I think the long term outcome is that Tesla mostly gets away with this, other car manufacturers attempt to copy their system with extremely poor results, dangerous failures result, and regulations are created.
I am not generally in favour of regulating software development, for the simple reason that I don't think as an industry we really understand how to do that effectively yet and consequently I think we'd get regulations written by high profile fools rather than careful engineers.
However, I am getting deeply concerned about casual programming standards and the inevitable bugs that follow now applying not just to random games and other stuff that doesn't really matter but also to real physical devices with real physical implications when things go wrong.
Creating the regulations after the fact won't help much if the next remote hack, instead of just stranding one aware volunteer in a still dangerous situation in the middle of a fast-moving road, is instead something like accelerating all cars of a certain model that are within range to their maximum speed by deceiving the cruise control.
We need more grumpy engineers, and we need very public warnings from credible groups of them about the dangers here, so the people buying these vehicles know what they're really getting, and so the politicians and corporate executives and investors know that if they don't act then there will be nowhere to hide if the big disaster happens on their watch.
I am not generally in favour of regulating software development, for the simple reason that I don't think as an industry we really understand how to do that effectively yet and consequently I think we'd get regulations written by high profile fools rather than careful engineers.
However, I am getting deeply concerned about casual programming standards and the inevitable bugs that follow now applying not just to random games and other stuff that doesn't really matter but also to real physical devices with real physical implications when things go wrong.
Creating the regulations after the fact won't help much if the next remote hack, instead of just stranding one aware volunteer in a still dangerous situation in the middle of a fast-moving road, is instead something like accelerating all cars of a certain model that are within range to their maximum speed by deceiving the cruise control.
We need more grumpy engineers, and we need very public warnings from credible groups of them about the dangers here, so the people buying these vehicles know what they're really getting, and so the politicians and corporate executives and investors know that if they don't act then there will be nowhere to hide if the big disaster happens on their watch.