Tesla More Likely to Run Over Black People

Optical illusions using black lines are more likely to stop a “driverless” car than an actual human.

Recently I wrote about reckless public road tests by Tesla owners who are intentionally training their “driverless” system to disregard red lights.

“All Lives Matter” wants everyone to know that if a Tesla says it sees a red light he has not been able to force it to drive through anyway.

Keep in mind that “All Lives Matter” is a slogan of violent social media terror campaigns that have been trying to convince American drivers to drive through crowds, run over people to kill them and silence speech.

Here we see not only Tesla safety engineering failing, but that a YouTube discussion of failures is being linked to a domestic terror campaign that violates traffic laws, specifically ignoring orders to stop.

It’s kind of similar to the 2010 post I wrote how red light cameras increase the number of crashes), but also there clearly is a different ingredient — intent to use a vehicle as a weapon in racist violence.

This is a very significant change to me as it paints a fairly clear vision of a very dangerous future where cars are used to target and kill people, like any missile used for assassination, while trying to blame an “algorithm”.

So what if BOTH are to blame, racist algorithm AND driver?

In the past a cement truck would typically be used as extrajudicial assassinations to run over someone (because operational norms for large trucks are so wide they typically can get away with killing anyone nearby), or a vehicle itself would be tampered to kill the occupants.

A journalist in Saudi Arabia was tucked into a typical small vehicle for a ride to a controversial site, for example, and was killed by a heavy truck. Did you hear about it? Of course not, because the whole point is killing innocent random people is what big heavy machinery is expected to do on a constant basis.

Perhaps that helps explain Saudi Arabia’s major involvement in funding Uber’s “driverless” program, which infamously ran red lights in San Francisco and then very predictably killed a woman crossing a road in Arizona?

Saudi Arabia’s wealth fund is Uber’s fifth-largest investor, having provided $3.5 billion to the rideshare company, not including whatever money the Saudis indirectly put into Uber through major investor Softbank’s Vision Fund. Yasir Othman Al-Rumayyan, the managing director of Saudi Arabia’s wealth fund, sits on Uber’s board. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is the fund’s chairman.

This post also could have been titled “Uber More Likely to Harm Women” except Uber backed off “driverless” after a very public disaster in 2018 (had they used a cement truck instead nobody would have blinked, if you see what I’m saying)… and tried to pin the whole thing on a woman “driving” a “driverless” car.

Compare that to Tesla. They had a pedestrian fatality the exact same month in 2018 and went the exact opposite way from Uber; CEO heavily ramping their troubled “driverless” program even more (causing far more deaths as a result, almost like they wanted high death rates to be a norm), cynically deleting their PR department.

Source: My presentation at MindTheSec 2021

Outrage does happen, even for the biggest trucks, so Tesla CEO’s cruel campaigns to normalize his machines killing people shouldn’t in any way be seen as reasonable.

Elon Musk reminds us all that ‘a bunch of people will probably die’…

He may as well be explaining why poor black workers aren’t returning from the mines, while their white owners are still profiting.

There are cases like when a driver in mountains was convicted of manslaughter for not using a formal off-ramp and instead choosing to plow into cars killing many people.

Hopefully that exception is self-explanatory for why trucks have been so effective for assassinations, let alone domestic terrorism, and how “driverless” will make targeted deaths far more commonplace by allowing a huge jump in untargeted ones without any accountability.

With that in mind, American cars have been documented widely as far more likely to drive into black people due to systemic racism and structural bias in transit planning.

Operational norms for a car in America have been systemically and carefully curated to kill a person of “lower” or “lesser” standing with impunity — politically prioritizing white property rights over non-white human rights.

Therefore self-driving cars are easily predicted to ingest data on this killer “privilege” and make it far worse (more volume, more velocity, more variety) by amplifying racist drivers with inherently racist tools.

Tesla is without question the worst engineered vehicle the road today (capabilities far below what is advertised) coupled with overtly irresponsible drivers, which can only result on tragedy at increasing scale.

I’ve even posted on this blog videos of the most recent (version 10) Tesla “driverless” technology nearly running over pedestrians in crosswalks.

All that being said, a new report shows exactly how the latest “driverless” engineers may be delivering just another easily predictable chapter in a long history of societal racism of American transit… by making their products inherently unsafe for Blacks.

We give evidence that standard models for the task of object detection, trained on standard datasets, appear to exhibit higher precision on lower Fitzpatrick skin types than higher skin types. This behavior appears on large images of pedestrians, and even grows when we remove occluded pedestrians. Both of these cases (small pedestrians and occluded pedestrians) are known difficult cases for object detectors, so even on the relatively “easy” subset of pedestrian examples, we observe this predictive inequity.

It’s interesting to note in the study just how significant a small difference of shades are for decisions about “safe” paths.

Anyone familiar with cows might see how this relates to a science of painting dark and light lines to control movements, as I hinted at the start of this post.

Cows see white lines (fake grids) as an obstacle in their path, begging the question why ranchers ever installed expensive metal grids in the first place.

Or my improved crosswalk design, meant to stop cars from killing so many children in the streets, could easily be adapted to a similar message of “Black Lives Matter”: just mix painted lines with retractable physical bollards.