85
Tesla drivers run Autopilot where it’s not intended — with deadly consequences
(www.washingtonpost.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I haven't seen anyone blaming the autopilot for situations like this
Your above comment was blaming it. Why even bring Autopilot up otherwise?
The above comment, which was a summary of the article, doesn't blame autopilot. It brings up autopilot as being used by an inattentive driver outside autopilot's intended use conditions. Acting like autopilot, it's marketing, and it's general population perception is an innocent bystander in this situation is, however, disingenuous. You don't give a car to someone and say "it has airbags, it's safe" and trust that they'll actually be ok on the road with no further info, right? So why would you think releasing untested software in a product with overhyped marketing using unfamiliar terms^1 would just be ok?
I'll blame the auto pilot. It's good enough to train people to not pay attention, but not good enough to be fully driverless. So the users are being trained to fully trust something they can't fully trust.
If you were trying to teach a new driver how to drive, you wouldn't do 99.9% of the driving for them, and then randomly throw them into the driver's seat when there's an emergency. That's not how you would get a good driver, that's how you would get a bunch of accidents. We know that at the human level. If you want to train a driver, you let them practice on the easy stuff, you keep them engaged, you keep them thinking about it.
The Tesla semi-automated self-driving, is the reverse, all the easy stuff the computer does, the rare emergency difficult stuff the human has to do. But they get no practice. It's like the gold standard of how to create accidents