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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.
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Isn't it fair that all of that media coverage should be withdrawn too?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.
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.
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
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.
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.
God, I can't wait for this election to be over.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
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.
> 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.
...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.
That's a bullshit argument.
When a schoolbus hits your kid, you don't just sue the driver, you sue the driver, the drivers union, the school, and the school district... 'cause this is 'murica, the must litigious place in our entire solar system. Do you think for a second that if someone gets hurt while hailing an autonomous Tesla, that they're not going to sue Tesla, regardless of whether or not the hailing service is operated by Tesla? So as long as Tesla is forced to take some risk, they're going to want a piece of the profits too. That's why the prohibition on using _other_ ride haling providers.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
Other than accidents per vehicle-mile traveled. But that's ok, you can pretend the data doesn't exist if it makes you feel better.
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.
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.
When there are several million Tesla's on the road, and you control for the fact that people who can afford them might have particular driving habits, among other factors, you might have a point.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
So the easy human monitored miles that autopilot can navigate are safe? That's simply astonishing!
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
"You have just experienced 1 hour and 20 minutes of 100% safe driv--
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Which is much higher than the human driving on divided highways stat. This has been beat to death. You are wrong.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
When autonomous vehicles come out, it is clear that the provider of the autonomy must carry all liability for anything that happens. If it is true autonomy then the person in the car might not even have a valid drivers license.. if there is a person in it at all. Nothing else is logical.
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
You think Clinton bashing will stop when the election is over?!
Except that accidents per vehicle mile traveled is an extremely misleading statistic, because for MuskWagons it only includes almost brand-new, high-end vehicles owned exclusively by rich people who can afford to have them religiously maintained and who probably either have better driving skills due to a higher education level, or who have somebody driving on their behalf who was likely selected for their above-average driving skills. Whereas by contrast, for the other vehicles assessed you're including low-end mass-market vehicles driven by the great unwashed, barely maintained if at all, and quite possible multiple decades old. A fair comparison would be to equate MuskWagons with brand-new standard cards in the same price bracket, and manufactured within the same range as Teslas have been. And I'd wager if you do so, the MuskWagon's supposed advantage would be largely -- perhaps even entirely -- negated. Which is precisely why Musk makes such a completely nonsensical comparison in the first place: It fits his desired narrative, even if it's totally misleading.
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.
But its zactly like awto pilot by gawd. Only differnt.
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"
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.
accidents per vehicle mile traveled is an extremely misleading statistic, because for MuskWagons it only includes almost brand-new, high-end vehicles owned exclusively by rich people who can afford to have them religiously maintained
Right now you have to have your car maintained by Tesla in order to keep your warranty. Will Tesla even let you use Autopilot if you don't do that? I doubt it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
At what point do we dispense with the fiction that we own the things we buy?
The more I hear about these Tesla cars the worse they sound. "We decide when, where, and how you use car and Autopilot, because the EULA says we can do whatever we want."
You know how everyone around here bitches a blue streak about how shitty software licensing is? Let's just apply all that same shit to cars! It'll be great!
They're only simulated people.
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.
The more I hear about these Tesla cars the worse they sound. "We decide when, where, and how you use car and Autopilot, because the EULA says we can do whatever we want."
Yes. It's a serious problem. Literally all of the self-driving cars are going to have to phone home in order to operate. It's standalone GPS vs. your phone all over again.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So we should compare them directly to Mercedes?
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.