I think Tesla is definitely going to end up killing more people with their software, but it probably ends up being a rounding error in the big scheme of things. People driving themselves home after a few too many beers are killing more people than driving AIs, and I honestly expect it to stay that way even with Tesla's reckless approach.
Personal automobiles have a huge cost to society. Self-driving doesn't really change a lot of that.
You can send someone to prison if they hurt someone driving drunk or distracted. Can we do the same thing to Autopilot users? Someone has to be seriously punished when they hurt people, and unless there's some meaningful way to send Tesla to prison, the beta testers will have to do.
If my brakes fail and I hit an innocent bystander (assume I could not have reasonably prevented this collision), am I going to prison? No. Are the manufacturer or designer of my brake being sent to prison? Probably not, as long as this isn't a consistent issue.
Tesla should be penalized for reckless behavior in the promotion and development of their FSD. However, reality is any product performing a sufficiently risky action for sufficiently many people will have a very small number of catastrophic failures. I could make a similar argument to yours for cars, planes, much of modern medicine, most electric products, alcoholic drinks, etc, etc.
While just an anecdote, Leo Laporte mentioned recently his Tesla often tried to run him into the same barrier. Based solely on news like that and others I get the sense that Tesla's radar-averse solution is far worse than the average driver.
Yeah. I think Tesla is making a mistake in going for cost optimization before their product actually works. You can see that it's technically possible to drive on sight alone; that's how humans drive cars. (But, it's not completely clear cut to me. Having the cameras in every Tesla means that they have a lot of data to use in their simulations, and that might help them more than depth data from lidar. I don't really know.)
Their current strategy does get people hyped. I wonder how many people you can program a machine to run over before it becomes an unprofitable activity.
I have a random comment I'll interject but it's totally off topic. My impression from watching people show off their Teslas is that they are constantly in awe of being able to get to work without controlling their car. But many of us have been commuting to work hands free for decades -- it's called public transportation. One person uses the power of electricity to take hundreds of people around the city, every 1.5 minutes during rush hour. It is pretty nice. But we didn't need self-driving cars to get there, we just needed to design our living and working spaces for hands-free commuting. Shrug.
What about an AI that refuses to start for a drunk driver? Boom, problem solved at the fraction of complexity and no innocent people get butchered up in the testing phase of a software that simply can’t reliably work with current tech.
Personally I like the ability to drive myself to the ER or away from an abusive spouse not being dependent on the false-positive rate of some device built by a notoriously shoddy car manufacturer, but to each their own I suppose.
As everything, it is a tradeoff. I would personally prefer not to have neither drunk drivers, nor overhyped smart-vacuums going around the roads.
But as for the very specific emergency case while you are drunk, it could be overridden with some visible sign turning on notifying other drivers - but it would need some law background, so eg. a cop can escort you in that case, etc. But tesla’s fake self-driving doesn’t help anyone.
Uh... self driving electric cars actually change 2/3 of the problem. In a couple of iterations it will be orders of magnitudes safer than drivers, to the point where you'll be able to get home drunk in your own car. Also orders of magnitude less pollution where humans live.
Last 1/3 is simple car size, aka congestion. Ironically, this will probably be solved by the Boring Company and teslas.
I'm a huge proponent of bike lanes + e-vehicles. But let's be serious, Teslas really are changing the game. Well, or will, once the price goes down in 10 years.
Personal automobiles have a huge cost to society. Self-driving doesn't really change a lot of that.