If your human bus driver crashes you place all the blame on that guy, fire him and move on with your business. If your AI that is used to drive every vehicle your fleet screws up you're potentially looking at grounding the entire fleet and running an extended PR campaign.

At the very least you'll need to stick a human behind the wheel to take the blame when the technology fails like Tesla does. You can't remove humans from the corporation centered blame shifting society because you remove available scapegoats leaving the company without a blame shield. Perhaps they'll hire third world people for lower wages to remotely watch the AI car feed all day and auto-fire them in the event of a crash.

This is all still a worse deal than Uber hiring humans to do it all, they outsource all of the maintenance and liability onto some rando that they can ban from the app if they get uppity and then take a cut of the profit in exchange for running a data center and some ads.

> Can someone explain to me why, over time, democratic states tend to drift into mass surveillance ?

Democracy, even a flawed democracy leaves the status quo power structure vulnerable to being changed by popular political action. Mass surveillance allows the existing players to identify any nascent political movements that may eventually grow to threaten them and undermine or destroy these movements before they ever become a threat.

I'm not sure they really can leave whenever they want. I think once you're far down the education track you will probably feel like you're trapped into continuing even if you decide you don't want to do it anymore, because the education loans will kill you and you need the big income on the other end to fix this. That probably contributes to the creation of a lot of miserable and crappy doctors.

> because the education loans will kill you and you need the big income on the other end to fix this

Being a surgeon doesn't have the same level of demand as a role in family medicine. Both roles provide an income for sustaining oneself, even through student loans. Also, the subject in this article has "been a doctor for 13 years".

It is like when you start listing the insane things the CIA actually provably did and still end up looking crazy.

They'll just say it is a bug when it is turned on.

Not to mention all the dark pattern lying nag dialogs that will trick you into turning it on, or just wear you down.

I saw a yellow dot alert next to the restart/shutdown button on my Windows machine the other day. Those historically indicate a request to restart to apply critical updates. But no, it was a message recommending I sign into a Microsoft account.

That was the last straw for me when it comes to Windows BS---designs that only serve Microsoft, and disrespects all the other times I've said no to their crap. I switched everything over to Linux the next day.

Valve basically tried the later approach with the initial Steam for linux push which included steam machines and the steam controller. It did have some level of initial success but clearly had lost momentum and the developer support it had seemed to fade after a few years. There were quite a few direct ports during that time though. I think they would have preferred that approach but ultimately decided it was a bridge to far.

They didn't put a fraction of the effort into Steam Machines that they have put in the Linux ecosystem since then.

I honestly think the problem can't really be solved because of the adversarial relationships involved. But if there was more than one search engine with significant marketshare maybe it would be easier to route around the problem.

You can just tax tires. And collecting the tax has the added incentives of being much easier to administer and not privacy invading.

I can just see those bare tires on the 101... And now people won't be stealing rims, they'll be stealing tires.

Yeah, I like the idea of taxing the tires at first, but then you start thinking about people postponing replacing their tires to avoid tax, and creating dangerous situations on the road.

It reminds me a bit of garbage collection in Amsterdam; lots of cities try to let people pay for the amount of trash they produce, but Amsterdam will let people thrown away their trash for free, and be happy they throw it away properly, because taxing that is going to create a mess.

Taxing gas is probably the easiest way to do it. Heavier cars probably use more gas than lighter ones, right? Except EVs don't use gas at all and still use the roads. There's just no easy solution.

Replacing tires already costs money. How much would an extra tax change behaviour? It is definitely something to consider but doesn't seem like a definite issue.

Quick back-of-the-napkin calculation: Let's assume a tyre life of 31,000 miles. At 31 mpg (supposedly the average consumption in California) that's 1000 gallons. Gas tax in California is currently 0.579 $ per gallon, which gives 579 $ in gas taxes over the lifetime of a set of tyres. So the tyre tax would have to be around the order of 145 $ per tyre.

The Delorean was chosen because it's horrendous 0-60 times made the acceleration to 88mph a believably difficult to achieve goal for the protagonist.