Some things I will never, ever do:
- Vote for a Metro Democrat
- Buy a Windows phone
- Own a “driverless car“.
The first is common sense; I’d no more vote for one of them than Hector Maduro. The second seems just good sense.
The last? It’s unamerican:
These days, Real Americans don’t much go to sea [a Moby Dick reference – Ed.] to relieve the damp, drizzly Novembers in our souls, but we do like to fire up the muscle Mustang or the F-150 truck with the gun rack and head out on the open road, following our noses and letting the trade winds blow us where they may.Or at least we used to like it. But with the advent of the abomination known as the “self-driving car,” one of our most precious freedoms is now in jeopardy.
I mean, who asked for this? Communists? Women? (I know, same thing, voting-wise.) Sob sisters, pantywaists, geeks, pencil necks, and nancy boys? I suspect them all. It’s bad enough to climb into the cockpit of a new car these days and be confronted with a home entertainment center on wheels, complete with giant video screens that don’t do a damn thing electronically a 1934 Packard couldn’t do manually back in the day when men were men, women loved them for it, and we had the culture to prove it.
Now what? A “self-driving” car is an oxymoron, in the same way that “paying for a tax cut” is. Someone or something is going to be driving that car, and the whole point here is that it ain’t going to be you, brother.
Never going to do it. Ever.
I mean, who asked for this? Communists? Women? (I know, same thing, voting-wise.) Sob sisters, pantywaists, geeks, pencil necks, and nancy boys? I suspect them all.
Capitalists asked for it. Imagine the jobs you could eliminate! I mean, imagine how much more efficient transportation would become!
The actual humans I have heard talk about how desirable a self driving is tend to be either people with long commutes, or are elderly and no longer up to driving.
Self driving trucks on the interstate is where the money is at, not delivering you from your driveway to your employer’s parking lot.
I can hear the Met Council droogs shouting with glee at the prospect of adding more single purpose, inefficient infrastructure. “We’ve got to have lanes dedicated to driverless vehicles”!
But it’s perfect: Our moral and intellectual “betters” can program in “exclusion zones” for the car, so it won’t take us anywhere that’s “dangerous”, like a gun show or a speech by anyone conservative. Also, it will be so much better for the environment when we’re all rationed a specific number of miles per month. It could have a hate speech sensor so the car won’t move if we listen to talk radio or start talking about things like limited government and fiscal responsibility.
I, for one, am ready to embrace this brave new world…
On the bright side for liability litigators “driverless vehicles” open up a whole new litigation revenue stream since suing the “owner”/occupant of the car will become less and less fruitful but suing the car maker and the software makers (cough Microsoft, google, Apple, cough) will give the enterprising PI lawyer targets with vast deep pockets to plumb. Of course given Bezos stranglehold on Washington congresscritters we can expect a carefully carved out liability exemption for driverless Amazon vehicles (ask your car to pull over when you see the big “A” on that truck in your rear view display)
I can only imagine the new Microsoft car getting the blue screen of death at 75mph! (what could possibly go wrong?)
I can only imagine the new Microsoft car getting the blue screen of death at 75mph! (what could possibly go wrong?)
@bikebubba: You’re assuming that the Microsoft car will even move?
More likely scenario: You have to install a service pack and then the car will only be able to go 30 mph because of machine lag…
bb, scrooGle owns the autodrive market. In other words, it will take you were it thinks you should go.
And what’s with the piling on M$? I own one and it is a much better phone than anything monopolistic scrapPle wants to cram down your throat, and that you have to update every year just to keep up with the technologies being used for years by other manufacturers. And I can at least turn off spying features on my phone, something you cannot do on scrapPle and scrooGle phones. Next thing you will start saying Elon Musk is something other than a snake oil salesman. Sheesh.
You won’t get me in a driverless car………….errrrr………I’ll give up my steering wheel only when you pry it from my cold, dead hands!!!
JPA: OK, when the Google car gets the blue screen of death. I am reminded of a friend who responded to the idea of a “smart gun” by noting that as someone who wrote firmware for a living, the last thing he’d want is for his life to depend on that kind of firmware. Just too many predictable problems.
Plus, let’s be honest. Unless you’re stuck in traffic, driving can be really fun. So driverless cars aren’t quite as dumb an idea as driverless sex, it’s close.
JPA
M$ believes that the OS As A Service business model is a roaring success. It is easy to predict that M$ will implement their driverless car as Drivetrain As A Service™ and Navigation As A Service™ with the constant Customer Experience call homes and the inevitable monthly patches and semi-annual upgrades that would capture your car rendering it unusable for hours or even days (if you happen to be in a rural area with metered satellite service)
I can hear the Met Council droogs shouting with glee at the prospect of adding more single purpose, inefficient infrastructure. “We’ve got to have lanes dedicated to driverless vehicles”!
BH: They won’t ADD infrastructure. They’ll simply limit existing lanes to driverless cars, causing even more pain to those of us who refuse to quit driving.