Self-driving cars are an oxymoron...

[Johnny1A]

The author of this piece waxes a bit silly in places, but amid the snark he's making a very serious and very real point that applies to automated systems in general:  ultimately, every single one of them is controlled by some human.

https://amgreatness.com/2017/11/24/say-no-to-the-driverless-car-for-civilizations-sake/

Now what? A “self-driving” car is an oxymoron, in the same way that “paying for a tax cut” is. Someone or something is going to be driving that car, and the whole point here is that it ain’t going to be you, brother.

Control really is a central theme here, and one of the reasons why so many governmental and corporate entities are so eager for this really is to get control out of individual hands.  Sometimes they have what are 'sort of' good intentions, sometimes not, but the result is the same.

[David Johnston]

Yes.  Someone will be driving.  But on the bright side that someone won't be drunk if they ever manage to get the bugs out enough to make them commercially viable.  

[Johnny1A]

On Sunday, November 4, 2018 at 11:06:33 AM UTC-6, David Johnston wrote:

Yes.  Someone will be driving.  But on the bright side that someone won't be drunk if they ever manage to get the bugs out enough to make them commercially viable.

True.  As with all technologies, 'automated' cars have beneficial and negative applications.  The problem is that the current social, economic, and political situation means that the most likely applications are precisely those that benefit centralized power (governmental and corporate) at the expense of the individual. 

It's sort of like with the Internet itself, it was never inevitable that it turn into a creepy, inherently insecure, shades-of-Orwell thing in 2018, other avenues always existed, but it evolved in the direction it did because of the political and social environment at its initiation.  Jaron Lanier has written on this, about how the dreamy idealism of the Internet's founding players, himself most definitely included, empowered the 'spy on the user' business model that drives Silicon Valley now.

Likewise, the economic and political pressure right now is toward corporate/government control of transport options.  Automated cars don't have to empower that, but that's the path of least resistance/most incentive.