The average age of a first time parent in the US is around 27 right now. The iPhone is nearly 19 years old this year, and Facebook opened its gates to anyone over 13 right at 20 years ago. That means these first time parents were below 10 when these came out, and they likely grew up in a world where social media consumption on handheld devices was very common. So, when they are supervising their children, they aren’t doing it from the perspective that these things are bad, they are doing as though they are normal, because for them they are. This is what I mean with children of smokers become smokers. If its normalized around the house, it doesn’t matter how much policing is done, it’s just a part of your life.

In related news, children of smokers more likely to smoke.

The jury found that the marketing from Tesla didn’t line up with the actual abilities. Musk is on record saying that Autopilot drives better than a human. They also stated that it should only be used on highways and access roads, but even with their GPS always active, the car doesn’t differentiate between road types, and so will let you use it anywhere you like.

On top of that, Tesla triggered the car to wipe the crash data from the local copy 3 minutes after the accident so that the only copy of the crash data that remained was stored on their servers and could be tampered with.

All of that led the jury to giving 33% fault to Tesla, which, again, I think is fair.

This is an interesting one. The jury actually only faulted Tesla for 33% of the total blame, but since the driver wasn’t a defendant in the suit, he doesn’t have to pay the remaining 2/3rds. I really struggled with this one because to me it felt like Tesla was being attacked, but looking at it in the full light of day it ended up being pretty fair. The driver completely ignored the road while looking for their cellphone which had dropped to the floor, and then blamed the Tesla for not alerting him of the intersection. That leans pretty hard on the driver being irresponsible to me, and the jury felt the same way, which is why they said that Tesla was only 33% to blame. So, Tesla trying to overturn this verdict is them trying to absolve themselves of all fault, which I don’t agree with, and I think the judge did the right thing. Tesla advertised a feature of a car that failed to work in the way it was described. Should the driver have been more present? Yep. Should Tesla still be partially responsible for the fault in their machinery? Yep, again.

Let me guess… just in time for a 2028 election where we all suddenly need our valid SSN?

That’s why this whole argument is worthless, and why I think that, at its core, it is disingenuous. I would be willing to be a steak dinner that a lot of these lawsuits are just fishing for money, and the rest are set up by competition trying to slow the market down because they are lagging behind. AI is an arms race, and it’s growing so fast that if you got in too late, you are just out of luck. So, companies that want in are trying to slow down the leaders, at best, and at worst they are trying to make them publish their training material so they can just copy it. AI training models should be considered IP, and should be protected as such. It’s like trying to get the Colonel’s secret recipe by saying that all the spices that were used have been used in other recipes before, so it should be fair game.