Hacker News Reader

Comment by newswriter99 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think this is as much of a troglodyte statement as much as it is a lack of personal autonomy and freedom.

The user isn't against the horse-less carriage out of fear, he's against the horse-less carriage because the option to control the horse has also been removed.

View on HN

It is possible that a self-driving car could still give you personal autonomy. Although you would lose direct mechanical control over the car, it is still technically possible to implement a self-driving car that always goes exactly where the occupant tells it to, without ever phoning home. Of course, none of the companies making self-driving cars actually want that, and most of the people buying them either don't care or don't realise, so it's probably not going to happen.

Yeah no thanks.

"jstaney you are under arrest - remain calm your vehicle will deliver you to the nearest processing facility. Do not attempt to control the vehicle. Do not attempt to exit the vehicle. Any action deemed as attempting to exit the vehicle or prevent it from arriving at the detention facility will result in your immediate admission of guilt and the appropriate sentencing will commence. Have a nice day, thank you for using GovCloud Services."

Poor jstaney, confused by a bureaucratic error with notorious rogue air conditioning repairman jstanley...

You're talking right past the comment you're responding to, which is highlighting the distinction between the inherent aspects of the technology, and the non-inherent authoritarian aspects which will be shoved down our throat by business interests and government perverts (different specializations of the same group, really).

Similarly, we could easily have mobile phones that do not track us. It's just in none of the manufacturers' interest to design them, as the vanishing epsilon of people who care enough to pay extra do not offset the economies of scale from going with the current surveillance-based designs.

Having said that, one of the themes in discussion of mass surveillance is the quantitative difference of it being easier than a police department having to expend the effort of physically following someone around. Government (de jure or de facto) controlled cars will make the act of arresting someone similarly effortless.

A manual-driving car can just lock you in until the cops arrive.

*Directional preference input available with in-app purchase

I mean, most advancements in technology come with restrictions on personal autonomy and freedom. Today's urban factory workers have significantly less autonomy than independent craftsmen, who had less autonomy than subsistence-farming homesteaders on the prairie, who had less autonomy than the Native American tribes they replaced.

Historically, it seems not to matter. The advancements in technology let societies that adopt them support a much higher population level. Those societies then go and kill off or enslave everyone who didn't adopt the new technologies, once a few generations have passed, their military supremacy is obvious, and there's enough cultural distance to view the adherents of the old technology as savage, subhuman primitives.

This. It's important to note that human society's major driver isn't freedom or self-actualization or any other variant of Maslow's heirarchy. The thing that drives every one of these decisions (from "let's stay in one place and grow crops" to "let's have a person spend their entire life attaching a single bolt to every single member of an infinite line of widgets" to "Let's pay a human to put things in boxes and dock his pay if he takes a break") is maximizing viable reproduction and minimizing the energy to do so.

So elevators vs stairs then?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com