The Safety of Tesla’s Self-Driving Cars
Tesla’s autopilot driver-assistance system is under investigation by federal regulators (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) after at least 12 accidents in which Teslas using Autopilot drove into emergency vehicles such as parked police cars and fire trucks, resulting in the death of one person and injuring 17 others. Former members of Tesla’s Autopilot team have spoken out in protest of about many of Musk’s decisions including constantly modifying the software remotely, relying solely on cameras tracking the surroundings without additional sensing devices, equipping insufficient hardware unable to work properly in difficult weather conditions, and announcing misleading claims about their self-driving cars that has encouraged many drivers to misuse the feature. While the Autopilot system (now called Full Self Driving) has been upgraded over the years since it was announced in 2014, engineers who worked on the technology claim that these functions have yet to perform to the degree that Musk has publicly claimed.
Facebook’s Censorship Mishaps
Facebook (now known as Meta), as well as numerous social media platforms, have a system in place that is meant to keep out unwanted content, but this system often makes mistakes that can lead to a user’s account being disabled, a discussion being flagged, or ads being rejected all through no fault of the user. The Wall Street Journal calculated that approximately 200,000 of these wrong calls happen daily – some greatly impacting individuals, businesses, and news organizations with no way to figure out what they did wrong. Facebook’s critics say it hasn’t done enough to prevent these errors, and raise the question: “Are we OK with companies being so essential that when they don’t fix mistakes, there’s not much we can do?”