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I understand why Tesla would let users beta test for them. It might even be ethical, taking a big picture view, but I don't understand what kind of person would

I understand why Tesla would let users beta test for them. It might even be ethical, taking a big picture view, but I don't understand what kind of person would use volunteer to be a beta tester. Is it about laziness, thrill seeking, ignorance, entertainment, or something else? It's little different from letting an 8 year old child take the wheel. Sure, it'd be fine most of the time but regularly, certainly, and randomly fail catastrophically. Just why?

gitfan86 4y ago
Why did people ride in the first cars? They were slow, prone to breakdowns, expensive to operate.
- staunch 4y ago
  Not really. Even early on cars were quite fast and priced around the same as horses and a carriage, and without the hassle of dealing with horses. They did tend to break down a lot but were quite usable. Tesla FSD is much, much worse than just driving oneself when taking into account the risk.
  - gitfan86 4y ago
    How often did horses breakdown? Do you see why someone from 1890 may think it is crazy to drive a car that frequently has a breakdown vs a horse? Similarly, 130 years from now people will ask "Why would you want to drive your self when there were self driving cars available? And someone else will have to explain that FSD required close supervision and needed interventions between 1 or 100 miles, depending on the driving situations."
    - nradov 4y ago
      Have you ever ridden a horse? They "breakdown" quite often. As soon as mass production of cars started, they were practically superior to horses in almost every way.
      - gitfan86 4y ago
        If you read the thread you would see that obviously we are not talking about mass production cars. Obviously those are superior to horses.
        staunch 4y ago
        So you're comparing the very first prototype cars to the technology present in millions of Teslas? Seems like a very contorted analogy and makes no real sense.
        gitfan86 4y ago
        Can you just read the thread? We are specifically talking about people who signed up to be a beta tester.
        staunch 4y ago
        Yes, beta testers for hardware and software that is in mass production and many years into development. By this stage in the development of cars they were an extremely rational choice over the alternatives. FSD is not a rational choice over the alternative and its adoption in no way resembles the adoption of cars. The analogy is bunk. But I won't keep beating a dead horse here, I was just trying to explain why it doesn't IMO make sense.
- vkou 4y ago
  Horses were slower, more prone to breakdowns, and more expensive to operate. They also smelled like horseshit.
ahmedalsudani 4y ago
My guess is it's about trying the latest and greatest new technology. It's exciting in the same setting up new software is.
- staunch 4y ago
  Sure, novelty makes sense. That would explain why a reasonable person might try it out for a few minutes in a dry, daytime, low speed, low traffic area.
- dylan604 4y ago
  The excitement to setup a brand new PS5 6 months before anyone else and very little training vs operating a motor vehicle that can end in death when things go wrong is not the same. At the end of the day, it requires a human to be licensed to operate a vehicle. Why should we not expect the FSD to be licensed, or have a new license category for the humans on how to operate one?
  - ahmedalsudani 4y ago
    Not advocating for anyone to beta test. Just pointing out the draw.
aidenn0 4y ago
I know lots of people who let 8 year old children take the wheel, so perhaps that answers your question?
- staunch 4y ago
  Sure, stupidity must account for some large percentage. I guess I'm curious about the other reasons.
- HWR_14 4y ago
  Yeah, but they choose a time and place where split-second reactions aren't critical and don't trust the child at all.
code_runner 4y ago
very unlikely to be ethical no matter what un-enforceable limits you put on the testers. their concern is legal liability and nothing more.
- joezydeco 4y ago
  I don't own a Tesla but I share the road with them, which makes me an involuntary part of their beta test. It's hard to give a shit about liability if one runs head-on into you and kills you. None of this is ethical. At all.
  - lp0_on_fire 4y ago
    Excuse me but Tesla makes drivers pinky swear that they will pay attention 100% of the time and be ready to take over driving at the drop of a hat. Obviously you're just a luddite. /s
  - staunch 4y ago
    It may be ethical if it really does lead to saving many lives by advancing the state of the art more quickly than it otherwise would have. And given how many people are drunk while intoxicated or using smartphones, it seems like a relatively negligible increase in danger. The math might be something like: police departments could increase enforcement of DUI and reckless driving laws by 1% and compensate for the total increase of danger caused by Tesla's FSD testing.
    - joezydeco 4y ago
      It may be ethical if it really does lead to saving many lives by advancing the state of the art more quickly than it otherwise would have. And if we kill a few hundred or thousand innocent passengers and/or pedestrians along the way, that's an acceptable sacrifice to perfect Musk's software? Holy fucking shit.
      - staunch 4y ago
        > And if we kill a few hundred or thousand innocent passengers and/or pedestrians along the way... So you're just going to make up numbers to be outraged at? As far as I know, no innocent passengers or pedestrians have been killed as a result of FSD. I imagine it would be big news as the (relatively few) Autopilot accident have been. It should be common sense to assume that FSD would be halted by Tesla themselves, or at least a government agency, if there were huge numbers of people dying. We only have safe and cheap air travel and safe cars today because many thousands of people died beta testing them. This is basic history that everyone should know. When it comes to high speed transportation, there's simply no way to avoid significant risk while making significant progress. The best we can do is make intelligent trade offs, which is my entire point.
dylan604 4y ago
I'd agree that the vast majority of people owning a Tesla would not be good beta testers.However, I do think some would be worth while, but because you have no valid way of weeding out the bad ones the candidate poole should not be used. The other alternative would cost Tesla so much to hire professional drivers with full understanding of what Tesla's FSD does/does not do in large enough numbers of cars and various environmental conditions to gather enough data in a fast time frame. That is NOT an excuse on why to turn it loose to the public.
- ggreer 4y ago
  Tesla only lets people with a safety score[1] of 98 or higher into the FSD beta. They've been slowly lowering the threshold since the initial 2020 rollout. I think around 60,000 Teslas have FSD beta right now, or about 3% of the fleet. 1. https://www.tesla.com/support/safety-score https://www.tesla.com/support/safety-score
powerbroker 4y ago
I'm also not sure if it is ethical. A good way to frame the question is, "Is it ethical, to take a single alcoholic drink, and then drive?" In both cases, AI driving and single-drink driving, the car operates in a less than optimal way. Occupants of the car are at risk. Other motorists and passers-by are at risk. In both cases, the data collection of AI-coincident accidents and drink-coincident accidents is spotty and anecdotal. Unlike AI driving, there are lots of tests that show how human performance degrades at each level of blood-alcohol level, and that information is searchable for your average internet-inclined driver. I would feel better if the government could be an umpire on these technologies and call out the accidents and fault with greater rigor... but I'm not sure that the lack of government involvement and the degree of lethal AI accidents has been reached for the current work, by unpaid crash-test dummies, to be unethical.
- HWR_14 4y ago
  > A good way to frame the question is, "Is it ethical, to take a single alcoholic drink, and then drive?" I don't see why. I would trust a road full of "I had a single drink" drivers over self-driving cars. Assuming the self-driving cars are all like the current models of trying to use vision, radar, lidar because it's assumed to be a mix of all vehicles. 100% self-driving cars with 5G and a mesh network is a different question.
rightbyte 4y ago
Some people I have talked to about the issue seem to think computer are fast and are better drivers becouse of that. And like, can calculate braking distances better. They did not seem aware of problem with edge cases etc or image recognition actually taking some time.
- staunch 4y ago
  So ignorance. That does seem like Tesla's responsibility. Tesla should probably show the worst behaving FSD videos on YouTube (like this one) before it can be enabled.

