Posted on 02/12/2013 3:14:51 PM PST by San Rafael Blue
Self Driving Cars!!!! I have seen a couple of them in the Northern California Bay Area. It looks like there is a metal mixing bowl on top of the roof. The little mixing bowl spins round and round, as it monitors all movement within it's 360 degree circumference. REE-MARK-ABLE! No?
We are getting to the point where machines, or robotic systems will be able to drive us around, if that is our choice. I'm someone who got my license at 14, like most people, but did not do much driving till years later.
I recall being twenty, during the Bi-Centenial 1976, 4th of July. I wanted to drive to the local Krogers to pick up more Vernor's Ginger Ale. I went to speak to my Dad and hopefully get the keys. Dad was sitting eating his early lunch of barbeque. My father was a great outdoors barbeque cook. He was so,,,,flustered and full of dread by my asking, just asking for the car keys, that as he q stood up to debate giving me the keys, his entire paper plate lunch spilled onto the carpeted dining room floor! Another fine mess. That was the last time I ever asked Daddy for the keys. My Mother was then mad at me for 'upsetting' my father. What?! Forget it! Not worth the hysteria.
I was in my late thirties before I bought my first car. It was a pale grey Cougar. I've grown used to driving my car myself. I prefer making my own calculations. I enjoy the excitement of navigating through traffic, most the time.
I can see some instances where having a self driving car would come in very handy. Nowadays, my father is quite old, and doesn't walk very well. However, he still has bouts of what I call Gypsy Fever, where he wishes to get out and watch the world whoosh by, while gently pressing that gas. For a physically disabled person (or mentally, I suppose) this would be a great way to get out of the house, reduce cabin fever, and retain a shread of independence from having to bargain with his snippy, selfish children, like me, if I forget my manners.
Like many ideas, I think self-driving cars will be really neat - right up till the moment the government begins to punish us for wanting to drive ourselves.
Ironically, back in the 1960s, when they were just inventing motorized wheelchairs, there were predictions that soon walking would become obsolete, because it would be so much easier to just ride.
I view the automated automobile as a godsend ~ for when I go blind at a minimum.
Google tested one of its cars by having it take a blind man to the grocery where he went in and bought a few things then came out to the car and went home ~ like normal.
I saw the Hand of God in that one ~ He does make his own prophets, even out of the stones on the ground if He wishes.
‘No Need To Walk Anymore?” Yikes, that sounds ominously like from that echoey song “In The Year 2525.
I think there was a cartoon movie with this theme about three years ago, a little yellow dump truck, all rusty and dirty. I forget the name of the film. Someone here probably knows it.
Agreed. And the sad part about it is that we will think it is a great idea right up to the moment we lose the freedom of choice.
The freedom of choice? We have a public road system. Currently it’s controlled by signs and drunk drivers. Imagine the future where you are among the elderly infirm and there are no signs you need worry about, nor drunk drivers ~ ever. You will be able to chose to go out for a ride!
That's part of what makes the eventual loss of choice inevitable - computers really will be better than average drivers, so we'll welcome the technology as "saving lives".
I've been driving for nearly 30 years, so I'm not sure I'll ever be comfortable letting my car drive me instead of me driving the car, but it certainly will beat being homebound due to illness or old age.
“WALL-E” was the movie. The humans had gone off-world and gotten so fat, moving about on hoverchairs and having robots do everything for them, that they could barely stand much less walk.
Yeah, it's not hard to see where this kind of technology could lead. "Pay-per-mile" taxation becomes a breeze - haven't paid your road taxes lately? No trip for you until you do. Government doesn't like where you're going? No Oreo Blizzard today.... It all sounds far-fetched (like ObamaCare), right up to the moment it comes to pass.
A critical issue is that such vehicles will displace millions of people who now earn a living driving.
More and more jobs, at higher and higher required intelligence levels, are being filled by computers instead of people. Cost and reliability are enormously better.
But what are we to do with the millions of people who are displaced? Up till now, the Luddites have been generally proven wrong. But there is no scientific law that this will always be the case.
The big question facing our society, and one almost nobody mentions, is what do we do with redundant people. Those people for whom there is no economic demand. Their number is increasing, as is the rate of this increase. Extrapolate that out a few years and it becomes frightening.
American Plains Indians were free and proud peoples till confined to reservations. By any rational standard they are much better off economically now than when they were nomadic. (Nomads, by definition, own only the stuff they can carry on horseback, which isn’t much.)
But the free Indians had a purpose and role in life they don’t have now, so alcoholism, drugs and despair dominate many of the reservations. No purpose, no roles, no self-respect. Same in the underclasses of USA and UK. Nobody is starving, but social pathologies run amok.
What do we do with the people who have no role in society?
“American Plains Indians were free and proud peoples till confined to reservations. By any rational standard they are much better off economically now than when they were nomadic. (Nomads, by definition, own only the stuff they can carry on horseback, which isn’t much.)
But the free Indians had a purpose and role in life they don’t have now, so alcoholism, drugs and despair dominate many of the reservations. No purpose, no roles, no self-respect. Same in the underclasses of USA and UK. Nobody is starving, but social pathologies run amok.”
Hahaha! Go back to Berkeley with that story.
The American Plains Indians (read Commanche) were like a Biker Gang in an area with no law enforcement, killing every man or beast that gave them pleasure and subjugating anyone who could be useful to them including their own women.
They were called “savages” for a reason.
And, no they are not better off today on reservations than they were in say 1600 when they had what probably seemed like an endless supply of food, populations of other Indians to kill rape and enslave and no one to tell them no. American Plains Indians were a people who worshiped spooks, feathers and ghosts. Not a gentle bunch of folks, they killed each other for no good reason (ask an Apache about a Commanche) and not a people one would want to know.
You are quite right that most of the nomadic tribes were not nice people by our standards. But that is not relevant.
They were free, and they were brave, and they did have a feeling of purpose in their lives that most of them don’t have today.
That was my point, not that they were nice people we’d enjoy going out to dinner with.
I said economically better off. You really claim that American Indians of today, with houses, cars, computers and cable TV don't have more "stuff" than the Indians of 1600? Who (like other peoples of the time) often starved to death when a harvest failed or game migrated out of reach.
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