The Future of Driverless Vehicles Is Violent Vandalism

We’ve been hearing about the future of driverless vehicles for a few years now. Testing is well under way in several cities, and development continues apace.

One reason big companies are so gung-ho about the idea? Not having to pay human drivers for trucking and other services would save them a lot. Humans, on the other hand, would lose a huge source of income from those types of jobs. I’ve long said that the obvious result of such a dynamic would be people f–king around with and even outright sabotaging such vehicles. You can’t feel guilty about property damage the same way you do about attacking actual people.

It seems my predictions were right on the mark:

www.nytimes.com/2018/12/31/us/waymo-self-driving-cars-arizona-attacks.html

The article lists problems one company testing driverless vans is having in one Arizona town. Vandals and attackers are a small, but constant problem, which the company does not prosecute, fearing bad publicity.

These driverless vehicles still have an actual human being inside of them for stand-by situations. Many of them, the article contends, switch the vans back into manual mode to avoid human attackers.

Imagine what will happen when the driverless cars, trucks, and vans are truly without a human driver… and when jobs are lost to this new innovation, which is one of the largest sources of employment: delivery drivers, public transportation, and taxi or shuttle services.

It’s weird to me that all these gung-ho tech people didn’t see this problem coming. It will get LOTS worse. It may even entirely derail the whole concept of driverless technology. What good is it if people keep damaging your sh-t? Insurance companies will charge high premiums for coverage with those companies to start, and will likely refuse to cover driverless vehicles eventually. Then all that investment will go for nothing, pretty much. But by that time we’ll likely have other, larger, issues to worry about…