331–340 of 498 posts
It's difficult to be sure about George. He spoke so derisively about other companies that failed to deliver, and now because of the inevitable paperwork that comes with a product that takes over your car for you at times (level-3 autonomy iirc), he too fails to deliver. If he leaves to join Tesla, it seems pretty irresponsible, given that he's raised $3.1M and has a team of employees relying on him. But that's all sp…
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Can you explain? You seem to be implying that you believe that the NHTSA is capriciously making demands of Comma but not to other similar companies in a similar stage of market-readiness.
They certainly could, which is part of my point. Whether they do or not depends on the honesty, bias, and personal ambitions of the people running the agency. The empirical experience is that regulatory agencies over time gravitate towards favoring the big established players in the industry they're regulating. The economist term is "Regulatory Capture".
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Proof that so-called autopilot systems are a danger to the public would be evidence that they perform worse than the average driver. I haven't seen such evidence, what are you referencing?
beyond the obviousness of what you have overlooked, its also worth pointing out that not all autonomous car usage will be substitutive. What if i just send my autonomous car to go take a picture of something? I might not have done it before, but now I will because it only costs a few cents/mile and none of my time.
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I more thinking "why the hell doesn't he have the answers already?"
Having mentioned this elsewhere, I have first-hand experience going between SMEs and X/Y/Z bureaucratic entities for half a decade and there's a big difference between "having the answers you think are satisfactory" and "providing answers that they think are satisfactory." GI Joe pointed this out long ago in that "Knowing is half the battle" and putting it into a work product that accomplishes its task is the other h…
I mean yeah, it sucks that the government is so darn picky about things, but that's not an excuse to just skip the process. They should have hired someone like you from the start to ensure that their ducks were in a row when they were ready to release.
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Not mission critical, rather life critical. I've worked on several life critical systems as a security researcher, helping to develop controls in tightly controlled environments to keep people safe. Work on software controlled switches in industrial machines mostly. As I've followed these developments and those of Google and Tesla I've been wondering at times if I live in some alternate universe. The level of diligen…
If 10,000 people were killed on the way to making driverless cars safe, and this wild west approach ended up getting them into mass market use a few years earlier, it would save the lives of thousands of people overall. Is this a bad thing? Is it not justified by utilitarianism?
He's currently throwing a temper tantrum on Twitter, and all because the NHTSA wanted to ask him a few questions about the product (you can see it here: https://www.scribd.com/document/329218929/2016-10-27-Special... ). Like, how dare the government try to have basic standards for multi-ton hunks of metal hurtling down the highway without human input. I've been trying to convince people lately that Silicon Valley isn…
Holtz's Twitter rant is at [1]. Cruise Automation was very lucky to be acquired by GM before they got a similar letter. Similarly, Otto being acquired by Uber. They were both proposing to sell similar add-on systems. Their valuations would have been much lower after receiving such letters. NHTSA has it right. "It is insufficient to assert, as you do, that 'your product does not remove any of the driver responsibiliti…
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His rep (from people I know who know him personally) is such that actually doing anything that doesn't involve a computer sending him into paroxysms of rage sounds completely in-character.
Someone should have told the people who funded him.
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If unnecessary red tape slows things down and causes 100k extra deaths is that ok? That's an imaginary scenario. You have no idea if that's the way it plays out. Let me give you another scenario: the first self-driving cars kill a bunch of people, and no one wants to touch them for years after they finally become safe; delaying the adoption of cars, and causing millions of additional people to die.
Very unlikely. Self-driving cars are potentially enormously profitable; with such profitable products I think you'll find that the opinion of an outraged public matters somewhat less than it customarily does.
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One problem with that model is that if the product ends up being unsafe and someone dies, it becomes the regulator's fault that they failed to prevent an unsafe product from being marketed and sold in the first place. Heads will roll. We as a democratic society decided awhile ago that the benefit of knowing a car product was probably safe outweighs the frictional burden of testing them before they can be sold. There'…
If that was true, then they could have left off the "or else, pay $21k/day for noncompliance". I've seen plenty of big-companies use forced compliance to kill smaller and more agile upstarts. I remember the tactics used to kill most butcheries and local meat shops. Same games, with onerous and idiotic requirements of "compliance" that the big guys can do. Of course, the big companies got legislation to enforce their…
Yes, regulatory capture exists, and incumbents often benefit from it. But I'm having trouble seeing how this particular case is a 'shake down' -- the NHTSA is simply asking him to follow the law, which he should be doing anyway.
[1] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2016/03/01/2016-04...