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Have fun with that! You won't find me in one of those.
by LinuxBender 8y ago
Have fun with that! You won't find me in one of those.
- cortesoft 8y agoEver? No matter what advancements are made with the technology? You sound like someone who would have said you would never ride in a carriage that didn't have a horse.
- newswriter99 8y agoI don't think this is as much of a troglodyte statement as much as it is a lack of personal autonomy and freedom. The user isn't against the horse-less carriage out of fear, he's against the horse-less carriage because the option to control the horse has also been removed.
- jstanley 8y agoIt is possible that a self-driving car could still give you personal autonomy. Although you would lose direct mechanical control over the car, it is still technically possible to implement a self-driving car that always goes exactly where the occupant tells it to, without ever phoning home. Of course, none of the companies making self-driving cars actually want that, and most of the people buying them either don't care or don't realise, so it's probably not going to happen.
- samstave 8y agoYeah no thanks. "jstaney you are under arrest - remain calm your vehicle will deliver you to the nearest processing facility. Do not attempt to control the vehicle. Do not attempt to exit the vehicle. Any action deemed as attempting to exit the vehicle or prevent it from arriving at the detention facility will result in your immediate admission of guilt and the appropriate sentencing will commence. Have a nice day, thank you for using GovCloud Services."
- logfromblammo 8y agoPoor jstaney, confused by a bureaucratic error with notorious rogue air conditioning repairman jstanley...
- mindslight 8y agoYou're talking right past the comment you're responding to, which is highlighting the distinction between the inherent aspects of the technology, and the non-inherent authoritarian aspects which will be shoved down our throat by business interests and government perverts (different specializations of the same group, really). Similarly, we could easily have mobile phones that do not track us. It's just in none of the manufacturers' interest to design them, as the vanishing epsilon of people who care enough to pay extra do not offset the economies of scale from going with the current surveillance-based designs. Having said that, one of the themes in discussion of mass surveillance is the quantitative difference of it being easier than a police department having to expend the effort of physically following someone around. Government (de jure or de facto) controlled cars will make the act of arresting someone similarly effortless.
- icebraining 8y agoA manual-driving car can just lock you in until the cops arrive.
- snsr 8y ago*Directional preference input available with in-app purchase
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- scrollaway 8y agoSo elevators vs stairs then?
- nostrademons 8y agoI mean, most advancements in technology come with restrictions on personal autonomy and freedom. Today's urban factory workers have significantly less autonomy than independent craftsmen, who had less autonomy than subsistence-farming homesteaders on the prairie, who had less autonomy than the Native American tribes they replaced. Historically, it seems not to matter. The advancements in technology let societies that adopt them support a much higher population level. Those societies then go and kill off or enslave everyone who didn't adopt the new technologies, once a few generations have passed, their military supremacy is obvious, and there's enough cultural distance to view the adherents of the old technology as savage, subhuman primitives.
- InitialLastName 8y agoThis. It's important to note that human society's major driver isn't freedom or self-actualization or any other variant of Maslow's heirarchy. The thing that drives every one of these decisions (from "let's stay in one place and grow crops" to "let's have a person spend their entire life attaching a single bolt to every single member of an infinite line of widgets" to "Let's pay a human to put things in boxes and dock his pay if he takes a break") is maximizing viable reproduction and minimizing the energy to do so.
- stephengillie 8y agoAdd a push button transmission to that list. They were a bad idea in the 1960s, and they're still a bad idea today.
- dsfyu404ed 8y agoChrysler's trying it all over again with their "turn the dial" transmission control. One of the basic rules of interface design is that the larger the effect of the button on the system the bigger and more attention grabbing you make it (like in an industrial machine where you have a big red button that requires a lot of force to activate and makes an impressive sound when you hit it and a green one that behaves similarly). The push button shifter and knob shifter both violate that.
- amyjess 8y ago> Chrysler's trying it all over again with their "turn the dial" transmission control. ...which they stole from Jaguar. Oddly enough, Mercedes has gone to column shifters in the last few years, which have previously been associated with American trucks.
