The attacks on Elon Musk have begun

The television ads for Dan O’Dowd, a software billionaire running as a Democrat for Senate in California, are not your typical campaign spots. To an extraordinary degree, they’re all aimed at one topic: Tesla’s automated driving software. Not at his putative opponent, Senator Alex Padilla, the incumbent Democrat.

O’Dowd’s campaign slogan is “Making Computers Safe for Humanity.” Tesla’s computers, he claims, are not.

“The problem of the last five or 10 years has been that we’ve been taking everything that our lives depend on and putting computers in charge of it,” O’Dowd said in an interview. “So now our power grid, our cars, or our dams, or bridges, hospitals — everything has been put in computers that have been put in charge of everything.”