gitfan86 4y ago

Why did people ride in the first cars? They were slow, prone to breakdowns, expensive to operate.

staunch 4y ago
Not really. Even early on cars were quite fast and priced around the same as horses and a carriage, and without the hassle of dealing with horses. They did tend to break down a lot but were quite usable. Tesla FSD is much, much worse than just driving oneself when taking into account the risk.
- gitfan86 4y ago
  How often did horses breakdown? Do you see why someone from 1890 may think it is crazy to drive a car that frequently has a breakdown vs a horse? Similarly, 130 years from now people will ask "Why would you want to drive your self when there were self driving cars available? And someone else will have to explain that FSD required close supervision and needed interventions between 1 or 100 miles, depending on the driving situations."
  - nradov 4y ago
    Have you ever ridden a horse? They "breakdown" quite often. As soon as mass production of cars started, they were practically superior to horses in almost every way.
    - gitfan86 4y ago
      If you read the thread you would see that obviously we are not talking about mass production cars. Obviously those are superior to horses.
      - staunch 4y ago
        So you're comparing the very first prototype cars to the technology present in millions of Teslas? Seems like a very contorted analogy and makes no real sense.
        gitfan86 4y ago
        Can you just read the thread? We are specifically talking about people who signed up to be a beta tester.
        staunch 4y ago
        Yes, beta testers for hardware and software that is in mass production and many years into development. By this stage in the development of cars they were an extremely rational choice over the alternatives. FSD is not a rational choice over the alternative and its adoption in no way resembles the adoption of cars. The analogy is bunk. But I won't keep beating a dead horse here, I was just trying to explain why it doesn't IMO make sense.
vkou 4y ago
Horses were slower, more prone to breakdowns, and more expensive to operate. They also smelled like horseshit.

ahmedalsudani 4y ago

My guess is it's about trying the latest and greatest new technology. It's exciting in the same setting up new software is.

