleate around them, just not to the degree or with the speed promised.
If the expert works in a lab developing new experimental solar panels they probably don’t see a clear path to mass production.
The CEO might know another manufacturing expert that does see a path to production and have enough high level understanding to know the methods are compatible.
Like a CEO saying, I have a material that can protect wearers from nuclear fusion blasts and it will be on the market in 6 months, but the experts in the field have yet to actually prove that material exists and create it in a lab.
But the point is that we are all equally capable of being wrong. Especially when we step outside our area of expertise. CEOs are just another type of expert but their domain is organization. We have to consider the source’s experience relative to the domain in question before we can decide if their prediction is trustworthy.
If I wanted to defend Musk I would do it explicitly. You don’t need to read between the lines.
Even CEOs who are an experts are by their very nature too biased to take at face value.
AI is a hard field to make predictions in.
Right but "hard to predict" does not mean "it will happen whenever I want it to happen". You can't look at a very hard problem, where a good sample of the world's experts say it will take more than 10 years to solve, and just say "I bet we can do it in 4 years" just because you want that to be true.
(The median expert prediction was between 2040-2060 previously, now quite a few people have moved that timeline to before 2035).
https://medium.com/@paul.k.pallaghy/chatgpt-did-any-one-remo...
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hQysqfSEzciRazx8k/forecastin...
https://research.aimultiple.com/artificial-general-intellige...
Check out for more predictions by experts: