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It’s an interesting analog to AutoPilot. People will leave their dogs in cars on occasion. I believe there are plenty of times you have to do that actually as
by zaroth 8y ago
It’s an interesting analog to AutoPilot.
People will leave their dogs in cars on occasion. I believe there are plenty of times you have to do that actually as a matter of safety, where there isn’t another option or a second person to stay with the dog in the car.
But a car isn’t perfectly safe for dogs, and perhaps hundreds of dogs die each year in hot cars. (Apparently a million dogs are killed in collisions each year, but I guess that’s besides the point)
So as a feature to keep dogs comfortable and safe, it’s a feature that is likely to protect dogs’ lives on hot days.
Yet, as you say, and I agree, it’s entirely possible a hardware or software failure will result in a dog’s death.
So they are protecting dogs lives, but in doing with a general purpose automotive AC could also risk a dog’s life in the event the system fails. In addition the existence of the feature may also contribute to a complacency around leaving dogs in cars that otherwise could have safely remained with the owner.
Does that mean it’s wrong to ship the feature? FSD, in a similar sense, has the potential to save tens of thousands of lives a year. It will also undoubtably cost some number of lives a year as well.
If we are unable to tolerate catastrophic failure of a system, you necessarily lose all the benefits of the system. To me it seems morally wrong not to ship the system which will save orders of magnitudes more lives than it might cost. That’s true whether we’re discussing dogs or humans.
It’s funny it’s hard to draw a precise line, but I’m sure for example the FDA has dealt with this exact calculation. No medicine is without risk, and to win approval is not to show a medicine is risk free. Their is some threshold where the risk is worth the net benefit.
In the case of an AC system in an automobile, it is already a mission critical system which is highly reliable by the way. When I had a cooling fan die on my last car a couple years ago I was unable to use the AC in my car on a 100°F day. It was amazing how hot the car got, and how quickly. If I was on a remote highway it would have been life threatening, to go from 72°F climate control to 100°F+ with no water on hand.