- userbinator 8y agoA lot of automatic transmissions in large trucks and buses still use pushbutton shifters.
- dang 8y agoPlease avoid personal swipes in comments here.
- cortesoft 8y agoSorry, that was in no way meant to be a personal swipe. Was just saying that the comment sounds similar to someone saying that. I should have said 'the comment sounds like what someone would have said about horseless carriages'
- philote 8y agoYou may find me in one, at some point in the far future, but I won't buy one. If they're really that good I'll use a service to have one come pick me up to take me places. But I've not heard much about self-driving cars performing well in all types of conditions to think that this will be safe enough (or at least reliable enough) any time soon.
- melling 8y agoThere are plenty of places where I wouldn’t mind using one now. Anywhere where the speed is under 30 miles an hour, for example. Have you ever been at the Las Vegas airport at the start of CES? I’ve waited an hour in line for a taxi. Of course they should have built the metro to the airport. If you commute by train, this type of car would be perfect to get you to and from the station, especially if it could drive itself back home during the day.
- bilbo0s 8y agoYeah, if there is no way to mechanically control the car, then that's kind of a problem. In that case, I'd have to be given some pretty ironclad indemnification before I'd get in one. If the car runs down a pedestrian in a crosswalk while said pedestrian has the right of way, on whom, exactly, does the civil liability fall? The manufacturer, or me, the occupant. Even more importantly, on whom does the criminal liability fall? If the answers to those questions are not spelled out, explicitly, in the regulations congress puts out, then I agree, it would be hard for me to get into one of those things. Especially if they said you were at fault because you told the car, "Take me home", or something. I can hear it now, "Your honor, the occupant was obviously exercising control over the vehicle!"
- anthanm 8y agoAhhh America, where you don't give 2 shits about potentially killing people so long as you don't have to pay for it.
- imtringued 8y agoAs you probably already know. A drone pilot used the "return home" feature of his drone and the pilot is liable for damages it caused when it collided with a helicopter in an area with a temporary flight restriction.
- icebraining 8y agoIt's not equivalent, though. A car without a steering wheel will be legally required to be L4 - to allow the user to take their mind off the route, or even sleep. A drone has makes no such promise - the feature is known to be "dumb" and you therefore must judge if it's safe to use it.
- mprev 8y agoIsn't the question whether or not you believe that a vehicle that claims to be L4 truly is L4?
- 8y ago
- HBlix 8y agoIt might be safer to be in one rather than walking near one, or driving alongside one. Sadly those are a lot harder to opt-out of!
- oblib 8y agoI can envision this being ok for urban use, such as taxis, shuttles, and busses, but not so great for personal use for everyone. For example, I want to be able to drive my car across the lawn to load/unload stuff. What bothers me most about this tech is we have a pretty long history of auto manufacturers knowing about problems involving safety issues that they evaluate with a cost/benefit methodology as opposed to a safety first and always approach. The Ford Pinto [1] is a good example of that. I still trust me more than an autonomous machine but I do look forward to a day when I don't. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto
- jws 8y agoI wonder if people said the same thing when elevators went from manual motor controls to automatic push buttons.
- LinuxBender 8y agoI'm sure some did. I base my decisions on risk ranking. Let's look at an elevator. An elevator can go up or down and has inertia brakes among other safety mechanisms. Most of these mechanisms are regulated and inspected and can not be disabled by software. I have watched videos of elevators behaving badly, but it takes a comedy of errors and many inept people for this to be a thing. An autonomous car on the other hand, can do anything a car can do and anything that the buggy or compromised software tells it to do. I will not be victim to the first angst filled 12 year old that is abused by his/her parents daily, or by some burnt out developer, or a serial number typo in an assassination attempt. The serial number of my car could be one digit off from some politician or spy. By all means, have fun in these things. Nobody will convince me to use one of these cars. Not now, not five hundred years from now.