I see it as "leap-frogging technology". Developing countries can take advantage of others' previous experiences. Since they didn't have to deal with checks, they could skip that entire infrastructure and jump to the latest, workable system. It takes time to phase out old systems (as it should). For example, I don't own a cell phone; would I be left out or will they provide a computer method?

Speaking of cell phones, I understand this is precisely what happened regarding land-line phones in developing countries. They skipped building that infrastructure and went straight to cellular towers/phones, saving a step.

Or heaven for the passengers who were good...

Oh, for full disclosure, I think we might have added those also killed by the distractions of the in-dash screens.

That's interesting because in the BBS days of the 1980s, nobody used his real name. I took that "lesson" over to the public Internet when it came around, and was surprised that people were using their real names on it.

I chatted with a bot once to run some numbers: We concluded that an order of magnitude more people die from the extra required energy pollution impacts of backup camera systems (manufacture and operation) than do from those getting backed-over.

If you want to get one, especially for an SUV, great. But it shouldn't be mandated.

Do I hear a Betteridge?

What you ask might be impossible to do with the US' current (myopic, in my opinion) pollution laws.

I'd be honored if you'd put this thread's URL in among your soon-to-be-thousands of tabs so you can stumble across it much later.

Meh, I started using ad blockers centuries ago when they were actually delivering viruses; do you remember those days?

I think I would otherwise continue to use them because they aren't just scroll-past-able banner ads anymore; do you remember those days? Now it's nutty the hoops one has to jump through to glance at something where it turns out you're not really interested in it.

Further, do you think they would stop adding ads per page once their coffer$ were full? Hahaha, that's a good one. They're going to push whatever they can get away with; like many companies do, like many people do.

I'd prefer they charge pennies per page view; maybe the content would improve, saving everybody's time.

It wasn't originally...back when I PAID for it (if you paid them money, they removed the ad banner at the top of your browser installation).

I'm not being critical, but how do you manage that/use those?

If this is a shot at my information, I'll just point out that the data center people could build these correctly, but that would cost more, maybe much more. Greed is going up against the people who live in proximity. It's not just ignorance, it's water availability and prices. It's electricity availability and prices. It's vibration. It's sounds. It's impactful to the local temperature. It's impactful to the local species. There are reports all over now that corroborate the common sense logic.

From my sad experiences, there's a small time window between a person losing her license and being unable to getting in and out of a car on her own to handle, say, grocery shopping.

And when more people can't drive, that also means they may be helpless when the autonomous vehicle gets stuck, physically or algorithmically--especially if the engineering geniuses believe they should do away with the steering wheels.

I just placed a washing machine transmission in my car during my work break so I can finish working on it at home. If I was calling a robo-taxi after work to load that transmission up, I would miss the precise "low traffic" window we have here and my commute would be > 25% longer. Again, no thanks. Again, scenarios the geniuses are unaware of.

I wonder what I will encounter tomorrow.

It happened to me; I emailed them and they fixed it.(?)

Fixed that for ya'. My elderly mother bought large bags of bird seed at the store, having someone else load the bags into the trunk. The bags still sit in the trunk, waiting for me or my father to remove them for her. How would that work with a driverless taxi situation?

A couple of days ago there were multiple tornadoes with 165 mph winds here. I left work early for my short commute to avoid them. Should I have sat around waiting for a car to arrive; and what if everyone else was hailing them at once? And what if there was a tornado near by (there was!), should I have been content to drive under the speed limit, once it's spotted?

Live power lines were on the street. Would the car drive right over them? How on earth is it going to know that from a twig?

As an embedded software developer, I know there are an infinite number of scenarios in driving that engineers can't predict. No thanks.