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Comment by thereare5lights | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk follows Longtermism. His position is that few deaths here and there today don't matter if it brings about full self driving cars.

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It is funny, isn't it, that every single person that thought that some lives had to be sacrificed now for the greater good or something later somehow managed to exclude their own life, and that of their loved ones, out of that equation.

For all the criticisms of Elon Musk you could level (and there are many), this is a weird choice in that it's demonstrably wrong - he livestreamed himself driving using the newest version of FSD Beta very recently.

Did he? And we know that wasn't heavily prepared?

Also, Musk is very capabale of doing stupid things. Especially when it comes to social media likes. I mean he spent 44 billion for that same reason...

It obviously wasn’t heavily prepared as Musks Tesla tried to kill him during the livestream.

So Musk will end this whole FSD Beta testing on the roads, disable the feature on sold cars via OTA (at least one sensible use case for that in cars beyond map updates) and stop advertizing and / or selling it while reimbursing those who paid for it?

So he's used it.. once? Or are you saying he uses it exclusively to get around?

I remember when Tesla demoed FSD and it was all faked. Given the company’s track record of fraud and his personal track record of over promising and under delivering on this very product, why should anyone believe his video is what he says it is?

https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/17/tech/tesla-self-driving-video...

Exactly; almost no skin in the game here.

What are lawsuits and fines to someone who buys 40B companies out of boredom / like we comment on HN.

Responsibility and repercussions must become much clearer and more sharply felt to any so called “leadership”.

This is one, if not the main malaise of our times.

Some of you may die, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make!

It sounds like a highly selective sort to me.

Like, wouldn't be too many deaths and accidents set back the goal? And wouldn't a previously acquired bad reputation slow down adoption when it's finally working?

And why not sacrifice short term gains by having say, LIDAR and better hardware at the start, to have the best performing system as fast as possible, and then gradually trim things down once everything works perfectly?

He has a point. The real question is whether it is his decision to make that this trade-off is worth it, not whether he has a cogent argument.

If he wants to be among the “few deaths”, good for him, but none if us signed up for his shit.

That might mean something if he was principled and competent rather than simply narcissistic and stabbing in the dark with generational wealth.

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