Privacy concerns aside regarding how this information in a negative way. I want my alertness to be monitored. One of the smart cars I was driving recently poped up a recommendation on the console that I should pull over and take a short break, or something to that effect. I realized that I was tired and groggy and I thought that was a good idea. So I pulled over and rested for about 20mins then got back on the road and I was more alert. I think these prompts are great because sometimes I don't realize that my lack of alertness can be dangerous. Having that reminder is a great plus in my experience.

The Rav4 has an aggressive driving indicator too I believe. One day my wife was out and we had an argument over the phone (my fault, of course...) She drove back in an emotional state of mind snd the car suggested her to pull over.

I don't see why driver monitoring data needs to go to the cloud. If the car senses swerving and large fluctuation in acceleration then the driver should take a rest.

The pull of the lane assist alone helps me realize when I'm not paying enough attention to the road.

See, this gets to me. Do you have a license to operate a motor vehicle? That little card is supposed to indicate that you are capable of safely operating a motor vehicle. If you cannot do that; you should not have that little card. You shouldn't be relying on the car to help you. It's not your fault though. The government deemed you responsible enough to operate a vehicle and that was probably a mistake. They do it to thousands of people. Probably over half of those little cards were issued to people who shouldn't have them.

I personally think we should make different classes of drivers. Drivers licenses for people like you who can only operate vehicles under 3,000lbs with max driving assists and at most 200 horsepower. And another class of unrestricted responsible drivers for people who actually want to get where they are going in a safe, cost efficient, and time efficient manner. People who respect that they are operating a piece of heavy machinery at great speed in close proximity to other human beings with places they're trying to go, and who take that responsibility seriously.

I think the solution should be to be more self-aware, not to jam highly invasive technology into vehicles. I don't want my car to have any sense of my "alertness" at all, ever, I don't care if it keeps that data local, it should never ever be recording/monitoring it in the first place.

when I was taught to drive by a professional driver, alertness, eye movement, passenger safety and control of the vehicle are part of the driving. After thirty years of safe driving, it is stunning to see people voting to include "alertness monitoring" .. you want that ?!? It seems like mental illness to me, to want that in your car, when you cannot turn it off.. Secondly I have posted about NO being tracked at all times, and gotten downvotes for that .. really honestly, what are you asking for voters?

The problem with losing alertness is that you also lose your ability to monitor alertness.

Yeah, and we can rip out all those pointless and expensive seatbelts and crumple zones and airbags and replace them with just a bit more unerringness.

Yes we should.

And then we can replace ambulances with hurses and arm the drivers. Think of the savings!

It's been an active research topic for big truck and military aircraft operators since the 1980s with a reputation of being a very challenging problem.

And there you go. Self driving cars won't take over because AI is as good as humans, rather because humans regress below AI.

That is very interesting. Do you know what the system used to determine your alertness?

Sounds like a great use case for a train.

Trains are great if you live in a country where they go lots of places. At least for me in the US, the driving to get to and from the nearest train terminus can be comparable to the amount of driving to go straight to my destination, even when going surprisingly far. (Of course, trains can be much better if you start and end close to an existing route.)

Well then the simple answer is to stop giving billions to subsidize a handful of electric cars for rich people and build a transit system instead.

Passenger trains went plenty of places in the US and Australia. They were systematically demolished and sold for scrap at a loss.

> Well then the simple answer is to stop giving billions to subsidize a handful of electric cars for rich people and build a transit system instead.

It's simple in that it's easy to say. Stopping giving billions of dollars would also be easy to do. I have no idea how easy (re-)building a rail transit system would be, but I expect pretty hard.

But the problem is that the actual doing of the task, no matter how difficult it is, is the easiest part by far; the hard part is convincing people to do it. Even as a huge fan of rail, if I had the ability to make people drop convictions as firmly held as Americans' that cars are and must always be central, then I would use that power to change other convictions first.

> the hard part is convincing people to do it

It starts with not repeating concern troll thought terminating cliches every time the subject comes up.

> It starts with not repeating concern troll thought terminating cliches every time the subject comes up.

