Tesla Paved The Way for Covid Gene Therapies

Musk has been beta testing his products unhindered for years

If regulatory models in the West are so great, why has a car company been beta testing never-seen-before capabilities in pseudo self-driving vehicles on public roads, when the kit doesn’t work?

Forget aircraft autopilots. Automating flying is easier because the variables are lower than driving a car on a road with tons of random stuff around and in very close proximity to loads of moving objects and people.

Add to that quality control failures that lead to massive recalls.

No wonder big pharma can get away with Covid-19 gene therapies. The government and regulator is captured and people aren’t clever enough to get proper safety testing of a car, let alone a gene therapy, before they get in it and let it do their crashing for them.

RT Tesla faces huge recall over danger to pedestrians

Still, the good news is that there’ll be tons of test subjects to have a Neuralink implant fitted, so we’ll all get to see how bad they are when the resultant quadriplegics and stroke victims can still manage a game of pong from their wheelchairs, just before they die or beg for euthanasia.

RT Musk’s Neuralink interface caused ‘extreme suffering’ in monkeys, doctors say

Looks like people will have to wait for longer than Musk claims before gullible people are listening to music inside their heads while their skulls bleed. As long as the 5G reception is good, it’ll be worth the wait and the hemorrhaging.

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Postscript: Following the care a reader took to raise shortcomings in the above via comments, to which the following is a response, I decided to append my reply here to compensate for my poor attempt to chuck out a short article which perhaps doesn’t serve any purpose.

I appreciate that the post is probably both glib and trite. In fact, I'll go further and state that it probably fails to communicate my point effectively. Sarcasm in writing is largely in the eye of the reader as well. I think it's fair for you to flag the massive difference between advanced cruise control/driver assistance tools and full self-driving/autonomous capabilities, which I acknowledge is not the fully marketed capability of Teslas.

I agree with you that, ultimately, current cars that are not certified and guaranteed as fully self-driving are the responsibility of the driver. In aviation, it is the pilot who is in control and responsible at all times, which is why flying is something that demands more cerebral engagement than many appreciate even if it looks labour-lite.

In 2015 the UK published these two review documents on driverless cars:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/driverless-cars-in-the-uk-a-regulatory-review

And there's a lot more information here:

https://www.gov.uk/transport/autonomous-road-vehicles

The 2015 document specifically states that the UK took a regulation lite/no-regulation approach to developing and testing autonomous vehicles on public roads, but a code of practise and various requirements have developed, partly covered in the second link.

My knowledge on the tech and practises involved in Tesla's FSD is not even waist deep and it is my failing that a glib post leaves you feeling the way you did.

My poorly made point is about a tension between: whatever is going on under the hoods and behind the curtains of both a private corporation and whatever regulator there might be supposedly regulating that market; the consumer's level of expectation and awareness of what the products or services are said to be and what they actually are, including limitations, descriptions etc that create perception which may not track reality for many, many reasons.

This is my basic parallel between Tesla and Covid-19 gene therapies.

One must take into account the target market and its capability for discernment and understanding, as well as training and accountability in use. Your post does cover this to an extent and is totally valid, but perhaps from specific technical perspectives (FSD Beta) rather than that of how generalised language affects the common man's perception of the capability that exists and is accessible to him now. To wit:

An A320 is sold with autopilot, to "expert" operator customers. Those products require specialist, licensed operators (pilots are heavy machine operators) with pretty extensive training that governs the higher level mechanics of the system, architecture, dependencies, modes and limitations. But from a technical perspective, that qualified operator is still a "user" and if the autopilot is not doing what that user wants, it is up to the user to intervene somehow, which, as you state, applies to cars. Pilots still don't look at the code, how it was built etc. They interact through the user interface of a common and standard suite of controls. However, the training pilots went through heavily structurally integrates the what of flying (get to A to B through the air in this machine) with the various forms of how it can be done in a level of detail that is simply absent from driving instruction. Drivers are trained in the basics of what to do and then everything else after that e.g. greater levels of sophistication of what and how, is left entirely up to the driver. Most people only do one driving test in their lives. Add automated tools into the mix after the driver has been licensed and with no further training and the user is left to RTFM then explore the system in a live environment. That's the funny thing about driving, everyone has access to a weapon and is free to wield it.

