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Cory Doctorow talks with TheWarOnCars.org: The End of Uber (transcript)

by hawkinspeter
Mon, Feb 07, 2022 13:13
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("The taxi and the squirrel" by saekhow is licensed under Creative Commons)

Saw this transcript and thought it was interesting as I'm a fan of Cory Doctorow's takes on technology etc. and hadn't come across TheWarOnCars.org before.

https://thewaroncars.org/transcript-episode-79-the-end-of-uber-with-cory-doctorow/

Quote:

Geometry hates cars. You know, if you multiply—I mean, I don’t have to tell The War on Cars this, but if you multiply, you know, all of the journeys by the space that the car occupies in the road, by the amount of road that you need, by the distance that that pushes people apart because you have to build more roads, you are in a red queen’s race that you cannot win.

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3 comments

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brooksby | 2 years ago
3 likes

That's a really interesting read, peter.

I particularly like his closing comment:

Quote:

All of the people who say we’re near a self-driving car because some minor subset of the self-driving car problem has improved in some way over the last couple of years are like people who say, “We have bred this horse to be so fast that it’s only a matter of time until it’s a railroad engine.”

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hawkinspeter replied to brooksby | 2 years ago
2 likes

I found the language a bit distracting with "you know" and "like" all over the place, but it's an informal chat so I'll cut it some slack.

I'm not sure that I agree with his closing comment as I think that self-driving cars will be feasible at some point, but time will tell. Although amusing, it's a poor analogy because there's only so much that you can do with horse breeding, but computer hardware has already been exponentially improved over the decades (more computing power in a modern phone than a PC of 10-20 years ago).

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lonpfrb replied to hawkinspeter | 2 years ago
1 like
hawkinspeter wrote:

I think that self-driving cars will be feasible at some point, but time will tell.

Since that feasibility will include implementation of the hierarchy of responsibility, it cannot happen soon enough.

As vulnerable road users we need to get the minimum number of people responsible for the control of kinetic energy bodies as possible.

So long as the network does not become outside Asimov's laws of robotics [Skynet..], we will be safer than now.

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