Blockquote[quote=“dommerdoodle, post:99, topic:135801”]
Full Stack Software Developer - whatever that is…
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Does that come with maple syrup?
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Who is hostile here?
I don’t know about your experience of traveling while disabled / elderly / frail. But I do know of the people dear to me who are / were disabled / elderly and couldn’t drive and happened to live in cities like London / Budapest with decent public transport. They wanted and could use public transport. And I know how they would respond if I gave them a choice between more reliable comprehensive wheelchair access to public transport, clear pavement etc… and self-driving cars.
Not to mention that those people with cognitive impairment / suffering from dementia, a growing section of the elderly rely on bus drivers and station staff to help them navigate / manage their way, reducing human contact for them is not an improvement. Their reality is more like this:
To summarise I am directing my hostility towards the straw-man argument that somehow, driverless cars are being developed for the benefit of human kind, for the joy and pleasure of those less fortunate–because there is absolutely no evidence that, that is the motivation here.
The unintended consequence of this obsession with this elusive driverless fairy dust (e.g. demonstrated in this thread) is that energy / resources which could be directed towards re-designing our cities are being squandered on pretending that technological fixes will at last be the solution for deep-seated human problems.
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Would you care to outline how consent is achieved in any form of government with a population greater than one?
I won’t argue consent is perfect, or abuses are absent, but arguing there is no consent is a very strong statement - especially since lack of consent is usually considered sufficient cause for violent overthrow of the government…
There’s a big difference between zero control and a very small amount of control. In any community with millions of citizens, your voice is going to be near zero, and that’s how it must be.
Likewise, the choice of the majority does not always rule (and thank God for that - representative democracies tend to have a government that is rather more left-leaning than the electorate - think what immigration or tax or civil rights legislation would be like if it had to pass a majority or worse 2/3 majority), yet the populace maintains it’s ultimate voice via elections.
Perhaps because I’m rather to the left of the populace, I understand that my preferred policies will never be enacted. But that does not mean that I do not have voice - it merely means my voice will never equate to the decision. And that is how it should be until such time as I can persuade a sufficient number of my fellow citizens of the correctness of my views.
And as for being born into society, I’d argue that my continued willingness to accept the benefits that society offers does constitute consent. To do otherwise is to (at least in my own mind) would have me end up like those Libertarians who demand all the protections of the state, while at the same time claiming they are not bound by any of the responsibilities that come with being a member of that state.
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I’d disagree. I think many people who currently drive feel that this would improve their lives significantly.
I’d strongly agree. There are many possible side-effects that most of us have not considered. I think your point of re-engineering cities to take into account of AI is a good one. We assume that AIs will be as good as humans, but it’s beginning to look like they’ll be way better than humans for some things, and much worse for others.
Until your post, Ihadn’t considered the possibility that the benefits where AI shines would be so high that there’s a serious chance it would be worth it to re-engineer cities to avoid the situations where AI has a serious and unsolvable problem. (One thought experiment - how to towns finance themselves when cars refuse to speed or run reds?)
Aside: I’m always amazed at how thin the dividing line (in human terms) between problems that computers can solve in milliseconds, and those that will take it 10^7 years to solve (obligatory XKCD comics here).
it’s the benefits to whom that are my question. a compact, dense city isn’t what everyone wants - but it has many benefits for the people living there. a city of sprawl provides people with yards at the expense of traffic, accidents, the wasted time commuting, pollution, and services spread so far and wide that being poor or mobility challenged means you lose access.
driverless cars will definitely benefit the people who own the cars ( and the people that play the ads in the car, and that sell you the internet, music, and movies you can access in the car ) - but will the benefits to us be more than the benefits of reducing car dependency?
i feel that’s unlikely.
i think the hardest tasks for computers seem to involve real time problem solving and “real” actions in the physical world. ( and driverless cars need both. )
it’s a tough problem that even humans don’t do well.
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I think we should let them loose, let them kill people, and look closely at how and why they’re screwing up, then make improvements as we identify situations they’re failing to handle.
(cut to me being run down by a robot car because my jacket is exactly the color value some programmer used for “no obstacle here”)
Look, it’s no more brutally disregarding of human life than our current system, which has no reasonable hope of improvement (aside from being replaced, in whole or part, by the robots we’re discussing here).
