US agency takes first step to mandate anti-drunk driving technology
news.yahoo.com
news.yahoo.com
> "If it's 99.9% accurate, you could have a million false positives," [Acting NHTSA Administrator Ann] Carlson said. "Those false positives could be somebody trying to get to the hospital for an emergency."
Don’t get the pitchforks out yet, the odds are still heavily against this ever happening.
Self-driving cars really is the ultimate solution.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims will be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
Fine, cars can let you speed but you get automatically fined, is that better?
Defaulting to creating laws or enforcement that takes away your personal autonomy is tyranny. Getting rights back will always be harder than losing them.
Having an emergency button is a great idea. Lights could flash to let people know they should get out of the way...
Some laws I could see falling under the scope of the Lewis quote might be laws against birth control, homosexuality/sodomy, or maybe even gambling. But speeding and driving recklessly are not victimless crimes stochastically.
> But speeding and driving recklessly are not victimless crimes
Speeding is, by definition, a victimless crime.
> …stochastically.
The implied syllogism is deeply authoritarian. Few acts victimless stochastically.
He was against moral legislation, such as laws against homosexuality and laws promoting marriage, but, again, speeding laws are not moral legislation. They are there for public safety, not public morality. That said, putting aside the law, he was a believer in morality, and I’m confident he would have opposed putting others’ lives at risk for one’s own selfish reasons.
> Speeding is, by definition, a victimless crime. Over 10,000 people in the US die in speeding-related accidents every year.
He was, more or less, a classical liberal. He may well have supported some common sense speed limits (as do I), but he would have been appalled at the idea of the government having the ability to remotely enforce speed limits in individual cars.
> Over 10,000 people in the US die in speeding-related accidents every year.
Millions of people exceed the speed limit every day without harming anyone. They are not responsible for deaths caused by other people, hence their speeding is a victimless crime. Attempting to blame all of society for the crimes of a feckless few is nonsensical.
[1] Though FCC regulations on radio may be a gray line here, but I'm not too familiar with them.
But it’s increasingly clear that the wealthy classes don’t think people should have this level of self-determination as they don’t appear to be able to govern themselves responsibly enough to consciously avoid catastrophic global consequences. Or perhaps the threat of various catastrophes are the mechanisms being used to implement policies even if they are simply being leveraged as an excuse to implement control.
In the words of Slovenian philosopher Slavoy Žižek:
> ‘To grasp the whole scope of this control and manipulation one should move beyond the link between private corporations and political parties…, to the interpenetration of data-processing companies like Google or Facebook and state security agencies. … The overall image emerging … provides an adequate and terrifying vision of new forms of social control that make the good old twentieth-century “totalitarianism” a rather primitive and clumsy machine of control’.
If you want to be free, vote with your wallet and stop buying this intermediate and compromised junk. On this site we all love technology and have a vision for the future that's possible now, but until we fix the governments of the world, it's just a pipe dream.
Because really, there's so much tech second-guessing the driver in a modern car, I wish it would just do the driving itself instead of constantly checking up on me. And I hate driving anyway.
Unfortunately this seems perpetually "only a few years away" but never seems to actually get closer.
I suspect it will be some time before we can get insurance policys for privately owned autonomous vehicles. If Google own the car and wrote the AI software then there’s only one party who is ultimately responsible should a collision occour. This is more complicated if you privately own an autonomous vehicle which is in an accident. Does the AI share culpability with the owner? How will insurance claims work?
Tesla requires users “maintain control and responsibility for your vehicle” while autopilot is on, and it feels like that is a CYA hedge should autopilot fail (“see, we told them to stay in control”).
I understand it will require a bit of a legal rethink, but I don't give a shit. The industry will just have to figure this one out. And in the end it's the insurance company that's financially responsible anyway, whether it's a human driver or computer in control.
But the legal issues are really the least thing that should hold this back. Don't forget it will actually make roads a lot safer by no longer having people in a hurry run red lights or cut off other drivers. And it will be good for the environment as well, as autonomous vehicles will be able to coordinate together on optimal speeds in busy conditions, alleviating the need for stop & go traffic jams.
Legal stuff is really meant to serve society, not hold it back.