6 ms·

Hopefully within the next 30 years or so, we will gradually phase out driver's licenses. Much like how smoking was ubiquitous in the 50s & 60s, but as we as a s

Hopefully within the next 30 years or so, we will gradually phase out driver's licenses. Much like how smoking was ubiquitous in the 50s & 60s, but as we as a society came to realize its grave dangers, it gradually became illegal in many public places. The idea that we allow almost anyone 16 or older to control several thousand pounds of metal that can travel at high speeds really is quite absurd when you think about it. There are more than 30,000 deaths every year due to car accidents, and hundreds of thousands more injuries. It's amazing how screwed up our society's priorities are. That's ten 9/11's worth of deaths every year from car accidents. By the time the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have ended, we'll have spent around $4 trillion on them altogether[0]. If even 1/100th of that had been redirected to research on self-driving car technology, we might have already saved tens of thousands of lives. 0: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/29/us-usa-war-idUSTRE75S25320110629 http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/29/us-usa-war-idUSTRE...

sliverstorm 14y ago
It's amazing how screwed up our society's priorities are. Consider it rationally. Driving is costly, but it engenders an entire host of benefits & pleasures I don't think you're even considering. I'm not saying I'm happy driving is dangerous, but saying "Driving is dangerous, and yet we do it? WTF?" is ridiculous.
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  > Consider it rationally. Driving is costly, but it engenders an entire host of benefits & pleasures I don't think you're even considering. I am considering it entirely rationally. I believe that we should be investing more money into research that could save 30,000 lives every year. Never did I suggest in my initial post that human driving should be banned before self-driving cars are capable of replacing humans in this capacity. If done correctly, self-driving cars will have all the benefits of current automobiles, and then some. As for the pleasures of driving - that's what a whole lot of people said about cigarettes, but look where we are now. And don't be silly - no one's personal "pleasures" override the safety of other people's lives.
  - philwelch 14y ago
    Research? We've known for centuries how to get by without conveying ourselves everywhere in 4,000 pound steel cages. It's called population density, mass transit when a community exceeds a certain size, and having vital services (drugstores, groceries, maybe the odd pub) within walking distance of where people live. It's not a technical problem, it's a social problem.
  - batista 14y ago
    >I am considering it entirely rationally. I believe that we should be investing more money into research that could save 30,000 lives every year. With like $10,000,000 dollars for drugs and some infrastructure we could save FAR MORE than 30,000 people every year in impoverished countries. And with not doing stuff like the BS Iraq embargo, we could save around 500,000 lives. Just a quick comparison...
- skyhook_mockups 14y ago
  it engenders an entire host of benefits & pleasures what is this host of pleasures? I get that some people enjoy driving. I loved it when I was a teenager, now I hate it. Most of my driving is done in traffic and I'd much rather read a book or take a nap insted of micromanaging my 20km/hr commute. Not only would autonomous cars give me back my 1.5hrs/day that is dead time... but the roads would be incredibly more safe. And for people who like to drive... how about a racetrack?
  - barrkel 14y ago
    The greatest pleasure I get from the roads - on my scooter :) - is from other traffic. Racetracks are a different kind of fun, for when you want to go fast and corner hard.
    - skyhook_mockups 14y ago
      I get that you get pleasure from driving or riding and if it's anything like my experience (in my teens) a good part of it is the danger factor. I drove like a lunatic when I was 16 (just like most other 16 year olds) and it was great fun at the time. Now when I look back I can see what kind of an idiot I was for putting others and myself in that kind of mortal danger. That's not to say that you can't enjoy driving responsibly. But there's so much unnecessary danger and tedium involved that it seems a no-brainer to move to a computer controlled future.
      - barrkel 14y ago
        It's actually less danger factor than it is the pleasure of competence, doing something well and smoothly. I live in London, where there are a lot of powered two-wheelers, filtering is legal, and it's just about the best way of getting from A to B in the congested city. Sure, it gets slightly more dangerous if you get into a bit of a race with someone else - the adrenaline of competition can push you a bit, but you're mostly just a risk to yourself. But being able to skip past long queues of stopped or slowly moving traffic, safely and efficiently almost as if the traffic didn't exist, feels really good.
bborud 14y ago
