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Elon Musk: Negative Media Coverage of Autonomous Vehicles Could be 'Killing people' (theverge.com)
On the sidelines of the Tesla announcements, CEO Elon Musk accused media of "killing people" by dissuading consumers from using an autonomous vehicle. Musk said that media is aggressively reporting on autopilot crashes, but does "virtually none" reporting of hundreds of thousands of actual accidents that involve non-self driving cars. He said, via a report on The Verge:Once you view autonomous cars sort of like an elevator in a building, does Otis take responsibility for all elevators around the world? No, they don't. What really matters here at the end of the day is "what is the absolute safety." One of the things I should mention that frankly has been quite disturbing to me is the degree of media coverage of Autopilot crashes, which are basically almost none relative to the paucity of media coverage of the 1.2 million people that die every year in manual crashes. [It is] something that I think does not reflect well upon the media. It really doesn't. Because, and really you need to think carefully about this, because if, in writing some article that's negative, you effectively dissuade people from using an autonomous vehicle, you're killing people.
The audacity of this motherfucker. He sells faulty technology then blames the media for covering it. Classic projection move. I can't wait until his "new system" starts killing people left and right so I can sit back and laugh. Stupid, stupid morons.
There does seem to be some logic in that argument. However, the question is about this particular feature. Has it killed more people by existing (or never having existed). We don't actually have any autonomous offerings out there, so there isn't really anything to dissuade.
So Elon's panties are all up in a bunch over supposedly overblown negative media coverage?
How about all the overblown positive media coverage he's been lapping up for years while running an unprofitable business that caters to wealthy customers getting taxpayer funded bonuses to buy his cars?
Isn't it fair that all of that media coverage should be withdrawn too?
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Sure, autonomous vehicles are dangerous, but they are orders of magnitude less dangerous than the assholes you already see on the road every day! Like the moron I saw trying to ride his bicycle down I-5 in downtown Portland during rush hour the other day...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Autopilot was billed as this revolutionary technology that got idiots to think "hey we don't have to drive anymore the car will do it." Musk is basically beta testing with his customers as the beta group.
Autonomous driving will be great when it gets here, but he is trying to oversell the current tech as revolutionary autonomous driving tech.
We will use the DMCA to remove any video showing any of our auto driver cars doing unsafe stuff or even just mock up's just like Samsung!
https://news.slashdot.org/stor...
So I guess if you're in the car business you have to use elevator analogies instead of the obligatory car analogy
I trust a computer a 100 times more than I trust a typical driver during bad weather. The worst part of driving in snow is the other drivers--not the snow. I trust a computer to stop and not rear-end someone when traffic suddenly stops where a human was "used" to driving on that portion of highway without thinking.
I mean, when I drove a motorcycle it was practically suicide being on the road with distracted drivers these days. You have to tap your brakes in advance and flicker them just to get people to wake up and not smash into you and kill you any time there was an abnormal stop situation like a road hazard.
Computerized cars can not get hear soon enough. We'll save countless lives putting people who don't like driving anyway into vehicles where they don't have to anymore.
I hope Elon continues to take the press to task for this.
The news media is deplorable for their reporting. Virtually nothing you see in the media has any chance of killing you.
The news media reports on home invasions and shootings, but the chance of you being shot in your home by a stranger is incredibly low.
The news media reports on terrorist attacks, but the probability that you will die in a terrorist attack is less than 1 in a million.
The news media does not report on the 1.2 million people who die in car accidents, nor the tens of millions who die from cancer, nor the tens of millions who die of heart disease.
IF YOU SEE IT ON THE NEWS IT WILL NOT HAPPEN TO YOU. Unfortunately most people do not understand this.
"Dog bites man" is not news. "Man bites dog" on the other hand...
Yes, there are fewer incidents with self driving car. There are, though, also vastly fewer self driving cars. Does anyone have a "Accidents per 100.000 vehicles" statistics out there? Else, it's about as useful as saying that Model Ts have the best contemporary accident records.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So, by extension, Musk making this argument has caused more media coverage, which results in killing more people, and these Slashdot postings kill more people, around and around...
It's a bloodbath.
