Thread by @mulegirl

You know all of these hand-wringing driverless car pieces beg the question…

Whyyyy—given all this fancy new technology we're contemplating—are we creating a transportation system made of potential murder bots?

newyorker.com/science/elemen…

Trains do have occasional accidents, but many systems have amazing safety records. And it's never like an individual car jumps the track to do a murder.

Repeating "well, driverless cars WILL have to murder someone at some point, whom shall we choose?" makes it sound like that is a feature not a bug.

We could have a safe, fast, reliable transport system, but that would require setting aside the story we tell ourselves about our individuality.

(That is to say the story automobile advertising tells us about our individuality.)

theedgemarkets.com/content/advert…

The Shinkansen is a phenomenal piece of engineering at the system level.

There are no grade-level crossings and the tracks are not shared with other train types (high speed passenger only), so it cannot crash into another vehicle.

An automatic train control system regulates the speed of the train in response to track conditions and the distance to the next train ahead. So they can go 200 mph.

Shinkansen trains run so frequently that buying an advance ticket is a weird edge case. I ran into a whole lot of confusion because of this.

The ticket machine only sold same day tickets and I had to talk to a desk agent to get one for the next day, like a weirdo.

It's like if planes from SF to LA left every ten minutes and you could just walk on.

And then have a beer, read a magazine, watch the landscape go rushing by. Relax. Have a snack from the snack cart.

But nooooo, we have to each be in our own individual murder bot.

Stupid.

But how do we identify ourselves as Americans? First and foremost as drivers. (or as DMV-certified non drivers).

So we aren't going to have cool beautiful safe train systems that are a source of national pride.

We're going to have junky little murderbots.