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National Autonomous Vehicle Day 2025
Today is National Autonomous Vehicle Day and I’m glad it’s Saturday. I have a lot of thoughts on this topic, so let’s get rolling.
🤖 Distracted Driving? 🚗
The key with autonomous is the whole ecosystem. One of the keys to having truly fully autonomous is vehicles talking to each other. ~Mary Barra
If the cars are all talking to each other, wouldn’t that count as distracted driving?
How are you supposed to get through congested downtown traffic if your ride is chatting up that cute BMW in the passing lane?
Yes, I’m being facetious. I don’t have a problem with autonomous cars.
In fact, I would have loved to have had one on my formerly hours-long commutes.
If I could have sat in a mobile mini office and watched TV or even caught a nap, my mental health would have been a lot more robust.
The thing that gets me hot is not so much that there could be a time when you no longer drive a car yourself, but rather the assertion that not only will you not drive but you will not even own the car.
Whoa, Nelly. Them’s fighting words.
I believe that many people who hold this point of view are city dwellers for whom cars are already optional.
When your whole lifestyle is supported by taxis, busses and subways, the free-ranging autonomous car makes perfect sense.
Where I live, it’s beyond ridiculous.
People have to understand the use cases before prescribing the future for everyone.
People with taxi-facilitated lifestyles are planning to make that mandatory for the rest of us.
No fuckin’ thank you.
I’m not even as spread out as people in the Midwest, but in rural Pennsylvania the cityfolk-mandated autonomous robotaxis make no sense at all.
Here’s the case:
When I go out, it has to be with a purpose because EVERYTHING is miles away.
Sometimes we go out specifically to grocery shop and that’s a process in itself, but typically it’s more a matter of taking advantage of going out for a medical appointment, visiting family, attending some specific event somewhere.
While you’re out doing such a thing, you might stop on the way there to pick up non-perishable items or you might stop on the way back for frozen or refrigerated items or even just stuff that can’t sit around in the sun while you’re visiting or attending to business.
So, if we had this concept of ubiquitous autonomous vehicles, how are you supposed to do what you do with a personally owned vehicle?
Say, for instance, we’re going over to my In-Laws’ for a holiday or birthday get-together.
In a city, you take a taxi. You bring your gift bags or whatever food you’ve prepared. No biggie.
Out in the boonies, I expect to stick the aforementioned food or gifts in the car, maybe some folding chairs, maybe some books that Kelly is done reading. I also expect to maybe stop at the Walmart on the way there for paper plates or plasticware, perhaps.
Well, if we’ve got a free-ranging autonomous car and I go in the Walmart to get the party items, presto, no car, no folding chairs, no prepared food or gifts. They’ve nicked off to go take Mrs. Abernathy to her cardiologist and I get to wait for the next robotaxi.
Y’all, what the fuck?
No, as previously stated, I’d be perfectly happy to be a passenger in a self-driving car, but I want it to be MY self-driving car so that I know I can get to/from my In-Laws with any and all incidental stops and the goods retrieved from those stops with no worry of the thing just wandering off.
It is stupid and people who try to sell me on the idea are cordially invited to take a long walk off a short pier.
There are use cases that need to be facilitated, and these tunnel vision absolutists simply won’t hear it.
How about you mind your own business and let people use their cars however they need to?
🚗 What Even Is It? 🤖
The Two Opposite Futures of Self-Driving Cars
Okay, so this video is a couple years old, but she’s cute and bubbly so sue me.
She makes an excellent point. There is a way to go until genuinely autonomous cars are viable.
I would totally love to have a self-driving car handle NYC or Philly traffic for me so I would never have to try to do so ever again (not fun).
The concern I’d have with a steering wheel-less vehicle is that even with onboard best practices, physics is a thing.
Where I live, there are hills and narrow twisty roads. Add ice or snow and the AI driver has tons more variables to cope with.
As with the city-bound dipshits who can’t think of rural use cases, you also have the programmers who have never had to try to negotiate what is essentially a giant sledding hill in a car full of your wife and kids.
Maybe some day, AGI can handle that as easily as a no-adverse-conditions sunny, dry day.
Today is not that day.
It may be Autonomous Vehicles Day (and as you can see from the video) with some working models in use, but we’ve got a way to go before we’re free of the need to handle driving.
It’s certainly something to look forward to.
💡 Autonomous Vehicles For Ideas 📚
Poetry, fiction as novels or short stories – these are autonomous as created by their authors. They should stand on their own, like pieces of furniture that should be judged as to their usefulness, elegance. ~F. Sionil Jose
He’s also got an excellent point. When you publish, your work becomes an “autonomous vehicle” of thought.
It stops being what you expected it to be, and it becomes what everyone perceives it to be.
People have their own perspectives and experiences that may overlap with what you’ve written.
For instance, there are people who are skydiving enthusiasts. I am not one of them. I was once and done.
I didn’t find it scary. Some people might be concerned about plummeting from 4500 feet before the chute deploys.
I had no problem with it. The fact that my junk got caught in the harness took a lot of joy out of the experience.
Even that is not what caused me to have less than no interest in repeating the experience.
It was boring.
Yeah, you heard me.
Boring.
So, I’m hanging from this stupid parachute watching Oklahoma approach at a leisurely pace.
The spotter had us pull the toggles to steer the thing to the landing zone.
My friend who had previously been in the Pararescue course pulled the thing hard and was apparently whipping around like a maplewing in a high gale.
Pass. Hard pass. I don’t go for that at Knoebels. I’m definitely not going for it on an actual parachute.
It was sort of like the Lazy River, only vertical and with my manly bits trapped between the harness and my thigh.
I just wanted to get to the ground, and I simply didn’t care. It was not an enjoyable time even if I had managed to adjust myself before finding out the hard way.
It was just boring.
I got to about 6′ above the ground and pulled the toggles down hard (as previously instructed) and landed as if I was walking off of an escalator.
If I want to walk off an escalator, I’ll go to the friggin’ Boscovs. Gimme a break. That’s a hundred bucks I’ll never get back and a Saturday more or less shot.
You could look at it from the glass half full perspective and say that I had that experience that so many never do.
Granted.
Even so, I look back on it and think, meh. Would have been perfectly happy never to have done so.
How does that relate to my original point?
So, if somebody’s telling me about how awesome skydiving is, I’m like cool story, bro. Hard pass.
The same with your books, short stories or poems.
You write it with a certain perspective and it’s read by somebody who doesn’t necessarily share that perspective.
Sure, they might appreciate being shown an experience they’d never be able to have for themselves.
Then again, they might be triggered as hell.
If I write a glowing post for Father’s Day about how much I like my dad but for someone who was abused by theirs, they might be feeling too triggered to experience the love and feels I’m trying to convey.
Once it’s out there, it stops being yours.
Naturally, you still have copyright but the work becomes whatever the reader perceives it to be.
It’s an autonomous vehicle, just like that free-ranging robotaxi running away with my string bean casserole and folding chairs.
That’s all for today. See you back on Wednesday for some cat 😻 hugging…