The fact of the matter is, every day, millions of commuters drive to and from work while distracted. If I'm going to be driving anywhere near somebody who's surfing the net on his phone while driving, I'd sure as HELL prefer that his car have some kind of autopilot capabilities paying attention to the road when he's not. At the very least, cars with limited autonomous driving have the potential to eliminate most rear-end collisions and accidents caused by drifting out of a lane.
Maybe South Florida is unique, but I've noticed an EXPONENTIAL increase in both gridlock, phone use while driving, and rear-end collisions over the past few years. The moment traffic slows down to 5mph or less, you can literally see every driver around you reaching for his or her phone (or already using it). Even a PRIMITIVE system that's only capable of "stay in the current lane, follow the car in front of you if the lane becomes ambiguous, and maintain speed while braking if necessary to avoid a rear-end collision" on limited-access roads would be a net improvement over what we have today.
or irretrievably stupid if he thinks car crashed are not reported. Watch a local news cast sometime ass-hole. FYI car manufacturers are responsible for product recalls. But hey if you're too much of a pussy to accept full liability, just admit it.
The proponents boldly claim how the new technology is going to be completely safe and how it'll be available for everyone everywhere at virtually no cost.
Then mistakes are made and there is a minor accident. Nothing too bad in the big scheme of things, but a serious accident nonetheless.
Then the accident is followed by attempts to cover it up by lying to the public about minor details about the accident, followed by more bold claims about how the technology is so absurdly safe that the opponents can only be evil. The media has field day after field day exposing the lies. Soon, there is a public outcry, which causes the government to step in with draconian regulation.
And then it's all over. The regulations make it impossible to build and operate the technology at a reasonable cost.
Yeah, that's it.
Tesla tries to prohibit you from ride-sharing - because they trust their product SOOO MUCH!!!.
The summary does not do justice to Musks argument.
If autonomous cars do indeed have fewer fatalities per km then retarding their dissemination through fake polemics is indeed causing the deaths of more people than pushing for their general adoption would.
The rub is in determining whether or not AV's are indeed safer than human drivers. Elon has his idea of that but in the absence of a serious non-biased study that doesn't exist yet I'm not convinced that he is right (yet).
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
And remember, it is illegal for you to read the leaked Clinton/DNC emails on Wikileaks. Your only legal option is to let CNN tell you what they say and what this means.
See $subject.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Autonomous vehicles probably have to be an order or two safer than the average to represent a comfortable decision for a skilled, conscientious person that is not an engineer (i.e. it has to have some overkill "to be sure"). It has to be both obviously better to overcome doubts and the normal risk of a cautious conscientious drivers.
Remember that both the median risk exposure is a lot different than the high risk drivers who blow up the averages vs someone who has intelligently eliminated risk in their daily profile including dangerous commutes, neighbors and neighborhoods.
All of the comments so far as so dismissive, right from the get-go. What you fail to realize is that he's got a point. It completely sucks that the people who died in these known crashes had it happen to them. But, think about it. How many people die every day in a car crash because they were (a) drunk/under influence of something (b) not paying attention at all/day dreaming (c) trying to drive like an asshole because they are "in a hurry" (d) not even mentally capable of driving attentively (too old, not even trying to discriminate. look up how many people die because of how many people are on the road that shouldn't even be driving anymore!!!!!) (e) staring at their goddamn phone (f) worrying about what their kid/friend is doing instead of looking at the road...and whatever other reason there is when someone dies in a crash because of another person/themselves.
It's true, everyone is pointing the finger at Elon for these happenings. Now, I don't think people are dying because they aren't driving a Tesla vehicle. But, seriously, people kill people every day while driving. If a car can safely drive itself, that takes care of the idiot-proofing.
FYI, the morons are the people who don't know how to drive, IMHO. So, want to blame somebody for deaths on the road? Blame the idiots who passed the other idiots on their driver's test. You're an idiot if you think these autonomous cars are the problem.
If he's so certain that this is all a simulation then why does he even care? I mean, none of this would be real, right?
He is correct, but it will not dissuade media stories for very long. If he is lucky it helps balance them.
The media rarely seriously considers the consequences of their reporting, short of "we actually have a guy behind enemy lines who will be killed the instant you report this."
