It has definitely been a noticeable problem much earlier than that, my guess probably a half-decade after the dot com bubble burst. I was in school at Palo Alto Senior High School and I gradually began to notice really offensive trends in the way "silicon valley people" acted. When I left school the damage was already done. I remember one of the last examples I saw before college was in a Facebook group called "humans of Palo Alto" (which I objected to from the start), there was a picture of two men in nice clothing holding cardboard signs that said "need venture capital money". Their quote was "you know the Drake song 'started from the bottom now we're here'? Well, that's about us"

It's not just outsiders who take this view.

I was hoping you'd show up in this thread ;)

It's definitely not just outsiders as you (and I) can attest; I went with that line of argument to try and convey some sense of urgency about the problem. It's easy to dismiss internal dissent about SV libertarian groupthink as not important, but "outsiders" have the potential to bring the party to an end if they collectively get really grumpy about what we're doing. I thought that might be more motivation.

Unfortunately for all of us, this will likely continue until people get killed in large enough numbers for some common sense to prevail.

Here's something I always wonder about humans; Why is it only groupthink when you disagree with it?

And we've now, at the behest of these companies, redefined statists down to:

- thinks it's OK for neighbors and local government to have a say in whether people run a hotel next door, possibly sharing a roof or even a wall

- thinks it's OK to require pretty reasonable background checks ala Austin for taxi drivers

- thinks it's OK to have some safety regulations around self driving cars sharing our roads beyond hey, it worked in my car on this specific stretch of road so, you know, yolo

Congratulations, by waiting a year to implement self driving cars, through overly burdening government regulations, you just killed ten thousand people.

What about those people? The people who WILL die in car accidents next year unless we do something about it. Screw them, right?

This isn't a self-driving car. It's a driver assist. It depends on an alert driver behind the wheel. What we're learning is that these systems can, in some circumstances, be the worst of both worlds --- a human driver lulled into complacency by technology that was not designed to handle complicated road conditions autonomously --- a system that itself generates both human and machine error.

There's an interesting similarity with Air France 447 in your description -- a crash caused by information overload and the normal assist system going into an alternate mode.

Noone is arguing about the benefits of self-driving technology in general.

The question at hand is: Does this specific piece of equipment actually work as described, and move us towards that goal, or is it a piece of cobbled together junk that will cause more accidents? If you want to sell this specific piece of equipment on the consumer market, you'd better have a good answer to that question, and be able to back it up with more than "hey, it worked for me this morning!"

my god, idlewords couldn't have written this better

I don't think this can be fixed. Silicon Valley thinks its the solution, when its more the problem. You can't drastically disrupt major pieces of the economy, expect to keep large swaths of the pie for yourself, and having no safety net, those who used to have jobs end up disenfranchised and permanently economically disadvantaged.

It's the exact same thing as the banking crisis, only with a bit of a techno sauce. See, if it works then they'll make bank, if it doesn't society will pick up the cost.

It's a bet without much of a downside.

Privatize the profits, socialize the failures.

The Uber lawsuit doesn't fit in that pattern. Cab companies are also being used over the same issue[1], since drivers were always considered contractors. Uber followed the established model there, it's not an example of SV arrogance.

[1] http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2014-03-26/news/chi-suit-...

How about just not caring on "correcting" people's impressions of our culture? It seems like it's a challenge any way, probably because it's a fool's errand. Yeah a lot of people who are brilliant don't give af, why get suckered into believing this is a bad thing? In fact, you don't have to have an opinion about it.