The deadliest maritime disaster in recent US history has led five years later to a ship captain being sentenced to jail, for the deaths of 34 people in a fire at sea.

The Conception was anchored off Santa Cruz Island, 25 miles south of Santa Barbara, when it caught fire before dawn on the final day of a three-day excursion, sinking less than 30 metres from shore.

Thirty-three passengers and a crew member died, trapped in a bunkroom below deck.

…

“[Conception Captain Jerry] Boylan was the first to abandon ship and jump overboard. Four crew members who joined him also survived.

If that sounds familiar, it because Tesla has become notorious for creating a robot it calls “Full Self Driving” (FSD) that can’t actually drive itself and, even worse, abruptly abandons its passengers when in danger.

Back in 2016 I argued in a security conference keynote (just after Josh Brown tragically had been killed by his Tesla) that an algorithmic decision made by a software-based “pilot” was trying to save itself while sacrificing him instead.

The passenger died falsely believing his pilot would try to save him, when it instead literally threw him under a truck so it could drive away.

In 2019 I asked here on the blog if the Conception ship diaster in California should be compared to egregious safety failures in the tech industry.

Fast forward to 2024 and the www.tesla-fire.com site has recorded that at least 83 people have died in a fire while under the care of the Tesla robots that had promised safety from harm.

That’s nearly three times as many as this case sending the offender to jail.

Also by comparison, engineers at VW have been severely punished for less, as their algorithms simply polluted air when disengaging control.

The Tesla “pilot” arguably has been killing its passengers for years, and continues on killing, barely regulated while it buries fatality investigations by blaming victims and then paying their grieving families large settlements to hush.