I'm sick this morning, so I can't ride my bike and am a bit grumpy about it, so bear with me. My academic career involves a lot of technologies in use in self driving cars; machine learning, image analysis, 3d point clouds. I have numerous colleagues that work directly on actual self driving car projects (I chose to avoid the field).
THE SELF DRIVING CAR IS THE WORST BOOMERTECH, END RUN, TECHNOCRAT NIGHTMARE SOLUTION TO A PROBLEM EVER.
Look, you want to make roads safer? Ban fucking cars. Public transportation and bicycles. Also in my dreams I have a pony that can fly.
Oh, we can't do that!Fine, I can probably identify 90% of driving infractions such as distracted driving, drunk driving, speeding, hit and runs, and otherwise shitty driving with technology that already exists that everybody carries around with themselves damn near 24/7: their cell phone.
But privacy! See: Self driving cars.
The dream of me stumbling out of the bar, passing out in the safe and loving arms of my self driving car to be safely delivered home just isn't going to happen. But some dipshit bro at Uber thinks he can save ten bucks by eliminating the driver from my uber ride home and is willing to burn through billions in venture capital to prove he's right.
We can't even make a web browser that doesn't crash, I'm not holding out much hope for cars. Also something something 737max automation.
Unfortunately, we'll probably get a self driving car. At best, we can just hope the self driving car becomes the flying car of today. But probably not. The dipshit tech bros have too much invested. Shipping crappy, barely working products without considering the larger impacts to society has never stopped them before, why should it stop them now?
Maybe we'll adapt our infrastructure to self driving cars. Maybe they'll just be a plaything of rich retired boomers. Maybe when we take the human pleasure out of driving a car, we'll come to our senses and realize private car ownership is just a retarded idea anyway. My pony that can fly is also a unicorn.
Thanks, and good morning. I'll leave you with this:
https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/999762887735263232