Self Driving Cars for the Ignorant

This news item is the reason for this blog entry:
  
Nissan Will Have Self-Driving Cars By 2020, CEO Says

 I had to edit the subject line a couple of times.  It started out with harsh adjectives describing the drivers that that would be moved to the passenger seat replaced at the wheel by a robot chauffeur.  The subject line I used is the 4th iteration of toning it down and actually is a good segue to what follows.

The lead from the link:

"YOKOHAMA, Japan (AP) — Nissan Motor Co. will have vehicles packed with autonomous driving technology by 2020 but whether people will be able to drive them on roads is up to government regulators, Chief Executive Carlos Ghosn said Monday.
Many of the world's automakers, and companies outside the auto industry such as Google, are working on technologies that allow cars to navigate without human intervention."

There will never be self driving cars that replace driver control of the vehicle.  The clear and simple truth about the goal and objective is that there will be self monitoring cars that control the live driver behind the wheel and to a lesser extent the passengers in the vehicle. It is all about controlling people not direct control of vehicle independent of a person.

The way that this control of the driver, not the vehicle is to be implemented is to design all internal and external inputs to a vehicle's computer that would produce the direct output to the various systems that would autonomously "drive" the car totally independent of the driver.  That would all come standard with the vehicle.  However the computer output and the physical means to mechanically control all the various robotic self driving systems would never be installed or only installed as a standard or optional feature.  For example; the current Mercedes self braking system if an imminent crash situation is detected. 

The purpose of this self driving vehicle concept is a Trojan Horse to sneak in control of the driver not the vehicle.  Input of all data necessary to self drive a car will have little or no output to actually drive the car.  It will all be input data recorded to a black box with relatively no output to mechanical systems but recorded for information purposes about the driver.

Much recording of vehicle and driver data and retention to memory in the vehicle computer and external transmission to some server is already being done.  My prior blog entry about the Progressive Insurance dongle on the OBD2 system describes that.  Future increased data input is described by my prior blog entry identifying patents filed by Google for future input to vehicle computers related to everything necessary for a self driving car that will never really self drive but will totally self monitor all inputs including driver inputs and related data like location and external circumstantial information.

A dongle is just an after the fact computer device added to a computer because the functionality of the dongle was not built into the computer in the first place.  A means to update an old computer to new functionality by a physical device attachment.   However it is an attached physical device that can as easily be detached like pulling the plug on a household electric device.  The OBD will be renamed some day soon with some euphemistic description when it becomes a computer with total functionality built in (built in to the extent that it is the default control system without which the vehicle cannot be operated or fiddled with).   The fiddled with part will be justified by crypto protection to avoid vehicle hacking by anyone for any reason.

Airliners already have a very sophisticated pilot monitoring system as well as auto pilot control systems.  Drones do not even have an on board human pilot.  However, those systems can be hacked is shown by the recent hacking of a commercial passenger plane to take over flight control:

Feds Say That Banned Researcher Commandeered a Plane.

The object of the self driving car is total information all the time about the vehicle and its driver.  It is not the control of a vehicle to chauffer a  person, never will be.  It is about control of the person chauffering a computer that sees all and reports all.  

For what purpose?  The general welfare?  

Seat belts and helmets are law because failure to wear them are a potential burden on society and avoidable tax on medical system resources when accidents result in medical bills.  It is for our own good.  How much more can be justified for out own good but in reality the corporate good to increase profit and decrease cost?

Creeping corporatism sold under the banner of marketing one thing (driver less cars, leave the driving to us) but delivering something that makes more money:  "Let Us Drive You While You Are Driving Car,  we know who you are, where you are and exactly what you are doing."

Several prior blog entries looked at the pay as you drive gas tax plan that is currently being tested in the state of Oregon.  It requires a dongle now to record and report milage.

Creeping corporate control that has creepy aspects related to information collection in domains that were previously unknown and assumed to be private simply because the state of the art technology was not in existence to monitor them.

It is now and more to come..........how the skids are being greased is a tribute to the state of the art in marketing technology to disguise the old business model of bait and switch.  

The self driving car and all its wonders is what we might be lead to expect but that certainly is not what we will get and anyone is takes the bait is ignorant of the switch.  Actually a very elegant strategy that I have often written about at this site in prior blog entries describing the self skinning cat concept.

I wanna get me one of them self driving cars and ride around in the back seat like one of them 1% ers smoking a big cigar and drinkin champagne.  My apologies to people who speak like that, stereotype is not intended.  Those that buy this concept that leads us down the road of being controlled are however as ignorant as the Fox news stereotype implies even if they are English Majors.