Comment by jgbuddy
15 hours ago
Because the operator is liable? Tesla as a company isn't driving the car, it's a ML model running on something like HW4 on bare metal in the car itself. Would that make the silicon die legally liable?
15 hours ago
Because the operator is liable? Tesla as a company isn't driving the car, it's a ML model running on something like HW4 on bare metal in the car itself. Would that make the silicon die legally liable?
Sounds like it's neither self-driving, nor autonomous, if I'm on the hook if it goes wrong.
Yeah, Tesla gets to blame the “driver”, and has a history of releasing partial and carefully curated subsets of data from crashes to try to shift as much blame onto the driver as possible.
And the system is designed to set up drivers for failure.
An HCI challenge with mostly autonomous systems is that operators lose their awareness of the system, and when things go wrong you can easily get worse outcomes than if the system was fully manual with an engaged operator.
This is a well known challenge in the nuclear energy sector and airline industry (Air France 447) - how do you keep operators fully engaged even though they almost never need to intervene, because otherwise they’re likely to be missing critical context and make wrong decisions. These days you could probably argue the same is true of software engineers reviewing LLM code that’s often - but not always - correct.
> has a history of releasing partial and carefully curated subsets of data from crashes to try to shift as much blame onto the driver as possible
Really? Thats crazy.
Its neither self-driving, nor autonomous, eventually not even a car! (as Tesla slowly exits the car business). It will be 'insurance' on Speculation as a service, as Tesla skyrockets to $20T market cap. Tesla will successfully transition from a small revenue to pre-revenue company: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYJdKW-UnFQ
The last few years of Tesla 'growth' show how this transition is unfolding. S and X production is shutdown, just a few more models to shutdown.
I wonder if they will try to sell off the car business once they can hype up something else. It seems odd to just let the car business die.
Wild prediction, would love to hear the rest of it
Especially since they can push regressions over the air and you could be lulled into a sense of safety and robustness that isn’t there and bam you pay the costs of the regressions, not Tesla.
Who’s the “operator” of an “autonomous” car? If I sit in it and it drives me around, how am I an “operator”?
If you get on a horse and let go of the reins you are also considered the operator of the horse. Such are the definitions in our society.
Great analogy, lol
The point is if the liability is always exclusively with the human driver then any system in that car is at best a "driver assist". Claims that "it drives itself" or "it's autonomous" are just varying degrees of lying. I call it a partial lie rather than a partial truth because the result more often than not is that the customer is tricked into thinking the system is more capable than it is, and because that outcome is more dangerous than the opposite.
Any car has varying degrees of autonomy, even the ones with no assists (it will safely self-drive you all the way to the accident site, as they say). But the car is either driven by the human with the system's help, or is driven by the system with or without the human's help.
A car can't have 2 drivers. The only real one is the one the law holds responsible.