Who put technology in charge of us?
We designed all these things. It's supposed to be subservient – but instead of technology fearing us, we now fear technology.
Using the self-checkout is a bit like talking to your mother-in-law.
You try your best, you want to do all the right things, but she comes along at the last minute to inform you that you actually have it all wrong and that you are just chewing gum on the shoes of life.
And so it was in the new Mitsubishi Triton with its unquote “driver monitoring system”.
That sounds scary enough — and it's even scarier when you realize that it's a camera that tracks your movements and facial expressions to see if you're driving carefully.
Sipping coffee, laughing and checking your blind spot – something absolutely essential to safe driving – all trigger the system.
It squealed, banged and carried so much that now the car company was forced to reduce the sensitivity because the distraction of the claws was more dangerous than anything the driver was doing at all.
You are under constant surveillance wherever you are. An hour in the car is the only time some of us—without phones, cameras, or annoying people—can be alone with our thoughts.
Now they are trying to take it from us too.
I suspect it makes us worse drivers because it encourages complete dependence on technology.
Automotive technology is advantageous to some extent. Reversing cameras and sensors are great helpers, for example.
But if the car takes control of everything, what responsibility does the driver bear? What happens when the technology fails (just ask CrowdStrike) and you have to take over?
I don't need my car to tell me that I looked at the radio for a few seconds.
If you can't figure out what is and isn't dangerous, then you shouldn't be on the road in the first place.
A dangerous driver with excessive technology is not a safer driver – it's just a dangerous driver with the wrong safety blanket.
They never need to improve their skills because the car compensates for their shortcomings.
And if that's not bad enough, consider the wider implications of having facial recognition technology hard-wired into your car.
The New York Times revealed earlier this year that major manufacturers, including General Motors, were collecting driving data from their vehicles — such as how hard you brake and how fast you're driving — and selling it to insurers through a third party.
Tesla employees had access to vision captured by cameras attached to their cars and shared compromising videos with each other via private messages — including one man who approached his car completely naked.
And we are to accept that all this technology is only for our safety?
Data is the most valuable resource in the modern world, whether from a financial perspective or an embarrassment perspective.
You can hardly enjoy privacy anywhere. You might as well set up a live stream from your bathroom once the cars are gone, because heck—there's nothing left to hide.
