Yes, he was [1] director of AI and Autopilot Vision at Tesla, directly poached and reporting to Elon Musk on the most important headline feature of Tesla directly managed by Elon Musk.

He had both the technical and executive authority to determine if the product was fit for customer usage. He had direct executive responsibility for the product on the road between 2017-2022.

If he, the lead architect and executive responsible felt the product was dangerous and then he was overridden, he can not get away with claiming he was “just following orders”, he had a moral duty to not sign-off or quit otherwise he is clearly complicit in deploying a dangerous product for his own self-enrichment.

When people talk about engineering ethics, this is literally a completely uncontroversial textbook example. The only way you accept this is if you do not want ethics in engineering.

Furthermore, he was extremely hireable with numerous job opportunitys available to him. He would not be destitute or even particularly worse off if he did quit for ethical reasons. Any self-preservation defense is also invalid.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/20/tesla-hires-deep-learning-...

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Barbing 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Andrej Karpathy is a reason* Tesla doesn’t have Lidar and thus is a reason Tesla self driving isn’t nearly as safe as it could be?

He heard Elon say “I drive with eyes, so cars just need eyes” & shipped?

:( happy to have my impressions corrected (but I was kind of pretending it’s a 2026 scenario where you could slap Lidar, ship a Waymo, if you were just willing to spend the friggin MONEY - 2017 was too early for most any “self” driving IIRC)

*edit - in a scenario where his refusal to skip Lidar catalyzed change

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Avicebron 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't the comp sci has the same requirements for ethics coursework like mechanical, aerospace, etc..

	▲	ahartman00 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		According to ABET they do if they want the degree to be accredited. We had two classes for my SE degree. From Criterion 3. Student Outcomes: "2. an ability to apply engineering design to produce solutions that meet specified needs with consideration of public health, safety, and welfare, as well as global, cultural, social, environmental, and economic factors." "4. an ability to recognize ethical and professional responsibilities in engineering situations and make informed judgments, which must consider the impact of engineering solutions in global, economic, environmental, and societal contexts." https://www.abet.org/accreditation/accreditation-criteria/cr...
	▲	browsingonly 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Passing a mandatory class != believing in its message and acting on it. Unfortunately, rather important courses like engineering ethics have become lumped in with mandatory DEI objectives and similar 'grievance studies' requirements, classes which many suffer through quietly, regurgitating the Correct responses while they count the minutes until they can get back to more substantive classwork. Some undergraduates may unfortunately gloss over ethics just as they gloss over lectures on privilege.