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I also think there is a certain fear or outrage around this stuff which is fueled by "technology" or the unknown. People are some of the worst drivers around,

I also think there is a certain fear or outrage around this stuff which is fueled by "technology" or the unknown. People are some of the worst drivers around, they cause all kinds of problems with cluelessness and inattention and they crash and die and kill and injure in all sorts of stupid ways. They get drunk, high, check their phone, fall asleep, speed, show off I think it's great that there are still companies out there throwing research into moonshot types of research projects like this. Automobile deaths are perhaps the biggest and most persistent pandemic we've faced, we've been facing for a hundred years, and it kills and maims young and old alike. Millions of people dead over the years. Many were willing to relax some of the protocols around vaccine testing to bring the covid vaccines in to use earlier, put mandates and coercion around them, and yes some suffered adverse reactions and even died from them. Still, it was thought to be a reasonable compromise by many. I hope we don't go the other way on other technology that can advance society and potentially save lives just because not everything goes perfectly from the start, or we get stuck in the pharmaceutical corporations = bad mindset. Not to say there perhaps shouldn't be more regulation around it, but a serious and careful study of risks and benefits I think is appropriate rather than handwringing and outrage.

couchand 5y ago
We don't need moonshots to solve the car pandemic. Strong Towns and others have shown that we already have plenty of common-sense, effective tools that we've simply chosen not to roll out on a wider basis. We don't need new technology, we need new leaders.
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  Of course we do. If you can get "Strong Towns and others", whatever exactly that is, to end the car pandemic, that would be a a moonshot wouldn't it? Maybe not technologically but politically and socially. You're not the first one to have thought it's a good idea or that we should try to do something about it. It's not like it's easy and people have just decided not to.
doodpants 5y ago
> People are some of the worst drivers around Compared to which other species?
heavyset_go 5y ago
> People are some of the worst drivers around 1 fatality per 100 million miles driven is relatively good, to be honest. This seems to me like a good argument for the public funding of electric rail lines instead of self-driving cars that perpetuate all of the problems personal vehicles are responsible for.
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  Sure and covid only kills a miniscule proportion of the people who contract it. Over a million people die on the roads every year around the world. It's been a 100 year covid. Handwringing about someone carefully testing a car and not hitting a cyclist in the process is really pretty rich. I'll happily take actual data and statistics but for every one of these I can also post a video of a driver doing something stupid that a computer would not.
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    > Sure and covid only kills a miniscule proportion of the people who contract it. A 1 out of 100 to 1 out of 1,000 fatality rate for COVID depending on demographics is quite literally several orders of magnitude higher than a 1 out of 100,000,000 fatality rate for driving. You're comparing apples to atoms.
    - throwawaylinux 5y ago
      No I'm not because not everyone goes out and gets covid most days for their whole lives. It's also much much less than 1 in 1,000 for young people in the range of 0-30 where auto wrecks are the number one killer in a lot of places. So no, it's more like apples to watermelons. The watermelons being bigger, the ones which have killed far more people and will continue to kill far more people.
      - jquery 5y ago
        Friendly reminder that yesterday, COVID-19 killed over 2000 people in a single day. It’s been keeping that grim pace for weeks. For every person who dies, at least a dozen will suffer from long Covid. Even still, no dangerous shortcuts were taken trying to get the vaccines out (in the West), other than doing steps in parallel rather than in sequence (at great $cost). So even COVID-19 wasn’t enough to “move fast and break things” (though I remember hearing many such calls to “move fast and break things” from the same contrarian-sphere community that is now Very Concerned about vaccine injuries). If COVID-19 wasn’t bad enough to completely remove our safety guardrails, certainly the never ending promise of FSD (watch any Musk video compilation where he promises FSD is just around the corner, going on five years now) isn’t enough.
lolinder 5y ago
> I also think there is a certain fear or outrage around this stuff which is fueled by "technology" or the unknown. From other communities I could buy the "fear of the unknown" bit. But here, most of us are involved in the production of software in some form. It's not the unknown that we fear, it's the known. We fully understand what modern software is actually capable of, and we know that it's not ready for prime time in these kinds of environments. Further, many of us have been in a chaotic public beta before, and seeing those patterns play out during a beta test of lethal machinery is really scary. Rapid chaotic iteration is fine when it's a simple SaaS product. Not so much with Tesla.
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  Most here have no idea what's involved in automotive control systems or these autonomous driving systems, let's be honest.

