The road to hell is filled with driverless cars (and other laments)

Autonomous vehicles are yet another technology that few people seem to want, being pushed on us in the name of "safety" and "convenience".

Teamsters don’t like ‘em. Residents don’t like ‘em. The mayor of Los Angeles doesn’t like ‘em. But driverless cars are now roaming the streets of Los Angeles anyway.

Waymo One, owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, began offering rides in a 63-mile square mile area of southern California last week.

Here’s how the LA Times heralded the news:

Los Angeles, buckle up.

Robotaxis will begin doing business in L.A. over the next couple of weeks as regulators, developers, drivers, passengers and policymakers grapple with safety concerns and all the other scenarios that can play out when machines take over the wheel. Fender benders. Sex in the backseat. Serious crashes. Hostility. Awkward dropoff spots. And yes, skeptics who want to test the technology by putting obstacles in the way.

Add fear to that skepticism and you begin to see that autonomous vehicles are yet another technology being forced on us that few people seem to want. Last year, a survey from driver’s association AAA showed a growing number of Americans are apprehensive about fully self-driving cars.

This year’s survey finds that 68% are afraid of fully autonomous vehicles. This is a 13% jump from 55% in our 2022 survey – the biggest increase since 2020. Nine in ten (91%) U.S. drivers either would be afraid to ride in a self-driving vehicle (68%) or are unsure about it (23%). Only one in ten (9%) say they would trust a vehicle to drive itself while they are in it. AAA has done the Autonomous Vehicle (AV) Survey every year since 2016.

In an opinion piece for the Dallas Morning News last week, David Dunmoyer, campaign director for Better Tech for Tomorrow, painted a picture of the dystopian near-future that self-driving cars will soon inhabit:

Facebook’s goal was to connect us with loved ones up until it transformed into a tool to surveil us and track our data for massive profit. For self-driving cars, the utopia is traffic congestion reduction and safety, right up until it’s tracking our movements and limiting our mobility, becoming a dystopia.

Dunmoyer argues that the problems autonomous vehicles are meant to solve — road fatalities, traffic congestion, reduced mobility, lost productivity — could only be solved if EVERY SINGLE CAR on the road is driverless.

A growing body of research shows that self-driving cars will only reduce traffic congestion if we all give up our steering wheels. Numerous simulations and studies confirm that traffic congestion might actually get worse when self-driving cars are on the road alongside human drivers, even if there is only one human driver to 100 self-driving cars. This is precisely why the largest automakers in the world are actively pushing for preferential treatment for vehicles they manufacture without steering wheels and brake pedals, and why engineers at companies like Tesla are being told to build vehicles without any features requiring human control. And now we can see the dystopian future.

A post on X about Dunmoyer’s op-ed caught the attention of our favorite charlatan-in-chief, Mr. X himself just last week.

Elon Musk weighed in to say, essentially, ‘yeah yeah self-driving cars might be something to worry about in a decade, but what about when Canada froze people’s bank accounts?!’ Which is basically just an admission that Musk knows exactly how this ends for us plebes: full tyrannical control through social credit as well as strict controls on mobility based on whether you’re compliant with the groupthink of the moment.

Orwell wrote the handbook, remember? “The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”

The vast majority of people struggling to pay their bills cannot think about what happens in 10 days, let alone 10 years. And that’s largely how we got to this state of precarity. We took the benevolence of our government and our system for granted — it was a system predicated on recognizing and honoring the spark of divinity that exists within each of us. But that recognition no longer exists — whether between institutions serving their citizens or between citizens themselves. That makes us all willing participants in the rollout of our dystopia at the hands of powerful elites.

With his vast wealth, Andrew Carnegie built libraries across America. But Zuckerberg and Altman, men with unthinkable wealth compared to Carnegie, build thousand-acre bunkers with protective walls and mercenaries with advanced weapons to protect them from what they know is coming.

The cold rationality of Artificial Intelligence and of the men who would play God, combined with the disassociation in each of us from a higher power means our digital identity cards — not dissimilar to the serial numbers tattooed on the victims of the Nazis — make us all eligible entrants to the new concentration camp. The vast majority of us are but one blackmail event, one hospital bill, one house payment, one phone scam away from crying out for our government to step in and save us. But that will simply seal our fate.

Meanwhile, the neo-conquistadors of our age — the Musks, Bezos, Gates and others of their ilk — all work as agents and co-conspirators with governmental forces to march us to our ruin and enslavement. The insecurity that permeates everyday lives makes the vast majority of us easy prey; meanwhile our predators sleep soundly at night in the knowledge they’re working tirelessly to leave behind the prison they’ve so callously and cravenly created for us. They’re close to hammering out their escape conveyances, too. As Bezos said in a 2019 article in The Independent: ““People are starting to bump up against the absolute true fact that earth is finite.” What he didn’t say is that only the elites will have the resources to inhabit that finite world.

It’s likely that, in the West anyway, our Bastille moment has come and gone without us even knowing it. And over the last 20 years, we lost the remaining members of the Silent Generation — the last generation to truly know the horrors of global war, the price to be paid for freedom, the debt that is owed to our forefathers, and the promise of a vast horizon of opportunity which they fought and won to give us all. In that sense, we not only bear the responsibility for having dishonored their sacrifices, but we’re now too poisoned, too fat, too indebted, too ideologically warped, and too digitally sedated to even do anything about it.

The very least we can do is push back on technologies that no one wants, and stop sacrificing our freedom and dignity on the altars of so-called “safety” and “convenience.”

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