Two quick example: (1) Around the time of the Israel-Lebanon war, people had been kidnapping reporters and getting less and less coverage for it, and it had been winding down a little. Then when a soldier was kidnapped, it got massive media coverage so everyone started kidnapping soldiers. (2) 9/11. In 1993, OBL bombed the twin towers with a van in the garage under the building. The media coverage emphasized, among other things, that the twin towers survived because they had been designed to withstand a plane impact. Al Qaeda was watching the coverage of the bombing and began plotting to hit the towers with planes.
Of course, that doesn't make the media murderers, but it makes some irresponsible. They did give OBL the idea because filling the airtime (for the networks) and getting on air (for the commentators) was more important than thinking "what will pushing this information to tens of millions of people including the attackers do?"
Because if, in skimping on a sensor that would prevent people from being decapitated by low-hanging objects, you effectively dissuade people from using an autonomous vehicle, you're killing people.
Hands-free freeway driving ought to be trivial. Stay on the road, don't hit the thing in front of you and don't hit the thing beside you. Staying on the road should be the hardest part, if you have reliable sensors that can identify if you're going to hit something.
Why does the media report on his musky scent?
Anti-CFL luddites were right to be skeptics. Those things are unreliable and nasty and never did live up to the hype. LED and other light-emitting semiconductor technology is the future.
He has a valid point, to some extent. On the other hand, that's just how the media works - it's also more likely to report deaths by plane crashes, or terrorism, or mass shootings, because that's what people want to read about. Also, those other things have a long history of causing only a small relative number of deaths, while autonomous vehicles are new, and deserve some higher level of scrutiny in the early years.
Musk once in a while misses a trick. The media reports on NEWS. Regular people dying in regular auto crashes is normal - it happens every day, so unless it's a particularly bloody or strange crash it's not new.
Autonomous cars are a brand new thing, and when a brand new thing kills people, it's news.
He may or may not be right (I actually think it'll have little to no real effect), but it's hardly surprising.
A thousand pounds of wood moving at 300 feet per minute. Don't get in the way.
While negative media coverage of autonomous vehicles could be 'killing people' , one of these potentially killed people could be the next Hitler. Who would be so irresponsible to take the risk ?
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
But elon musk has a spaceship.
Not only does he have a spaceship, but after 30 days some people could be homeless and starving on the street. dying, after not getting paid on paypal in time,
Fuck elon musk
God, I can't wait for this election to be over.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
And I couldn't be happier.
i guess CFL's are fine if you like mercury poisoning.
The onus is on him to show that his new technology is actually safer than human drivers. So far the only arguments I've seen from him are hand-wavy approximations.
This isn't a web app, you're dealing with people's lives, you can afford to publish some proper research to demonstrate how the AI compares to humans.
Take the initial fatal crash that caused all the uproar. It turned out the car couldn't see the white truck because of the sunlight and time of day. Is that a scenario they examined during testing? Why didn't the AI refuse to drive in those conditions?
I stole this Sig
Call me about your 'kind-of-autonomous-vehicle-but-not-really-but-I-want-to-sound-cool-that-we-have-autonomous-vehicles' when they don't do stupid shit like run smack into a giant semi-trailer in the middle of the road. Until then, stop saying you have an autonomous vehicle.
Should have been called "Driving Assist" or similar - calling it an autopilot is not good enough when your product has mortal risks and can be used by complete morons.
There is (was?) a higher bar to getting a pilot's license so calling airplane pilot ASSIST features autopilot could be tolerated when those features were developed.
> does Otis take responsibility for all elevators around the world? No, they don't.
If one failed in such a way that its design caused deaths yes they absolutely would.
The problem is autonomous cars made by Tesla. If he really wants them to gain acceptance then he should stop producing them. Let the companies that spend their capital on engineers instead of lobbyists create the vehicles.
Where would Slashdot be without it?
...so why should he believe in us? I don't take advice from him. You guys are killing people by not doing what I want. Right. Safety versus freedom, blah blah blah slashdot modmedown call me a troll, i'm practically falling asleep from boredom after reading these comments.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
Negative Media Coverage of Autonomous Vehicles Could be 'Killing people'
Whereas sending people to Mars, that won't kill anyone. If anything it will result in a baby surplus.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
about colonizing Mars is premeditated murder, you asinine narcissistic psychopath.
Any normal person who uses computers on a day to day bases doesn't have to have a Newspaper tell them that they should be suspicious of any software.