Drivers are almost everyone in society and their development as a driver comes from practise rather than continuous training or development. That means you are legislating for morons and experts alike. Enter the marketing department and the grey zone we are in of parallel development, testing, roll out and regulation. This, to me, is a fundamentally problematic paradigm that is in play in Covid-19 gene therapies as well as Tesla FSD and it has been endorsed for those products by state actors, including Dominic Cummings who was advisor to UK Gov and publicly espouses what some would call technocracy.

I would argue that it should not have been legally possible for Tesla to ever use the term "Autopilot" in reference to any of its products because of the power of that word over the expectations and perceptions of consumers. Tesla knows more about the causes of its crashes and faults than the public and probably any regulator does and there have been reports about this recently. Labelling and definition is important. Mislabel something, then require users to know for themselves what you meant, and something starts to mess up. Whether that's "vaccine" or "autopilot" instead of "gene therapy" or "advanced cruise control", the problem is the same when you are promulgating those terms through society at a rate of marketing knots with the state at your back. The state being silent and allowing you to promulgate a message could well be bad (Tesla Autopilot). The state actively backing your message is worse (Covid-19 gene therapies).

https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20200225.aspx

“In this crash we saw an overreliance on technology, we saw distraction, we saw a lack of policy prohibiting cell phone use while driving, and we saw infrastructure failures that, when combined, led to this tragic loss. The lessons learned from this investigation are as much about people as they are about the limitations of emerging technologies,”

https://www.automotivesafetycouncil.org/announcement/ntsb-tesla-crash-investigation-report/

"The NTSB determined the Tesla “Autopilot” system’s limitations, the driver’s overreliance on the “Autopilot” and the driver’s distraction – likely from a cell phone game application – caused the crash. The Tesla vehicle’s ineffective monitoring of driver engagement was determined to have contributed to the crash.

"The 38-year-old driver of the 2017 Tesla Model X P100D electric-powered sport utility vehicle died... The Tesla was then struck by two other vehicles, resulting in the injury of one other person. The Tesla’s high-voltage battery was breached in the collision and a post-crash fire ensued. Witnesses removed the Tesla driver from the vehicle before it was engulfed in flames.".

Check this NTSB report's list of contributory shortcomings to a fatal crash and links to further:

https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20200225.aspx

NTSB "tesla crash" search results:

https://www.ntsb.gov/Pages/search.aspx#k=tesla%20crash

These reports highlight that hoi polloi driver behaviour is being negatively influenced by the onboard systems that appear to being misused to some extent for some reason. The question is "why?". That's been neither answered nor publicised.

To cut this short and bring it full circle with the title of the original post, a massive number of people have used a technology that has been mislabelled and negatively influenced their behaviour. People have deferred to the manufacturers and regulators of gene therapies who have knowingly mislead them in multiple ways going right back to how pharma has corrupted the trial and peer review process. This is now at the point of mass, foreseeable harm to society on an unknown scale and timeframe.

The UK Government has implemented a fast parallel approach to the testing, development and rollout of gene therapies under a false label. It has also allowed this in Teslas, when you look at it from a process point of view. I believe that doing this in this way is a fool's errand. For me, in both cases, it is inadequate to offload entirely responsibility to the user without a systemic view of the factors that resulted in user behaviour that some would cite as root cause. The 737 MAX crashes follow this pattern as well. Following the events and investigations, it turns out that blame lay squarely in places and for reasons that were very different to initial suspicions, and it was all to do with corruption of incentive, motivation, process, accountability and oversight. In the case of the 737 MAX both pilot and passenger perceptions were utterly warped by higher layers of the systems that got the aircraft certified and airborne. Passengers knew nothing and assumed safety. Pilots didn't and couldn't know enough because they weren't allowed to. Thus they ended up hapless users and died. That's certainly true for gene therapies and it's an open question with increasing automotive automation as we transition through this present grey zone, where lives of not just the user but also their passengers and third parties are at stake.

One thing that is missing from a Tesla (or any vehicle with similar capabilities) is any external indication to others that the vehicle has engaged any form of automation. If this were visible, other road users' behaviour may change to increase at least their safety margin and therefore the net margin as well. Just a thought.