I often hear this kind of thing and am really surprised by it. Specifically for the tech in vehicles example, it seems like a real double standard. Around 37,000 people in the US die in car accidents every year[1]. That's 100 people a DAY. There is a huge cost to not adopting new safety measures, even if it depends on immature tech, and that needs to be factored against the potential new unknown risks.

Driving to work is almost certainly the riskiest thing you do most days. I find it plausible that people 50 years from now will think that the cars we drove before 2010 were unconscionable death traps.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

However, when you are considering system risk (e.g. that a bad actor could crash 100k cars at the same time) the worst case outcome could be much worse than the mean outcome.

That statement doesn't seem meaningful to me in a vacuum, without further qualification. It's not at all guaranteed that safety features have net benefits, either measured financially or in estimated human welfare. Have you noticed there are a lot of high tech safety features in modern cars, but insurance companies are selective about which ones receive discounts?

If self-driving cars are substantially safer, insurance companies will be able to give substantial discounts. I vaguely remember Tesla making noises about providing insurance to their own customers, but I don't know if it came to anything.

Depends on the feature you're talking about. With self-driving cars, for example, there is no evidence that they are any safer than human drivers. In fact, it is possible that they are more dangerous than human drivers.

An immature relationship might be based on selfish interests, compounded with power struggles, boundary issues, jealousy, spying, and a little rage and stockholm syndrome thrown in for fun.

A mature relationship is based on trust and mutual respect. It does not concern itself with knowing every detail or trepidation regarding other suitors. The relationship is there because it is valued and there are willing participants.

Now... internet connected devices.

We need safe updates with transparent documentation as to all the changes, with hardware enforced feature switches. Forcing them to go through an approval process doesn't sound bad until you've met regulators like the FAA -- or Apple.

If you allow users to approve and roll back updates then there is some ability to recover after bad updates. Of course, you don't want theives to be able to roll back to a vulnerable release, but you can require the master owner key & code for rollback.

I wonder how long it will be before we start to see legal or regulatory interventions in this area. Mandatory self-updating and phone-home functionality is rapidly infecting technologies we rely on every day, from our cars to our home computers to our TV sets.

This always-connected, always-updated approach inevitably introduces some risks. It often causes intrusions into privacy or brings changes after purchase that users of these technologies don't necessarily want.

Competition in these markets is evidently insufficient to provide alternatives for those who don't want anything to do with this modern culture. I don't believe that is limited to a small group of eccentric tinfoil-hat fans any more.

Hopefully it won't take some sort of widespread disaster to wake the politicians up to the dangers here, though given the past performance of the political class around the world when it comes to technology issues, I'm not particularly optimistic.

Consumers don't have a voice here, and (given the Democrats' record) I don't see that changing regardless of who wins the upcoming election.

Not long IMO. It'll be sold as a safety measure, but the real purpose will be to limit competition. I think it's similar to "warranty void if removed" stickers, but I'm worried we're not going to get the same pragmatic legislation that makes those ignorable.

Something has gone terribly wrong with modern technology.

Gotta remember, that every day people entrust their lives to lots of software and electronic systems. Of course, it's important to have reasonable security measure taken, but just because something's electronic doesn't make that a bad thing.

Most modern cars don't connect to the internet.