A Tragic Loss
This is on the road to being off topic, but still relevant given some of the commentary in this thread:<p>It makes me a bit sad that the political zeitgeist in the tech community is leaning towards &quot;acceptable losses&quot; when it comes to accidents in automated cars, to the point of pre-emptively expressing disdain at ordinary people reacting negatively to such news. I sense it&#x27;s going to become harder and harder for us to talk about our worries and skepticism regarding automated driving, since the louder voices claim it will all be worth it in the end. Surely — <i>surely</i> — you&#x27;re on the side of <i>less death</i>? But personally, I find the utilitarian perspective distasteful. We&#x27;re perfectly happy to let technology (literally) throw anonymous individuals under the bus as long as less people die overall, but what if it&#x27;s <i>you</i> that gets hit by an auto? What if it&#x27;s someone you care about, not Anonymous Driver On TV? The point is that humanity is not a herd to be taken as a whole; every life has rights, including the right not to be trampled by algorithmic decisions or software bugs for the betterment of all. (Sure, you could argue just as well that we have the right not to be run over by drunk and otherwise negligent drivers, but at least this kind of death is not methodical and has some legal recourse.) I feel this perspective needs a strong voice in the tech community too, to counter the blind push forward at the expense of human lives.<p>Now, this isn&#x27;t necessarily what happened in <i>this</i> case, but I find Tesla&#x27;s behavior in these kinds of situations to be creepy and self-serving, at best. Is every death going to come with a blog post describing how much safer automated features are compared to human drivers? Every auto-related casualty is, and should be, a massive event, not a minus-one-point on some ledger in Elon Musk&#x27;s office.