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My immediate thought is a dystopian version of this article: If all cars were autonomous, society, the economy and the environment would all suffer. Here is ho
by tarr11 9y ago
My immediate thought is a dystopian version of this article:
If all cars were autonomous, society, the economy and the environment would all suffer. Here is how…
* You will be forced to watch non-stop ads in these automotive cars, similar to how some taxi services work today. You can turn these off for a fee of course.
* Hackers or bugs in softawe may easily cause global traffic jams
* Congress will pass laws controlling when, where and how you may travel
* You may be blacklisted from traveling in any autonomous by corporations, governments, police etc.
* The aggregate amount of automotive travel will increase exponentially, causing more carbon emissions and even worse traffic since more people will have access to travel
* Sprawl will get worse, as people move further away from urban areas since they can do other activities in cars.
* Investment in mass transit will diminish, since funds will move towards automatic cars.
- corodra 9y agoAgreed. There’s an article of a remote hijack of I think it was a Jeep using Ulink or whatever it’s remote interface was. Scarey with its limited capabilities. To be fair, I won’t even blame the auto industry for having vulnerabilities in their software. At this point I’ve come to accept that any bit of technology has flaws and can be exploited. No matter how great their dev team is. Comical as it was and unrealistic for the time period, the latest fast and furious movie showed a potential scenario of a fully autonomous traffic. It’s going to be the same reason there’s no flying cars. The tech has been around for easily 20 years. But if you watch enough Air Disasters, autopilot and other computer controlled airplane functions still fail catastrophically. To this day. The average person is not capable of flying an airplane. Shit, the average person still isn’t great at driving a car. Sure that brings to argument that then all cars should be self driving. But the added risks, I don’t think so. The current sample data of self driving cars is still small and there aren’t active hackers looking to truly exploit yet. It’s like when people said that Macs were immune from viruses back in the day. No, people made viruses for windows because they can cause more wide spread damage since they were more widespread. Few had macs thus, why bother? But it doesn’t matter. Self driving cars will happen and something bad will happen in that time. There’s too much money to be made. This isn’t being done to save the world. It’s a control scheme as you pointed out. It’s funny how the older you get the more you realize that when someone starts to spout they’re trying to saving the world, they’re covering up some type of scheme to make money and make the world a shittier place.
- Shaanie 9y agoI think the most interesting part is how we humans reason when it comes to risk. A hacker causing accidents is so scary that autonomous cars sound like a bad idea, yet the risk of dying to a hacker while in an autonomous car would almost certainly be lower than dying to a drunk or distracted driver right now. 37 000 people in the US died in vehicle accidents last year and around 2 million were injured. Obviously not all accidents would be preventable by autonomous cars, but I wonder how many of those people would be alive or uninjured if the cars could have been autonomous.
- corodra 9y agoYea, suicide rates are just as bad too. Same with medical malpractice and just getting an antibiotic resistant infection. Bad things will always happen. An issue here is control. I have an amount of control on the road as an active driver. Truly once self driving cars become a thing, no one will be a passive driver realistically. Everyone will have their nose in their phone. I grew up in Florida and learned to drive in Florida. The rest of the USA has rookie numbers when it comes to deaths on the road. Defensive driving is why I’ve dodged 2 drunk drivers. I won’t give up control of a vehicle to a computer. The reason why flying commercial flights is scary, lack of control even though it’s statistically safer. But it’s also statistically a complete shit storm when something does go wrong. Engine failure in a car and a plane have different stats on result for a reason. Point being, I doubt annual deaths on the road will differ all that much. We will all die in new ways because of self driving cars. That and folks who drive drunk are actively not making a smart decision already. “I don’t need the car to drive me home. I’m fine” that’ll be the new last words. Anyone who goes they’re too drunk to drive, don’t already, without having a self driving car.
- chiefofgxbxl 9y ago> It’s funny how the older you get the more you realize that when someone starts to spout they’re trying to saving the world, they’re covering up some type of scheme to make money and make the world a shittier place. I agree with all the points the OP made for self-driving car downfalls, but I still think that the people working on the tech have the best intentions. It's just that we as humans do a bad job of having foresight and the critical analysis skills necessary to truly assess the whole of a technology, and not just the good parts. Maybe that reflects well on humans as it hints at an optimistic nature? I see the potential benefits of self-driving cars, but am worried that the medium-term to long-term negative points will outweigh the positive. There should really be a council of techies, representatives, legal experts, and most importantly average citizens that sit down and heavily critique this technology to address all the negative points before it becomes widespread.
