China Just Approved Flying Taxis — No Pilot Needed

[rcjordan]

https://engineerine.com/chinas-flying-taxis/

[Brad]

>flying taxis

This will not end well.

Brad's Rules:

1. I'm not getting in anything that flies that has no pilot.
2. As far as land vehicles, I'm not getting in any car that has no controls or driver.

[rcjordan]

I added 'Tourist Helicopter Rides' to my Nope List after a couple of western crashes (Grand Canyon, IIRC).  NYC crash this week just raised the Nope factor a notch or two.

Storytime:  In the late 1930s, my dad was standing at the gate at Baltimore^? airport.  Back in that era the gate was literally a gate in the chain link fence surrounding the tarmac.  His flight came in, crashed on landing, and burst into flames in front of him.  He tore up his ticket and never flew again.

[littleman]

>Brad's Rules

Sound rules imo.  You all remember that B movie from the 1980s called Maximum Overdrive?  In it aliens take over all the machines on Earth and program them to kill people.  I remember the movie bothered me because the technology to remotely control cars wasn't in the cars back then.  Today, that's really changed.  We have cars that have self driving technology and they are updated via the Internet.  This seems like a massive vulnerability.  How long until some nefarious person or group hacks into one of these system and turns them into killing machines?  I don't mean to sound hyperbolic, but it is a real possibility today.

[ergophobe]

Decent rules for the present, but I think there is a strong chance that before I die, my rules will be:

 - I am not getting in anything that flies that has a human pilot.
 - I am not getting in a land vehicle that has a human driver I do not know (taxi, bus) or many many land vehicles with human drivers I DO know.

PS - I have now been in vehicles with a human driver who thinks the car is driving, but actually the system is turned off. This is the worst possible case. We are no in a sort of sour spot

PPS - smart systems in cars, especially adaptive cruise control, have dramatically reduced the stress I feel as a passenger. I find that a very high percentage of drivers are tailgaters and ACC reduces that dramatically. Also, there are two types of tailgaters:

1. The dangerous kind: aggressive drivers who follow close hoping to intimidate people into pulling over to let them pass

2. The *extremely* dangerous kind: non-aggressive drivers who don't even know they are tailgating and are barely paying attention, but are 0.7seconds off the rear bumper of the car ahead of them. Typically if I ask them how they decide what a safe distance is, they have no answer (CA driver's manual says to maintain 3-4 seconds; I think of 2 seconds as that minimum in most driving situations but might go as high as 6+ seconds in snow and ice)