Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said that cars operating in Tesla’s Autopilot mode are safer than those piloted solely by human drivers, citing crash rates when the modes of driving are compared. He has pushed the carmaker to develop and deploy features programmed to maneuver the roads, arguing that the technology will usher in a safer, virtually accident-free future. While it’s impossible to say how many crashes may have been averted, the data shows clear flaws in the technology being tested in real time on America’s highways.
Okay but none of that is relevant to the question of “Are computers in their current condition better drivers than humans?”. No one here thinks that Elon is cool or good, I haven’t seen a single fanboy comment so far. But that doesn’t change the hard facts about the things that a couple of his companies (who have hired a lot of very good engineers) have accomplished. Pretending that Tesla and SpaceX have zero accomplishments or benefits does not enhance your arguments against their boss, it detracts from them by discrediting you. There are plenty of legitimate criticisms to make, many of them absolutely damning, there’s no need to falsify anything to condemn them.
Elon might literally be the single most influential tech charlatan and serial tech bullshit artist currently living, and generally engages in amoral behavior that makes it obvious he will never do the right thing unless compelled to do so by a government or court of law.[1] absent a third-party source independently going over all of the relevant data here and publishing it in some kind of peer-reviewed scientific journal, i would not trust a single word or piece of data the guy or any of his companies have on this subject–or indeed any subject where he has a vested interest in a favorable outcome that would make him more money.
he has, for example, interacted favorably and consistently with people who think there is a satanic cabal of Democrats who sacrifice children to harvest their adrenochrome and use it in blood rituals (and that the only way to solve this is systematic executions of liberals), and his website boosts people who want to commit genocide because he thinks anything else is censorship. ↩︎