[hyperman1]

To be honest, not being allowed to drive your own vehicle is probably a good thing.

See e.g. https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index.... From the first few paragraphs:

  Road traffic crashes are a leading cause of death in the United States for people aged 1–54     

  More than half of those killed are pedestrians, motorcyclists, or cyclists.

Drivers risk other people's lives, hence, other people have a right to demand safety from drivers' actions. Supposing computers do get better than humans in the future, why not just stop humans from doing this dangerous activity?

If someone wants to do some old school driving in 2040, go have fun on a private racetrack or whatever. You can even ignore speed limits.

[zizee]

It does wrestle a lot of control from the individual though. It's not hard to imagine possible abuses of power. Tracking everyone's movements is just the start. What if some government decided to deny service to someone? Or not let certain groups travel to certain places. Imagine opportunities for havoc due to hacking

I'd still like driverless cars, but privacy and freedom of movement rights protections need to be thought about.

[hyperman1]

There are 2 separate aspects here: Driverless, and governement controlled. A driverless car might be a car like today's, except with a computer on board. Governement doesn't connect with your car at an individual level, even if they might adapt the road code a bit to make it more easy on the cars.

The problems you mention are real, but a driverless car doesn't change much. Havoc due to hacking is already possible today, with OTA software updates for cars. Tracking is also possible with cell phones. Driverless car software could be like GPS updates today: Some corporation provides a yearly update and that's it.

[noduerme]

>> Havoc due to hacking is already possible today

But it's still legal to buy and drive a car from the 80s that can't be hacked.

Looking ahead, my concern is that we'll begin to see laws that restrict human controlled vehicles from autonomous lanes and eventually whole roads. This would take a lot of burden off the manufacturers. If cars can use a common protocol to communicate across brands, you don't even need traffic lights or turn signals; you don't even need to stop at intersections. Cars can just slow down or speed up by a tiny bit in coordination with other traffic. At that point it will be impossible for a human to drive at all.

It's impossible to separate increasing vehicle autonomy from increased government control. Once there's an ability to make any car pull over to the side remotely, knowing who is in it and where it's going, all freedom of movement and therefore all human autonomy exists completely at the whim of government. That level of control will be abused sooner rather than later, if not in America then certainly in authoritarian states.

Full self driving is an authoritarian trap.

[egypturnash]

How... how would pedestrians cross these streets?

[noduerme]

You could still have crosswalk lights without having traffic signals. Cars on the network would slow, reroute or stop if the pedestrian crossing lights were active. But if there were no pedestrians they could run through intersections at full speed at 90deg angles to each other, as long as they were all timed with the cross-traffic.

To me this is an extremely dystopian outcome, but it's inexorably where we're going once we have full self-driving. And the Tesla fans, not to mention people who are like "oh humans shouldn't even be allowed to drive! Too dangerous!" will be living in this and looking back wistfully at the days when you could make eye contact with a driver and know whether it was safe to cross the street.

[hyperman1]

What's missing in this analysis is everything not a car or pedestrian. Bikes, scooters, ... So this vision can't become truth. Now I understand these are rare in the US, so maybe you're from over there?

My guess is we'll establish a maximum speed allowed to drive for humans, say 30km/h up to 50km/h. Speeds above this are reserved for robotic drivers, outside inhabited zones. Some of these roads are vehicle only, like we have E- routes in the EU or I-routes in the US. Here, non human traffic is forbidden. Then there are the secondary routes, where high speed should be robot-only and robots have to take care for other traffic. Roads can have markings adapted for easy optical recognition, but driverless cars are required to drive safely without them.

Eye contact with a driver does not at all make it safe to cross a street, as current death toll proves.

[elzbardico]

You don't need remote control for that. Just a etanol sensor, local processing, car computer refuses to start.

[noduerme]

>> If someone wants to do some old school driving in 2040, go have fun on a private racetrack or whatever

This reminds me of how only rich people could afford to fly places in the 1940s; then the upper-middle class could afford airline vacations in the 60s-80s; then by the 2000s, it was available to everyone so everyone had to be treated like scum/cattle, and once again if you wanted to take a nice vacation you had to be rich and buy first class tickets, or rent a jet.

So your ideal vision for 2040 is that everyone is herded everywhere and no one gets to experience even a fleeting sense of freedom on the road, except the extremely rich who can afford cars that aren't road-legal and can only go to racetracks? Or maybe large private land holdings?

Because currently, we still live in a society where the average person can experience a modicum of freedom - mobility, autonomy, and privacy - by getting in their car and driving it without help from a computer or monitoring from the government. I think that's worth preserving. A generation that grows up without ever feeling that freedom will be way too easy to control.

Maybe driving your own car will seem anachronistic like, say, writing in full sentences without emojis. But if you think about what we'd be losing, as a personal experience of having the privilege to take yourself anywhere on your own recognizance, it seems like a massive step backwards to deprive humans of that. And it sounds like imprisonment.

[vagrantJin]

I certainly don't buy that your car is freedom trope sold to our parents to buy the latest car back in the sixties. Most cars are dailies and only ever drive between home, work, store ad nauseum. So the rosy tinted idea that cars are freedom just means more traffic, complaining about fuel, complaining about tires, complaining about insurance, and the forgetful fact that humans are driving around a metal and plastic box with several dozen litres of flammable fuel at 100km/h - while listening to shitty breakfast show radio.

No thanks.

I'd rather we do away with the car is freedom trope. Most cars arent even useful, just signals to your nieghbours and friends that you are, in fact, balling. No thanks. Uber had the right idea. Don't own it, go where you want and pay up. Should be cheap when it's automated. Don't like that then take public transport...and if you can - just walk. What happened to just walking?

Right...you can't because our spaces are designed for car travel, not people. Do you see my point?

[NDizzle]

Cars were my freedom. People live different lives, you know?

Did you drive 100+ miles, one way, for epic parties when you were in high school? I did. That's how rural Arkansas works.

My first tech job required me to go 130 miles one way for months before I could afford my own place and move closer. How would I have done that with your rules?!

[vagrantJin]

Take a bus.

Or a train.

[notreallyserio]

I have the opposite view: driving doesn't feel like freedom to me. It feels like a necessary evil forced upon my by prior generations. Using a self driving car to get around sounds a lot more free to me as I'd be free to do something other than stare at the road and listen to podcasts.

[postsantum]

I am sure it would work great with the upcoming quarantine of 2038. Fellow citizen, for your own good, your car has been geofenced to your local grocery shop

[noduerme]

This is my cubicle. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

Projecting 6 different insta feeds on the walls and floor and ceiling will be so freeing for our kids. They can save up for a Meta subscription with GTA GFE. Just like driving in a real car with a real girlfriend, but better.

[Scoundreller]

bicycles (wo)man!

[postsantum]

With the current average BMI my point still stands

[RNCTX]

You're never going to see Elon Musk assume liability for one of his exploding deathtraps. It will always come with the disclaimer that you're responsible for driving it.

Autopiloted cars are just investor marketing.