Yes and we will have flying cars. Except we won't. Because flying cars is called "aviation" and aviation brings new dimensions of "hard" in addition to a third spatial dimension. And truly self driving cars that require no dynamic input from humans at any time is something we'll get asymptotically closer to, but will never quite achieve except in relatively specialized cases. This is what I believe. I can't prove it, but it is what my gut feeling tells me. And why would you want to? Of course, for typical highways it is obvious that it would probably be both faster and safer to have some sort of mandatory cooperative autonomous mode, but even that will be hard to achieve. I've met some of the people who work on developing and standardizing certain inter-car protocols to solve these types of problems. Most of the people I've met are neither brilliant nor capable. For the most part they illustrate to me a) how hard the problem is at scale (ie. get all manufacturers onboard) b) there will be a lot of idiots involved in this which means it'll take an awful lot of time to even come up with even baseline systems for proper crash-avoidance -- nevermind the real-time dynamic systems for controlling masses of fast-moving vehicles.
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  I've come to realize that autonomous cars are a pre-req for flying cars. Obvious now that I see it, of course. Humans as a whole can't possibly handle flying machines when they have so much trouble with cars. I'm skeptical about totally autonomous cars, but I think freeway driving will be increasingly automated. Thrun has said that he's let his car drive him from the bay area to Reno several times. I assume he's exaggerating a bit, but probably not by much. It's a solvable problem for good road conditions.
  - SlipperySlope 14y ago
    Right on! There is no way a mass market for personal air vehicles can happen if we need traditional pilot's licences. Following the eventual success of driverless cars, one can imagine that all-weather PAVs will not require a license because we will just be passengers. See: http://www.boeing.com/news/frontiers/archive/2004/july/ts_sf14.html http://www.boeing.com/news/frontiers/archive/2004/july/ts_sf...
- 14y ago
bborud 14y ago
Oh, and as for priorities: the cost of eliminating danger from traffic to where it is "trivial" or "absent" probably isn't financially viable. Meaning you'd have to spend an inordinate amount of money for ever slimmer returns. If you follow how rules and regulations aimed at making traffic more secure over time you'll notice that the incremental improvements are becoming smaller and smaller. In most sensible jurisdictions, the important, big stuff that saves lots of lives is in place and people are now bickering over the little stuff that is perhaps going to same a small number of people. Or, in many cases, won't save a single person, might even cause more accidents, but generates more revenue. If you want to analyze something in terms of value to society you'll have to be prepared for a lot of unpleasant aspects.
mc32 14y ago
I'm not sure they'll be phased out entirely. What happens when all electrical systems go out. What do we do about inclement weather, system malfunctions. What do we do about classic cars (as in people like owning cars from decades ago). What about driving on unimproved roads (in the country). I think in urban areas and developed areas this is feasible, but I think there are some scenarios where it may not happen for a long time. Why don't we now have self-driving trains/subways? They move on rails but we keep insisting they must be supervised by people in the vehicle (with a few exceptions like people movers at airports and amusement parks, etc).
- reycharles 14y ago
  The metro in Copenhagen is completly autonomous.
- greggman 14y ago
  The yurikamome in Tokyo is self driving
- philwelch 14y ago
  > What happens when all electrical systems go out. What do we do about inclement weather, system malfunctions. You could ask the same questions about human-driven cars. When the stoplights don't work and there's ice over all the roads, sensible people stay off the roads, and people with a death wish go out for a spin.
  - tommi 14y ago
    Wait, what? No stoplights and ice on the road - that's like 1/3 of the year here in Finland. All you have to do is adjust to the environment and you are able to get from a place to another.
    - philwelch 14y ago
      In a city, with 10-20% grade practically everywhere? Yeah it's passable in flatlands or sparsely populated areas, but frankly automatic cars aren't really going to be any worse than humans at traversing bad conditions, so an impassable road for an automatic car would be impassable also for a human driver.
pinaceae 14y ago
try to take away my motorcycle and i'll buy a gun. seriously, what's wrong with you? individual mobility is a great freedom and source of happiness. i like to be able to control a machine, drive it up a mountain. i've spent months driving all across the US, Europe and places like Iceland. best experiences ever, every single turn was a choice by me. the minute you make every thing super safe people will kill themselves out of boredom. but i guess you're one of those people that want to ban drugs, sugar, fat, knifes, flight, compilers and anything with sharp edges. and your numbers, oh scary, TEN 9/11s. maybe all that shows us that on a historic scale, 9/11 wasn't that big? how many people got wiped out on D-Day? By the Spanish Flu?
- skyhook_mockups 14y ago
  It seems the most knee-jerk reactions always come from bike riders (buy a gun.. really?) :) How about the upside. Every bike rider I've ever talked to bitches about stupid "cage drivers". Imagine if every 4 wheeler was autonomous.. no more bitching, you'd be able to zig-zag between them easily, and if you do happen to lose concentration for a moment you can rest assured that a computer will (probably) stop before it kills you. the minute you make every thing super safe people will kill themselves out of boredom. Really? You think people would kill themselves because they no longer had to manually do one of the most boring, repetitive, tedious everyday things they have to do? Personally I'd read a book.
- dr42 14y ago
  This is ridiculous. You're seriously suggesting that you're going to shoot your way to mobility :) I'm assuming that's just some macho bullshit because it's insane. What you're not realizing is that it's often not the person causing the accident that gets hurt, the idea of making something as tedious as driving automated is that it's safer for everyone. Drugs already are banned. The ones you're most likely talking about are anyway. And the reason is because they fuck people up. How about people do something productive with their lives instead of taking drugs, developing diabetes from sugar, overweight from fat, and kill people with large heavy steel motorized machines? You can try to belittle 30,000 people but if you stop cleaning your guns to think about it long enough you might actually appreciate that all those people probably didn't want to die from theirs and other people's driving mistakes.
grecy 14y ago
I've always thought a simple way to improve the process would be to require people to volunteer 200 hours in an Accident and Emergency ward at their local hospital. force us to spend time with people who found out what thousands of pounds of metal does to the human body when it decelerates quickly. I think there will be two nice outcomes: 1. Lots of people will chose not to get a license (and will probably avoid cars altogether). 2. The people that do get licenses will drive with a lot more care and respect.
- jasomill 14y ago
  Alternatively, we could require them to ride along with accident investigators on the police force, because police officers are well known for their careful, respectful driving.
  - zxcdw 14y ago
    accident investigators != police officers behind the wheel. You probably know this, but still had to make an awesome comment about it? It's funny how some people really think that self-driving cars are a bad thing, automation is a bad thing and people should be kept in labor. Yet, the same excact people, "optimize" their workflows by automating things, writing scripts, making the machines do as much as possible because there's no human-errors, it's cheap and it's very fast. I really don't see (consumer)cars having no steering wheels, pedals or any other conrol equipment. What I see is cars gradually(within the next 5-10 years and onwards) get more and more of technologies to assist and aid with driving, ultimately resulting in a vehicle to which you can just say the address, and it will get you there. And yes, you'll still need a driving license for driving such a vehicle for decades, even if you don't expicitly take any control over the driving process. For some it's an awesome future, for some it's a nightmare.
- Cass 14y ago
  I've worked in an Emergency Room. Literally every single person who worked there drove a car. Both trauma surgeons were motorcycle enthusiasts. I'm friends with pulmonologists who smoke, psychiatrists who drink, endocrinologists who are fat. Having seen the possible consequences of a bad decision first-hand does not, in fact, stop people from making bad decisions.
Heinleinian 14y ago
Um, you must be joking. Frame it like an opponent would who is running for political office against you in the year 2050. So you're saying take away people's privilege to operate a vehicle they own and paid for with their own money? You want to require people to use an automated machine that, in theory, the state could over-ride the controls of at any moment? You want to eliminate all jobs associated with commercial driving (buses, delivery trucks, etc.) many of which are union jobs? No. No. No. Also, the answer to the danger & death problem is well understood -- you simply require people to first accumulate several dozen hours behind the wheel, under supervised instruction, with training for emergency situations, just like we do now with pilots licenses. The fact that this hasn't happened yet in the US (like it has in say, Germany) should show you what a political impossibility what you're saying really is.
- Heinleinian 14y ago
  P.S. For added hilarity, the story directly below this one on HN is about cell phone tracking, where the top post is all talk of going without cell phones because the device's tracking could infringe on people's freedom. Which is the scarier dystopia? Your phone keeps a running tab on your location, which could be accessed by the state or Google? Or your mode of transportation is tracking you, _and can be over-ridden or disabled at any time by the state or by Google_...
  - skyhook_mockups 14y ago
    I'm FAR more frightened of being t-boned by a drunk driver than of big brother taking control of my car. Honestly can't tell if you are trolling or serious.
    - batista 14y ago
      Then you'll love the MS AutoCar 2020. It has a top of the line electronic routing OS, designed by Visual Basic veterans.
    - Heinleinian 14y ago
      I was seriously trolling, also known as taking an idea to its logical extreme to make a point. You're presenting a false choice here. There's lots of other ways to attack the drunk driving problem without taking everyone's drivers licenses away and banning normal driving, as the OP was advocating.
AngryParsley 14y ago
I tried to upvote you but accidentally hit downvote. Sorry.
hcarvalhoalves 14y ago
That's how we improve the society: not by improving individuals, but taking away responsibilities from them. What comes next? People destroy their health eating crap, so we just plug them into feeding tubes? There are many benefits to self-driving cars, and sure, security may be one of them, but don't delude yourself thinking you can solve all societies chores by restraining what people can do. People still smoke, even though it's known to be harmful. People do stupid sh. Neither technology or regulation are substitutes to wisdom.

sliverstorm 14y ago

It's amazing how screwed up our society's priorities are. Consider it rationally. Driving is costly, but it engenders an entire host of benefits & pleasures I don't think you're even considering. I'm not saying I'm happy driving is dangerous, but saying "Driving is dangerous, and yet we do it? WTF?" is ridiculous.

w1ntermute 14y ago
> Consider it rationally. Driving is costly, but it engenders an entire host of benefits & pleasures I don't think you're even considering. I am considering it entirely rationally. I believe that we should be investing more money into research that could save 30,000 lives every year. Never did I suggest in my initial post that human driving should be banned before self-driving cars are capable of replacing humans in this capacity. If done correctly, self-driving cars will have all the benefits of current automobiles, and then some. As for the pleasures of driving - that's what a whole lot of people said about cigarettes, but look where we are now. And don't be silly - no one's personal "pleasures" override the safety of other people's lives.
- philwelch 14y ago
  Research? We've known for centuries how to get by without conveying ourselves everywhere in 4,000 pound steel cages. It's called population density, mass transit when a community exceeds a certain size, and having vital services (drugstores, groceries, maybe the odd pub) within walking distance of where people live. It's not a technical problem, it's a social problem.
- batista 14y ago
  >I am considering it entirely rationally. I believe that we should be investing more money into research that could save 30,000 lives every year. With like $10,000,000 dollars for drugs and some infrastructure we could save FAR MORE than 30,000 people every year in impoverished countries. And with not doing stuff like the BS Iraq embargo, we could save around 500,000 lives. Just a quick comparison...
skyhook_mockups 14y ago
it engenders an entire host of benefits & pleasures what is this host of pleasures? I get that some people enjoy driving. I loved it when I was a teenager, now I hate it. Most of my driving is done in traffic and I'd much rather read a book or take a nap insted of micromanaging my 20km/hr commute. Not only would autonomous cars give me back my 1.5hrs/day that is dead time... but the roads would be incredibly more safe. And for people who like to drive... how about a racetrack?
- barrkel 14y ago
  The greatest pleasure I get from the roads - on my scooter :) - is from other traffic. Racetracks are a different kind of fun, for when you want to go fast and corner hard.
  - skyhook_mockups 14y ago
    I get that you get pleasure from driving or riding and if it's anything like my experience (in my teens) a good part of it is the danger factor. I drove like a lunatic when I was 16 (just like most other 16 year olds) and it was great fun at the time. Now when I look back I can see what kind of an idiot I was for putting others and myself in that kind of mortal danger. That's not to say that you can't enjoy driving responsibly. But there's so much unnecessary danger and tedium involved that it seems a no-brainer to move to a computer controlled future.
    - barrkel 14y ago
      It's actually less danger factor than it is the pleasure of competence, doing something well and smoothly. I live in London, where there are a lot of powered two-wheelers, filtering is legal, and it's just about the best way of getting from A to B in the congested city. Sure, it gets slightly more dangerous if you get into a bit of a race with someone else - the adrenaline of competition can push you a bit, but you're mostly just a risk to yourself. But being able to skip past long queues of stopped or slowly moving traffic, safely and efficiently almost as if the traffic didn't exist, feels really good.

bborud 14y ago

Yes and we will have flying cars. Except we won't. Because flying cars is called "aviation" and aviation brings new dimensions of "hard" in addition to a third spatial dimension. And truly self driving cars that require no dynamic input from humans at any time is something we'll get asymptotically closer to, but will never quite achieve except in relatively specialized cases. This is what I believe. I can't prove it, but it is what my gut feeling tells me. And why would you want to? Of course, for typical highways it is obvious that it would probably be both faster and safer to have some sort of mandatory cooperative autonomous mode, but even that will be hard to achieve. I've met some of the people who work on developing and standardizing certain inter-car protocols to solve these types of problems. Most of the people I've met are neither brilliant nor capable. For the most part they illustrate to me a) how hard the problem is at scale (ie. get all manufacturers onboard) b) there will be a lot of idiots involved in this which means it'll take an awful lot of time to even come up with even baseline systems for proper crash-avoidance -- nevermind the real-time dynamic systems for controlling masses of fast-moving vehicles.

