The aging population should live in towns in which you can walk to where you need to go (or ride a cart); if they can't, we've made a mistake in how we design towns.

As for demanding the ability to travel anywhere, in robot cars - that's a new high in self-entitlement.

We're in a world rapidly hyperheating from fossil fuel burning a construction (25% of carbon dioxide emissions come from laying concrete, for roads I assume, mostly). We've a rapidly expanding population worldwide; wildlife is disappearing as humans build suburbs in their spaces (literally in east Africa - elephants live in a tiny swath of land surrounded by new suburbanites who are pissed the elephants are messing up their new gardens, all made possible by car access). Not a world which needs more humans demanding more access at any time. I would call that a civilization of spoiled-rotten children in adult bodies. Our selfishness is killing everything else. Perhaps a health dose of NO is needed.

Cell phones and associated toys make about 60 million tons of tech garbage every year. Your *use* may be a success story, but the off-loaded exterior costs are not passed on to you, so you don't consider what a disaster they've been. Extend this to other technologies. We need to simplify, not constantly add more circuits onto an already-overdesigned and unstable mess.

Software developers are not held liable.

Damn. The hubris.

Put ten millions of them on roads with bicycles and small children. And kids with HERF guns.

This is a solution in search of a problem. Humans + cars are the most deadly killing even in man's history, slaughter worse than all the death tolls of all our wars combined; the appropriate solution is trains.

Cars + computers is a solution to a *suburban* problem, a problem created by the existence of cars driven by people and the road topology that results from their capabilities, a problem of needing to travel long distances at any time for all reasons to random destination. That problem can't be solved by rail because the houses aren't laid out for rail.

More efficient, more sane, to lay out towns for rail access than to build billions of robot tanks to emulate trains.

Automated voting machines, self-driving cars. Same bad ideas, same misplaced abundance of faith in programming. The world isn't a video game; it's full of chaos and malice, and you can't anticipate the outcomes.

Planes, yes, cars, no. Planes have buffer space and trained commercial pilots. Cars will have people reading books, and no in practice no space or time buffers. You can dodge a random garden hose of water, but you can't dodge rain.

You may joke, but that sort of thing is why Target let 60+ million customer records get into the hands of bad guys. You will always be adding more to the programming, and it will always be failing. You can't program for chaos, and especially can't anticipate malevolent intent.

Far better stated than I did. Let me add: bicycles.

"Proof"? He's speculating on outcome of capability, which should be second nature for you. No wonder they keep sneaking up on techies with surveillance tech - no imagination allowed?

Or you could build a train.

Curious: CAN self driving cars see bicycles? If they can, do they know how to anticipate a bicycle's movements? How about recumbent trikes? Pedal powered vehicles of any time? Anything that isn't a car - how do they fit into the world of computing machines driving speeding tanks?

We are nowhere near ready for robot cars. Humans are general purpose computing machines that can perform pattern recognition tasks that no software can. If we are really concerned about human error to the extent we want to eliminate humans, then we should go back to formula and start building rail lines again. Making cars into trains is inefficient, not to mention impossible. A waste of time and resources in a world rapidly running out of both.

The Bill of Rights never were stone: hence the Amendments.

But the 9th Amendment WAS designed for such things as privacy - "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." I am aware the nuance of the amendment can be argued, but the thrust of the law is obvious. Enumerated rights (the BofR and the Constitution itself) don't mean others don't exist. Such rights, as, say, the right to not have a citizen's horse and carriage tracked forever using ethereal invisible rays broadcast by tiny wizards in a horses's brain. Every conceivable SF possibility didn't have to be painstakingly imagined by the Constitutional Congress in the late 18th century. Nor do we need to create a new amendment every time someone invents something novel that tap dances around the law, or common sense. Or uncommon sense, as most people don't care or don't recognize the possibilities in things such as universal surveillance.

Well, I like that interpretation, and I know the actual law will never be used in that fashion. But it should be.

The GPS functionality will be woven into the brain of the engine, so that blocking or disabling will cause the engine to cease functioning. Ever try to cut out the GPS of your phone? I mean, REALLY kill the circuit? You can't. The phone ceases to function. Cars are rolling networks now, and pretty easy to control.

Disabling GPS could cause the car to yell to the cops, the insurance company, Ford, whatever. Once the pieces are in place, any scenario can be deployed.

Cutting out the GPS will be declared a crime. Eventually. Because terrorism, crime, whatever. Doesn't matter. This is stepwise world engineering here - boil the frog slowly, and no one will care much.