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Tech

Beware, Florida: Driverless Robot Cars Will Kill Your Old Ladies

Sure, I like "technology, but driverless cars?" Gee golly, what a bunch of fuddy duddy. This might be the first publicly aired political assault on roboticized, driverless cars; a Google-backed concept that's typically met with the kind of...

Sure, I like “technology, but driverless cars?” Gee golly, what a bunch of fuddy duddy.

This might be the first publicly aired assault on roboticized, driverless cars; a Google-backed concept that’s typically met with the kind of media swooning reserved for NASA projects. It’s an attack ad on John Brandes, who was challenging a 12-year incumbent for one of the state’s senate seats, and it revives some familiar techno-paranoia tropes with all the subtlety of an Apple product launch.

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An old lady—with a walker, no less—shakes her fist at those goshdurn “dangerous” driverless robot cars that are terrorizing her neighborhood. The also-old-lady narrator expresses her contempt, and huffs, “you would think he’d focus on jobs.”

It’d be a pretty rote example of an attempt to paint technological pursuits as ridiculous whilst tapping into fears of the changing world—particularly amongst the elderly—if it weren’t for the novelty of the subject matter. As such, it does raise some interesting questions, like, might citizens actually be frightened by the specter of automated vehicles dominating our streets? Might a concept that thrills tech bloggers, seems kind of cool to young folk, and even feels somewhat mundane to the internet-absorbed actually piss off the nation’s little old ladies? Might it tap into a sense that our world is spiraling out of our control and into the hands of road-raging robots?

I doubt it. For starters, Brandes won the race, so the ad couldn’t have been all that effective. Secondly, this is a generation that watched mankind land on the moon, drop the nuclear bomb, and tie the world together with the internet. Driverless cars should register as a silly nuisance at worst—it’s unlikely they’re keeping anyone up at night.

And it’s perfectly valid to consider the tech itself a waste of time with a wrongheaded focus (I do—let’s just build trains already), but pretending like supporting robotics somehow cancels out “job creation” is beyond preposterous.

It’s certainly interesting to see advanced technology take fire in such a politically-motivated way—who knows, maybe the next techo-paranoid political ad will take on the Google glasses.

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