9 Comments
Feb 18Liked by Andrew Maynard

I’m worried about the people who you mentioned in your article got into accidents with the driverless cars. Acting like a mob and burning vehicles is of course not ok. But not feeling safe on the street is also not ok.

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This, is of course, a really important part of the conversation here. In the one case of a pedestrian being dragged by a Cruise car it led to Cruise not operating in California. The case between the cyclist and the Waymo is less clear, although the damage was reported as only a dew scrapes and bruises. Also, balanced against this is evidence of a strong safety record for Waymo at least: https://futureofbeinghuman.com/p/waymo-safety-study-shows-benefits

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Even one human being harmed by a driverless car is too much. I would not want to be around machines that are incapable of processing a cry for help. Certainly there must be other uses for such vehicles. Why impose them on people in cities?

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You should not make machines in the likeness of the human mind. Burn them all.

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Thankfully I don't think my mind looks like a self driving car!

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Its obvious how all of this leads to existential threat to humanity. So it is understandable if humans do not wish to die. Life is love and beauty.

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The word luddite comes from a guy named Ludd, who famously destroyed the looms that made weaving faster and easier. So, burning driverless cars makes perfect sense.

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I was going back and forth on bringing in Luddites (I've written a lot about the movement -- recently here: https://futureofbeinghuman.com/p/unraveling-the-luddite-narrative), but I'm not sure this incident justifies the term as the Luddite movement wasn't anti-tech but anti tech that took away jobs and livelihoods.

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The Luddites were not anti-tech, as you say, but that nuance got lost and the name of the movement became a shorthand for backward looking primitivism, propagated by people with an interest to frame any opposition against technology as nothing but. The same, I fear, is happening here. You frame the people torching the car as opposed to all autonomous technology. Maybe they are just opposed against the deployment of a technology in their city without them having a say in it? Or maybe they were concerned about safety? Or maybe they expressed anger about the incursion of private interests into public spaces? I don't know, I did not ask them, but neither did you, but you dismiss whatever legitimate - or at least understandable - reasons there might have been to paint this as an attack on autonomous technology per se. It's the Luddites again - the narrative, not the movement.

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