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Come on, that’s blatant whataboutism. Surely we’re good enough here to realize that we can hold both Tesla and other drivers to a higher standard? Yes, people

Come on, that’s blatant whataboutism. Surely we’re good enough here to realize that we can hold both Tesla and other drivers to a higher standard? Yes, people are often bad drivers. But it doesn’t follow that we must ignore the faults of any self driving technology just because regular drivers crash too. If Tesla is pushing out updates that make their own super fans comment on the cars doing unsafe and erratic things, that’s something we should look into.

NickM 5y ago
I don't think that's an example of whataboutism, given that one of the stated goals of autopilot is literally to provide a safer alternative to the status quo of humans driving manually; pointing out the riskiness of driving in general is not some unrelated thing that's being raised as a distraction from the real issue.
jjk166 5y ago
No, we can't. Accidents are going to happen no matter what because driving is a complex task with an infinite number of potential failure modes, and no threshold where the risk of serious injury or death can be considered zero. If something is safer than average, then it is objectively an improvement, and that's all it needs to be.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  > If something is safer than average, then it is objectively an improvement, and that's all it needs to be. GP is asserting that FSD is significantly less safe than previously known, and only driver intervention is preventing FSD from killing more people. Personally I’ve heard way too many “FSD regularly tries to drive into that bridge pillar” for me to believe an assertion that FSD is safer than drivers without significant evidence. Second, we’re talking about a case where even Tesla owners acknowledge that an update made their cars noticeably less safe. Even in cases where FSD is better than human drivers, which I don’t think is the case yet, we should be quite concerned about the possibility of software updates making vehicles less safe.
  - jjk166 5y ago
    My comment was made in response to GP's claim that it is whataboutism to compare the safety record of FSD to human drivers. It is entirely possible that FSD actually is less safe than drivers, and if so let the evidence show it. But the fact remains that you should very much be comparing the safety of FSD to human driving.

NickM 5y ago

I don't think that's an example of whataboutism, given that one of the stated goals of autopilot is literally to provide a safer alternative to the status quo of humans driving manually; pointing out the riskiness of driving in general is not some unrelated thing that's being raised as a distraction from the real issue.

jjk166 5y ago

No, we can't. Accidents are going to happen no matter what because driving is a complex task with an infinite number of potential failure modes, and no threshold where the risk of serious injury or death can be considered zero. If something is safer than average, then it is objectively an improvement, and that's all it needs to be.

ashtonkem 5y ago
> If something is safer than average, then it is objectively an improvement, and that's all it needs to be. GP is asserting that FSD is significantly less safe than previously known, and only driver intervention is preventing FSD from killing more people. Personally I’ve heard way too many “FSD regularly tries to drive into that bridge pillar” for me to believe an assertion that FSD is safer than drivers without significant evidence. Second, we’re talking about a case where even Tesla owners acknowledge that an update made their cars noticeably less safe. Even in cases where FSD is better than human drivers, which I don’t think is the case yet, we should be quite concerned about the possibility of software updates making vehicles less safe.
- jjk166 5y ago
  My comment was made in response to GP's claim that it is whataboutism to compare the safety record of FSD to human drivers. It is entirely possible that FSD actually is less safe than drivers, and if so let the evidence show it. But the fact remains that you should very much be comparing the safety of FSD to human driving.