That might be worse than death to be frank.

A British businessman purchased Segway in 2009, and in 2010 accidentally reversed off a cliff while walking his dog by the ocean, and died.

Nobody mentioned Marie Curie yet?

You forgot to mention that his "parachute" looked to be a bunch of cloaks and furs tied around his neck like a cape. That's important info lol

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Reichelt.ogv

I think basically it's a situation where he did manage to create the "scientific prodigy" reputation around himself, this created public buzz around whatever he was doing, and that did translate into different forms of funding. So some of the success is due to him, but basically on account of fraud. Same basic principle as Trump.

Yeah, I really do think

Subscription based democracy?

Only sign up for the laws you want, with a quid pro quo/golden rule stipulation?

The process of it becoming good enough will be more gradual, with corporate interests lobbying for whatever is most marketable at the time. There will be no singular convention on driving where the philosophical question at the root of policy gets resolved - research will show new drivers benefit most, so at first first-time drivers might be obliged to have some AI backup then there will be some incremental movement as the political climate is favorable.

Not to go off on a tangent, but I think gun control is a useful example of what I'm talking about: it's so easy to make people fight bitterly over minutia while ignoring the core philosophical questions entirely (government monopoly on violence, civilian relationship to government, civilian disarmament), an earnest discussion of which would likely be more disruptive to either overarching agenda than losing any court case (by calling other policy into question - like militarized police who do not even see themselves as civilians anymore).

So nVidia releases a better self driving AI than Tesla, and everyone is comfortable with letting it drive on the highway for you. Each step will be fairly uncontroversial until at some point we're all comfortable with the thing and someone only wants to make it mandatory for some small segment of drivers, which itself will not draw much controversy because classic non-AI cars with manual transmissions and such will only be in the realm of enthusiasts and collectors.

Yes good point. Ends-means arguments are basically that people trust some rigid system more than the humans around them, even if it means them losing control and being helpless themselves.

Sure, and we do hundreds of thousands of miles of simulation on each SW build before it'll be okayed for even driving on site, then it has to pass additional tests before it's allowed on public roads with a test driver.

Self flying car*

I'm almost 50, but I remember when I was a kid, my mom told me that by the time I turned 16, cars would drive themselves. Just tell it where to go and it would do it.

That timeline would have been the early 90s. Oops.

After driving a modern car with all of the current safety features, I've come to the conclusion that self-driving cars were even farther away than I thought. It frequently misinterprets the situation and screeches its irritating alarm noise.

How many times did he have to intervene on the test stack to get that nonchalant about it -- 200, 300?

Hey cool I sat in that thing when I was about 6 years old. Still remember the little 4" tv's 35 years later...