Carnet: Rise of the Machines
Sam Aurelius Milam III
Consider
a car that has a facial recognition feature and a voice recognition feature.
It can identify its occupants. Consider a car that has GPS.
It knows its location. Consider a self-driving car that's code controlled.
Its performance can be manipulated by changing its code. Consider
such a car that has internet access. Its code can be changed remotely
and its performance can be controlled remotely. Consider the possibilities.
You're
wanted by the cops. They make an entry into a database. You
get into a car, it recognizes you, locks the doors, and drives to the police
station.
You
didn't pay for a ticket, or your vehicle registration is out-of-date, or
your insurance has expired, or you didn't renew your driver's license.
The cops remotely instruct your car to drive itself to the impound lot.
Your
former girlfriend gets a restraining order against you. A court clerk
uploads it to a database. Your car refuses to let you drive to the
shopping center where the girlfriend works.
Your
wife discovers that you're having an affair. She hires a hacker to
reprogram your car. You pick up your paramour for a date. Your
car recognizes her, disables the cell phones, locks the doors, and drives
into a bridge embankment at 90 miles per hour.
Some
conspirators decide to kidnap the daughter of a tycoon, and hold her for
ransom. They remotely reprogram her car. When she gets into
the car, it locks its doors, disables her cell phone, and drives her to
a remote location, where they're waiting for her.
Some
anti-technology activists threaten the car manufacturers. The manufacturers
adjust the code in the activists' cars. The activists are later found
locked in their cars, at the bottoms of various lakes and rivers.
Some
terrorists hack a car company's database. All of that company's cars
simultaneously lock their doors, accelerate to 90 miles per hour, and then
lock their steering.
The
NSA wants a certain journalist to disappear. An agent remotely instructs
the journalist's car to take him to an acquisition site.
Those
all seem like bad situations, but they're not the worst that could happen.
In 1901, New York became the first state to require that cars had to be
registered. Since then, cars have increasingly become instruments
of control. Government propaganda has deceived people into the belief
that cars provide freedom, but that's a lie. Cars provide mobility,
but not freedom. Much to the contrary, everything that's associated
with driving a car is either required, prohibited, or regulated.
If somebody refuses to cooperate with the government, in any way at all,
whether or not it has anything to do with driving, then the government
can suspend that person's driver's license. Since a driver's license
has become virtually a necessity for survival, licensing requirements associated
with cars have become a carte blanche for control of the people.
The
kinds of cars that are now being developed represent a huge increase in
the government's powers of surveillance and control. With such cars,
the cops can always be in the car. They can know the location of
the car. They can know who's in the car. They can know what's
being said and what's being done. The cars themselves can notify
the cops if any licenses have expired or if any wanted people are present.
Every car can be a surveillance drone and, potentially, a weapon.
If the use of such cars remained optional, then they might be tolerable.
People could avoid the increase in surveillance and control by using old
style cars. Such a loophole is intolerable to the government.
Old style cars will be prohibited. All cars will be required to have
the new features.
It
doesn't matter how much safer it is for cars to drive themselves, how convenient
it might be for a driver to be able to snooze at the wheel, or how many
lives might theoretically be saved by self-driving cars. All such
alleged justifications are propaganda. They're excuses intended to
lure people into accepting the additional surveillance and control as being
"necessary". In fact, anything that increases the effectiveness of
a car as an instrument of surveillance and control, however allegedly noble
the motives, is a bad thing. The driver, not the car and certainly
not the government, should always be in control of the car, however great
the risk or the inconvenience.
For
decades, writers have been warning
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