In the robot future, only cars will drive

boing
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[Read the post]

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So… no more motorcycles, period?

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Fear? I’m looking forward to that!

If they remain as necessary to our infrastructure, I doubt that will happen. Maybe some will be sold off (a la Highway 407 in Ontario), but I doubt that all, or even most, will be.

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Good. I hate driving and going to the DMV is a god damn nightmare.

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I said this like 3 years ago. I know eventually we won’t be allowed to manually drive on highways.

I imagine there will be “drive parks” where people can have fun driving around manually.

Part of me gawks at the loss of liberty.

The other part of me thinks I will be a old fart by that time and will love to be able to take a nap on the way to the laser gun range or light saber dueling class.

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Sorry, but the self congratulatory’ism of Google taking over just about everything on planet Earth is getting old, real old.

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This might happen. But not in our lifetime. People forget how big the USA is and they forget about the rural areas. Where you live far enough out you have to drive an hour to work (due to distance, not traffic). These people will not give up their pick-ups and SUVs easily, and anyway, these corporations won’t spend the money on infrastructure there.

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Yeah, about that…I’ll believe it when I see a robot car able to negotiate the Renous Highway during the two different snowstorm systems you tend to encounter during the same drive through it in wintertime.

/ Mountain View CA, Austin TX, Kirkland WA and Metro Phoenix AZ aren’t the best test beds, they’re the easiest test beds.

// maybe if Root had had a ‘Machine 2.0’-driven car…

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OH I won’t use a Google car. Fuck those guys. They would track all my movements for sure and do god knows what with the data.

Probably sell me advertisements.

"I see you spend a lot of time outside your old girlfriends house. People who visited her house also purchased: wine, flowers, economy packages of condoms.

“Suggested products for you! Zeiss Binoculars. Electronic Sound Amplifier. 1 gallon sterile urine collector. Puffs Plus Tissues with Aloe. Radiohead’s Pablo Honey CD.”

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Oh, we have those here at work…

TMI, I know.

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In the future, only robots will be employed and so able to afford cars.

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I’m confused: How does the collector know that the urine is sterile?

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Do you work in health care, long distance trucking, or just no bathroom breaks?

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Our primary task is to identify Pathogens & Bacteria in food supplies. It’s a GOV job, not sexy, but it pays the bills.

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Yeah, this is a case of “Here’s something to fear be pleased about self-driving cars!” as far as I’m concerned, too.

We already have them. “Go-kart” tracks. I went to one with some friends some years ago and was amused to see that it required one to have a driving license.

Yeah, it’ll be slow (too slow for my liking), hampered by the currently poor ability of autonomous cars to deal with bad weather, and relying on older cars being naturally cycled out of use (though insurance policies and laws will hasten this artificially).

Let’s face it - that will be all cars, though. But by the time this happens, there will be so many things in our lives tracking our every behavior that automobiles will be the least of our problems.

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Particularly, Thinking About You on repeat.

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I just imagine the traffic jams when the networked systems go down that look like the freeway scenes full of dead cars from any post-apocalyptic movie.

“My story is a novella called “Human Readable,” and of all my short fiction, it is the story I’m most proud of. It’s the tale of a world that’s been upended by hyper-efficient planning algorithms based on ant-colony optimizations, so that Los Angeles has the best traffic in the world. However, when these networks crash, they really crash — cars, surfboards, and many other common conveyances end up catastrophically failing, with concomitant loss of life.”

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I was thinking, “Creep”, but YMMV.

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Creep is when the narrator of Thinking About You gets angry and self-aware I guess. Maybe it’s a transition from one to the other over time, with Every Breath You Take by the Police in the middle for good measure.

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suits me fine. driving was a nice fad, and it had its run, but it’s time to move on.

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