> Without FSD, you pay attention to the road and everything else is within your control. With FSD, you still need to pay attention but now there’s the additional cognitive load to monitor an unpredictable system over which you don’t have direct control.
For the author, FSD is a worse experience in addition to costing a lot of money.
When you are new to it, yes. For me it's a better experience because I've been using it so long and have a good idea of what it can and can't handle. I use it extensively on roads I know it works well on, and use it sometimes tentitively on new roads when I'm in the mood. That I spend almost all of my driving time on the same few routes makes FSD very valuable to me. It's probably still not a net benefit if you're mostly driving new places or places where it doesn't work well, but it's getting better.
> For me it's a better experience because I've been using it so long and have a good idea of what it can and can't handle.
How would you know that, though? That's the reason why at this point I can't see myself ever using that kind of a feature. The added stress of the unpredictability would make the experience miserable.
I believe the author isn’t dishonest about how they felt. But that supportive reasoning is pretty discardable. They emphasized one change as additive but glossed by the subtractive change implying there was none in concurrent executive decisioning. Experience around cognitive load can be a result in part from a users anxiety with the momentarily unfamiliar, and i think this probably is more at play than author is self aware of in the comparison.
> Without FSD, you pay attention to the road and everything else is within your control. With FSD, you still need to pay attention but now there’s the additional cognitive load to monitor an unpredictable system over which you don’t have direct control.
For the author, FSD is a worse experience in addition to costing a lot of money.