Actually the real message being sent by these attacks is “America is full of stupid ####s.”
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To be fair these idiots comprise a mere 0.000004% of the population of Arizona.
If you get killed by a driver, your family can sue him. If you get killed by a robot vehicle, who does your family sue? Who do the police arrest if there is any question of negligence or illegal intent? The manufacturer? The company that wrote the software? The company that owns and operates the vehicle? Those could all be different. And do you sue the company and/or the person/people who own/write/test/somethingelse the technology involved? Autonomous vehicles break the entire civil law system. They negate the very concept of liability by making it impossible to hold anyone accountable because they make it impossible to identify who is or might be responsible.
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If your brakes fail and you run over an old lady in the crosswalk who does her family sue? Who do the police arrest if there is any question of negligence or illegal intent? The brake manufacturer? The company that made the vehicle? The company that owns and operates the vehicle? Those could all be different.
I deliberately left “you” out of the list above as it’s really the same thing. Removing the driver from the equation simply removes one layer of responsibility, not the entire structure. If “you” were arrested etc then “you” would pass the buck and call your insurance company, who would in turn pursue all of the above.
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This is one part of why autonomous vehicles aren’t anywhere near being ready; aside from the fact that the actual tech is under-baked and not ready, the liability structure is nowhere near worked out and it’s going to be real fuckin hard to find liability insurance for a real long while.
Though it’s pretty ironic that you are concerned about liability for autonomous vehicles, when the status quo is pretty goddamn slanted in favor of automobile drivers in the event one of them kills a pedestrian or bicyclist. As long as you don’t flee the scene, you can get away with killing someone with a car with pretty minimal penalties, you can even make it seem like you were the victim of their carelessness.
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The company that made and runs the robot? These aren’t a bunch of Data’s running around.
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I live in England 
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The Transformative potential of well designed cities with accessible public spaces, walkable distances, healthy mix of live / work usage far outweighs the transformative potential of any potential new technology at a fraction of the cost.
Driverless cars to sort out a badly designed, misanthropic living environment is about as effective as the search for the perfect pill to sort out the obesity crises of a citizenry whose most exhausting activity is getting in and out of a car.
We have plenty of evidence to prove that well designed towns contribute to a healthier and happier populace… Just visit any historic town centre in Italy–where people (have to) walk everywhere. These places are highly accessible because people make it so: walking with the old and frail and disabled. Few other places are as supportive and inclusive in spite of the geographical challenges.
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I’m all in favor of redesigning cities so our lives aren’t dependent on automobiles, but in the meantime the disabled and the elderly need to get around in the cities we already have.
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Public transport is the solution. Trams especially. Reduce car lanes and turn them into tram routes. Far more efficacious and egalitarian than driverless cars which will always be the privilege of the rich.
But these protesters aren’t opposing the idea of private vehicles. They’re just opposing the idea of private vehicles that would be useful for the disabled and the elderly.
useful for the very rich disabled and elderly… which of course is a minute section of the rich and elderly.
I’am aware that public transport and accessible city design is not particularly high on these folks political agenda. But my issue is with the persistent argument that driverless cars which atm are just a funding black hole are somehow the worthy solution for such fundamental ills as appallingly designed, inaccessible cities.
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There’s no reason to believe self-driving cars will always belong in the realm of the very rich. We’re almost certainly approaching the day when a disabled person will be able to own a self-driving van for less than the cost of hiring a driver.
Millions of people drive to work every day. Why should we say “FUCK YOU, TAKE THE TRAM” to a blind person who just wants the same option?
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Oh, dear, things are in a bad way then! 
earlier, your argument re: public transportation and redesigns of cities was driverless cars will serve “in the meantime.”
and yet here you are saying, driverless cars will hopefully maybe possibly be available to all only someday… so what do we do in that meantime?
the truth is driverless cars will only further cement the current city designs we have. and maybe even increase sprawl because now (some) people can do other tasks while the car drives.
if both investments (driverless cars and livable cities ) are going to take some time, why not advocate for the path that has multiple human benefits, rather than some proprietary tech which serves us questionably at best?
( there’s not a lot of money to be made by big corporate entities for livable cities though so i’m not holding my breath.)
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It means that I expect we will have the technology to allow disabled people to experience the independence made possible by self-driving cars sooner than I expect the wholesale re-engineering of the world’s transportation infrastructure to make automobiles unnecessary.
In the meantime, many disabled and elderly people depend on cars anyway. They just also depend on human drivers.
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agreed. underlying my previous post is the feeling that touting mobility as one of the key benefits of driverless cars seems spurious to me.
i think the real reason people are supporting driverless cars is just the belief that technology is always cool and always good. many people dont want to consider the side effects because it’s a downer. and the world in general is already a downer, so lets just hope for the next neat thing that this time - no really - will solve all our problems.
i suspect driverless cars in cities will require (expensive) modifications to existing roads and infrastructure. i suspect that pedestrians will be further sidelined in those efforts (to reduce the chance for accidents) just as they were when cars came around the first time. i suspect that sprawl (and pollution) will increase. and i suspect local, state, and federal funds will get sucked up to support it.
there are existing ways to improve transportation options. and there are better ways of spending public money than enriching the private companies that want to bring us driverless cars.
none of those options are the next neato tech though. and we monkeys do like our distractions. so the next tech it is, rather than actually just investing in fixing the problems at hand.
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There is absolutely no reason to believe that self driving cars will be the realm of the poor and homeless. None.
Well designed public transport says: come on, step in, you are welcome we are all in this together.
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The point is that you shouldn’t direct any more hostility toward elderly or disabled people who want to get around in cars than toward anyone else who wants to get around in cars. Especially since those people often face even MORE barriers to getting around on transit than you or I do.
Self-driving cars aren’t the problem and targeting them specifically is frankly kind of ableist.
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I have a driverless car on my driveway right now!
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