this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2023
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Autonomous driving isn't necessarily controlled by a corporation any more than your PC is. Sure, the earliest computers were all built and run by corporations and governments, but today we all enjoy (the choice of) computing autonomy because of those innovations.
I can be pro AV and EV without being pro corporate control over the industries. It's a fallacy to conflate the two.
The fact is that letting humans drive in a world with AVs is like letting humans manually manage database entries in a world with MySQL. And the biggest difficulty is that we're trying to live in a world where both humans and computers are "working out of the same database at the same time". That's a much more difficult problem to solve than just having robots do it all.
I still have a gas powered manual that I love driving, but I welcome the advancement in EV/AV technology, and am ready to adopt it as soon as sufficient open standards and repairability can be offered for them.
That's just outright wrong.
Modern cars communicate with their manufacturer, and we don't have any means to control this communication.
I can disconnect my PC from the internet, I cannot disconnect my car. I can install whatever OS and apps pleases me on my PC, I cannot do anything about the software on my car's computer.
So, while I can take full control of my PC if it pleases me, I cannot take any control of my car.
With all due respect, you're still not understanding what I'm saying.
If you traveled back 50+ years to when computers took up several hundred sq ft, one might try to make the same argument as you: "don't rent time on IBM's mainframe, they can see everything you're computing and could sell it to your competitor! Computers are always owned by the corporate elite, therefore computers are bad and the technology should be avoided!" But fast forward to today, and now you can own your own PC and do everything you want to with it without anyone else involved. The tech progressed. It wasn't wrong to not trust corporate owned computing, but the future of a tech itself is completely independent from the corporations who develop them.
For a more recent example, nearly 1 year ago, ChatGPT was released to the world. It was the first time most people had any experience with a LLM. And everything you sent to the bot was given to a proprietary, for profit algorithm to further their corporate interests. One might have been tempted to say that LLMs and AI would always serve the corporate elite, and we should avoid the technology like the plague. But fast forward to now, not even one year later, and people have replicated the tech in open source projects which you can run locally on your own hardware. Even Meta (the epitome of corporate control) has open sourced LLaMA to run for your own purposes without them seeing any of it (granted the licenses will prevent what you can do commercially).
The story is the same for virtually any new technology, so my point is, to denounce all of AVs because today corporations own it is demonstrably shortsighted. Again, I'm not interested in the proprietary solutions available right now, but once the tech develops and we start seeing some open standards and repairability enter the picture, I'll be all for it.
You might want to pick another example, because OpenAI was originally founded as a non-profit organisation, and in order to avoid going bankrupt they became a "limited" profit organisation, which allowed them to source funding from more sources... but really allow them to ever become a big greedy tech company. All they're able to do is offer some potential return to the people who are giving them hundreds of billions of dollars with no guarantee they'll ever get it back.
Maybe reread my post. I specifically picked ChatGPT as an example of proprietary corporate control over LLM tech.