We're not on opposite sides of this. I love trains, and take them wherever I can. But something like a poorly built out rail network doesn't get changed overnight, so just saying "sounds like a great use case for a train" when there isn't one isn't helpful either—a bit like telling a starving person this would be a great time for some food. It's the right answer long term, but not much help short term.

But if there's something specific I said that sounded like I was trying to disparage trains, then maybe you could tell me what it was so that I can say it better.

Well the context was a massively subsidized system that is years away from being reliable, will take well over a decade to roll out, has large negative externalities, requires giving up numerous freedoms, and may not ever work, for solving the same problem trains solve but worse.

The amount of public resources going into roads between now and when driver monitoring makes a difference is staggering, and we could just spend that money on transit and solve numerous other problems at the same time.

Responding to a (admittedly snarky) suggestion that we steer towards an egalitarian future rather than a panopticon when both are equidistant with a tautilogical assertion that we're not in the good future now is the same tired line that comes out anytime anyone suggests improving things rather than expending greater resources making them worse.

Is there a train to Aspen?

There should be.

I realize that everyone involved has the best of intentions, and that some of these things will save lives. Still, I don’t actually trust that the technology (like the Gaize test device, AutoPilot, etc.) actually _work_ reliably and without bias. I feel overwhelmingly certain that we need more data privacy guarantees, not more private companies like insurance groups and car manufacturers slurping up ever more data. This all sounds so boringly dystopian.

Once the data is spreads past a certain minimum availability, it's better to make it widely available instead of restricted. For example, my Social Security Number has been leaked every few years over the last decade or so. Yet, its partial restriction makes knowledge of it appear to be useful for authentication.

Similarly, if a trace of my location is only known to my mobile network provider and government surveillance, then if I get swept up by some mistaken dragnet, I'd be disappeared. If it were published to all my friends, family, and neighbors, they'd at least be able to see when and where I was taken, and maybe be able to fight for my release. Ideally, the security camera video of my capture would have been live-streamed to the public as well. We can't rely on individuals to be present and taking out their cameras. The public needs its own surveillance to protect itself from the state.

Boringly dystopian is casually accepting 40k auto deaths a year. Driving should be as solemn, restricted, and monitored as flying a plane. Driving is not a human right, and being a menace to other road users is not a private matter. I look forward to driving safety systems pushing drivers who are not suited to the responsibility of piloting 2-ton deadly weapons around pedestrians out to more appropriate, fun, and relaxed forms of transportation. The driver’s seat is treated way too casually.

It's funny watching the same neckbeards who complain about DRM in their over-the-top RGB LED Windows laptop but line up around the corner for DRM in their saltine-cracker Prius if it means they still get to drive without paying attention to the lines on the road.

How did you get from "...the PC should be a general purpose computing machine that executes arbitrary commands given to it by an operator" to "I really want a car that tells me when I need to count backwards from 10?" Like seriously, no wonder why traffic was so much better when you all WFH.

Driver and occupant monitoring will save lives, at least until we get high level autonomy. E.g. monitoring driver attentiveness and sleepiness or pet / child detection in hot cars (the latter will get points soon in EuroNCAP testing [0]).

There are already cameras monitoring humans inside rental cars and nobody seems to mind. If privacy concerns really become paramount there's always lidar/radar that offers relatively high anonymity.

[0] https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2021-12/GRSP-70-30e.pd...

> There are already cameras monitoring humans inside rental cars and nobody seems to mind

While i'm fully aware my rental can often have GPS tracking etc for the rental company, I have never, ever seen a rental with a camera filming the occupants, and I've rented a lot of cars around the world. I cant find any evidence of this online either.

The one example I can find where a lens was present in the cabin from Hertz appears to be part of a navigation system feature that was never used, and Hertz even then had to handle public backlash for the disabled camera. The public backlash/reputation damage of filming private occupants in the cabin solely for the security benefit of the rental agency would be pretty significant too, to the extent I can't imagine this happening in most Western nations.

Dear god 38 fatalities a year in a country of over 300 million, we must scramble to deploy this new technology in all vehicles with no delay!

Can we please just have high quality public transit, including high-speed inter-city rail?