Software is only as good as the software authors. Fly By Wire software has killed several pilots in the past, despite millions and millions of dollars in development. The resources Musk has devoted to this task and the testing done pales in comparison.
It will be a long time before I take my hands off the wheel.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
How is this off topic - it is very much on topic. The opinion presented in parent's post may be not something you would like to see or not something you share but it is not off topic. This is clear case of censorship by mods. Not good.
Maybe South Florida is unique, but I've noticed an EXPONENTIAL increase in both gridlock, phone use while driving, and rear-end collisions over the past few years.
It would have to be pretty unique to have an actual exponential increase in those things.
When Elon Musk is willing to let me pick any place in the United States, accessible to road, get into a car he built with no manual controls, and bet his life he will arrive there safely, in the rain, at night, then I'll accept that there are self driving cars in existence.
Until then, they are, at best, an experiment in the earliest stages, but mostly, some rich guy's toys.
So the higher the stakes the more we should just guess so we might save lives... or not...
And following the car in front of you works fine until all the cars in front of you are autonomous then you get that 120 car pile up in the ditch.
These vehicles will only save lives if more than half the drivers are in them. Until Musk presents his plan on how to make his vehicles affordable by 75% of the population, this is all hot air. It must be nice to live in a world where all things somehow get cheap enough for everyone to own one.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
The media are all over small plane crashes much the same way, giving a highly distorted view of just how safe aviation is. Aviation organizations like AOPA have started to get on the media's case about this.
If they reported car crashes with the same enthusiasm the "news" would be nothing but car crashes.
...laura
just like BSD.
-linux... they can't *give* that shit away.
You think Clinton bashing will stop when the election is over?!
if your cars cant kill people because "peole are still driving the vehicle", then they cant save people either
dont need to be a genious (or be called one)
We can get back to plain old Bush bashing. Or Reagan.
fortune may favor the brave, but fortune favored you because right place right time with right people, your not smarter than many many people, you have more resources and connections, that is not a sign of brilliance.
[CITATION NEEDED]
1) Musk is basically correct
2) Yet Musk should not be saying this himself. He needs to act very humble about the capability of the technology until it really is proven out and accepted, because people will smell a businessman wanting to make a profit at there expense.
We should not justify what the media does. The media does not give people an accurate understanding.
U.S. Auto Crashes: About 35,200 in 2015.
I'm hoping it will at least come up only when a little bit relevant. Right now it's, "I'm stuck at a red light. Fucking Crooked Hillary!" or, "This mac and cheese is terrible, but not as terrible as Donald Trump!"
We get it, people. You think you're topical and clever. You have feelings and ideas and stuff about current events. We just don't want to hear them.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Media coverage is incidental. Yes, there are traffic accidents. A very small percentage of them are fatal. Hyperbole much? What a ********. Really, really tired of this weasel.
By working in a fast food establishment, you are literally killing people. And heart disease / obesity is 10x to 100x worse than automobile accidents as far as death statistics.
because then it will always be the human driver's fault and not the autopilot.
Which prompts the question: Why is Tesla allowed to lump "all miles driven in autopilot mode" into one bucket when it makes its safety claims? Under scientific testing conditions, any change in hardware or software should require a fresh slate for testing data. We talk about needing autonomous vehicles to have 100 millions miles of driving experience, but we know nothing about how these cars perform when they aren't on public roads and there is no protocol for collating that data.
Teslas that BSOD, randomly veer onto crowded sidewalks, their batteries eject plasma at pedestrians.
All of his businesses are failures, all of his "visions" are fantasy with no reality. He is as much of a failure as Trump, and both are washed up!
I'm hoping it will at least come up only when a little bit relevant. Right now it's, "I'm stuck at a red light. Fucking Crooked Hillary!" or, "This mac and cheese is terrible, but not as terrible as Donald Trump!"
Thanks, Obama!
i.e. Good Fucking luck
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
For a smart guy, Elon seems amazingly stupid about statistics. Trillions of human-driven miles accumulate each year, and that's just in the U.S. The fatal accident rate compared to miles driven is extremely low -- about 25 deaths per billion miles driven (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year). And this is with drivers actively evading dangerous situations tens of thousands of times per day. Not perfectly, but acceptably. In contrast, driverless cars have not competed with nearly enough vehicles for any valid statistical significance. Moreover, nobody knows how well driverless cars interact with each other, since there are so few on the road.
