Don't talk to me about the 90s if you weren't soaking a tennis ball in lighter fluid and firing the flaming missile out of a "potato gun" made out of beer cans... in the 70s. Also something about all the kids trying to imitate Evil Knievel and jumping their bikes off ramps made out of planks and milk crates... Without protective gear of any kind.
Everyone who got out of that decade alive and with at most minimal brain damage thinks that we're too obsessed with safety today.
Don't worry we know you were alive in the 70s just from you including a hyphen in that emoticon (and everyone knows I was alive in the 90s because I said emoticon and not emoji) ;)
The most I will say about the bullshit we got up to, as "the last chopper out" before literally everyone had CCTV, is that we made it our personal goal to get everything we did listed in the local newspaper's crime blotter
11 yr old me bought canned hairspray in the drug store, walked straight to the payphone 12 feet outside the drug store, ignited the hairspray and torched the phone until it didn't work anymore.
Another analogy can be found in the current way that automobiles are sold. For new models that are considered desirable, they maximize their margins by putting expensive limited editions with desirable badging and options on sale first. It may take a full year or more before a mainstream mass-market edition with basic features is released at a lower price.
The iPhone Duo and iPhone 18 Pros were released this week. The "ordinary" iPhone 18 apparently won't ship until Spring of 2027. That's the same strategy!
I can't speak for anyone else, but I suspect that Amazon are nearly continuously planning for automated deliveries. Drones? Trucks with lockers that stop in front of your house and you retrieve your delivery?
I dunno, but there's no way Bezos doesn't look at his drivers and delivery partners and think, "Your livelihood will soon be my margin."
Do you think robotics on the street are going to last long at scale? How’s it going for Flock ALPR cameras? Is Bezos going to be out in the streets defending automated vehicles, drones, and last mile robots on foot? Unlikely.
I don’t think that comparison works. People aren’t attacking Flock cameras because they’re taking work away from hard working video camera watchers. It’s because they’re spying on them. By comparison autonomous delivery vehicles aren’t doing anything the manned vehicles don’t do today.
> As part of a June 2024 survey, the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator for Political Economy
and Regulation (VPA) polled 1,031 U.S. adults ages 18 or older to identify attitudes
toward drone delivery services, which may soon be much more common due to
changes in the regulations governing them.
Our polling reveals that Americans are deeply concerned about the possibility of
neighborhood disturbances, privacy violations, and abuses of power by the large
corporations poised to dominate drone delivery, including Amazon, Google, and
Walmart. Moreover, we find overwhelming bipartisan support for the regulation of
drone delivery services. When Americans learn about policy options to curtail the
drawbacks of drone delivery, they respond positively to the government taking action.
Aerial drone delivery services creating a fleet of flying lawnmower noises over my house is entirely a different thing than quiet electric based ground delivery vehicles... At least theoretical ground based delivery vehicles without humans aren't dumping gatorade piss bottles.
The business conditions that necessitate the use of piss bottles themselves are a pretty good indicator of how poor the working conditions are for many 3rd party contracted delivery services.
To drive itself around safely, any ground vehicle will need some kind of awareness of those surroundings. Right now, that means cameras. I don't think people will be satisfied if those cameras get replaced with short wavelength radar given that WiFi-band radio goes through walls and would therefore allow spying inside houses and there's already people messing around with this as YouTube tech demos.
Similar applies to basically all sense equipment: if it is good enough for safe driving, it's good enough to be a surveillance node.
And given that "oh no my data was leaked" is a big enough problem even with just websites, that there are whole businesses dedicated to just helping with it, anyone who starts with "Your Privacy Is Important To Us" is automatically facing a massive trust deficit.
I think that's a legit question, but the way it plays out is not clear.
See the luddite movement in the UK: the way the machines were getting used threatened livelihoods, protestors (who were even fine using the machines in principle) damaged or destroyed them, government wrote new law allowing the death penalty for "machine breaking".
On the other hand, the UK in the 1810s is not something that people today would call "democratic", so perhaps popular vitriol might today may instead result in politicians getting elected to make the automation cease.
I think the long term plan is for the automated vehicles and last mile robots to defend themselves. We're already living in some form of a post-modern cyberpunk dystopia, it just isn't full distributed yet.
I'm not sure I understand the comparison. There's over 100k Flock ALPR cameras in the country, despite how many people passionately despise them and are willing to risk criminal charges to destroy them. Amazon is a much more popular business and delivery robots pose fewer privacy concerns, so I would expect street robots to face even fewer deployment problems if the tech becomes cost-competitive.
Flying drones I can see more potential problems with.
In the 1970s, a bunch of us would have marathon sessions playing this newfangled game called "Dungeons and Dragons." It was a box set then, AD&D was yet to come. We played in a games club on Yonge Street in Toronto, and just down the street as the kind of sleazy movie theatre that played "Swedish Naturist" movies and any other porn or porn-adjacent films they could get away with.
On Saturdays, we would play until about 11:45, lock the club up, and go to the theatre, where they would show The Rocky Horror Picture Show at midnight. It was semi-wild. A few people would be there in costume, and lots of people would shout out the most famous lines.
I enjoyed it, and ended up making a minor contribution to the atmosphere: I started brining a water pistol along, and when there was rain in the movie, I'd fire it upwards, waving it randomly so other patrons would get a little sprinkle.
Oh that's right I almost forgot that this film exists - his astounding pronunciation and boogie woogie tailors are two highlights of this strange stage play adaptation. I have to .. no .. i must watch it again.
If you see it next to the
Rocky Horror Picture Show (edit: and as pennywise in IT!) it really displays how wide the interpreting skill of the actor were.
Not that it matters, but my use case for Nitter and XCancel was to provide a link to accompany a screen shot when discussing a tweet on Mastodon. Now I'lll just use a screen shot, there is zero chance I will send them direct traffic of any kind.
Fred and Wilhelmina are in bed together. Fred tosses and turns, unable to sleep. "Fred, what's troubling you?"
"You know Bjarne from the bank? Well, a balloon payment is due tomorrow on my loan, and I don't have the cash flow to pay it."
Wilhelmina thinks for a bit, then reaches for her phone. "Betty? Yes, this is Wilhelmina. Sorry to call so late. Would you tell Bjarne that Fred can't make the loan payment tomorrow? Yes, that's all. Good night."
Fred states at Wilhelmina, aghast. "What did you do THAT for?" She smiles. "Now it's Bjarne's problem. Let him toss and turn, you can go to sleep."
I chose the names from The Flintstones, although the joke is not from the show.
Ridiculously unimportant trivia: The Flintstones borrows heavily from The Honeymooners, was the first animated sitcom, and was also the first animated show aired in prime-time.
Everyone who got out of that decade alive and with at most minimal brain damage thinks that we're too obsessed with safety today.
;-)
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