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Uber and Lyft Want You Banned From Using Your Own Self-Driving Car in Urban Areas (siliconbeat.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the Mercury News:
The rabble can't be trusted with self-driving cars, and only companies operating fleets of them should be able to use them in dense urban areas. So say Uber and Lyft, as signatories to a new list of transportation goals developed by a group of international non-governmental organizations and titled "Shared Mobility Principles for Livable Cities"... According to Principle No. 10, "Shared fleets can provide more affordable access to all, maximize public safety and emissions benefits, ensure that maintenance and software upgrades are managed by professionals..."
It's stated reason is to "actualize the promise of reductions in vehicles, parking, and congestion, in line with broader policy trends to reduce the use of personal cars in dense urban areas." But others remain suspicious.
Gizmodo complains that the proposal "doesn't exactly sound like the freedom-filled future sci-fi writers have been promising, now does it?" and concludes that Uber and Lyft "have a hot new idea for screwing over city-dwellers."
It's stated reason is to "actualize the promise of reductions in vehicles, parking, and congestion, in line with broader policy trends to reduce the use of personal cars in dense urban areas." But others remain suspicious.
Gizmodo complains that the proposal "doesn't exactly sound like the freedom-filled future sci-fi writers have been promising, now does it?" and concludes that Uber and Lyft "have a hot new idea for screwing over city-dwellers."
So, basically the complete opposite of what Uber currently says they stand for (people owning their own vehicles and using them to make some extra money "sharing" rides).
Uber clearly has the best interests of the people at heart and isn't just in it to make a buck by whatever means are more convenient.
Same as the Old Boss (Taxi Companies)
good for liability & saves owners from facing criminal changes when the owner is just one guy and the he does have the funds to go court to get the source code so he can say the software messed up.
Up Yours?
To the tune of "Horst Wessel"
Uber and Lyft uber alles!
There will be no need to legislate against provately-owned cars, autonomous or otherwise.
As self-driving fleets proliferate, there will be irresistible temptation on the part of urban developers to cut back on parking spaces at businesses, which will be needed only for individually owned cars; instead of a sea of parking spaces for all customers at a movie theater, the business will expand into its parking area, leaving only one row of "VIP spaces" that the diminishing number of car owners will have to pay for. As mass car culture fades, owning your own autonomous car will be like owning your own plane, a niche market for the well off. As hoi polloi buzz around in autonomous fleet cars that park only in industrial-zone warehouses when out of service, the remaining individual owners will pay for parking spaces as though they were airport tiedowns or marina slips.
Then Uber, Lyft and the other signatories can pay for the streets and their upkeep (paving, plowing, etc.). If tax payers are expected to continue to pay for streets then we damn well will use our driverless cars on them.
... that we will not realize the full benefit of self-driving cars unless they are networked to communicate with each other and with the regional traffic control infrastructure. This is not a good area for individual empowerment. Rogue vehicles that don't play by the rules -- whatever those rules turn out to be -- will ruin it for everybody else.
In most sane societies, it would be the role of the government to regulate many aspects of automated vehicle development and deployment, from communication and navigation protocols to congestion avoidance to the standardized swappable battery packs that (should) power those vehicles. But we've collectively decided that government should be run by the weakest and dumbest among us. That leaves corporations to supply the necessary leadership.
So, don't blame Uber and Lyft for taking a self-interested authoritarian stance. Blame the voters who put Bible-thumping idiots in charge of the interests that we all share.
It always amazes me that when you think this kind of psychopathic filth have reached the bottom of the ignominy pit, they still manage to dig themselves a few inches deeper.
Psychopaths really are the plague, the cancer of humanity. Whatever small advantage their disfunctional brains may hypothetically bring to our species, it can't possibly even remotely make up for the insane, obcene amount of pain, suffering and bloodshed they have caused throughout history.
Hunt them down. Kill them all. Wipe their genetic filth from the face of the earth.
Next thing you know, they'll be telling me I can't ride my unicorn in the public park.
Car manufactures. Only them will be responsible for theirs autonomous cars! I only need to go from point A to B, I don't need a piece of craps. I will pay for the service and nothing more, just think of taxi without taxi driver. I need a car about 1 hour per day, the time left in the day it's only rusting in my yard.
