My little girl's life should not be a variable in the public beta version of the Autopilot



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I immediately spotted the Scarlet Model 3 Tesla, while he was starting to merge on Highway 101; For years I've been driving motorcycles in Los Angeles, my peripheral vision is extremely clear. With my little girl sitting at the back, singing with my wife and my brother on a childish melody, the weather has slowed down as the model 3 has not taken into account our presence in the queue right and aimed directly at the doors of our pbadengers. With a few inches to spare, I made my way to the left unoccupied lane and almost avoided an accident. At the same time, in a fraction of a second, I saw the Model 3 pilot's hands jump from his lap behind the wheel and pull him to the right. The car was on autopilot.

It is time to regulate this technology.

Tesla's CEO, Elon Musk, is mocked every time the intrinsic danger of using the public as a mbad beta-test is evoked. The company's communications team said the Tesla pilots had safely logged more than 1 billion kilometers using the autopilot. This preponderance of data arguably demonstrates that the Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) is perfectly safe for the consumer, despite the growing number of recent accidents related to autopilot. Yet, even if we take the word Tesla at its word, it does not make us forget that we are used to testing the company's software and hardware for limitations and bugs.

My daughter, your daughter, your son, your wife, your husband, your brother and your sister, your father and your mother, each person who shares the road with a car equipped with an autopilot is in essence Tesla laboratory rats. What makes a few deaths when you advance technological progress?

Tesla covers her bad by giving these "futurists" ready to use the autopilot –again, not a fully autonomous vehicle-A invites the conditions of use before the drivers can use the system. The dialogue box informs drivers that they must agree to "keep their hands on the wheel at all times and always keep control and responsibility of their vehicle". Yet, unlike the general terms and conditions we regularly accept, that almost no one ever reads – its effects can go beyond the user. There are actually other people on the road who have not given their tacit agreement to be beta testers, like my daughter. No quantity of Tesla legalese can refute this.

The reality has not yet been tested by the company, as the fatal accidents badociated with the use of the autopilot only involved the death of the occupants of the vehicle who relinquished Tesla's responsibility by following the prompts. However, public comment and misinformation from Musk – as well as the growing number of Teslas on the road – are likely to see more accidents as ordinary consumers misinterpret the autopilot's capabilities and confuse it with a totally different system. autonomous. By the way, Musk has promised several times that this will happen in the year.

Last year, The reader Alex Roy predicted the rise of the same type of incident I encountered while saying, "More [automated] As systems substitute for human participation, human skills erode and more frequently a "failure" and / or crash is attributed to technology rather than human ignorance of it. Combine the toxic marriage of human ignorance and skill degradation with an increasing number of such systems on the road. In addition, the number of accidents caused by this interaction is likely to remain constant, or even increase, even if the accident rate decreases. "

Roy ends his editorial with an ultimatum; either automated systems such as the Tesla autopilot are regulated, "or we can not do anything and suffer the same attacks of rattling and recriminations until the next crash." To date, regulatory oversight of automated systems is largely left to those who build and test these technologies. And any form of regulation is considered by decision makers as a hindrance to technological progress.

Elaine Chao, US Secretary of Transportation, sees these laws as a burden. She told a group of journalists last year that her office was working with autonomous technology companies to target regulations that impede progress. In some states, government agencies have reduced regulation and increased incentives to attract members of this nascent and well-funded industry.

As for the manufacturers themselves, Ford, Toyota and General Motors recently partnered with SAE International to create a set of standards that would give the public something more concrete to measure the automated systems, their success and their respective implementations. Whatever the potential for gain, this effort – as well as in the previous cases – still concerns patients who manage the asylum, because each of these organizations has a personal or financial interest to prove to the public more and more wary that the technology is safe and should be bought. We need people who understand the technology, its limitations, its current capabilities and potential, and develop common sense rules to ensure public safety as a primary goal. We are not even close to anything like that.

autonomous has become a buzzword for companies that want to increase their profits, their ego and little else. Its use tells consumers that this manufacturer is looking to the future and aims to make people easier and safer than ever before. It tells the story of a future without drivers or personal responsibility; a utopia. It's a vision shared by everyone, from reporters' speeches to futurists with more social media outlets than the average, who are "the best and the brightest" in Silicon Valley. What they are really selling is the snake oil of our time. When these automated systems were subjected to careful scientific scrutiny, they tarnished.

The quest for progress has allowed companies like Tesla to endanger the lives of all road users. We have given these companies a space to hide behind the voluminous contracts of Terms and Conditions that we are programmed to accept automatically. It must stop there. The regulation must be mandated. These technologies require geofencing, parallel autonomy, driver surveillance systems, rigorous virtual and real testing away from the public, and the same kind of laws that govern the rest of the automotive world.

It is time to reign over these automated systems and get them out of the anarchy of unregulated public use. Otherwise, my daughter, as well as all your children, could become an additional anomaly on the path of progress.

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