- userbinator 9y agoExactly. Don't forget the inevitable regulations on the software too, or even restricting/banning non-autonomous cars completely. I'm glad there are others out there who also see autonomous cars as a threat to freedom. It is said that driving is one of the most dangerous activities we do, but I think it's no coincidence that it's also one of the most liberating. It's a very pleasurable feeling to be able to get into a car and drive, controlling it as if it were an extension of your body. The phrase "If all cars were autonomous" has a similar feeling to others like "if there was no crime" --- sounds good on the surface, but also has deeply authoritarian and dystopian implications. Edit: there's also this, which is basically like Stallman's "Right to Read" but for self-driving cars: http://this.deakin.edu.au/lifestyle/car-wars http://this.deakin.edu.au/lifestyle/car-wars
- tyingq 9y agoMinority Report does a decent job depicting several of these topics. Self driving cars[1], intrusive ads[2], and "no crime". [1]https://youtu.be/Vrxyr1CjiSM https://youtu.be/Vrxyr1CjiSM [2]https://youtu.be/7bXJ_obaiYQ https://youtu.be/7bXJ_obaiYQ Not bad for a 2002 film adaptation of a 1956 short story.
- bognition 9y ago> It is said that driving is one of the most dangerous activities we do, but I think it's no coincidence that it's also one of the most liberating I experienced this to an amplified degree the first time I rode a motorcycle. I now commute almost everyday on a motorcycle and my commute has transformed for a soul sucking hell to one of my favorite parts of the day.
- orangecat 9y agoI think it's no coincidence that it's also one of the most liberating On an open highway, sure. In rush hour gridlock, it's awful.
- Mithaldu 9y ago> It is said that driving is one of the most dangerous activities we do In the USA cars kill a small city every single year: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/Motor_vehicle_deaths_in_the_US.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/Motor_ve... This is roughly on par with gun deaths (which are ~2/3 suicides). Cars, not designed to kill people, kill roughly as many people per year in the USA as things designed to kill people. And if you want that feeling of freedom, ride a bicycle. Not as "powerful", but it surpasses the "extension of body" feeling in every way possible. That said, granted, the very layout of how people live in the usa is much different than in other countries. You guys have, compared to most of europe, vastly inflated distances between everything outside of city cores, making cars an evil necessity for society to keep functioning.
- gaius 9y agoCars are such an emotive topic because they are a powerful democratizing force. Any ordinary citizen can have at their disposal a machine that can transport them, their family/friends and their stuff, anywhere they want to go at any time, can be packed in advance and unpacked at leisure when you get back, can act as a base or a shelter at the destination, can extend a bubble of personal space on long or stressful journeys that no other means of transport can, and so on and so on. The self-driving car utopia breaks all of this. You can experience it right now, we have voice-activated self-driving on-demand cars right now, running on artificial-artificial-intelligence: they're called taxis. Taxis have not supplanted personal vehicle ownership by a long shot, therefore neither will self-driving cars, unless personal vehicles are banned by government edict - and a government would love to determine where and when you are allowed to go. Will it be worth it?
- derefr 9y agoThe equivalent of the ultimate promise of the self-driving car that we have right now isn’t a taxi; it’s a limousine driven by someone you have permanently on your personal retainer, like a landed noble’s man-at-arms. Such a person might favour the law over you, but they won’t like doing it, because they try to hold your beliefs as their own. Or, for a simpler comparison: a horse. Your horse, from your personal stable.
- gaius 9y agoAnother thing to consider is, if you're just calling a magic box on wheels to take you from A to B then disappear again, why would you can who it was made by, what style it was, and so on?I wonder if the manufacturers have fully thought this through from their own perspective... I mean I can't imagine ticking a box for "... and it must be a Volvo" when I summon one, I simply wouldn't care!
- greggman 9y agoI'd care. for a long trip > 15 minutes I'd want a quiet and comfortable car. Quiet so I can relax and/or listen to audio without having to crank up the volume over the noise of the car. comfortable might include seats big enough I can put my notebook on my lap and work. comfortable might also mean a luxury style suspension so the ride is not hard.
