this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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On the flip side I’m worried about manufacturers realizing that the continuous revenue stream from autonomous vehicles is more profitable than selling vehicles outright thereby increasing the cost of buying a vehicle to the point where ownership becomes functionally obsolete except to the ultra-wealthy. This also makes it much easier to restrict the movement of people. Self driving car companies could easily disable the ability to travel to entire areas either because they say they’re too dangerous or not profitable enough to operate in. I can imagine entire cities and rural areas becoming ghost towns. While personally I think autonomous vehicles, in a vacuum, have the potential to save countless lives, the reality is that in time we will be giving the companies making these vehicles the ability to dictate where we can and cannot go.
I think this is spot on.
Adding onto this, city driving is just... different, in a way that I think a human element is always going to be needed. Sometimes you need to take a risky left, or cut across the double yellow lines into the other lane past someone, or run a yellow. Are these things unsafe? Of course. But when it's rush hour you have to be a dick just to get through it sometimes. In 2016, Uber built and tested their self-driving cars in my city of Pittsburgh, because we notoriously have some of the worst and most confusing spaghetti messes of roads in the country. They stopped whenever a car struck and killed someone. I rode in one one time because I was just tryin to call an Uber for a concert, and since it couldn't go on the highway it took the worst way through downtown, and got stuck at a red light for over 5 minutes because the car was waiting to take a left, and everyone was going around us and not giving us a break.
Also, all these new cars with their auto-correcting features scare the shit out of me. What happens when you go across the double yellow to go around someone riding a bicycle and it swerves you back into their lane?
You could call these bugs to be worked out but I feel infinitely safer when I'm the one doing the driving. In a perfect world maybe our infrastructure and transport would've been planned differently but I swear half the roads around here are based on deer trails or something, winding through crazy hills in the woods. I've heard self-driving cars do best on roads specially designed for them. We can't even get the city to fix our thousands of potholes, or crumbling infrastructure. We had a major bridge collapse a couple years ago, and the way it was rated during inspections was pretty close to the other ones around here. So how on earth are self-driving car roads going to be put in?
That's probably going to happen with or without self-driving.