Jean Paul Sartre was right: “It is enough for one man to hate another for hatred to spread throughout humanity”. This time the other is not a human being but a robot with wheels. The concept, however, is the same: we are witnessing an incredible and violent wave of hatred towards self-driving cars.
After the skittles resting peacefully on the bonnets of self-driving cars in San Francisco (sending the software haywire because the car “thinks” it has hit an obstacle and therefore stops) we have now arrived at pure violence: an autonomous Waymo taxi, from Alphabet group, the parent company of Google, was vandalized and completely set on fire by several people who attacked it. Always in San Francisco during the Chinese New Year holidays, because California is now the home of unmanned taxis, the state that should have pioneered this technology.
A role played in reverse, however: the hunt for self-driving cars is now open in San Francisco. Reason? They take away jobs from taxi drivers, they scare people. According to the Washington Post, which analyzed data from the American Highway Safety Agency last June, the “autopilot” mode has been involved in 736 accidents and 17 deaths in the USA since 2019. Nothing compared to the overall numbers, but enough to terrify and therefore trigger hatred. We are faced with the same case as the shark, which everyone is afraid of, ignoring the fact that cows kill ten times more every year.
So, another incredible thing, the images published on social networks of the Waymo Jaguar on fire in a crowded street in Chinatown received a lot of likes. There are many videos of the angry crowd breaking the windows, throwing firecrackers into the passenger compartment which explode and then start a gigantic fire.
And now the world laboratory for autonomous vehicles seems to have given its verdict: these cars are hated. And technology or artificial intelligence can evidently do very little against hatred.
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