> Yet this article chooses to worry about the cars?
The article doesn't really focus on your car phoning home and telling Google where you are.
Instead, it talks about restrictions on how fast you can drive, driving style, and loss of autonomy by having an AI drive for you. Almost all of the benefits being touted as advantages of driver-less cars only become reality if everyone uses the AI. In theory, in some dystopian future, everyone would be forced to rely on the AI to drive.
I don't want to be forced into a situation where I cannot drive my car.
Of course, the problem here isn't the presence of some AI, but laws requiring me to use one. Having the choice to drive with an AI is certainly better than not having the choice, but choice is key.
> The article doesn't really focus on your car phoning home and telling Google where you are.
Apparently you and I didn't read the same article, since the main worry of the article seemed to be that Google can't be trusted with your data.
>Almost all of the benefits being touted as advantages of driver-less cars only become reality if everyone uses the AI.
The article does imply this, but it's simply not true. Autonomous cars will be able to reduce accidents and park themselves the moment they are available. There have been some past pie-in-the-sky ideas of ultra-high-speed internetworked cars, but the practical problems of those are (perhaps counter-intuitively) harder to solve than the technical problem of a car that can drive autonomously without communicating to other vehicles.
Furthermore it is obvious with a little thought that autonomous vehicles will have to be able to function well on roads where every other car is driven by a human. Otherwise there will never be a "first" autonomous car.
> In theory, in some dystopian future, everyone would be forced to rely on the AI to drive.
1) IMO that is still far in the future
2) Whether or not this is dystopian is subject to debate; certainly in the hypothetical future where the car sends all your travel data Megacorp X without any option to opt-out it's dystopian, but the same would be true of mandated tracking devices in cars without mandated autonomy. I personally would be perfectly happy with a future where manual driving was forbidden on public thoroughfares but I could still take a sports car to Laguna Seca and burn some rubber.
The article doesn't really focus on your car phoning home and telling Google where you are.
Instead, it talks about restrictions on how fast you can drive, driving style, and loss of autonomy by having an AI drive for you. Almost all of the benefits being touted as advantages of driver-less cars only become reality if everyone uses the AI. In theory, in some dystopian future, everyone would be forced to rely on the AI to drive.
I don't want to be forced into a situation where I cannot drive my car.
Of course, the problem here isn't the presence of some AI, but laws requiring me to use one. Having the choice to drive with an AI is certainly better than not having the choice, but choice is key.