Until a transit strike paralyzes it. Or until a storm shuts it down. Or until government decides to shut it down Covid-style. Or until the trains turn into homeless shelters with meth-overdosing zombies. Last thing in the world I want to do is spend time with “the public.” Or have to haul kids and groceries via train. Or have to get to a doctors appointment on one side of town and then another event on the other side of town and minimal time to connect those dots. I also don’t want to walk multiple blocks during heat waves, storms, or snow.

> Until a transit strike paralyzes it.

People have had protests in the middle of a free way, so human action resulting in paralyzed transportation isn't novel. Storms, car crashes etc have "paralyzed" roads. Bridges have fallen into water ways paralyzing transit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-5_Skagit_River_bridge_collap...

> Or until government decides to shut it down Covid-style...

If you have widely used public transportation, then it can't be shut down. The public won't allow it. It goes from infrastructure to critical infrastructure. You would probably see enforced mask mandates.

If you have public transportation used by the middle or upper class, the tolerance for homeless and drugs will decrease.

> Last thing in the world...

And this is the fundamental selfishness. You want to rob cities of economies of scale so they can subsidize your posh suburban life style. Meanwhile, there's a whole bunch of people just like you, and the end result is hour long commutes for 20 minute's of distance or 10 lane freeways that somehow seem to be some of the most clogged in the nation. You have bad experiences with American "public transportation" but probably haven't experienced functional transportation. Your point to point trip in a city could be unencumbered by the spectre of traffic.

> I also don’t want to walk multiple blocks during heat waves, storms, or snow.

If you travel to Asia, you will find that functional transportation often comes with sprawling subterranean complexes or covered walkways. Even when it doesn't there are umbrellas for sale everywhere.

You still have to park and travel from your parking to your destination. I don't know about you, but that's frequently been blocks of walking for me in any city.

American public transportation is bad. It's not reasonable to point to our bad transportation and say public transportation as an idea is bad. It is a vastly more pleasant experience in other places.

Most of the country is low density.

Local buses were shut down for almost 2 years from Covid. Tons of businesses shut down for sole reason that people couldn’t get to work. Not having a car is insane.

The first time you go to a city that has incredible public transportation you will have a very transformative experience. Go spend a month in Seoul or Taipei.

Cars are poison. They poison walk-ability, they poison commuting, they damage health from their exhaust, deprivation of walking, and crashes, they require attention to operate and thus literally steal your life hours. Cars require parking and parking spaces. Cars require wide roads which reduces density. Cars require surface level roads. Cars create traffic. Cars spit in the face of economies of scale.

When I lived in the center of a city, I could run my finger across my window seal and it would come up black from all the car exhaust that had settled on it. That is going into our lungs.

Structuring the operations of life around cars is insane.

Density is a policy choice.

This is a tired old argument that doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The majority of people live in cities, not rural homesteads.

Once upon a time we didn't have the interstate system, but FDR created the New Deal, and with that the federal government created the interstate highway system we have today. We can do the same for rail, but the automobile lobbyists won't allow it.

I'd argue that the interstate highway system is probably the USA's greatest accomplishment, and one of the greatest public works projects. FDR sold it by framing it as a national defense initiative.

Maybe we need to use some of that national defense budget for public transit? Sadly, I don't think we'll ever have a politician with the kind of gumption necessary to save ourselves from ourselves.

Low density cities. Few places are like Chicago or New York.

The interstate highway system was actually for defense. Moving things from coast to coast was far to difficult.

FDR saw the German Highway system during the war and was rightfully jealous.

Let's say you're right, and cities are low density. So what? What precludes them from having good public transit? Roads exist, why can't they be rail lines instead?

Roads are quite expensive, and there are many internet resources with tons of evidence and arguments about this: strong towns, not just bikes, climate town, etc.

Roads are much easier to interconnect than rails because road vehicles can make much sharper turns and handle steeper grades.

Point to point navigation has high utility and is difficult to acheive with rail.

Minimum viable roads are actually quite inexpensive: clear large vegetation from the path and there's a usable road. You can incrementally improve with path markers, grading, gravel, pavement, etc. Minimum viable rail is a much higher standard, which needs grading, railbed preparation, laying the rail, signalling and operations.

If only FDR had seen the Swiss system of streetcars…