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Tesla’s Cybercab has been deployed, and it’s already under investigation
(arstechnica.com)
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is updating vehicle standards to make it easier and faster for driverless cars to deploy on public roads. It’s currently tweaking eight rules, including those requiring car parts that driverless cars don’t really need: brake pedals, windshield wipers, and rearview mirrors. But for now, years-old standards remain in place.
Beyond private companies using tax dollars to manage their special regulatory environment, privatize and monetize public roads, and test their unfinished and unregulated products on citizens, I expect these to be fully-equipped roving surveillance and oppression machines:
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Each car can be covertly equipped with a suite of LPR or facial recognition cameras, sensors, and signals intelligence equipment.
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Autonomous cars can patrol and surveil large areas to gather intelligence while acting as innocuous taxis.
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Journalists, brown people, or pregnant woman making the mistake of entering one of these could simply be recognized and driven to a “detention” center for arrest.
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Vehicles can autonomously work in tandem to hunt down and assault other vehicles, or serve as transport for domestic military operations, or blockade roads.
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Service can be selectively denied to certain areas or social groups to curtail and manage movement during protests or events.
I mean, just use your imagination as to how an authoritarian federal government could collude with a Fascist tech CEO to leverage a large autonomous robo-taxi fleet set upon the population:
