The world cheered — well, at least the nerds cheered — when Google’s autonomous cars drove 1,000 miles with no human intervention and another 140,000 miles with occasional human intervention in 2010. Since then, the cars are still tooling about in a series of tests as early fans watch them in action on YouTube and Vimeo. The tests are going so well that Nevada, Florida and California have already deemed them street-legal. Surely other states will soon follow.
No.
"A critical mass"? You mean EVERY car. No one is removing stop signs and lights while any actual people are driving. Which means every car on the road now will be illegal to drive. And every motorcycle will forever be illegal, they can't be automated. Sooner or later, "for efficiency and safety reasons," human-driven cars will be eliminated.
And also, for your comfort and safety, every car will be tracked from start to finish, so your freedom to move anonymously will forever be ended. All autonomous cars HAVE to know where all cars surrounding them are at all times, and what they're doing, for the system to even theoretically work.
If you think that will be done with a non-centralized peer-to-peer kind of communication protocol, think again. The power and usefulness of such movement data will be irresistible to authorities, and "your" car WILL testify against you (as already has happened). You won't own your data.
Also, be sure the rules for these cars will be written so the manufacturers/programmers/system controllers will be protected against lawsuits or any liability whatsoever, so if the system fails and "everybody dies," the victims' recourses will be very limited. So sorry, this is the price of "progress."
If you don't think so, you haven't been paying attention lately.
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Where's My Autonomous Car?
Posted by: Pam Baker December 28, 2012 05:00 AMThe world cheered — well, at least the nerds cheered — when Google’s autonomous cars drove 1,000 miles with no human intervention and another 140,000 miles with occasional human intervention in 2010. Since then, the cars are still tooling about in a series of tests as early fans watch them in action on YouTube and Vimeo. The tests are going so well that Nevada, Florida and California have already deemed them street-legal. Surely other states will soon follow.
"A critical mass"? You mean EVERY car. No one is removing stop signs and lights while any actual people are driving. Which means every car on the road now will be illegal to drive. And every motorcycle will forever be illegal, they can't be automated. Sooner or later, "for efficiency and safety reasons," human-driven cars will be eliminated.
And also, for your comfort and safety, every car will be tracked from start to finish, so your freedom to move anonymously will forever be ended. All autonomous cars HAVE to know where all cars surrounding them are at all times, and what they're doing, for the system to even theoretically work.
If you think that will be done with a non-centralized peer-to-peer kind of communication protocol, think again. The power and usefulness of such movement data will be irresistible to authorities, and "your" car WILL testify against you (as already has happened). You won't own your data.
Also, be sure the rules for these cars will be written so the manufacturers/programmers/system controllers will be protected against lawsuits or any liability whatsoever, so if the system fails and "everybody dies," the victims' recourses will be very limited. So sorry, this is the price of "progress."
If you don't think so, you haven't been paying attention lately.