It wouldn’t be so bad if he was just making empty promises, but he’s been charging Tesla customers extra, thousands of dollars extra, for this non existent, optional feature for years. Seems like straight up serial fraud to me.
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Reading about Elon Musk and his need to have input on the self-driving program, my takeaway was that Musk was only making it less likely that the technology would ever work. Just so many self-sabotaging decisions, so many incredibly dumb pronouncements to justify them… It’s part of what makes me laugh when people think he’s a genius.
To be fair, he’s also said plenty of stuff that was obviously wrong/easily falsifiable, too. Anyone who wants to claim he’s a genius has a lot of stuff they have to ignore.
Yep, this is well known to be an incredibly dangerous approach. Just completely, obviously stupid.
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we coulda had 'em too if it wasn’t for all the nervous Neds insisting on a completely unreasonable ratio between self-driving and self-crashing.
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Yeah, it’s part of what he fell out with Google over. They had that shit already but knew it was worse than useless. It’s level two, He is asked about level 4 in the video. Which he also lies about.
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My first professional job as an engineer was in the auto industry and I spent my last year in that job working on self-driving cars (at the time it was called something like the “intelligent highway system”). The Big 3, the US government, and various universities had worked together on something much like what you described, sensors on cars and at the roadside with inter-vehicle communication. As I recall, various proof-of-concept trials had been run, though to my knowledge only on closed tracks. Still, many people realistically thought that we would see self-driving cars within a decade.
The year, by the way, was 1994. Even then it was not seen as a new idea, but one that finally seemed like more than a science-fiction pipe dream as automakers were increasingly accepting of putting microprocessors in their vehicles.
I think we will see relatively mature self-driving cars in my lifetime, but personally I doubt they will be the majority of vehicles on the road – but then, I may have a few years on you, in which case we could both be right. The average vehicle lives something like 8 years, some much longer, so even once there are a lot of mature options it will take a long time to convert the entire automotive fleet, at least without strong (and likely expensive) policy support.
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That depends – do you know anyone who can make a convincing deepfake?
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Serious question: how many deaths are we prepared to accept from the robot drivers, given that the human drivers are such a bloodbath? Do the robots have to be perfect? Human drivers kill about 100 people a day in the United States. What if rolling out a robot fleet resulted in 50 deaths a day, of which 49 were caused by humans and one by a robot. Is that an improvement?
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And this is what led to Uber’s fatal autonomous car pedestrian strike. Everyone was quick to blame the “driver” but the whole thing was set up to make driver attention impossible. (That one was especially egregious as the car was set up to ignore some types of potential collisions and rely on the driver noticing the warning and stopping the car, rather than the other way around - stopping the car unless the driver over-rode it.) When I read how it was set up, I was shocked, as it so clearly goes against best practices. It really drove home how completely reckless it was to allow this technology to be worked by tech dudes who had only ever worked on apps, and how none of these fatal accidents seemed to change very much of how anything was being done by companies like Tesla. “Disrupting the auto industry” by killing people.
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There are major ethical considerations for sure, and its not a new discussion topic. An old consideration is similar to the trolley problem but with a twist, is it better for a person or a robot to make a mistake? Would you think it worse for a person to make a decision that ends someone else’s life or is it worse for a piece of software or machine to make a mistake? If software or machine creates an accident that injures or kills someone who assumes the blame/risk?
There aren’t straightforward neat answers to the questions and we also have to unfortunately have to reduce people down to a numbers game to determine what is an acceptable risk. Driverless vehicles aren’t the only thing acceptable risks are calculated for, medication and many other things we use on a daily basis already have these calculations factored in so in the end its something we just have to take on
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“If software or machine creates an accident that injures or kills someone who assumes the blame/risk?”
Well, in real engineering, the engineer who signed off on the plans takes the blame, if a failure is down to the engineering, and not something well-designed getting put together wrong.
Meanwhile, over in software “engineering”, I would face less oversight and official certification to push pro-anorexia content to kids or give a robot a gun than beauticians have to dye and perm hair. If something went wrong, I might not even hear about it.
I’m not saying this is right, it’s actually downright horrifying, but it is how things are currently set up.
As of the end of last year, Elon Musk will have paid taxes that average out to $1.5 million per day for every day since he became a US citizen (or $1 million/day since he first came to the US.)
He pays all the taxes he legally owes. If you think his “fair share” is more than $1-1.5 million per day (and you might well), then you should contact your representatives about changing the tax code (unless you’re confident that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren can get it done for you 
).
The “Elon pays no taxes” meme began with an article that tried to gin up outrage over the fact that many people with large (but unrealized) capital gains don’t pay income tax on those capital gains.
Not surprisng, since capital gains are taxed when the gains are realized — i.e., when the stock is sold, f’rex.
No one pays income tax on unsold stock.
This last year, he paid a shitload of income tax for exercising stock options (the difference between current stock price and the options’ strike price being taxed as income), and a shitload of capital gains tax on the stock that he sold (mostly) to pay his income tax bill.
About $11 billion in taxes, all told.
What Bernie and Elizabeth et al. will do with that money remains to be seen.
Who knows, maybe they will feed some hungry children somewhere — but $11B is (almost) enough to pay for a new Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier, so I confess I don’t have very high hopes.
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Traffic jam yesterday and traffic jam tomorrow, but never self-driving cars today.
Oh, boo hoo. His net worth is over a quarter trillion dollars. And he pays a smaller percentage of of his income than middle class Americans
In June, a ProPublica investigation found that while Musk’s wealth had grown by nearly $14 billion from 2014 to 2018, he paid $68,000 in federal income tax in 2015, $65,000 in 2017 and none in 2018. Between 2014 and 2018, the investigation found, he had a true tax rate of 3.27%.
Cute of you to average the amount out to make it seem like Musk has been paying a fair share all along when he demonstrably has not.
It’s not an accident or some form of justice that he pays so little, the wealthy have been paying politicians to make it so, and they have an unfair advantage in keeping it that way. So don’t act like it was decided democratically based on fair representation.
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That looks like a really impressive number until you look at the percentages. And that’s why taxes are reckoned as percentages.
Also…
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Which is why I said:
You might well think that. And I don’t disagree.
Look, I’m not saying “He shouldn’t have to pay that much.”
I’m just pushing back against the idea that he doesn’t he doesn’t pay any.taxes.
I’m sure he could pay more taxes, and I think he probably should. But I don’t expect him to pay more than he owes. (You can’t, actually. Overpay the IRS and they’ll send you a refund.)
If you want him to pay more taxes, you need to yell at your congresscritters about that.
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When you file your taxes, you do not actually have to take advantage of every possible deduction, and they are not going to send you a refund check for unclaimed deductions.
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Reposting this here, because it is very relevant. Musk has been badly overpromising what self-driving might be capable of, and it is a critical part of how Tesla is valued.
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Tell you what: you try and talk to your congresscritter¹, and Elon will talk to his², and we’ll see who gets more from their effort.
1] by which I mean: get some acknowledgement that they have heard your plaint, and they respond to it in some halfway relevant way. “Your concerns are valid and I will raise it with my superiors in the party” counts. “Here are the reasons why we’re not going to do that” counts. “Thanks for your correspondence, here is our legislative agenda for the coming term and here are reasons why the other party eat babies” does not count. Neither does complete silence in return.
“I can email congressmen in the vasty deep!”
“Why so can I, and so can any man, but do they come when you do summon them?”
2] Whether it’s by calling their personal number in his speed dial contacts list, or by chatting between holes on a lazy nine.
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There is no prospect for “cold fusion” using known physics
All the “just give us 20 more years” projects are regular hot fusion
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