In between trying to become the world’s first trillionaire, expanding his defense contracting business, fighting the “woke mind virus,” feuding with Sam Altman, and overseeing half a dozen tech companies, Elon Musk has somehow found the time to wade into the debate over whether it’s good or bad that a rogue Waymo robotaxi (by the company’s own admission) seems to have run over and killed a beloved bodega cat in San Francisco.
In case you somehow missed it, a cat was run over earlier this week, leading to ongoing anger against the reputed culprit (Waymo). The feline, whose name was KitKat—but who also went by the moniker “the mayor of 16th street”—was a longtime staple of Randa’s Market in the city’s Mission neighborhood. KitKat’s owner, Mike Zeidan, told The San Francisco Standard that his pet was hit by a robotaxi late Monday night. “Honestly, man, it’s difficult,” Zeidan said. “He was a one-of-a-kind cat. He brought joy to so many people. People loved him.”
Waymo seems to have admitted that its vehicle did, indeed, run over KitKat. “We reviewed this, and while our vehicle was stopped to pick up passengers, a nearby cat darted under our vehicle as it was pulling away,” a company spokesperson told Gizmodo. “We send our deepest sympathies to the cat’s owner and the community who knew and loved him.”
On Friday, as a means of adding his two cents, Musk retweeted an account that had defended driverless cars as being a savior, not a killer, of neighborhood pets. “5.4 million cats are hit by cars every year in the U.S., and 97 percent of those cats die from their injuries,” @WholeMarsBlog wrote. “Autonomy will dramatically reduce that number.”
“True, many pets will be saved by autonomy,” Musk commented.
It’s great that Elon could take time out of his busy schedule to participate in the discourse around KitKat. Big picture, Musk is launching a robotaxi service, so we all know which dog he has in this fight. But the truth of the matter is, we don’t really know if autonomous cars would reduce the number of feline deaths.
One of the primary selling points for robotaxis has been that human drivers are notorious for running into things, crashing, and otherwise causing dangerous mayhem on America’s roadways. And it’s true that human drivers can be absurdly dangerous. That said, the jury is still out on whether robotaxis are actually that much safer than human drivers. Speed is a factor in a significant portion of traffic fatalities, and robotaxis have so far steered clear of those speeds. At the same time, there’s also the fact that, whether robotaxis are safer or not, part of living in a free society involves accepting a certain amount of risk attached to that freedom. Currently, anyone can get into a car and drive it where they want to go, regardless of what the software in the car is programmed to do. That won’t necessarily be the case in a world governed by robotaxis.
