People will buy Teslas, then instead of having them sit in a parking lot all day while they're working, the car will be out giving rides to others autonomously. The top 10% extracting that much more from the 90%...

Vault 7 - CIA "Looked Into" Hacking Cars in 2014

https://hangthebankers.com/wikileaks-vault-7-cia-hack-cars-kill-michael-...

Heh... Gotta love a site with a name like that, right? Lots of links there...

No way I can afford one as things stand now, but I kind of like the idea of sitting back and watching the scenery as I enjoy a good beer or something similar.

we're all sitting here saying, "NO WAY! I'm not giving up control!", but the average schmuck just goes along ... kicking off his shoes before getting on the airplane, handing over the keys to his privacy to facebook and alexa, smiling cheerfully at the now ubiquitous surveillance cameras ...

And when 90% meekly submit, your resistance is futile.

However, at least some afford older, inexpensive used cars that they rely on for grocery shopping, transportation to work, and sometimes, even housing after their house is foreclosed or they're evicted from an apartment.

This is what I'm planning to use my car for in case things go south. Mine is 20 years old with some recent work on it and more needed plus tires, but it's been paid for awhile and I only have uninsured motorists for it. Gas is paid for by my work comp insurance. I had to use uber and it was more than my insurance.

My first thought when reading this was the same as k9' disc's. Sure thing. Put people in autonomous cars and then the PTB hack the ones that have dissidents in them and takes them to FEMA camps. Gee. What could go wrong?

Does every car suddenly stop and become immovable?

"... but the average schmuck just goes along ... kicking off his shoes before getting on the airplane, handing over the keys to his privacy to facebook and alexa, smiling cheerfully at the now ubiquitous surveillance cameras ..."

As anyone who has flown recently knows, dealing with the TSA checkpoints at airports is quite intimidating. Everyone is well aware that if you protest or are seen as uncooperative in any way you can end up being taken to an isolated room and interrogated, possibly strip searched and almost certainly miss your flight. The only way you will ever see the public standing up to this treatment is if everyone on the security line refuses to cooperate. Things have not reached that critical mass just yet.

As far as privacy is concerned, it is possible to avoid Facebook (I know people who do) and to avoid having a listening device--Alexa or whatever--in your home. But this whole deal of invading our privacy to benefit big data is something that has been put on by stealth--you have to read the fine print in agreements full of legalese to even begin to comprehend what is going on, or you have to be obsessive about researching this stuff, which most people simply do not have time for. There is nothing cheerful about this; it is a matter of a gradual encroachment on people's rights that would, again, take mass protest to reverse.

This does not mean that people don't care about their rights to travel unmolested, to privacy, etc. They just don't see what they can individually do about it without suffering worse consequences.

is increasing, report finds Cheap gas and SUVs, that is what the capitalists are selling and the consumers are buying. Moar asphalt, more paving continues, more freeway parking lots. The infrastructure is based on oil, all else is kabuki to distract from yet another failure of government to provide... anything the planners have been tasked to provide. Autonomous profits for Wall Street, the untouchables get rich as the world burns.

California is failing to meet its goals to reduce vehicle travel, imperiling efforts to achieve ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets, according to a state report released Monday.

The report by the California Air Resources Board, the state’s climate change regulator, found that carbon emissions per capita from vehicle travel in California were increasing. That’s despite a decade-old law that required regions across the state to plan for housing growth so that people could live closer to where they work or public transit and reduce their time on the state’s roadways.

“California — at the state, regional and local levels — has not yet gone far enough in making the systemic and structural changes to how we build and invest in communities that are needed to meet state climate goals,” the report said.

blah blah blah the report said. Same as it ever was, CORRUPT. Anyone else ever lived in the same area for six decades? As things fall apart, so do the political promises. lather rinse repeat

amerika's coming attraction
the future happens here first

Still smelling of barf and cigarette smoke and god knows what else on the seats?
I would buy one for myself. I'm not that far away from 80 years old and having a self-driving car would be better than being marooned like so many old people who have to give up driving.

Besides, I worked a long time as an embedded systems programmer, so I know all the things that can go wrong, yet, as I told my wife, "I still would trust a microprocessor, even one programmed by a clueless H1-B, over Illinois drivers." You really don't know how horrible they are here. As soon as you get out of state into Indiana or Wisconsin, you see the difference. New York has the rudest drivers, but at least they are competent. Illinois drivers drive like they are half-drunk and staring at their smart phone.

EDIT: Soon Illinois will have legal pot. I'm for that, but shudder to think what the roads will be like when half of them are toking while driving.

Autonomous cars use a machine-learning algorithm as they go. In other words, they practice on us to learn how to drive, with occasionally fatal results. I consider this conducting experiments on human subjects without informed consent. If a scientist or student tried something like this, they'd be in a heap o' trouble. It should be totally illegal on the face of it, but money talks. I hope some communities might be able to use this argument to prohibit autonomous cars.

In the 60's, there was an sf novel out called "The Four-Day Weekend", where autonomous cars under a central machine intelligence decided to take over.

My mother was put in a wheelchair for life when an 85 year old driver mowed her and her friends down. One lost a leg. I can see arguments for removing the human element from machine operation under some circumstances, but I WILL NOT trust this to a market/profit decision!