Its hard to show sarcasm in text form sometimes. Brad wants to wrap the world in legislative bubble wrap. I thought i could give him more ideas
DUI, now in the same category as rape? DUI is bad but let's not pretend it that bad in the grand scale of bad.
It's that bad. Now if you want to talk murder rape, then yeah that's worse. DUI is a shot at killing a carful of people every time you sit behind the wheel in that state.
Legislation is frequently the only way to deal with a problem like drunk driving. If you don't put the flashing red lights up people drive drunk just because they're impaired enough not to have to remember the kid on the pavement in front of them after they failed to swerve. The Right spends a lot of time defending people's basic rights to be assholes, corporate crooks (just don't make the laws and there's nothing a corporation can do that is crooked) and generally terrible citizens. The movement should think about that some. It's a really bad place to be.
I can't wait for the day that I can tell my google car to take me to the bar and back home. The private sector will solve this one if the government doesn't regulate them out of prosperity first. The number of deaths on the road will be radically reduced when we transition to self driving cars. Of course that won't stop people from wanting to ban them when the small percentage accident kills some people.
If you don't regulate the private sector you get nightmares out of the bad actors. "Trust Me" doesn't work better for large corporations than it does for individuals it works worse, because responsibility is compartmented and nobody has the big picture in view all the time. So one unregulated/unwatched decision can undo whatever else the corporate body is trying to do. This assuming the corporation just isn't crooked as hell to start with, like W.R. Grace, Enron or VW.
Regulation is often necessary. Over regulation is often a problem. Can't wait for my self driving Google car.
People like to drive though. When your hypothetical day comes that the majority of people are kicking back and letting their pussy self-driving electric cars do the work someone in the private sector will make a KILLING on a stick-shift 5-speed V8. Folks will be trading in their "Google Flea" for this car left and right. thats why even if self driving cars were practically priced you'd need the govt to step in cause no one would buy them anyway IMO
Murder then rape? Damn. No, you're wrong. It's like a 6 on the bad scale because the end result isn't always death or life long trauma. Murder and/or rape, crimes against children would be a 10. Littering would be a 1.
Or even better will be how all the self driving cars will detect me coming and communicate with each other and get out of my way in an elegant ballet, causing no accidents, as I drive down the highway at 90 mph.
MADD was founded because a guy got in his pickup blind drunk and then drove headfirst into a schoolbus full of children killing many of them in the process along with himself. At the time drunk driving was seen as a minor offense and the person was generally not prosecuted because they were considered to be not in control of their faculties at the time they made the decision to drive. This assuming he wasn't buddies with the guy who got to the accident first or a cousin of the judge or DA or whatever. It took a long time for us to come to grips with the fact that DUI is in fact a major crime and that the people who drive while impaired are in fact criminals. Reading this thread makes me think that some of you didn't get the message along the way. Get it, because it's an important message. If you don't know somebody who has been killed in a drunk driving accident you're in the minority, although the numbers are getting better and better and the younger guys might actually be lucky enough to go through their entire lives without losing a loved one to somebody else's criminal decision to drive while impaired.
time will tell I guess. I'd love the self driving car. I'd love for that to be what my kids had too. Not sure what the majority would want. I'd imagine over time self driving cars could come with awesome features that would be very desirable.
We're going to have the hacked car problem. It's easy to kill somebody by hacking their car and making it do something it shouldn't do. People are probably already hacking cars, given the level of automation involved but it will become the anarchists dream when we begin to trust cars to drive for us, not to mention all the other shady types that slink around messing with people.
So, no GPS? No way to acquire information about road conditions and hazardous weather along the way? No way for police or maintenance people to remotely stop a runaway car when a system failed? It's just not going to happen. And even if you decided to remove any of the features above that's not going to change the fact that hacking isn't just by modem any more. You can actually hack just about any electrical system to do strange things, using the built-in infrastructure to carry signals and produce results favorable to your end requirements. We're not at your father's air-gapping tech any more.
GPS is reading global satellites, not allowing connections to the car. You can read information about traffic and weather without allowing connections to the vehicle. The hacks you've read about are using connections to the car. Now if someone hacks the information sources then there's a big problem. I suspect some creative two-factor authentication could help protect against that as well.
I'm not saying hacking isn't a concern, btw, I agree it's a huge one. It's just the first rule of security is to start with every door closed and only open what is necessary. Then apply the max security to the open doors. I think it can be reasonably addressed.
There's no way to stop somebody from hacking into any system that calls out. It may take technology and knowledge that's well beyond the reach of the average bear but people will figure it out given enough time and resources. That's the world we're entering right now. We still don't have a clue but the odds are we're obsoleting human beings and human behavior in the process. That's where the anti-AI backlash is coming from in the tech and academic sectors. Those are the people who are generally smart enough to know that they don't know what they don't know. The thing that's interesting about AI is that it's the thing that could outsource the elite. Why should shareholders pay a human being millions, if not billions of dollars to head up a major company when an AI can do the job better and without any of the sentiment or attachments that produce illogical behavior and decision-making that reduce shareholder gains?
