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Comment by PedroBatista | Hacker News Reader

They can also cut our balls once and for all and put us out of our misery.

So much is spent pursuing "safety" and squeezing that extra minute of "productivity" that everyone is forgetting to live their lives as human beings.

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I don't see the connection between driving and "living my life as a human being", or the connection between riding in an automated vehicle and "having my balls cut".

Human identity has nothing to do with driving. I can't wait until I don't have to do it anymore.

I generally disagree with the GP post, but I think automated cars will almost certainly result in more closely monitored and controlled travel.

No more so than already exists by almost everybody carrying a mobile phone.

At least you can smash it with a rock and continue to go where you want to go, when you want and how you want.

By not knowing how to drive something, you are losing an important ability. Your reach will be 3 or 4 miles at most, and over time this passive "I just want to [_____], do it for me" mentality sets in.

And for what? just not to drive? to have more 20min available to check your Twitter stream?

Remember, you are choosing to be ignorant in a very important aspect of modern live, and i guess only those who at some point were deprived of it realize their importance.

Seriously? Most of the world's population doesn't drive a car. It's not good for very long distances and not good for very dense urban areas where traffic is slow and parking is lacking. It can't drive in rural areas (unless you have a sturdy jeep) and it costs a lot of money. Also, it has a non-negligible probability to kill you along the way.

The modern car is not some one-true solution to transportation, it's great success in the US has a lot to do with the patterns of suburban sprawl and to destruction of the rail system by the car manufacturers.

I suspect the car is going out of fashion as people move more and more into dense cities.

Most of the world's population doesn't drive a car because they can't afford one.

"I suspect the car is going out of fashion as people move more and more into dense cities."

Really? millions and millions of chinese people moved to massive urban areas and the first thing they buy when they earn some money is a car or a motorcycle, making China the biggest auto market in the world around 2010/11. Pretty much the same pattern with the "BRIC"s

Look, everywhere outside the same old cosmopolitan places where the reality distortion field is too strong, people will own a car and they will make roads and bridges so they can happily drive them.

I hate driving and can't wait to get my hands on such a car. I've got far more interesting things to be doing with my time than staring at a road. Don't you?

You are hating a mechanism that allows you to live the life you have now ( which might be pretty good compared to 95% of the population ).

If you hate it so much, why not replacing it with electrons aka the Internet?

Do you even understand the concept of "trade-off" ?

The act of driving does not allow me to live the life I have now. The act of travelling does.

I don't understand your claim that the act of staring at a road and pulling leavers is somehow beneficial to me, or anybody else.

The act of you BEING ABLE to. Thats the point i was making in the first post.

I want the right to be able to walk around a busy city centre swinging a baseball bat randomly at head hight. I know it's dangerous and pointless, but if you don't let me do it, you may as well castrate me. It's all about freedom man!

Sound ridiculous to you? Now you understand why you sound ridiculous to me.

Yes, because driving a car is "dangerous and pointless" so that baseball thing it's a perfect analogy.

Since you are at it, lets talk about pre-crime too.

Driving a car is dangerous and pointless, if it can be done better by a computer...

You seem to think your rights are infringed if you are prevented from staring at a road and pulling some levers. Well, my rights are infringed if you're allowed to choose to risk my life by driving manually on the same road as me. You don't get to make that choice.

This discussion seems to be unimportant anyway. I am happily convinced that things will turn out the way I want them to when the technology matures. You will not be able to risk my life by manually driving your car on the same road as me and my robot car. And if that makes you feel like less of a man, then maybe you need to re-prioritise what's important to you.

Ohh those mean cars with their dangerous levers! Risking my live every single day, tearing apart my hyper self preservation illusions so carefully developed over the years, also bees, their are evil.

Lets restrict and regulate other people's abilities so i can sleep at night knowing that there is not a single chance anything happens to me that i didn't approve before hand and if that super smart computer that drives 100% better that humans 100% of the time ever fails, i can just sue their asses and feel instantly better with my self.

btw, no skating on the side walk, you might touch me.

About 40,000 Americans die in road accidents a year. 90% of those due to human error. If you think that your freedom to mindlessly stare at some tarmac is worth 36,000 dead Americans every year, that's your right. Good luck trying prevent the inevitable. More realistically, good luck whining about your freedoms on the Internet.

Finally! the ad-hoc statistics card was played and it came attached with the "but think of the children" postcard too.

btw, if someday you feel the need to stop pulling out stats of your ass, here it is:

http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/transportation/m...

Are you drunk? Not only did I not mention children, but the documentation at the link you yourself provided, backs up my stats...

What's so special about driving? It's a task that has only been available to humans for a century.

And look where we are now compared to every single century...

We've made large leaps in the last century, but I think deodorant is a bigger factor than motor vehicles. It came to prominence around the same time we started making big progress. Coincidence? I think not.

Sure, especially when all the ingredients composing a deodorant can are extracted, synthesized and produced by magical gnomes that ship their product directly to you using highly efficient automated unicorns receiving 5 bars of 4G pretty much everywhere in the world.

That's horn antenna technology at work.

Industrialization made cars finally feasible, not the other way around. It takes cleverness and tinkering to maintain a car (less so when new), but operating it is not a human-level task; I'm pretty sure a monkey could be trained to do it.

Real men ride horses, everyone knows that!

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