If the world had more stuck up prigs, billion dollar corporations wouldn’t be using customers to beta test their lethal robots on public streets.
Here’s to prigs!
Here’s to prigs!
I think Tesla is somewhat reckless with self driving, but we all need to agree humans aren't much better and don't generate any controversy.
At the current state of the art for self-driving, this simply is not true. Humans are much better, on average. That's why the vast majority of cars are still driven by humans.
The technology will keep improving, and at some point one would expect that it will be more reliable than humans. But it's significantly less reliable now.
The right way asks for community buy in, follows safety procedures, is transparent and forthcoming about failures, is honest about capabilities and limitations.
The wrong way says “I can do what I want, I’m not asking permission, if you don’t like it sue me” The wrong way throws the safety playbook out the window and puts untrained operators in charge of untested deadly machines. The wrong way doesn’t ask for community input, obfuscates and dissembles when challenged, is capricious, vindictive, and ultimately (this is the most crucial part) not effective compared to the right way of doing things.
Given a choice between the safe thing to do and the thing that will please Musk, Tesla will always choose the latter.
PS: I'm not claiming that every single transport need can be solved by trains, but they do dramatically reduce the cost in human life. Yes, they have to be part of a mix of other solutions, such as denser housing. Yes, you can have bad actors that don't maintain their rail and underpay/understaff their engineers which leads to derailments, etc. I say this because the utopia of not having to drive, not caring about sleepiness, ill health, or intoxication, not having to finance or repair a vehicle or buy insurance, not renting parking spots, all that is available today without having to invent new lidar sensors or machine vision. You can just live in London or Tokyo.
I traveled there regularly, for over 20 years.
Their train system is the Eighth Wonder.
A lot of the reason, is cultural. Trains are a standard part of life. Most shows have significant scenes on commuter trains, as do ads. Probably wouldn’t apply to nations like the US.
Not for everyone, we didn't. Self-driving cars have the potential to serve people who don't want to restrict themselves to going places trains can take them.
> You can just live in London or Tokyo.
Not everyone either can or wants to live in such places. If I prefer to live in a less dense area and have a car, the risk is mine to take. And if at some point a self-driving car can drive me more reliably than I can drive myself, I will gladly let it do so.
If self-driving cars at their current level of reliability were as common as human drivers, they would be killing much more than a million people a year.
When I am satisfied that a self-driving car is more reliable than I am, I will have no problem letting it take me places instead of driving myself. But not until then.
Anyway, subways are awesome.
This is what happens in the real world when you're a stuck up prig, not the Hollywood movie ending you've constructed in your head.