couchand 5y ago

We don't need moonshots to solve the car pandemic. Strong Towns and others have shown that we already have plenty of common-sense, effective tools that we've simply chosen not to roll out on a wider basis. We don't need new technology, we need new leaders.

throwawaylinux 5y ago
Of course we do. If you can get "Strong Towns and others", whatever exactly that is, to end the car pandemic, that would be a a moonshot wouldn't it? Maybe not technologically but politically and socially. You're not the first one to have thought it's a good idea or that we should try to do something about it. It's not like it's easy and people have just decided not to.

doodpants 5y ago

> People are some of the worst drivers around Compared to which other species?

heavyset_go 5y ago

> People are some of the worst drivers around 1 fatality per 100 million miles driven is relatively good, to be honest. This seems to me like a good argument for the public funding of electric rail lines instead of self-driving cars that perpetuate all of the problems personal vehicles are responsible for.

throwawaylinux 5y ago
Sure and covid only kills a miniscule proportion of the people who contract it. Over a million people die on the roads every year around the world. It's been a 100 year covid. Handwringing about someone carefully testing a car and not hitting a cyclist in the process is really pretty rich. I'll happily take actual data and statistics but for every one of these I can also post a video of a driver doing something stupid that a computer would not.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  > Sure and covid only kills a miniscule proportion of the people who contract it. A 1 out of 100 to 1 out of 1,000 fatality rate for COVID depending on demographics is quite literally several orders of magnitude higher than a 1 out of 100,000,000 fatality rate for driving. You're comparing apples to atoms.
  - throwawaylinux 5y ago
    No I'm not because not everyone goes out and gets covid most days for their whole lives. It's also much much less than 1 in 1,000 for young people in the range of 0-30 where auto wrecks are the number one killer in a lot of places. So no, it's more like apples to watermelons. The watermelons being bigger, the ones which have killed far more people and will continue to kill far more people.
    - jquery 5y ago
      Friendly reminder that yesterday, COVID-19 killed over 2000 people in a single day. It’s been keeping that grim pace for weeks. For every person who dies, at least a dozen will suffer from long Covid. Even still, no dangerous shortcuts were taken trying to get the vaccines out (in the West), other than doing steps in parallel rather than in sequence (at great $cost). So even COVID-19 wasn’t enough to “move fast and break things” (though I remember hearing many such calls to “move fast and break things” from the same contrarian-sphere community that is now Very Concerned about vaccine injuries). If COVID-19 wasn’t bad enough to completely remove our safety guardrails, certainly the never ending promise of FSD (watch any Musk video compilation where he promises FSD is just around the corner, going on five years now) isn’t enough.

lolinder 5y ago

> I also think there is a certain fear or outrage around this stuff which is fueled by "technology" or the unknown. From other communities I could buy the "fear of the unknown" bit. But here, most of us are involved in the production of software in some form. It's not the unknown that we fear, it's the known. We fully understand what modern software is actually capable of, and we know that it's not ready for prime time in these kinds of environments. Further, many of us have been in a chaotic public beta before, and seeing those patterns play out during a beta test of lethal machinery is really scary. Rapid chaotic iteration is fine when it's a simple SaaS product. Not so much with Tesla.

throwawaylinux 5y ago
Most here have no idea what's involved in automotive control systems or these autonomous driving systems, let's be honest.