Saturday, January 03, 2015
Constants and variables 23
Reading a thoroughly disgusting exhibition of techboy insanity in local "newspaper".
When discussing self-driving cars, people tend to ask a lot of superficial questions: how much will these cars cost? Is this supposed to replace my car at home? Is this supposed to replace taxis or Uber? What if I need to use a drive-thru? They ignore the smarter questions. They ignore the fact that 45% of disabled people in the US still work. (Source: page 20) They ignore the fact that 95% of a car's lifetime is spent parked.(Source) They ignore how this technology could transform the lives of the elderly, or eradicate the need for parking lots or garages or gas stations. They dismiss the entire concept because they don't think a computer could ever be as good at merging on the freeway as they are.In the first fucking place, "How much will it cost" is NOT a superficial question. Obviously it doesn't matter to you trillionaire techboys, but it does matter to humans. Drive-thru is not superficial either. How do you preprogram a turn into the driveway of the bank or McDonalds, which is PRIVATE PROPERTY and thus not part of the street map? Will Google require Authorized DriveThrus to have a Digital Right-Turn Management License, thus cutting out Unauthorized turns into Unauthorized stores? There are all sorts of situations that simply cannot and will not be handled by preprogrammed patterns. Helping the disabled is also a moot point. Anyone who is capable of independently getting in and out of a car, with or without wheelchair, is also capable of driving the car with some combination of adaptive equipment. Anyone who would need a totally self-controlled car would need human assistance for everything, and thus would NOT benefit from the supposed independence of a Googlebot. When you start working through the details, you quickly conclude that the whole fucking idea is NOT for civilian use. It's for police or military use, where a quiet capture operation can be fully preprogrammed within a nice clean chain of command. In other fucking words, self-driving aircraft (drones) and self-driving cars are matching parts of the same overall project. So why do techboys LOVE LOVE LOVE the land version and HATE HATE HATE the air version? It's all the same.
Labels: Constants and Variables
¶ 7:12 AM
