Ted talk on the driverless car.

Yep. I remember those days

I remember people gettin' dead, cause they weren't lookin' in the right direction. I remember what it was like. If you stepped into the street in front of your house, like right over there... you could DIE.... I remember when  if you went to a party and got drunk, you could kill other people, just by getting in your car and turning it on.

They had a kind of police officer, called a traffic cop, whose only job was to make sure you weren't being an idiot while behind the wheel. No really, Whole towns made money with this thing called a speeding ticket, 'cause people could ignore the rules on that chunk of road, and cops would chase 'em down, and make 'em pay.

There was a time of day you couldn't drive anywhere, 'cause all the cars were blocking everything, and everybody kept making little mistakes that caused everybody to stop moving. They named it  a "rush hour". No. I'm not making this up, goog it. Goog "traffic jam" too. That'll blow your mind.

I remember the first robot cars, the ones made by Google, yeah, the original one.  I 'member how everybody thought they were MORE dangerous than letting a guy with three kids drive a car manually. Everybody thought those things weren't all that safe, for some reason.  Then the reports started coming in, a few glitches were spotted, some of them bad ones, but overall people were safer in a robot car, than in their own... Soon all the fancy cars could drive themselves, with overrides if you didn't want to, of course. Then ALL the cars could drive themselves... then  people could get in trouble for switching to manual while on the highway, and stuff.


No, I'm serious, people would do that.  Turn off the car's driving while going a hundred miles an hour. Every car around would go right into collision avoidance and you'd have this one damned fool looking like a shark chasing a school of fish what with all the cars dodging the idiot. Try as hard as he could, he couldn't hit any of them, they reacted so much faster than the fool. If he was trying to kill himself, best he could do was head for a wall, he sure wasn't gonna hit another car.

So nowadays it's a felony to go to manual mode without a damn good reason. What was it, about ten years ago someone did that? They had to look up what that used be called. A "traffic fatality", they hadn't seen one in so long.