The first time I watched The Jetsons, I was eleven years old, and I thought they were pretty neat. The way they zipped around Orbit City in their flying cars was a great departure from the way we used to travel. My parents owned a light blue station wagon then, where we'd all pack in and head to burger and ice cream places like Jumpin' Jacks in the summer, or the mall on Saturdays. They loved taking the back roads which meant the slowest possible way to get to all the places, so my sister and I often took turns riding in the back cargo space, sometimes both fitting back there. My sister, at the time, was taller than me, with her lanky frame taking up most of the back space. Watching George, Jane, Judy and Elroy fly through the skies looked way more appealing than getting jabbed in the ribs with my sister's foot.
The Jetsons were not my initial depiction of futuristic things back then. That belonged to the inside cover of my mother's high school yearbook. Her yearbook staff decided to design the inside cover with images of the 1964-65 New York World's Fair, which took place in Flushing Meadows Park in Queens over the course of two six-month seasons. The fair focused on the culture and technology of the mid-20th century, featuring pavilions of major United States corporations demonstrating their vision and concepts for future use. General Motors' "Futurama" was a massive exhibit at both the 1939 Fair and 1964, showcasing advances in technology with displays of concept cars that looked remarkably like those on The Jetsons, except it was still on wheels.
So it's now 2018 and we're out here driving electric cars, more fuel efficient cars, and cars we can start remotely. That's amazing! But, they all still have wheels. Baby steps, I guess. We've certainly come a long way since the massive station wagons of the late 70's and early 80's my parents loved. We're also doing something about cars that is remarkably stupid, and I can't even begin to wrap my head around it.
Driver-less cars. As in, no human beings driving the cars.
Uh...what?
Sorry, the more fancy term for this is autonomous cars. That makes it sound totally better. I definitely trust this concept now! These autonomous cars often rely on something called simultaneous localization and mapping, which has a great acronym you definitely want to associate with cars - S.L.A.M. Now SLAM appears to focus much of its development on sensory and mapping, which is critical because - you know what, I don't care because it's dumb. Mapping? Sensing things? Driving a human death machine isn't like some Montessori school feelings board. Operating a motor vehicle is serious business. People die in these things. Every day. I lost a loved one to a car wreck. The National Safety Council estimated there were over forty-thousand fatalities by motor vehicles both last year and in 2016. That's some bullshit. Yet we're out here treating actual cars like they're the remote control toys we wanted for Christmas. What could possibly go wrong?
I'll tell you what could go wrong. An autonomous car whacking some pedestrian walking her bicycle across the street, that's what. Because of thisincident stupidest thing ever, Arizona governor Doug Ducey suspended the testing of autonomous cars. Read that sentence again, and focus on the word TESTING. Someone was killed because we're...still in the testing phase of the Stupidest Thing Ever. Testing cars are done at places like an empty race track, or the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah - not on an actual road where human beings can exist. This is your first problem. All the cameras and sensors and mapping prowess of these dumb cars absolutely do not replicate what the human eye can see. Especially humans who have been driving for a long time, on roads they're familiar with. To complicate matters, this particular vehicle that struck and killed a pedestrian had someone in the driver's seat. Had this driver been steering the car and not glancing down at her phone every two seconds, there's a fairly good chance no fatal accident occurs.
I am uninterested if this was the very first fatality. I am uninterested in how long Uber or whomever had been running cars like this in the area or anywhere else. This really is the Stupidest Thing Ever. There is absolutely no way am I getting into a vehicle on an actual street being operated by NOBODY. You cannot put autonomous vehicles in the same places where human decision-making (like crossing a street) is a thing. Designate a separate road or space for these type of vehicles. Airports and cable cars do this with their tram systems. Or, maybe just stop trying to make autonomous cars happen, because it should never be a thing. There's better concepts out there to fix, instead of those that aren't broken.
The Jetsons were not my initial depiction of futuristic things back then. That belonged to the inside cover of my mother's high school yearbook. Her yearbook staff decided to design the inside cover with images of the 1964-65 New York World's Fair, which took place in Flushing Meadows Park in Queens over the course of two six-month seasons. The fair focused on the culture and technology of the mid-20th century, featuring pavilions of major United States corporations demonstrating their vision and concepts for future use. General Motors' "Futurama" was a massive exhibit at both the 1939 Fair and 1964, showcasing advances in technology with displays of concept cars that looked remarkably like those on The Jetsons, except it was still on wheels.
Driver-less cars. As in, no human beings driving the cars.
Uh...what?
Sorry, the more fancy term for this is autonomous cars. That makes it sound totally better. I definitely trust this concept now! These autonomous cars often rely on something called simultaneous localization and mapping, which has a great acronym you definitely want to associate with cars - S.L.A.M. Now SLAM appears to focus much of its development on sensory and mapping, which is critical because - you know what, I don't care because it's dumb. Mapping? Sensing things? Driving a human death machine isn't like some Montessori school feelings board. Operating a motor vehicle is serious business. People die in these things. Every day. I lost a loved one to a car wreck. The National Safety Council estimated there were over forty-thousand fatalities by motor vehicles both last year and in 2016. That's some bullshit. Yet we're out here treating actual cars like they're the remote control toys we wanted for Christmas. What could possibly go wrong?
I'll tell you what could go wrong. An autonomous car whacking some pedestrian walking her bicycle across the street, that's what. Because of this
I am uninterested if this was the very first fatality. I am uninterested in how long Uber or whomever had been running cars like this in the area or anywhere else. This really is the Stupidest Thing Ever. There is absolutely no way am I getting into a vehicle on an actual street being operated by NOBODY. You cannot put autonomous vehicles in the same places where human decision-making (like crossing a street) is a thing. Designate a separate road or space for these type of vehicles. Airports and cable cars do this with their tram systems. Or, maybe just stop trying to make autonomous cars happen, because it should never be a thing. There's better concepts out there to fix, instead of those that aren't broken.