[ExI] Why Tesla Can Program Its Cars to Break Road Safety Laws

[William Flynn Wallace]

### Another hatepiece on Tesla. If a human may choose to ignore a law on
his own, then he must be able to choose to ignore a law when using a robot.
It's obvious.

Rafal

Maybe we should make cars that are not able to break laws.  In 1969 I drove
120 miles per hour on back roads to get my wife to the hospital.  She
delivered 90 minutes later.  In retrospect it would have been far safer for
me to have delivered the baby on the roadside than drive so fast.  It would
have been very frustrating to have to obey the speed limit, I admit.  We
have catered to our need for speed and what has it gotten us?  Tens of
thousands of deaths per year extra?  Paradoxically, alcohol makes one feel
that one is a great driver.
Maybe we should let people who want to race, race at racing tracks.    bill
w

On Tue, Jan 25, 2022 at 10:31 PM Rafal Smigrodzki via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
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> On Tue, Jan 25, 2022 at 10:28 AM Dave S via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
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>> https://usa.streetsblog.org/2022/01/12/why-tesla-can-program-its-cars-to-break-road-safety-laws
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>> *Thousands of Teslas are now being equipped with a feature that prompts
>> the car to break common traffic laws — and the revelation is prompting some
>> advocates to question the safety benefits of automated vehicle technology
>> when unsafe human drivers are allowed to program it to do things that
>> endanger other road users.In an October 2021 update its deceptively named
>> “Full Self Driving Mode” beta software, the controversial Texas automaker
>> introduced a new feature that allows drivers to pick one of three custom
>> driving “profiles” — “chill,” “average,” and “assertive” — which moderates
>> how aggressively the vehicle applies many of its automated safety features
>> on U.S. roads.The rollout went largely unnoticed by street safety advocates
>> until a Jan. 9 article in The Verge, when journalist Emma Roth revealed
>> that putting a Tesla in “assertive” mode will effectively direct the car to
>> tailgate other motorists, perform unsafe passing maneuvers, and roll
>> through certain stops (“average” mode isn’t much safer). All those
>> behaviors are illegal in most U.S. states, and experts say there’s no
>> reason why Tesla shouldn’t be required to program its vehicles to follow
>> the local rules of the road, even when drivers travel between jurisdictions
>> with varying safety standards.“Basically, Tesla is programming its cars to
>> break laws,” said Phil Koopman, an expert in autonomous vehicle technology
>> and associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University. “Even if [those
>> laws] vary from state to state and city to city, these cars knows where
>> they are, and the local laws are clearly published. If you want to build an
>> AV that drives in more than one jurisdiction and you want it to follow the
>> rules, there’s no reason you can’t program it up to do that. It sounds like
>> a lot of work, but this is a trillion-dollar industry we’re talking about.”*
>>
>
> ### Another hatepiece on Tesla. If a human may choose to ignore a law on
> his own, then he must be able to choose to ignore a law when using a robot.
> It's obvious.
>
> Rafal
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