Like Boeing. As much as I hate people saying dumb shit about a company they don’t know much of anything about, Boeing is the epitome of what you said. A company getting a small slap on the wrist for gross negligence in the name of profit. Especially because of all the goodies they develope for the US Federal Government. And since they are a world wide company our government isn’t the only one. They know they reside in a place of power because they fill a hole in an industry that basically has to be filled. And people want to try to bankrupt them with some weird ideas about voting with their dollar. But that’s nonsense.

People don’t understand about how they build planes not to sell but to lease. How these types of leases keep their customers paying out the nose for an asset they don’t own, and responsible for the maintenance of that asset until it’s time to upgrade. They cornered the market on enshitification long before the likes of Microsoft and Google, and they have mastered the art of it.

Tesla or Uber or whoever wish they could do what Boeing has been doing for decades. People have this rose tinted glasses view of what Boeing “used to be” when it was “run by engineers” etc. That’s hilarious to me. Back in the day they hedged their bets in a race to the bottom to develop a two engined plane that wouldn’t catastrophically fail and fall out of the sky if it lost an engine so they could skirt worldwide federal regulations that required planes to have more than two engines. This added to upkeep and fuel costs making it untenable and creating air travel that was incredibly expensive. And their engineers managed it, so they played the long game, basically allowing them to develop planes that were more fuel efficient and cost effective to maintenance meaning their customers could afford to buy more of them by providing air travel opportunities to more people.

You know what we got from that? Shittier seating arrangements, poorly manufactured planes, and baggage fees out the whazoo in addition to ever rising ticket prices for air travel.

We’re working on it, although for some parts of the world we will need to go through periods of increased snowfall to get there.

Average is better means fewer incidents overall. But when there are incidents, the damages for those incidents tend to be much worse. This means the victims are more likely to lawyer up and go after the company responsible for the AI that was driving, and that means that the company who makes the self-driving software better be prepared to pay for those worst case scenarios, which will now be 100% their fault.

Uber can avoid liability for crashes caused by their human drivers. They won’t be able to do the same when their fleet is AI. And when that happens, AI sensibilities will be measured my human metrics because courts are run by humans. The mistakes that they make will be VERY expensive ones, because a minor glitch can turn an autonomous vehicle from the safest driving experience possible to a rogue machine with zero sense of self-preservation. That liability is not worth the cost savings of getting rid of human drivers yet, and it won’t be for a very long time.