Yesterday I rode in a friends’ Tesla Model 3. As someone who is a poor driver, I am very impressed by the near-total elimination of the need to intervene as a driver. You almost forget you need to pay attention at first and keep your eyes on the road; even so, it is far safer to ride in a (nearly) fully-autonomous vehicle than to drive. Driverless cars are the future, eliminating the shoddy, dangerous driving of elders, teenagers, persons under the influence of drugs or alcohol, people texting or looking at social media, people getting angry at the opinions of the person to whom they are listening to on talk radio, road rage in general, and other problems which lead to death, dismemberment, incarceration, and higher insurance premiums for drivers. And obviously it is far more pleasant than taking public transportation, certainly here in the United States.
My primary concern with the technology is the surveillance by Grok and probably the law enforcement and intelligence community, and loss of control over the vehicle due to being dependent on “the cloud” (and not just anyone’s cloud! Mr Musk’s cloud!), over-the-air updates, and the vulnerability of car owners to vender lock-in, subscription treachery, as well as further decreasing the right to repair one’s own automobile. However, these problems are not insurmountable, and are being tackled. Purism has managed to deactivate the Intel Management Engine, while RISC-V is beginning to moot hardware backdoors entirely, pushing them to the ashheap of the V chip, the Clipper Chip, and the Fairness Doctrine. Linux phones are coming into their own, even for regular people. Self-hosted and libre AI models are a thing. When combined with freedom in choice of cloud for self-driving cars, similarly to the freedom we have today in hosting providers and domain registries today, the locked-in, mass surveillance-friendly worlds of Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok, DeepSeek and their ilk while face serious competition of the same type GNU/Linux gave to Windows and the old commercial Unices. Openness will also drive down costs and maintenence fees, increasing the right to repair. Of course, hackers, entrepenuers, and governments will need to enable this sort of competition and more importantly a paradigm shift. Libre automobiles would decrease costs, much as RISC-V will decrease costs of electronics. Finally, alternatives to rare, expensive, and politically-difficult lithium. Of course, some of these criticisms apply to traditional modern cars, such as the privacy implications and locked-down automotive software. However, in a traditional vehicle one does not need to worry about your car refusing to travel to your requested destination or obey corporate or government orders, perhaps incorrectly due to honest errors that still have serious consequences (e.g. an “I can’t let you do that Dave” scenario.) Still, modern cars can be made to do sneaky things if undesirable forces get their way.
Due to the profound benefits of self-driving vehicles, we must insist on avoiding the pitfalls of the past. Putting a damper in iPhone-esque stranglehold’s on cars, rather than living under similar tyranny for decades. Avoid overpriced materials that overperform and limit the accessability of autonomous automobile usage and manufacturing large corporations. The people who go along with Google, Apple, Microsoft, and so forth endlessly and unquestioningly must not be allowed to dictate the future any longer. People need to expect repairable, reasonably-priced autonomous vehicles which they themselves truly own. These cars must be safe, and indeed they shall be safer than human drivers, but safety is far too often used as a pretext to destroy freedom, prosperity, and flourishing for human beings.
Regardless, I look forward to a road with a lot fewer hooligans doing doughnoughts, teenagers racing, texting drivers killing drivers doing their makeup, and manslaughter of pedestrians and cyclists. And that is the world of autonomous vehicles.