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Comment by daghamm | Hacker News Reader

This is a really odd take. Should I accept that my car can kill me because statically other drivers may also cause a crash and kill me?

There are a few Tesla crashes on camera, and they look like something even a fairly bad driver could avoid. See for example the SF tunnel crash: https://abc7news.com/tesla-sf-bay-bridge-crash-8-car-self-dr...

Besides, other vehicles have now active safety functions that seem to work extremly well. There are car models out there with ZERO fatalities so far thanks to this technology. So FSD being an improvement compared to really bad drivers is not really an improvement.

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I think it's your interpretation that's odd. Don't give me wrong I'm not an Elon fan, but I at least like where that technology is headed.

If I were given a choice between one in five chance of death by cancer, or a one in six chance of death by Russian roulette, I'm going to take the Russian roulette it doesn't matter that it's a dumb game. What matters are my better odds.

This isn't to say that we should accept people playing Russian roulette it's just that if Russian roulette is a cure for cancer then we got to accept those stats.

Now if we're going to compare active safety functions to Russian roulette with rubber bullets, then maybe the FDA should mandate Russian roulette with rubber bullets.

Is it not a statistical fallacy to claim improvement by beating the worst case?

Most people don't drive like crazy and taking a ride in my car is statistically not as dangerous as playing Russian roulette.

What was the driver doing, sleeping? Isn’t this what the car does if you take your hand off the wheel?

He was not sleeping. From the article:

"... Tesla Model S was in "full self-driving mode" when it suddenly deployed the brakes. A total of eight vehicles crashed, nine people injured, including a 2-year-old boy."

And does it then not accept the press of the accelerator to override the braking? I believe it does.

From the video it looks like there would be ample time to do just that, even before the first crash.

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