in this article about self-driving cars which ignores the humans inside of them, the passive voice is used at deafening volume to imply that the man mentioned *in this sentence* was not responsible for trying to *run cars off the road*. his (non-self-driving) jeep did it. 
the self driving car thing is interesting for me. i'm absolutely, positively, firmly against them. i'm also against cars, but not the way a lot of anti-car people are because we can't change the fact that the US has handcuffed millions of poor people to their cars
you cannot replace a car with a bike for a person with severe arthritis who drives 15 miles to the only walmart that will employ them. you can't add a bus line that will get them to work without requiring them to leave at 4 AM.
the actual problem for this person is not getting them to work; it's that they have to work 15 miles away. that there is no way to shrink that gap. you can't remove cars until this is done.
at the same time, I read this and I think "you could say the same thing about cars. period." did anyone hold a vote to choose to start structuring the entire nation around cars? or to allow cars on the road before ABS brakes or crumple zones were invented?
i absolutely, positively do not believe that autonomous cars are a solution to any extant problem. i could go into that at length but in short, unless you think we're somehow going to replace a significant number of the *276 million* cars in this country, safety will not improve
you cannot possibly believe that we're going to replace any significant portion of the 6 decades of cars on the road with these. some rich people might own them; mostly they are being developed to create liability-free high-profit taxi services
there is no reason for them to exist. they provide no solution to any problem and present new ones that none of the principals intend to solve and in fact are banking on.
as usual, technology will not solve social problems. no solution developed in a glass tower in San Francisco is going to do anything about the drunk man in a rusted out 1976 Dodge driving into a woman who would not have chosen to drive to work if she could have avoided it.
i always hear "self driving cars can be much safer than humans" and i'm like, so? what does that do for the person on the receiving end of the 1976 Dodge with three empty whiskey bottles in the passenger seat? we're talking about fractions of fractions of improvement
if we invented these 40 years ago, or accelerated time by 40 years to replace half the cars on the road, okay, sure, maybe. it's not useful technology to us at this specific time.
