| There are some real positives to self-driving cars, but the negatives concern me far more. A lot of people who have great trust in the system probably won't see this as an issue until its too late, but one of the things that greatly concerns me about this notion of self-driving cars is its possible negative impact on human freedom. To some extent, a car represents freedom because its a tool that lets you go anywhere you want to go without requesting permission from anybody. Particularly for cars with internal combustion engines, the ability to quickly fuel up and travel anywhere affords you some measure of control over your life and choices, particularly in an emergency. A car that's run on software is effectively no longer yours and cannot be relied on as a tool to ensure control over your own fate. And electric cars (at least current versions) cannot quickly be refueled in the same way. A corporation decides to demand extra payments for some software that lets you travel on highways? What can you do about it when your new car is maxed out the wazoo with DRM? Government decides that it doesn't want its subjects to travel too far? Software update refuses to take you anywhere besides approved destinations and alerts authorities. This is no longer dystopian speculation or some distant past authoritarian experience: we've seen in modern western democratic countries in very recent experience that it was made illegal to travel too far from your house. I love a lot of the tech behind Teslas and electric cars, but I don't trust the scenario where my car can be manipulated entirely by software and there's no absolute fully physical manual override that ensures a human can control it. |