- derefr 9y ago> You may be blacklisted from traveling in any autonomous by corporations, governments, police etc. Well, I mean, you can already be blacklisted from travelling in regular cars: your driver’s license can be revoked. Or are you referring more to capability than legality? Because even in a world with entirely autonomous cars, I would find it hard to believe that all such cars would be “non-rooted”, for the same reason we don’t live in a world where 100% of computers run iOS. Large companies (e.g. logistics companies) need total control and predictability over their vehicle fleet, just like large enterprises need total control and predictability over their servers. So there would likely always be a category of “dumb autonomous” vehicles like all-terrain pick-up trucks, sold to farmers and loggers and quarry workers et al, that you could buy; just like you can buy a regular PC today. You, as its “OEM” owner, would have complete control over what cloud traffic-control systems it submits to, if any. It might be illegal to configure it in certain ways and then drive it on the road, but that’s not the point here.
- lobotryas 9y ago>"non-rooted" That's a nice dream! Car companies will fight this tooth and nail. For an example, see John Deere who use patent and cyber crime law to prevent their product owners from fixing/modifying their equipment. Or, look at Tesla and how they have fought releasing service manuals or allowing owners to make any kind of modifications/repairs to their cars. Don't be surprised if you have someone coming into this thread to also tell us how these are "good things".
- 13of40 9y ago> farmers and loggers and quarry workers And you can forget about ever visiting your favorite fishing hole again. You know the one, where you have to drive a mile or two down that tricky dirt road that's not on the GPS. Not allowed.
- glogla 9y agoNo-drive list us going to be much more fun than no-fly list.
- Xunxi 9y agoWhile making it sound like they care about your, productivity or the world in general what matters to Volvo is their profits and the preceding brainwash to get the right traction and acceptance. [Digress: Volvo's pitch to legitimize joining forces with Uber to fully automate driving.]
- icebraining 9y agoDo you expect Volvo to make more profits in an era where fewer people own cars? I don't think car manufacturers are rubbing their hands at the thought of becoming suppliers to be squeezed by Uber et all, rather than sellers of aspirational items to billions of individuals. I see them as resigning themselves to that future.
- Xunxi 9y agoThe passenger is monetized and Volvo becomes a conduit through which everything listed in the top comment gets implemented and even It has nothing to do with the number of cars being sold.
- icebraining 9y agoA conduit is only valuable if they have a monopoly. Otherwise they just become a dumb pipe, with the value all being conducted back to the service.
- masklinn 9y ago> * Sprawl will get worse, as people move further away from urban areas since they can do other activities in cars. Or the other way around, you can move "transit" underground and contract cities as there's no need for non-pedestrian surface streets.
- sigzero 9y ago* Government will be able to track you and control the car.
- PaulRobinson 9y agoHackers or bugs in software can already kill you - a modern car is a computer with an engine attached. You think that pedal is any more advanced than a scroll mouse? Congress already passes laws controlling when, where and how you may travel and you may be effectively blacklisted today by insurance companies, courts or police officers for a range of reasons. Do you honestly think that you are entitled to roads wherever you want and your license can never be revoked and insurers can't charge what they want? Half of the total lifetime emissions of a car are in the driving of it. Autonomous vehicles open up the opportunity for an Uber-esque experience where you're less likely to buy a car and just rent it for when you need it: most people actively need a car for less than 10% of the total time that they own one for. That means significant environmental gains will come from lower demand for car manufacturing. How is that a problem? Sprawl "getting worse" is another way of saying housing becomes more affordable as it does not need to be so concentrated. City centres will become more comfortable, communities will become more connected. And finally, if there is one area that will cause a boon for investment by autonomous cars, it's mass transit: driverless buses, trams and trains, will all allow for more money to be spent on more vehicles and the net price of using these services will drop as the cost of employing, training and managing driving staff is reduced. We can go around and around on this: it's happening, come to peace with it, and try and make sure we maximise the positives and reduce the negatives. Note though, I did not counter the advertising thing. Tesla's T&Cs on their cars already suggest the owner does not really own the car. I think that's a problem. RMS in one of his more popular talks says he doesn't want software inside his microwave to Free because he would never want to modify it: I think a good argument can be made that if I buy a car that drives itself, I should be able to see and modify the source code.
- chiefofgxbxl 9y agoAnother interesting point that I don't think is brought up at all is how self-driving tech will impact children. The legal driving age requirements will likely become obsolete. Can school children take a self-driving car to school every day? Will this increase traffic significantly? How long until a hacker takes control of a car and abducts the child inside? How safe do parents really feel letting their kids be in this machine on their own? etc.