waterlesscloud 14y ago
I've come to realize that autonomous cars are a pre-req for flying cars. Obvious now that I see it, of course. Humans as a whole can't possibly handle flying machines when they have so much trouble with cars. I'm skeptical about totally autonomous cars, but I think freeway driving will be increasingly automated. Thrun has said that he's let his car drive him from the bay area to Reno several times. I assume he's exaggerating a bit, but probably not by much. It's a solvable problem for good road conditions.
- SlipperySlope 14y ago
  Right on! There is no way a mass market for personal air vehicles can happen if we need traditional pilot's licences. Following the eventual success of driverless cars, one can imagine that all-weather PAVs will not require a license because we will just be passengers. See: http://www.boeing.com/news/frontiers/archive/2004/july/ts_sf14.html http://www.boeing.com/news/frontiers/archive/2004/july/ts_sf...
14y ago

bborud 14y ago

Oh, and as for priorities: the cost of eliminating danger from traffic to where it is "trivial" or "absent" probably isn't financially viable. Meaning you'd have to spend an inordinate amount of money for ever slimmer returns. If you follow how rules and regulations aimed at making traffic more secure over time you'll notice that the incremental improvements are becoming smaller and smaller. In most sensible jurisdictions, the important, big stuff that saves lots of lives is in place and people are now bickering over the little stuff that is perhaps going to same a small number of people. Or, in many cases, won't save a single person, might even cause more accidents, but generates more revenue. If you want to analyze something in terms of value to society you'll have to be prepared for a lot of unpleasant aspects.

mc32 14y ago

I'm not sure they'll be phased out entirely. What happens when all electrical systems go out. What do we do about inclement weather, system malfunctions. What do we do about classic cars (as in people like owning cars from decades ago). What about driving on unimproved roads (in the country). I think in urban areas and developed areas this is feasible, but I think there are some scenarios where it may not happen for a long time. Why don't we now have self-driving trains/subways? They move on rails but we keep insisting they must be supervised by people in the vehicle (with a few exceptions like people movers at airports and amusement parks, etc).

reycharles 14y ago
The metro in Copenhagen is completly autonomous.
greggman 14y ago
The yurikamome in Tokyo is self driving
philwelch 14y ago
> What happens when all electrical systems go out. What do we do about inclement weather, system malfunctions. You could ask the same questions about human-driven cars. When the stoplights don't work and there's ice over all the roads, sensible people stay off the roads, and people with a death wish go out for a spin.
- tommi 14y ago
  Wait, what? No stoplights and ice on the road - that's like 1/3 of the year here in Finland. All you have to do is adjust to the environment and you are able to get from a place to another.
  - philwelch 14y ago
    In a city, with 10-20% grade practically everywhere? Yeah it's passable in flatlands or sparsely populated areas, but frankly automatic cars aren't really going to be any worse than humans at traversing bad conditions, so an impassable road for an automatic car would be impassable also for a human driver.

pinaceae 14y ago

try to take away my motorcycle and i'll buy a gun. seriously, what's wrong with you? individual mobility is a great freedom and source of happiness. i like to be able to control a machine, drive it up a mountain. i've spent months driving all across the US, Europe and places like Iceland. best experiences ever, every single turn was a choice by me. the minute you make every thing super safe people will kill themselves out of boredom. but i guess you're one of those people that want to ban drugs, sugar, fat, knifes, flight, compilers and anything with sharp edges. and your numbers, oh scary, TEN 9/11s. maybe all that shows us that on a historic scale, 9/11 wasn't that big? how many people got wiped out on D-Day? By the Spanish Flu?

skyhook_mockups 14y ago
It seems the most knee-jerk reactions always come from bike riders (buy a gun.. really?) :) How about the upside. Every bike rider I've ever talked to bitches about stupid "cage drivers". Imagine if every 4 wheeler was autonomous.. no more bitching, you'd be able to zig-zag between them easily, and if you do happen to lose concentration for a moment you can rest assured that a computer will (probably) stop before it kills you. the minute you make every thing super safe people will kill themselves out of boredom. Really? You think people would kill themselves because they no longer had to manually do one of the most boring, repetitive, tedious everyday things they have to do? Personally I'd read a book.
dr42 14y ago
This is ridiculous. You're seriously suggesting that you're going to shoot your way to mobility :) I'm assuming that's just some macho bullshit because it's insane. What you're not realizing is that it's often not the person causing the accident that gets hurt, the idea of making something as tedious as driving automated is that it's safer for everyone. Drugs already are banned. The ones you're most likely talking about are anyway. And the reason is because they fuck people up. How about people do something productive with their lives instead of taking drugs, developing diabetes from sugar, overweight from fat, and kill people with large heavy steel motorized machines? You can try to belittle 30,000 people but if you stop cleaning your guns to think about it long enough you might actually appreciate that all those people probably didn't want to die from theirs and other people's driving mistakes.

