Missy Cummings
Engineering Professor
One of the U.S. Navy’s first female fighter pilots turned robotics professor and former NHTSA safety adviser, whose repeated public warnings about Tesla’s driver-assistance AI made her one of the most prominent — and combative — critics of overhyped autonomy.
Why this score
How the formula works →- 40%proBuilds AI professionally
- 16%antiCalls AI overhyped
- 16%nuancedCampaigns for AI safety rules
- 16%nuancedSupports AI only with conditions
- 12%anti3 anti-AI statements (forceful)
Includes the ×1.25 multiplier for having a stake in an AI-impacted field. Evidence splits 40% pro, 28% anti, 32% direction-free → Nuanced
In her words
I just really hate bad tech. And if you’ve got some bad tech that is really dangerous, I’m going to call you out on it.
Car companies — meaning Tesla and others — are marketing this as a hands-free technology. That is a nightmare.
Biography
Mary “Missy” Cummings (born 1966) is an American engineer, former U.S. Navy fighter pilot — among the first women to fly the F/A-18 — and a professor at George Mason University, where she directs the Autonomy and Robotics Center. Previously at Duke and MIT, she studies human-machine interaction, and in 2021–2022 served as a senior safety adviser at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Warning on autonomous driving
Cummings has spent years arguing that self-driving and driver-assistance systems are being sold well beyond their real capabilities. She warns that drivers “overtrust the technology,” growing so comfortable that “they are letting the cars speed” and “getting into accidents that are seriously injuring them or killing them.” She has been especially critical of Tesla’s camera-only approach, insisting that a system that cannot reliably perceive the world cannot safely act in it.
They are letting the cars speed. And they are getting into accidents that are seriously injuring them or killing them.
Her stance made her a target: after her NHTSA appointment, Elon Musk called her “extremely biased against Tesla,” and she faced a wave of online harassment. Cummings frames her position not as opposition to autonomy but as a demand for regulation and honesty about failure modes — the technology, she says, is being abused by humans and needs guardrails government has been slow to impose.
Quote sources
- The New York Times, 2023(nytimes.com)
- George Mason University, 2023(gmu.edu)
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/missy-cummings
