We take comfort in blaming humans when things go wrong. The NTSB took that point of view when it investigated the death of Joshua Brown. His Tesla had come with instructions, and he had plowed ahead all the same. He had, apparently, been too trusting of what the car could do, and unaware of its limitations. But why did the Tesla even let any driver’s trust outstrip what the machine could actually do? We demand that new technologies do not only what they promise, but what we imagine. We also demand that they behave in the way we guess they will, without ever having used them before. But making
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