grecy 14y ago

I've always thought a simple way to improve the process would be to require people to volunteer 200 hours in an Accident and Emergency ward at their local hospital. force us to spend time with people who found out what thousands of pounds of metal does to the human body when it decelerates quickly. I think there will be two nice outcomes: 1. Lots of people will chose not to get a license (and will probably avoid cars altogether). 2. The people that do get licenses will drive with a lot more care and respect.

jasomill 14y ago
Alternatively, we could require them to ride along with accident investigators on the police force, because police officers are well known for their careful, respectful driving.
- zxcdw 14y ago
  accident investigators != police officers behind the wheel. You probably know this, but still had to make an awesome comment about it? It's funny how some people really think that self-driving cars are a bad thing, automation is a bad thing and people should be kept in labor. Yet, the same excact people, "optimize" their workflows by automating things, writing scripts, making the machines do as much as possible because there's no human-errors, it's cheap and it's very fast. I really don't see (consumer)cars having no steering wheels, pedals or any other conrol equipment. What I see is cars gradually(within the next 5-10 years and onwards) get more and more of technologies to assist and aid with driving, ultimately resulting in a vehicle to which you can just say the address, and it will get you there. And yes, you'll still need a driving license for driving such a vehicle for decades, even if you don't expicitly take any control over the driving process. For some it's an awesome future, for some it's a nightmare.
Cass 14y ago
I've worked in an Emergency Room. Literally every single person who worked there drove a car. Both trauma surgeons were motorcycle enthusiasts. I'm friends with pulmonologists who smoke, psychiatrists who drink, endocrinologists who are fat. Having seen the possible consequences of a bad decision first-hand does not, in fact, stop people from making bad decisions.

Heinleinian 14y ago

Um, you must be joking. Frame it like an opponent would who is running for political office against you in the year 2050. So you're saying take away people's privilege to operate a vehicle they own and paid for with their own money? You want to require people to use an automated machine that, in theory, the state could over-ride the controls of at any moment? You want to eliminate all jobs associated with commercial driving (buses, delivery trucks, etc.) many of which are union jobs? No. No. No. Also, the answer to the danger & death problem is well understood -- you simply require people to first accumulate several dozen hours behind the wheel, under supervised instruction, with training for emergency situations, just like we do now with pilots licenses. The fact that this hasn't happened yet in the US (like it has in say, Germany) should show you what a political impossibility what you're saying really is.

Heinleinian 14y ago
P.S. For added hilarity, the story directly below this one on HN is about cell phone tracking, where the top post is all talk of going without cell phones because the device's tracking could infringe on people's freedom. Which is the scarier dystopia? Your phone keeps a running tab on your location, which could be accessed by the state or Google? Or your mode of transportation is tracking you, _and can be over-ridden or disabled at any time by the state or by Google_...
- skyhook_mockups 14y ago
  I'm FAR more frightened of being t-boned by a drunk driver than of big brother taking control of my car. Honestly can't tell if you are trolling or serious.
  - batista 14y ago
    Then you'll love the MS AutoCar 2020. It has a top of the line electronic routing OS, designed by Visual Basic veterans.
  - Heinleinian 14y ago
    I was seriously trolling, also known as taking an idea to its logical extreme to make a point. You're presenting a false choice here. There's lots of other ways to attack the drunk driving problem without taking everyone's drivers licenses away and banning normal driving, as the OP was advocating.

AngryParsley 14y ago

I tried to upvote you but accidentally hit downvote. Sorry.

hcarvalhoalves 14y ago

That's how we improve the society: not by improving individuals, but taking away responsibilities from them. What comes next? People destroy their health eating crap, so we just plug them into feeding tubes? There are many benefits to self-driving cars, and sure, security may be one of them, but don't delude yourself thinking you can solve all societies chores by restraining what people can do. People still smoke, even though it's known to be harmful. People do stupid sh. Neither technology or regulation are substitutes to wisdom.