veen, am_Unition - I enjoyed your conversation greatly. It's interesting the perspective you both bring to it; I gave up on The Age of Context halfway today so I come at it from the perspective of someone who has had "the Internet of Things" shoved down their throat for a day and a half.

Thanks! Was it the book or the idea that made you give up reading it (and if it's the latter, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on it).

I can't think of any other public/private system in which the interplay between a large, financially-motivated monopoly and a basic human right is so primed for strain.

From a legal standpoint, it will be really interesting to see how the responsibilities for this technology will be determined. Is it the software that is responsible for the car's behaviour, or is the driver still expected to keep an eye out and thus still responsible for what the car may do? Will different states and countries respond differently to this? It almost reminds me of scifi movies, where we need to make laws to govern AI's responsibilities. But I'm not versed enough in law to research something as complicated as this will be.

What I'm more interested in (and more capable of actually saying something meaningful) are the grave implications such a technology can have on our car-dependant societies. Especially in America, the most car-dependant nation in the world. How is [insert anything car-related] going to change because of this? Could this lead to a decentralised public transport system, one that abandons trains and subways in favour of train-like self-driving cars? Assuming this will be expensive at launch, what will the socio-economical consequences be? Will this fuck our sustainability goals even more, or is this gonna boost electrical cars even more? For more than a hundred years, our average commuting time has stayed roughly the same: will this continue, or will people work more in their car, only appearing in the office an hour per day for a meeting? Maybe minivans become mini-workplaces. Will cabs still exist? How will this affect logistics? When will we trust these cars enough to hand over our lives to lines of code? What is love, baby don't hurt me, don't hurt me, no more?

I could go on like this for hours. I'll definitely try to get my thesis on this subject, which I'll have to arrange in eight months or so. I'm not entirely free in my decision. Maybe I should go for a PhD so I can be the first expert in this new area. You never know.

In the US, at least, we have a Supreme Court that thinks HBO is broadcast over the air. Expecting a nuanced understanding of machine vision, GIS, LIDAR limitations in fog and the value of a pothole map is a pathway to disappointment.

Not just disappointment: deaths will happen because of bad nation-wide legislations handling tech like this.