I'm being downvoted - but this is the reality of what will happen. Who wants that sort of monitoring when they are driving?
Is this a consumer-driven feature? Or is this more government management - leveraging technology to micro-manage every detail of our lives - only allowing good citizens travel privileges etc?
We are sleep walking into a dystopia, and I get downvoted for stating the obvious! Seriously - your government is about managing you, saying what you are and aren't allowed to do, extracting taxes, fines and licensing fees from you - its not there to help!
PS I was being downvoted, but now I'm back up... It was right what I wrote it!
(1) alcohol-impaired driving fatalities represent
approximately \1/3\ of all highway fatalities in the United
States each year;
(2) in 2019, there were 10,142 alcohol-impaired driving
fatalities in the United States involving drivers with a blood
alcohol concentration level of .08 or higher, and 68 percent of
the crashes that resulted in those fatalities involved a driver
with a blood alcohol concentration level of .15 or higher;
(3) the estimated economic cost for alcohol-impaired driving
in 2010 was $44,000,000,000;
(4) according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety,
advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology can
prevent more than 9,400 alcohol-impaired driving fatalities
annually; and
(5) to ensure the prevention of alcohol-impaired driving
fatalities, advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention
technology must be standard equipment in all new passenger motor
vehicles.
(b) Definitions.--In this section:
(1) Advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention
technology.--The term ``advanced drunk and impaired driving
prevention technology'' means a system that--
(A) can--
(i) passively monitor the performance of a
driver of a motor vehicle to accurately identify
whether that driver may be impaired; and
(ii) prevent or limit motor vehicle operation
if an impairment is detected;
(B) can--
[[Page 135 STAT. 832]]
(i) passively and accurately detect whether
the blood alcohol concentration of a driver of a
motor vehicle is equal to or greater than the
blood alcohol concentration described in section
163(a) of title 23, United States Code; and
(ii) prevent or limit motor vehicle operation
if a blood alcohol concentration above the legal
limit is detected; or
(C) is a combination of systems described in
subparagraphs (A) and (B).
The "right" way to fix this is by reducing car-dependency - better public transit outside of metro areas, less subsidies to gasoline, taxing car makers to cover for externalities - and not by instituting policies that can be used against law-abiding people.
I think its possible to make an argument for lots of things, in the name of safety. That it should be impossible to have anonymity online, etc because of child abuse, or terrorism, or some other action.
The safety argument cannot balance the fact that we also need freedom of speech and thought. We are heading into a world where the power balance is going to become so wildly asymmetrical - the government will know everything about you and will have the power to act against you instantly, automatically - it will change us. It will be dehumanising - you will have to watch your back. If you don't already.
We will have to conform to have a job, be able to travel, receive our govcoin vouchers, etc.
We are literally installing an even worse citizen score system than China, that no one would ever want, but each step of the way we are convinced by some spurious and limited 'safety' argument. This misses the whole picture.
And if you think that the government won't act against you once it has the power to do so, you are dreaming. Everyone seems to think that government is a force for good, as opposed to being the operators of the slavery system we find ourselves in. Some of us try to kid ourselves that we are free, while we hand over 40% of our income for government to service the interest on the debt that they have accrued on our behalf. I don't.
Anyway - I say what I see, no one likes my message, everyone seems blind to the points I raise, or wants to ignore them - what can I do? I hope I'm wrong.
> I think its possible to make an argument for lots of things, in the name of safety.
I think the word you are looking for is `Nanny State` [1]. People's opinions on issues like this always tend to be based on political tribalism. If it's from my political party, then they are so amazing that they care about other human beings so much. If it's a political party I am opposed to, how dare they infringe on our freedom.
you might be right you might be wrong - however I suspect you'll find there are many of us out here who are just not willing to let ourselves get so worked up about such a ridged view of a possible future - doubt you'll find many on HN who are ignorant to the signs - i'm certain many are concerned about the trends - that doesn't meant people necessarily disagree with your thought - we just may disagree with your outlook - myself - i'm inclined to believe I - my friends- and fine folks like you are thoughtful enough to deal with it in the moment - even if that took a civil war - i'm not inclined to believe at some point i am going to lose touch with reality - nor am i inclined to believe my government is going to turn against me without noticing - for what it's worth i don't think you need to take it so personally - lots of people are concerned - just not everyone is freaking out (yet)- maybe you can somehow make peace with that? :=)
Thank you for your thoughts and concern. Let me say I am at peace with myself, I've come to terms with life, mortality. I do fear that the future will be neo-feudal, techno-slavery very shortly though, if people don't start to push back against the governance system + the corporations that run it.
I differ on a few points to you. I don't think the government has turned, I think it has always been this bad! It has always been full of parasitic middlemen that look to make a fortune off the people doing the actual work - people in government are the worst of us, while pretending, nay demanding, that they are portrayed as 'the best of us'. Anyway, I think its that we are at the end of ... something - technology + political immorality seem to be combining in a potentially unpleasant way.
Also, I think the governance approach that has been taken is very incremental - the plans are slow and stealthy - we are disclosed a bit at a time, but never so much that it causes a rebellion. We became aware of 3 letter agencies, then that they were sometimes nefarious, then that they were spying on us, then we had travel constraints, camera everywhere passes to travel, etc, etc - the direction of travel is only one way - towards technocratic governance. None of those steps on their own tripped enough alarm bells to prompt anything more than hand wringing - but if you look back over the years - say 20 years - you'd never believe where we are now. Nor how we got here. That's the power of incrementalism.
> nor am i inclined to believe my government is going to turn against me without noticing -
Are you in the US? If so then out of curiosity, considering we have published research demonstrating that the average American has effectively zero influence on policy and the only groups with representation are extremely wealthy individuals and corporations, and we've already seen the US government engaging in the warrantless surveillance of every last American, the continued push for more extreme uses of gerrymandering and other forms of voter suppression, police executing citizens in the streets for minor infractions, the promotion of lies and misinformation encouraging citizens to get sick or seek ineffective treatments during a global pandemic, the mass incarceration of Americans at a rate far beyond any other nation on the planet, along with continuous efforts to weaken and ignore our constitutional rights, just how much longer do you think it'll be before the notice that they've turned against you arrives?
This degrades our freedoms and our privacy. Many of us are already being tracked every time we drive. All of the tracking, all of the loss of control and it's not serving us. Most people aren't even aware it's happening to them. These "features" are and will increasingly be abused and not just by the government, but by the corporations as well. Do we really want a permanent record of everywhere we drive and when? Of how fast we went? Of who we were with and what we were talking about while in the vehicle? We'd better start asking ourselves those questions now because that's where we're headed.
Right now, you can at least physically disconnect and disable the OnStar system. In the future it seems likely that kind of thing will be entirely built in and impossible or illegal to disable.
Is seriously this your biggest concern about government controlling you after the news that the Supreme Court banned abortion?
You don’t have any whatsoever concern about that, I bet.
You are attempting to discredit an opponent's position by charging hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving the argument. This is known as "whataboutism", and there's an article on it on wikipedia.
The fact is that loads of people drive drunk, drive illegally, and drive dangerously--on public roads. Police enforcement clearly doesn't work. Automated enforcement would. Why should people get to endanger others? The leading cause of death for children and teens almost every year is 'motor vehicle crashes' and it wasn't the children and teens causing those.
This is a dangerous frame for this argument. "Get to" implies a "right," or that the action is condoned somehow. It's not. Not everything bad in the world needs to be prevented by government action. We could stop all traffic deaths today by banning cars. We could stop all forms of obesity by making everyone drink Soylent. Personal liberty prevails because, in the end, the knock-on effects of removing liberty are a case of the cure being worse than the disease, in most cases.
Automatic enforcement.... That sounds like letting the algorithms put people in jail.
Obesity isn’t putting others at risk in the same way. Cars endanger others. People make a special exception to norms for cars because it is hard to look past the convenience of them.
It’s not a stretch to say that the obesity epidemic in the US is causing limited health care resources to be redirected to a vast number of people with self-imposed health issues, leading to significant deaths and under-investment in populations with diseases that were not self-imposed.
However this is in no way is a convincing argument for government to take over control of what people stuff in their mouths.
Things can pretty much always be made safer by eliminating personal freedom. The safest human protected by the best 5-laws-safe robot overlords probably doesn’t get outside all that much.
Is this a consumer-driven feature? Or is this more government management - leveraging technology to micro-manage every detail of our lives - only allowing good citizens travel privileges etc?
We are sleep walking into a dystopia, and I get downvoted for stating the obvious! Seriously - your government is about managing you, saying what you are and aren't allowed to do, extracting taxes, fines and licensing fees from you - its not there to help!
PS I was being downvoted, but now I'm back up... It was right what I wrote it!