It's definitely not just outsiders as you (and I) can attest; I went with that line of argument to try and convey some sense of urgency about the problem. It's easy to dismiss internal dissent about SV libertarian groupthink as not important, but "outsiders" have the potential to bring the party to an end if they collectively get really grumpy about what we're doing. I thought that might be more motivation.
And we've now, at the behest of these companies, redefined statists down to:
- thinks it's OK for neighbors and local government to have a say in whether people run a hotel next door, possibly sharing a roof or even a wall
- thinks it's OK to require pretty reasonable background checks ala Austin for taxi drivers
- thinks it's OK to have some safety regulations around self driving cars sharing our roads beyond hey, it worked in my car on this specific stretch of road so, you know, yolo
Congratulations, by waiting a year to implement self driving cars, through overly burdening government regulations, you just killed ten thousand people.
What about those people? The people who WILL die in car accidents next year unless we do something about it. Screw them, right?
This isn't a self-driving car. It's a driver assist. It depends on an alert driver behind the wheel. What we're learning is that these systems can, in some circumstances, be the worst of both worlds --- a human driver lulled into complacency by technology that was not designed to handle complicated road conditions autonomously --- a system that itself generates both human and machine error.
There's an interesting similarity with Air France 447 in your description -- a crash caused by information overload and the normal assist system going into an alternate mode.
Noone is arguing about the benefits of self-driving technology in general.
The question at hand is: Does thisspecific piece of equipment actually work as described, and move us towards that goal, or is it a piece of cobbled together junk that will cause more accidents? If you want to sell thisspecific piece of equipment on the consumer market, you'd better have a good answer to that question, and be able to back it up with more than "hey, it worked for me this morning!"
