I think there's an implicit bargain made when you get in a car that a person is driving: you're both risking your lives on this journey. A self-driving car is risking possibly millions of dollars and bad publicity, but not a life. It's hard to trust a computer like that.
Ultimately, you dont have to trust a computer. You have to trust the corporation that built that computer. That is quite different IMO. How am I supposed to entrust my life to a machine built by a corporation that just recently dropped the slogan "we wont do evil"? How am I going to entrust my life to a machine that has been built by a company that, like all the others, is maily interested in maximising profit margins? Why should I believe they care about my health as an individual? As you said, if I am passenger of a human driver, I can at least hope they dont want to die. If the machine crashes itself, who cares?
You trust corporations all the time to make products, construct buildings, etc. to not kill you when used more or less correctly in accordance with what most people would consider common sense because said companies know they will be sued, fined, etc. if they don’t make safe things. It’s actually unclear what this means in the context of autonomous vehicles that will presumably have some non zero accident rate even if safe enough at some level.
Yesterday I was talking to a friend who ran a Twitter botnet of sorts and was telling me he outsourced a lot of his menial tasks to Indian workers, but found out that a lot of those workers would outsource work to China. Realizing now that some of those Chinese workers may be outsourcing the same work to North Korea.
yes...imagine if samsung or hyundai gain unprecedented access to this ultra ultra cheap labor force.
overall the article is bang on, the only people that benefit is north koreans and maybe south koreans but give the reunification a few decades or more, the end result is a shift of the status quo of regional power for neighboring countries.
Actually, unification might make this less attractive, as wages likely would rise in the North, changing the economics of doing this kind of stuff (I guess a bit in the way the abolition of slavery changed economies)
