Your Attention Is Your Most Valuable Asset
Using it carelessly can have drastic consequences
On May 7, 2016, Joshua David Brown, the founder of tech company Nexu Innovations, died behind the steering wheel of his Tesla Model S.
Brown’s Tesla was motoring northbound along the highway in self-drive mode. Suddenly, a trailer coming from the south turned left and cut his path to diverge from the highway to a local road.
The Tesla S went under the trailer without slowing down. The roof got ripped off. The car moved another 297 feet, hit a utility pole and broke it, and stopped 50 feet later. Brown didn’t make it out alive.
The National Transportation Safety Board’s final report highlighted plenty of points. The truck driver should’ve yielded to the Tesla. The autopilot system was far from perfect. But the report also highlighted that Brown was inattentive.
“The combined effects of human error and the lack of sufficient system controls resulted in a fatal collision that should not have happened,” the NTSB’s report declared.
In all likelihood, Brown wasn’t inattentive; he was relaxed thanks to the self-driving automation. When the trailer swerved in his path, his brain snapped into panicked attention. It didn’t get enough time to figure out what was happening…