I guess I’m sanguine in both senses of the word.
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Our current system could be greatly improved if people who cared about safety were more willing to show up to planning and zoning meetings, rather than just the people who want to shave 10 seconds off their commute and have a gut feeling that wider roads will do the job.
Isn’t that what’s happening in Chandler, AZ? Isn’t that why people are attacking the cars in the first place?
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Perhaps, but I suspect in this instance it’s more likely motivated by the same fear that has people threaten or attack immigrants: Fear of change.
[Edit for clarity of above - I’m not talking about the larger group people who are unhappy about testing, I’m talking about the people who are actually using violence]
Hmmm. I don’t know. I’m not in a hurry to have my community become a human research project, with potentially harmful or lethal results. “Hey, we’ve tested these things on empty roads, now we need to see how they work in messy, complicated, stupid human environments. Onward and upward!”
That seems like a really reasonable fear.
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Agreed it is a reasonable fear. But I’m willing to bet you aren’t actually attacking or threatening riders in these cars with violence.
It’s all anecdotal on my part, but I’ve found the mindset of people who are willing to use or threaten violence tends not to be overly concerned about consumer safety and are more usually motivated by more reflexive fears.
Have you ever been aboard public transit? I’ve been aboard a bus with a passenger who needed to puke; she did, and then the bus driver threw her and everyone else off the bus miles from our destinations. Public transit doesn’t care. (To be fair, no form of mass transit, public or private, can afford to divert for one passenger.) That’s a large part of the reason why we have private cars.
A toddler should not be alone in a driverless car, and letting a driverless car pull over on the command of a toddler is terrifying. For the driver, Google Maps lets you find a gas station on your route quickly; any self driving car in production will have similar functionality. They’re also likely to have emergency pull-over buttons.
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No. A large part of the reason we have private cars is because of the power of car and oil companies, which pushed to end alternatives in many parts of the country.
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There’s multiple reasons for many things, but I’ve done the public transit thing. Even if buses down my road and down the cross road came every quarter-hour, I may still have to wait up to a half-hour to get to and more important from the closest grocery, dragging all my grocery bags. It’s so much easier to jump in my car and pick up whatever I need. I was lucky enough to have an almost direct bus route to the game store, but I was still spending two hours there and two hours back, four times as long as it took to drive it. Maybe rail could approach driving times, but it’s still not going to replicate the freedom and flexibility of a car.
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You’re privileged to be able to do so. Plenty of people depend on public transit for all the basic of transport, because they can’t afford a reliable car and all the recurring costs associated with them.
We could make public transit more productive for everyone, instead we decide that our privilege means no one else should have access to good transit. Fuck that.
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A reference point for judging public transport standards:
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Only 10% of American households don’t have cars, so I’m not that privileged. I am male; my sister got her first car after harassment on the bus going to college was too much, a concern with public transportation I’m too privileged to have to worry about.
You’re conflating issues left and right. Mass transit should be improved in many cases. That doesn’t mean that cars aren’t more convenient than mass transport, so much so that in any but the most dense cities with great public transport, people round the world who can afford a car buy a car.
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So, fuck the people who don’t? People often get cars because they have to, because they live in a place with NO form of public transit, or deeply underfunded if it does. Having a car also does not mean having a reliable car. It can also mean further impoverishment for many, as it costs a good deal of money to keep up a car, especially an older car, which is what the working poor tends to have.
I’m well aware of harassment in public spaces. Are you seriously suggesting that because it happens, we should not fund public transit. What are your plans for literally every other public space where women get harassed, which is… let me see… ALL OF THEM. Yes, we get harassed in our private cars too (men leering from a car next to ours).
Yes.
And making public transit MORE convenient would have a measurable impact on the proliferation of cars. [ETA] Those who could not afford them or the expense associated with them could have an alternative.
Which kind of makes my point there. The current state of affairs with regards to how we get around is not inevitable and can indeed be changed in favor of more environmentally friendly solutions.
Yet another privileged form of travel - not everyone can afford to take a plane to get between NYC and Chicago, and if you’re not traveling to and from a hub (Chicago, NYC, ATL, LAX, etc), it’s even MORE expensive to travel via plane…
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