And yet, as Robert Lowell wrote, “No rocket goes as far astray as man.” In recent months, as outrage began to multiply on Twitter and elsewhere, Musk seemed determined to squander much of the goodwill wasting it that he had built up over the course of his career. I asked Slavik, the plaintiffs’ attorney, if the recent shift in public sentiment towards Musk hadn’t made his work in the courtroom easier. “At least I think there are more people who are skeptical of his judgment at this point than before,” he said. “If I was on the other side, I would be worried.”
However, some of Musk’s most questionable decisions are beginning to make sense when viewed as the result of outright utility calculations. Last month, Reuters reported that Neuralink, Musk’s medical device company, had caused the unnecessary deaths of dozens of laboratory animals through rushed experiments. Internal communications from Musk made it clear that the urgency came from above. “We’re just not moving fast enough,” he wrote. “It’s driving me crazy!” The cost-benefit analysis must have been clear to him: Neuralink had the potential to cure paralysis, he believed, which would improve the lives of millions of people to come. The suffering of fewer animals has paid off.
This form of clumsy long-termism, where the sheer size of future generations lends them additional ethical weight, is evident even in Musk’s comments about buying Twitter. He called Twitter a “digital marketplace” responsible for nothing less than preventing a new American civil war. “I didn’t do it to make more money,” he wrote. “I did it to help humanity I love.”
Autopilot and FSD represent the culmination of this approach. “The overarching goal of Tesla engineering,” Musk wrote, “is to maximize the area under the user’s satisfaction curve.” Unlike Twitter or even Neuralink, people died from his decisions—but no matter. In 2019, Musk balked at claims that Autopilot is anything but a life-saving technology in an irritated email exchange with activist investor and outspoken Tesla critic Aaron Greenspan. “The data is unequivocal that autopilot is far safer than human driving,” he wrote. “It is unethical and wrong of you to claim otherwise. By doing so, you endanger the general public.”
I wanted to ask Musk asked to explain his risk philosophy, but he didn’t respond to my interview requests. So instead I spoke to Peter Singer, a prominent utilitarian philosopher, to clarify some of the ethical issues involved. Was Musk right when he claimed that anything that delays the development and adoption of autonomous vehicles is inherently unethical?
“I think he’s right,” Singer said, “if he’s right about the facts.”
Musk rarely talks about Autopilot or FSD without mentioning how superior it is to a human driver. At a shareholder meeting in August, he said that Tesla is “solving a very important piece of AI, and one that can ultimately save millions of lives and prevent tens of millions of serious injuries by driving just an order of magnitude safer than humans.” Musk has data to back it up: Since 2018, Tesla has released quarterly safety reports to the public showing a consistent benefit of using Autopilot. The most recent, from late 2022, said Teslas with Autopilot on were one-tenth the chance of an accident than a normal car.
That’s the argument Tesla needs to make to the public and jury this spring. In the words of the company’s safety report, “While no car can prevent all accidents, we work every day to make them much less likely.” Autopilot can cause a crash at WW times, but without this technology we’d be at OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO .
