> You are not the only person on the road, you are creating risk for other drivers and pedestrians every time you drive.
Aren't you notice, my dear safety fan, that the thing you are propagating is effectively adding one more person/actor on the road - a programmer of potentially buggy software, totally not FOSS and without any responsibility for any possible outcomes of possible bugs?
Your comment is very hard to disagree. But how are you going to test if there might be some interference of two changes? For example, negative effect from screen/touchscreen and positive from auto-breaking - isn't your next proposal to gather more information including video of driver's moves? I have a strong feel that an argument that the drivers must be video-streaming while moving will be equally hard to disagree.
Why should drivers be video streaming? I'm just suggesting that regulators should compare accident rates of cars with and without automated breaking. I'm not saying we should spy on anybody, surely regulators already get this data.
Because nobody has drawn a red line and Ron Jones in 1967 has shown us how vulnerable our freedom is.
We already has a lot of mandatory non-FOSS software in cars which use to phone home which effectively is a streaming (not a video yet, but amount of data is never decreasing). And a lot of so-called safety (surveillance in reality) devices are around us nowadays - phones exposing a lot of uncertain data about us, bank cards which allows banks know where we are right now, etc. If some crackpot politician proves to safety-demanding influencers that video streaming from every moving car helps us to prevent $bad_things_list so that kind of demand is totally possible, especially if using cars for mass killings would become more common than mass shootings.
> I'm just suggesting that regulators should compare accident rates of cars with and without automated breaking.
It's impossible because you have not 100% of the data.
So what? If that's the price to pay to maintain control, fine.
These precedents are also creating risk by the way. It hasn't been that long ago since news was posted here of security researchers remotely cutting off car engines or cars repossessing themselves if you don't pay on time. That's the sort of existential risk you're paving the way for by accepting "safety" in exchange for control. It's not really your car anymore, it's the government's car, the insurer's car. What other policies would they like to set, I wonder?
Right, it's a slippery slope. Today they're making your car save lives, tomorrow they'll be draining your bank accounts and seducing your significant others.
The examples I cited were not hypothetical. The "tomorrow" you dismiss as some unrealistic joke is already here. Search HN for the news if you don't believe it. Want another? Not too long ago some car maker's data leaked and we discovered they were recording people while they were driving. Got any other bright ideas you feel justified implementing in the name of "safety"?
They're "making your car save lives". How? By taking away your control. You're not in command of your vehicle anymore. Don't forget it.
How many lives makes it worth it? Just one? Should it make an appreciable difference? I am hesitant to hand the reigns of society to safety nazi bean counters who are more interested in appearing to "do sometihng" than actually improving our lives.
Vehicle regulation should be based on the overall safest option, not 'dignity' or freedom or individualism anything like that.