A few hours ago the SF Chronicle published a map of crashes that illustrates quite well a failure of driverless cars to deliver safety or reliability.

There are so many simple yet catastrophic failures it’s hard to choose which one will become most popular among the many groups watching and aiming to disrupt transit in major urban areas.

For example an easily predictable congestion of wireless communications led to fleets of cars going into failure mode, stopping and blocking all traffic as if robots staging a protest. SFPD had to be diverted from real work to attend to giant incapacitated and needy robots, ultimately redirecting traffic to other streets that weren’t in crisis.

As many as a dozen stalled Cruise autonomous vehicles blocked streets in San Francisco’s North Beach and near this weekend’s Outside Lands music festival, snarling traffic and frustrating riders barely a day after state regulators voted to allow the unlimited expansion of robotaxi companies.

Social media users posted about one incident late Friday in which about 10 Cruise vehicles appeared to be standing still with their hazard lights flashing, blocking lanes on Vallejo Street near Grant Avenue.

The whole city is vulnerable to sudden remotely controlled shutdowns. But more to the point, the map of crashes shows the robots are failing at basic daily safety before we even get to the phase of trivial targeted wave attacks on them (e.g source code).

In 2019 we all watched the sleazy car salesman tactics get 250,000 people to pay $100 for nothing.

Worse than nothing, they paid for the promise of a “tough” truck that immediately was revealed as fragile.

You may remember LEGO cleverly mocked this slime spectacle with what seemed to be a far superior toy truck design.

To put it another way, context matters here. LEGO puts a huge amount of engineering and careful craftsmanship into their vehicle replicas. Their recreations of famous cars are truly impressive at any scale.

So when LEGO threw together a minimal effort block they described as an improved version of the silly Tesla Truck design craze, it was literal mockery of inflated egos at Tesla peddling sadly simplistic ideas and low skills. LEGO slam dunked on the spectacle, wisely foreshadowing the truck’s predictable failures.

FastCompany is now laughing out loud at the little dictator running Tesla, after he just threw up his hands and issued an edict that the Truck must be built like a LEGO.

The problem, according to Musk, is the bright metal construction and predominantly straight edges mean that even minor inconsistencies become glaringly obvious. To avoid this, he commanded unparalleled precision in the manufacturing process, stating in his email that “all parts for this vehicle, whether internal or from suppliers, need to be designed and built to sub 10 micron accuracy. That means all part dimensions need to be to the third decimal place in millimeters and tolerances need [to] be specified in single digit microns.” …Musk added, “If LEGO and soda cans, which are very low cost, can do this, so can we.”

Commanded? Demanded? Unhinged.

If LEGO and soda cans can do this, why can’t a flamethrower at 100 meters perfectly turn an apple on my head into a delicious pie? I command you peons to make my fantasy a reality and if you fail I’ll just find more peons who keep believing.

Herr Musk seems raised on the privilege of an unrelenting pursuit of selfish fantasy and unable to grasp basic reality. His toddler-like curations of design based on mysticism, as if they could replace actual engineering knowledge, soon may have his legions of unskilled enablers/believers headed for a rough and abrupt awakening.

What do you call it when a giant flat shiny steel panel after three years still produces the exact opposite effect of what was promised to a quarter-million people who put money down?

Advance fee fraud truck.

The dumb design promised to be on the road by 2021 is a failure by almost every measure, a monument to a sheltered elitist South African apartheid boy pushing symbolism over substance. America should take down the 1920’s statues of General Lee and mount the 2020’s Cyber Truck on columns instead. Start renaming the overtly racist failure of Lee Street to Cyber Truck Lane. Same stuff, lessons not learned, 100 years later.

At this point you have to ask how a car company can exist let alone be valued when it so very obnoxiously shows it can’t handle even the basics of car design.

Studebaker folded for less.

Lately when people ask me about OpenAI’s ChatGPT just lying so brazenly, intentionally misstating facts and fabricating events, I explain that’s likely the purpose of the tool. It aims only to please, not ever to be “right” in any real sense let alone have any integrity.

Over time the AI company has been getting worse, based on extensive direct experiences while trying to help law firms investigate fraud among the platforms offering chat services. Lately the ChatGPT software, for example, has tried to convince its users that the U.S. Supreme Court in fact banned the use of seatbelts in cars due to giant court cases in the 1980s… cases that SIMPLY DO NOT EXIST for a premise that is an OBVIOUS LIE.

I hate calling any of this hallucinations because at the end of the day the software doesn’t understand reality or context so EVERYTHING is says is a hallucination and NOTHING is trustworthy. The fact that it up-sells itself being “here” to provide accuracy, while regularly failing to be accurate and without accountability, is a huge problem. A cook who says they are “here” to provide dinner yet can NOT make something safe to eat is how valuable? (Don’t answer if you drink Coke).

Ignoring reality while claiming to have a very valuable and special version of it is appearing to be a hallmark of the Sam Altman brands, building a record of unsafely rushing past stop signs and ignoring red lights like he’s a robot made by Tesla making robots like Tesla.

He was never punished for those false statements, as long as he had a new big idea to throw to rabid investors and a credulous media.

Fraud. Come on regulators, it’s time to put these charlatans back in a box where they can’t do so much harm.

Fun fact, the CTO of OpenAI shifted from being a Goldman Sachs intern to being “in charge” of a catastrophically overpromised and underdelivered unsafe AI product of Tesla. It’s a wonder she hasn’t been charged with over 40 deaths.

Here’s more evidence on the CEO, from the latest about his WorldCoin fiasco:

…ignored initial order to stop iris scans in Kenya, records show. …failed to obtain valid consent from people before scanning their irises, saying its agents failed to inform its subjects about the data security and privacy measures it took, and how the data collected would be used or processed. …used deceptive marketing practices, was collecting more personal data than it acknowledged, and failed to obtain meaningful informed consent…

Sam Altman runs a company that failed to stop when ordered to do so, continued to operate immorally and violate basic safety, as if “never punished”.

This is important food for thought, especially given OpenAI has lately taken to marketing wild, speculative future-leaning promises about magically achieving “Enterprise” safety certifications long before it has done the actual work.

Trust them? They are throwing out a lot of desperate-to-please big ideas for rabid investors, yet there’s still zero evidence they can be trusted.

Perfect example? In their FAQ about privacy it makes a very hollow-sounding yet eager-to-please statement that they have been audited (NOT the same as stating they are compliant with requirements):

Fundamentally, these companies seem to operate as though they can be above the law, peddling intentional hallucinations to placate certain people into being trapped by a “nice and happy” society in the worst ways possible… reminiscent of drug dealers peddling political power-grabs and fiction addiction.