[marxism]

Counterpoint: don't blame the founder for leading with driving use cases. It's audience selection bias, not the founder being reckless. He's showing what gets traction, not necessarily what he thinks people should actually do

I'm contributing to a similar open source coding tool [1] and I see the same skewed reaction: voice control of "whatever" while driving gets 5-10x the clicks of any other demo.

There's a logical reason so many people think of voice control while driving. It's not because they're reckless.

It reflects the hierarchy of needs. People with long commutes (often younger, lower-paid engineers living further out) spend 2+ hours driving daily.

This is their biggest time sink, so of course they think about making it productive. When you're living far out for cheap housing and hear "coding while driving", its easy to think: finally, a way to get ahead without choosing between career growth and seeing my family.

Again, I think its just an off-the-cuff reaction, not actually what people will do. Just like people try your app and tell you its amazing but then never pay. Doing stuff while driving just sounds nice until you know... you think about it for 3 seconds and yeah, its bad idea.

[1] https://github.com/slopus/happy

[gpm]

"Don't anthropomorphize the founder, they're just responding to market pressures" is not the defense that you think it is. For the same reason you don't want to do business with Oracle (see the great rant from which I borrowed this phrasing [1]) you don't want to do business with someone who will advertise their product for unethical use cases - they'll cross other ethical boundaries too involving screwing you over.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=1981s

[marxism]

Let me rephrase this. I am feeling empathy for the Blue founder because I am in a similar position to show voice control to people and the overwhelming response is "cool, I'll use it while driving". And similar to people here, I don't like that conclusion. So I think it feels bad for the Blue founder to have people pile onto the driving detail that he likely already agrees with meanwhile people ignore the hardware accomplishment.

To me the point of voice control is walking. I'm thinking of Einstein, Darwin, Thoreau. They believed that physical activity helped stimulate his mind and spark creative thought.

You walk, you think, and occasionally you say something.

But in practice people have been quick to jump to conclusions that surprise me. Such as "the point is to try to kill people".

So I'm merely working backwards to figure out why people want to jump in a car first thing.

And the charitable explanation is the people are just not thinking to carefully and are just excited by seeing a computer respond to voice with a low enough error rate.

[fragmede]

Driving while drunk is a major crime if you get caught these days. People still do it anyway. People who are caught have to get a device installed into their car that they have to blow into to prove they're not intoxicated. They still drive intoxicated. They get sent to jail and they still get behind the wheel. Talking with your phone because driving is boring as shit is fairly harmless because people are going to do dumb ass shit regardless. The better answer is to promote comma.ai and similar ADAS like blue cruise, because I think that'll lead to fewer accidents. We have the technology to take a lot of the human out of the equation. People are dying. Why are we waiting?

[Silhouette]

Talking with your phone because driving is boring as shit is fairly harmless

It really isn't. Driving while distracted by a phone conversation is comparable in safety to driving while heavily intoxicated or while barely awake. This is not a hypothetical. There is actual experimental research behind it and the evidence is consistent and overwhelming. There is no justification and no defence. It's not a debate. It kills people.

Everyone is right in saying that those drivers should take public transport instead if they want to work or call or play a game while they are on the move. And yes - maybe in time there will be self-driving options that will make the whole issue obsolete. But right now anyone driving but not paying full attention is a danger to themselves and others and this is not something we should condone or attempt to justify. It kills people.