There's a lot of interest lately in the development of cars that drive themselves, you know, safely taking you from one place to another while you scan pictures of cats on your cell phone. Seems like a really shaky idea to me.
Now I don't mind being driven. I've done my share of driving over the years and the idea of letting someone else do the driving is quite attractive. I learned to use the bus while we lived in England and it was really convenient. But I don't like the idea of being taken, especially by an automatic car. Well, I might relent if all the cars were automatic and on some sort of level playing field, but basically we'd be riding around inside mobile computers. That's what they are, after all, computers with GPS and a lot of sensors to keep them on the road and avoid running into things. In theory, it would make everything safe.
But computers get hacked. Suppose someone got into a few of these computers and gave the automatic cars a bit of attitude. We'd never know which ones have been hacked. Could even be our own. How would you like being driven around by Basil Fawlty? Or if your car was programmed by Microsoft and had to be rebooted half way to work and Basil was right behind you?
One could make a pretty good argument that our cars already do too much of our thinking for us. It all happened around the time the repair guys went from being mechanics to technicians.
What is it about us that seems so willing to give away control and responsibility?
No comments:
Post a Comment