Your right to drive is being taken away, and not just by the courts.
If you’ve ever had to accompany anyone to traffic court or, worse, been there yourself. You most likely had the opportunity to hear the judge lecture some kid in the front of the bench.
Judge: Whose license is this?
Kid: Mine.
Judge: No! This is my license. I only allow you to hang onto it if you obey the law. Now . . .
It’s generally a kid because most everyone older has either heard this lecture or been told about it just before entering the courtroom. The judge is correct, at least in America. Sometimes it seems like they can take a person’s license on a whim. For many younger people it is also their only valid form of ID. Most don’t have the extra cash and/or patience to obtain the state ID while getting their driver’s license renewed.
A court, operating under the rule of law, should be able to take your license away. What about vehicle manufacturers though? While they haven’t been able to take the actual license (yet) they are doubling and tripling down on taking away your ability to drive.
Google and GM
People who think Google should be able to gather all of the information they want about you and sell it to whoever for however much in whatever form they want, think driverless cars are a good thing. For many GM’s Cruise has been a spectacular example of why AGILE is both a criminal and fraudulent software development methodology, yet GM is doubling down on it.
Despite a fatal crash Uber is bringing back their self-driving cars. Why? Because they don’t want to pay a living wage. Your right to drive and your right to have someone drive will both be taken away there.
What may shock even more people is the fact, right now, today, there are driverless semis on the road. Yep, 73,000+ pounds of screaming death and nobody behind the wheel. Add in the fact these systems have to be networked and the slip-shod AGILE software development methodology along with script-kiddie development tools and third world countries don’t need nuclear weapons to destroy us. Just enough of these on the road, an Internet connection, and probably a free download off the Dark Web. Make them all crash into something important at once.
#DisneyBoycott
Personally, I don’t mind the idea of a driverless commuter train. Unless a semi hauling something bad or very heavy parks on the track, you are going through. They already have in train continuity testing in case someone pulls up a rail. People are bad enough drivers. Do you really want to put your life in the hands of the lowest wage software developer GM can find? I know I don’t.
If there are any visa workers involved in creating any safety system on any vehicle all Americans should boycott the product, period.
You can change corporate behavior by putting the corporation out of business. If you honestly consider yourself an American you shouldn’t take your kids to a Disney owned park, go to their movies or in any other way consumer their products. #DisneyBoycott
GM and other companies engaging in this H1-B visa abuse should also be boycotted.
So, by the end of 2020 (or shortly thereafter) we are supposed to have thousands of self-driving vehicles on the road. How long before manufacturers are allowed to screw us all by getting rid of the steering wheel? 2025? 2030? Not only is your right to drive being taken away, so is your right to having someone at the wheel of every other vehicle on the road.
No Steering Wheel and No Changes to the Law
Can a high school student legally be expected to obtain a driver’s license when most cars no longer have a steering wheel?
Will the Federal government make it illegal for any state to issue a DUI to someone in a vehicle without a steering wheel? They damned well should because you can’t possibly be driving but you can be the religious terrorists in various government offices who love decrying anything outside of their strict (and warped) interpretation of religious text a sin to be taxed won’t let that happen.
Should you still be required to have a driver’s license to buy a car when that car does not have a steering wheel?
Most importantly, how long before enough self-driving vehicles are on the road to make them a viable terrorist weapon? How long before enough of them are infected with something like a bot-net virus allowing an outside entity to take control of them? We’ve already seen IoT (Internet of Things) is highly insecure and I have little reason to suspect, given the same development practices, that autonomous vehicles will be any more secure.
Off Won’t Mean Off
Will off now mean as little for a vehicle as it does for a desktop computer? What, you ask? When I turn my desktop off it turns off. Not exactly. Many of you reading this aren’t old enough to remember the big red switch on XT/AT and some later desktop and tower computers. Hopefully you can see the image to the left. Like a light switch, that was real. Power ran from the plug to the switch and through the switch to the power supply.
Today’s computers have those little buttons on the front. How do you think they work? Well, there is always some amount of power running through your power supply and the motherboard. When you press the switch and release it some signal gets sent back through the motherboard to tell the power supply to begin sending full power.
If that was a real power switch pressing it once while the computer was running would instantly turn the computer off. You wouldn’t get some popup dialog asking if you really want to shut down. You also wouldn’t have to hold it for 5+ seconds to physically power down a locked up or racing computer. At some level there is a bit of logic going on. If you have a keyboard with a power button there is even more logic going on.
Your Right to Drive and The Update Syndrome
Self-driving vehicles, with their continual need for updates will have even more logic running when they are “off.” They have to. How many of you have a Windows based laptop you leave powered off for weeks at a time? Even if you don’t normally leave it off for a week or more, this is an experiment you can conduct yourself, just leave it off for over a week. No matter how quickly it “seems to boot” when you turn it on, try actually doing something on the network like retrieving your email. It’s a living Hell. Why? Because Windows and every other application you have installed has an automatic update daemon running. As soon as it realizes it hasn’t checked for updates in over a week, every one of those daemons tries to pull down updates. If you have Norton or some other antivirus software installed this can be a big update. Oh, and let’s not forget the automatic “performance monitoring” software is going to start scanning your disk to update indexes while organizing your files for better performance.
The first 45+- minutes after you turn it on the laptop is virtually unusable. If your driverless vehicle isn’t always connected to get updates while not in use it will be the same. Not only will your right to drive be taken away, so will your right to actually get going, at least until the updates complete.
Think About the Map Database
How many of you own a Garmin or some other stand alone navigation device? When you finally update the maps, just how long does that take? A self-driving vehicle is going to have to keep navigation maps up to date. It cannot rely on a network server because it could pass through a dead zone which means it has to shut down unless it has local copies of the maps with the most recent traffic and construction updates.
Many people who live in cities and own vehicles only drive them on the weekends. Just how happy are you going to be if you have to start the car two hours in advance of actually going somewhere? Yeah. Off won’t mean off for self-driving vehicles. They will be checking for and applying updates until the battery goes dead. At least one computer will be running, connected to the Internet and vulnerable to attack.
Are you really going to give up the steering wheel for that?
