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Elon Musk Posts a Tweet That Really Doesn't Do His Intellect Any Justice

Why didn't those who built the current road infrastructure lots of decades ago think about the needs of an AI controlling a vehicle? Well, because they weren't Elon Musk.
Elon Musk, Tesla Technoking and Imperator of Mars 1 photo
Photo: CFP / news.cgtn.com
Tesla, through the voice of its Technoking, Elon Musk, has made and missed countless (we've literally lost count) promises regarding the time when self-driving cars would become reality. The thing is every time a new deadline was set, the TSLA share value would go up. However, when that due date came and passed, nothing really happened.

In the meantime, the company kept telling everyone that the Autopilot wasn't ready to take full control of the vehicle, but Musk made everything legally allowed to suggest that it was. And who were the majority of Tesla owners supposed to believe, a faceless company, or the supreme visionary Elon Musk?

Ever since its introduction, Autopilot has been a hot topic, and that's because it constantly pushed the limits of a legislation that wasn't ready for it (and still isn't). Then, blatantly ignoring the criticism leveled at the "Autopilot" name, Tesla launched the "Full Self Driving" suite, a software package (the hardware was installed by default) that was supposed to do what it says on the tin, though it's hard to say when.

Given the constant narrative about how close Tesla was to achieving full self-driving capabilities for its vehicles, some people naturally began to trust their EVs more than they should. However, we all know what happened to Joshua Brown, and the tally of Autopilot-related deaths (17 unofficial, six confirmed by Tesla) has risen ever since. There's even a website that keeps tabs on all Tesla-related fatalities, with a special column dedicated to the Autopilot.

You will have probably heard about the latest incident in Texas that may or may not have had anything to do with Autopilot. Police reconstructionists say there was nobody in the driver's seat at the time of impact, as witness statements seem to support that by claiming the two occupants had set off with the intent of testing the vehicle's self-driving capabilities.

Elon Musk, on the other hand, claims the Autopilot wasn't and couldn't have been at fault for a few simple and clear reasons mainly to do with the fact the road had no markings. The investigation is still ongoing so we can't know for sure which of the two sides holds the truth.

Yesterday, Elon Musk published a tweet that is essentially blaming the way the road network was conceived for the difficulties of implementing Level 4 and 5 autonomous vehicles. "The entire road system is designed for biological neural nets with optical imagers", he says, which is fancy talk for "made for humans". Well, duh!

Anyone can feel free to decide whether this has anything to do with what happened in Texas, but it does sound like an excuse because it relates to something so plainly obvious, it shouldn't have come as a surprise God knows how many years after the start of the project.

Besides, what Musk is suggesting there is that we need to change the infrastructure to accommodate the AI, whereas we can all agree that, to make it feasible, it should be the other way around. The switch to electric powertrains poses enough infrastructure challenges as it is, so the last thing we need is to turn the entire world into a giant construction site as we modify all existent roads.

But, hey, if that's what it takes to make Autopilot and FSD happen, then maybe we should do it, right? I mean, it's definitely easier than sticking a LIDAR sensor on the cars and taking your time with the public release, like all the other manufacturers are doing.

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About the author: Vlad Mitrache
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"Boy meets car, boy loves car, boy gets journalism degree and starts job writing and editing at a car magazine" - 5/5. (Vlad Mitrache if he was a movie)
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