Source: Google’s Driverless Car Rear-Ended, Brin Says, Defending Effort – Bloomberg Business
Is this really a good idea? This driverless car idea is an invention looking for a need much like for example, a gas powered toothpick. Self flushing toilets or light switches that turn on and off automatically may have their uses, but have we become so lazy that we need self driving cars? It’s like sex without having to undress and clean up afterwards: is there a market for this?
These kinds of pursuits are contributing to the dweebing of the population; a process that has been on going for most of the last generation. If you think about it, the gradual transition from a society that communicates with others by the richness of language and voice to one in which interaction is mainly done by text is right at the leading edge of this dweebing. Instead of being inclusive, texting actually isolates people from one another. It increasingly dehumanizes the most elementary of human experiences to that of abstract interaction. Nuance and subtlety are eliminated to be replaced by the canned LOL or OMG.
Driverless cars would contribute even more to this sense of isolation. Besides, given the universal experience of software failures, long reboots and arcane glitches with ubiquitous computers, why would anyone place their welfare in the hands of the software geeks that are in charge of driverless cars? You don’t have to be paranoid to imagine that once you cede control of a vehicle to some monitoring facility, you are then at the mercy of whomever is programming that car. Imagine getting into one of these cars; the doors lock and the next thing you know, you’re at your mother in law’s place. There are already numerous options for people who feel that driving is just too much of an inconvenience. They’re called cabs.
