Hear Us Talk About Why We Aren’t Ready For Self-Driving Cars (And Some More Fun Topics Too)

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Have you ever been reading an Autopian article and found yourself wishing you could hear the author yammering on about whatever they’re going on about, so you could bask in their voice, their cadence, their overall presence? Of course you haven’t; why would you subject yourself to that? My god, even just imagining it, well, it gives me chills. And I’m one of those authors. Think how I must feel every day.

This is why it’s so hard to tell you what I need to tell you right now: I was on two recent podcasts, and our Publisher Matt Hardigree was on one of those with me, and because federal law probably requires it (don’t check) I have to insist that you listen to both of these fine podcasts that I have soiled with my presence, loudly and lavishly. I’m sorry, but it’s the law.

The latest podcast is just me, on Computerworld’s Today in Tech podcast, where Keith Shaw talks to me about self-driving cars, and I get to go on and on about what I think about them, which is a wonderful luxury and privilege to have. If what I say is interesting to you, I do happen to have a book you could read, if you wanted. Just saying! I also talk about such melodramatic things as The Death of the Journey, and I’m pretty sure I snuck in the phrase “have a wank” in there, so see if you can find it.

The other podcast I was on, this time with Publisher Matt, was the Rocket podcast, which is a podcast about tech and fun geeky stuff, hosted by some friends like Christina Warren, Brianna Wu and Simone de Rochefort.

This time we got to talk about fun stuff like rocket-jet powered cars and Isaac Newton and cheating cars in racing and all sorts of fun car stuff. It’s fun! Look, you can confirm that empirically:

I know your time is valuable, and there are only so many podcasts you can listen to. I get that. And while I’m sorry that you’re definitely probably legally required to listen to both of these, likely at full volume in some public space or restaurant, bar, or coffee shop, ignoring the pleas of everyone around you just shut off that noise, dear god, please, turn it off, I nevertheless have to insist that you do, in fact, listen to these.

Thank you for your cooperation, and I hope there’s no need to involve the authorities.

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About the Author

Mercedes Streeter

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11 thoughts on “Hear Us Talk About Why We Aren’t Ready For Self-Driving Cars (And Some More Fun Topics Too)”

  1. Darn and blast. I thought The Autopian podcast was being resurrected after its brief run. I hope it continues because I like hearing your words.

    A critique if I may, is that I wasn’t particularly fond of the guest interviews. Without an obvious direction, all I heard was the Autopian writers interjecting randomly throughout an autobiography in an attempt to describe what things look like and go off on tangents. It may work in video form but it was unlistenable in the car.

    I enjoyed your beginning episodes more where you went in to more depth/background of the articles of the week.

    Having guests on to talk about a singular topic would be great but I wasn’t able to make it through the last four guest interviews, despite my adoration for the work that those gentlemen have accomplished.

  2. “You could make it a hell of a lot safer if you flip the level 2 dynamic!”

    Yes please. Related, I’ve long felt that lane keeping is a better choice than lane centering.

    With lane keeping, as I’ve experienced it, the car will notify you and/or correct you if start to drift out of the lane. If you try to disengage and let the car drive it’ll ping pong off the lines and keep you in the lane, no one sane will choose to let the car drive here.

    With lane keeping when the human makes a mistake the car tries to help by notifying the driver or nudging the car, making the situation better.

    If the car makes a mistake the human who has been driving continues driving.

    If both the human and car make a mistake it’s a really problem. But now it’s less often than the human alone. You have reduced the overall error rate to only the cases where both human and automation fail.

    With lane centering the car drives steadily and seems like it knows what it’s doing. The vigilance problem kicks in and the human drifts off. Now when the car makes a mistake the human is less likely to be there to correct it.

  3. OK I survived that.
    The YouTube thing was OK and was entertaining.
    The podcast was pretty hard work and it sucked that the Changli in depth was effectively behind a paywall.

  4. So, I was thinking about your comparison to how Aviation handles its semi-automation as compared to cars, and how the major difference as far as danger is the whole airborne thingy. (Now that is a run-on sentence!)

    Anyway, I think it’d be a fascinating thing to “dive deep” into the topic of how boats (read: yachts and shipping) do in their effectiveness in the area, seeing as they are not hanging out and about with clouds…

    It’s a whole different deal, but with some bow/stern thrusters and some GPS tech, you CAN basically go to sleep and let it do its thing. Hell, you can even adjust course from your Garmin watch if it’s all set up right. That’s very next level compared to whatever car tech is at right now.

  5. Oh, so now you’re stealth deleting factual curseless comments? Delightful.

    I’m happy to get rid of my membership if this is how you’re going to go about run your site.

    And here I though y’all would be above that sort of thing. I guess this is the sorry state of the internet nowadays, shadowbans, stealth comment removal, etc.

    1. Don’t know what happened to you, but it’s not because it’s curseless, that the content of a comment is okay.
      There is plenty of reasons to be erased. Like spreading lies or miserformation.
      You did that with the supposed advantages of the stainless steel body on a cybertruck, several time, that was fake news, and as a website, they are legally responsible of what people write in their comments. So if you did something like that, don’t be surprised to be erased, your freedom of speech is not free of consequences for them, nor it should be for you.

      1. Section 230 protects them from legal liability for user content if they act as a platform instead of a publisher, then again I’m not a lawyer.

        There are advantages of stainless steel in any application, as there are disadvantages. The whole thing with life is maximizing the advantages and minimizing the disadvantages. Previously I have advocated for them using an ALL ALUMINUM chassis on the Cybertruck as it would be easier and very corrosion resistant (though dissimilar metal corrosion would be an issue)

    2. The “sorry state of the Internet nowadays” is to get rid of comment sections entirely. They’re bad for SEO, and don’t really add that much to the bottom line for most websites.
      Be grateful this one still exists.

      1. What do you call when your comments don’t show up on any other thread you have replied to UNLESS you’re logged into your account? Log out and they disappear on threads anyone without an account can read. Same goes for if you use a VPN and look at same threads without an account,

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