I am not looking forward to self-driving cars. Technology is already intruding into my life in unwanted ways. What would technology do to my self-driving car, if it is already bothering me with my laptop?!!
Every time I turn on my computer, I have to wait for a message to pop-up asking me if I want to buy McAfee virus protection. My computer won’t work until this pop-up fully appears on my screen. Then, the McAfee pop-up can’t seem to establish an internet connection, so another pop-up tells me to try at another time. Now I don’t want McAfee, I don’t want the pop-up, and I most certainly don’t want to try again to secure a connection for a product I never wanted in the first place. No matter what I do, I can’t get rid of this pop-up about a product I don’t want. Then there are those involuntary updates that my computer does without my permission. Many times, I’ve had a good idea that I wanted to write right away, but my computer decides it needs an update, so I have to wait up to 15 minutes or so for the computer to update, and recite my idea over and over in my mind to keep from forgetting it. Then there was that day when Microsoft decided to update the OS on my office computer to a higher version when I was away on holidays. The upshot was that the printer went offline, and I had to bring in our tech guy to re-install the printer. Not to mention me learning yet another program when the other one worked just fine. My email account has decided to remind me after three days if I haven’t responded to an email I know full well about, but didn’t need to reply to.
Now about self-driving cars. What if I’m late to work, and my self-driving car decides to update its OS and I have to sit in the cold, and wait for my car to update and make me late for work??? I’ve driven cars that started beeping at me because it thought that I was driving too close to another car in the parking lot, or because another car drove too close to me which I clearly saw and the car startled me and almost caused an accident. How many pop-ups are going to plague me on my dashboard of the self-driving car? Maybe the car won’t start until I tell it that I don’t want McAfee on my car. I think that computer programmers have too much idle time and sit around thinking how to take away our own decision-making minds. I think that they think we need computers to make our decisions for us, and, with AI, maybe ultimately to think for us. What if my self-driving car decides that I really don’t want to go to the place I do want to go to??
David Fekete 