So Musk's claim that media reports are killing people is statistical poppycock.
These robo-cars are going to revolutionize the Democrat party's "bring out your dead, get out the vote" operation. Get in the car, tell it to take you to the polling place and it stops at the nearest Democratic Voting Center where you can vote for anyone you like, as long as they're Democrats. Fuck yeah, I am so with her!
They're only simulated people.
If this is the way Tesla's talking heads are going to behave, trying to guilt people into buying their crap and not thoroughly reporting on divisive new technology, then they deserve all the negative coverage they get.
The news is only news because it's a rare or exceedingly unlikely event. The mere fact that something is in the news is all the evidence you need that it is NOT going to happen to you.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
"My father could not get elected in todays' republican party. According to the republicans today my dad would be deemed a dangerous liberal. He raised taxes, and raised them more on the rich. When confronted with a serious threat from a middle eastern country he did not go to war with them but resolved the issue with diplomacy. He raised the debt and he eventually cut defense spending. He increased medicare more significantly and oversaw the largest increase in the federal minimum wage ever. All of these were sane responses to the issues he faced. But today's republican party would never let sanity get in the way of ideology. It's not my dad's party anymore. My dad's party. The party of 'good morning in America' has been replaced by a bunch of apocalyptic fundamentalists who cozy-up to radical racists and ethnonationalists. They may call his name with reverence but I am sure glad he didn't live to see what they do in his name." - Rod Reagan (quoted from memory, may have heard or remembered a word here or there wrong, but the gist is accurate).
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
You've heard this one before?
Please give an historical example that follows your timeline.
My pics.
Elon definitely has a stake in this, but he raises a valid point -- overly negative media bias can severely hurt a technology, no matter how beneficial it may be in the future. That's what happened to nuclear -- it's literally the least lethal source of power (and a metric fuckton better than coal/gas), and puts nothing into the atmosphere (well, there's steam, but even that is regulated so that it doesn't have negative effects on weather/the environment), but over the course of it's development as a power source, extreme media bias and some fear mongering crippled it's chances of wide adoption.
I can see that happening to autonomous vehicles just as easily. People are not rational creatures; even if the tech develops to a point where it is irrefutably better than traditional driving, they will have bias against it due to the focus on negative news about it early on. Considering the potential for lives saved, that would be pretty damn bad.
That said, the tech isn't quite there yet. I'm not saying that we should ignore the flaws in current implementations (that would be counter-productive to getting to a widespread solution), but news outlets should try to avoid creating a widespread bias against the technology in general. The reason news outlets are so big is that a lot of people do not realize how sensationalized the news becomes, and accept the general ideas presented at face value -- if those ideas are that autonomous driving is super-dangerous, it's an issue.
It's not the media that dissuades me from buying a self-driving car. Not at all. It's the price of self-driving cars, and the fact that they're still pretty buggy.
Once the price of reliable, safe, bug-free-to-a-very-high-standard-deviation self-driving vehicles drops, I'll be in the market. I couldn't care less what the media wants me to think. The FUD bounces off and splats against the floor.
His point is a good one. Some people want self driving cars to reach the point of absolute safety. That's an impossible goal; there will always be things that the vehicle cannot predict, like a pedestrian who appears to be walking on a sidewalk suddenly darting into the street.
But once self driving cars reach the point of being able to drive more safely than human drivers, a point that they may have already reached, publicity that discourages people from using self driving cars is dangerous. It might lead people to making the more dangerous choice of driving the car manually, even if they are tired or under the influence of alcohol, rather than letting the car drive itself.
Elevators have a lot of regulation surrounding them which defined the rules of how they operate. They also have much simpler interfaces and only a few actions / static environment.
Self driving cars have an entire OS that has to keep a live version of the world surrounding it (as far as the road and anything moving on it) in internal memory. If any part of that OS fails, so does the car. Also, Elon Musk insists on being able to send out updates at any time, and any one of those updates could have serious consequences for the operation of the system.
Further, Elon Musk's version of a self driving car is far inferior to Google's for instance, and Google's doesn't go nearly as fast as his.