Quote from Tesla critic Missy Cummings in the WSJ piece: "There is no question that someone is going to die in this technology, the question is when"<p>This is obviously true. However, I never heard these critics say that about cars without autonomy features. Way over a million people killed each single year around the world by that technology. Where was the concern for human life?<p>To anyone looking at it rationally, without emotion, it's clear that humans are not good at this task and that computers will eventually make roads safer than ever. The question is not if but when. Currently that data is debatable but some argue this point has already happened and cars with computer-assisted driving are already safer than those driven entirely by humans.
> The system didn't know what this was, so it smashed at full speed into the trailer.<p>I feel like this will be a never-ending battle with a camera-based system. There will always be some visual situation not seen before. Shouldn't the default behavior be to slow/stop or throw up its metaphorical hands and release control back to the driver?
Showing the camera footage from these vehicles (and the Uber ATG incident) causes a fallacy most people don’t even realize - eyes are way better than current cameras. So you think visibility was worse than it is, things were further away and approaching more quickly, and so on. So people are inclined to look at the video and say it was clear no one could avoid that. Which is just an inditement of the sensor tech but unless you see the scene yourself or have other sensor data, it’s not so obvious.
I do wonder if Tesla put its resources towards crash avoidance instead of FSD, maybe we would be more enthusiastic. I don’t really need my car to automatically drive straight, I need it to have inhuman reflexes to make the instantaneous decisons that will save my and my family’s lives.