staunch 4y ago
Sure, novelty makes sense. That would explain why a reasonable person might try it out for a few minutes in a dry, daytime, low speed, low traffic area.
dylan604 4y ago
The excitement to setup a brand new PS5 6 months before anyone else and very little training vs operating a motor vehicle that can end in death when things go wrong is not the same. At the end of the day, it requires a human to be licensed to operate a vehicle. Why should we not expect the FSD to be licensed, or have a new license category for the humans on how to operate one?
- ahmedalsudani 4y ago
  Not advocating for anyone to beta test. Just pointing out the draw.

aidenn0 4y ago

I know lots of people who let 8 year old children take the wheel, so perhaps that answers your question?

staunch 4y ago
Sure, stupidity must account for some large percentage. I guess I'm curious about the other reasons.
HWR_14 4y ago
Yeah, but they choose a time and place where split-second reactions aren't critical and don't trust the child at all.

code_runner 4y ago

very unlikely to be ethical no matter what un-enforceable limits you put on the testers. their concern is legal liability and nothing more.

joezydeco 4y ago
I don't own a Tesla but I share the road with them, which makes me an involuntary part of their beta test. It's hard to give a shit about liability if one runs head-on into you and kills you. None of this is ethical. At all.
- lp0_on_fire 4y ago
  Excuse me but Tesla makes drivers pinky swear that they will pay attention 100% of the time and be ready to take over driving at the drop of a hat. Obviously you're just a luddite. /s
- staunch 4y ago
  It may be ethical if it really does lead to saving many lives by advancing the state of the art more quickly than it otherwise would have. And given how many people are drunk while intoxicated or using smartphones, it seems like a relatively negligible increase in danger. The math might be something like: police departments could increase enforcement of DUI and reckless driving laws by 1% and compensate for the total increase of danger caused by Tesla's FSD testing.
  - joezydeco 4y ago
    It may be ethical if it really does lead to saving many lives by advancing the state of the art more quickly than it otherwise would have. And if we kill a few hundred or thousand innocent passengers and/or pedestrians along the way, that's an acceptable sacrifice to perfect Musk's software? Holy fucking shit.
    - staunch 4y ago
      > And if we kill a few hundred or thousand innocent passengers and/or pedestrians along the way... So you're just going to make up numbers to be outraged at? As far as I know, no innocent passengers or pedestrians have been killed as a result of FSD. I imagine it would be big news as the (relatively few) Autopilot accident have been. It should be common sense to assume that FSD would be halted by Tesla themselves, or at least a government agency, if there were huge numbers of people dying. We only have safe and cheap air travel and safe cars today because many thousands of people died beta testing them. This is basic history that everyone should know. When it comes to high speed transportation, there's simply no way to avoid significant risk while making significant progress. The best we can do is make intelligent trade offs, which is my entire point.

dylan604 4y ago

I'd agree that the vast majority of people owning a Tesla would not be good beta testers.However, I do think some would be worth while, but because you have no valid way of weeding out the bad ones the candidate poole should not be used. The other alternative would cost Tesla so much to hire professional drivers with full understanding of what Tesla's FSD does/does not do in large enough numbers of cars and various environmental conditions to gather enough data in a fast time frame. That is NOT an excuse on why to turn it loose to the public.

ggreer 4y ago
Tesla only lets people with a safety score[1] of 98 or higher into the FSD beta. They've been slowly lowering the threshold since the initial 2020 rollout. I think around 60,000 Teslas have FSD beta right now, or about 3% of the fleet. 1. https://www.tesla.com/support/safety-score https://www.tesla.com/support/safety-score

powerbroker 4y ago

I'm also not sure if it is ethical. A good way to frame the question is, "Is it ethical, to take a single alcoholic drink, and then drive?" In both cases, AI driving and single-drink driving, the car operates in a less than optimal way. Occupants of the car are at risk. Other motorists and passers-by are at risk. In both cases, the data collection of AI-coincident accidents and drink-coincident accidents is spotty and anecdotal. Unlike AI driving, there are lots of tests that show how human performance degrades at each level of blood-alcohol level, and that information is searchable for your average internet-inclined driver. I would feel better if the government could be an umpire on these technologies and call out the accidents and fault with greater rigor... but I'm not sure that the lack of government involvement and the degree of lethal AI accidents has been reached for the current work, by unpaid crash-test dummies, to be unethical.

HWR_14 4y ago
> A good way to frame the question is, "Is it ethical, to take a single alcoholic drink, and then drive?" I don't see why. I would trust a road full of "I had a single drink" drivers over self-driving cars. Assuming the self-driving cars are all like the current models of trying to use vision, radar, lidar because it's assumed to be a mix of all vehicles. 100% self-driving cars with 5G and a mesh network is a different question.

rightbyte 4y ago

Some people I have talked to about the issue seem to think computer are fast and are better drivers becouse of that. And like, can calculate braking distances better. They did not seem aware of problem with edge cases etc or image recognition actually taking some time.

staunch 4y ago
So ignorance. That does seem like Tesla's responsibility. Tesla should probably show the worst behaving FSD videos on YouTube (like this one) before it can be enabled.