I won't lie, if laws like they suggest ever got passed then I would straight up burn down the local Uber/Lyft/Assholes Inc. hub and destroy all the cars there. Then I would post a video of it burning and encourage others to do the same. Tyranny must be opposed.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
You're a retard, you know that?
Before you can be banned from using your own self driving car you have to own one, and I think it's very unlikely someone would ever want to sell one to you.
With fully autonomous vehicles, manufacturers will be liable for accidents caused by the self driving cars, so it's in their best interest to keep a tight control on the vehicle maintenance. They probably won't risk trusting the end user with regular checks and fixes. Even something as simple as dirt covering a camera lens could cause an accident. So naturally they would prefer to sell the vehicles to ride sharing companies that are able to professionally manage a fleet, to partner with such a company, or to manage their own fleet themselves.
Uber and Lyft will adopt SaaS into their new subscription based model; AaaS - Automobile as a Service..
A brave new world awaits!
So only approved people can get to request approved "transport" pod in the city at set times?
A mil, government or big brand does not like you and no city car for you.
No car to or from that protest.
The internet politics of the car brand and the user's web history requesting the car is too far apart? No car app in the city for that person.
A few brands will make a nation wide list of who they will drive into a city for shopping, medical, work, fun.
The self driving car looks over every profile and finds out the next request is from a city worker, city contractor, member of the press? Are they doing an investigation on the brand? The brand considered them a ToS risk. No self driving car for them.
Car ownership and been able to drive yourself, a taxi is going to be looked back on as true freedom.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
This is a clear glimpse into the machinations of the corporatocracy wishing to impose their totalitarian vision of the future.
In this "gig economy" foisted on us with all of it's service jobs, private toll roads, apartments, cloud services, and soon to be automated car fleets the every day person will legally own very little. Instead immortal corporations will try to take ownership of most property and the rest of us will live as serfs subjugated to the shifting legal terms of service by said corporations.
Our whole legal systems is built around property rights and only the affairs of property holders seems to matter. Any consideration of the ordinary person is considered to be "cumbersome regulations" that should be eliminated.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be-T J
... in line with broader policy trends to reduce the use of personal cars ...
Said the two companies that hire people to use their personal cars.
... and only companies operating fleets of them [self-driving cars] should be able to use them in dense urban areas.
Ya, fleets, like taxi-cab companies - oops.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
What I see being the future of transportation would be to have shared vehicle fleets that act similar to public transit in that they will pick up other people along the way instead of a bunch of single occupancy self driving vehicles. How this might work is you hail one with an app, and get in. Somewhere down the road a message pops up on the console asking if you would like to pick up other passengers, or pay a fee to continue by yourself. Perhaps a rating system for other passengers so you could make a decision based on what rating they have. Sort of Black Mirrorish, but might be interesting.
What I don't look forward to is the inevitable advertising that will be put into these.
I've been car free for over a year, and the only thing I sometimes miss is using the car as a portable storage unit. Without a car that will be the same one when you get done shopping you have to carry everything you take, and buy, with you.
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." [Thomas Jefferson]
And EV s as well. It is to deprive the populace of a car ownership. Welcome to Soviet Union States of the World.
They'll probably just disable self-driving capability if maintenance is not regularly performed by a dealer. Service departments have massive profit margins.
If dirt on a lens can cripple the system and it can't be detected, I doubt it would pass whatever industry standards get adopted by regulations.
If you have a self-driving car, you don't need Uber or Lyft.
You have your own car drive itself and come and pick you up. It can dive off to a cheap parking garage too, so you don't have to pay inner city parking rates.
A family wouldn't need as many cars either, so more expensive self-driving cars become more affordable.
I hate self-driving cars. Anything to reduce their usage is a good idea.
No thanks.
As if a business would do anything to lock out its potential customers from their own rights so as increase their own profits.
Eventually Lyft/Uber vehicles are going to be used in the commission of crimes (burglaries, robberies, terrorism, etc.). The powers that be should say, "Sure, since you're claiming to be responsible let's see you acting responsibility as well and allow us to put your CEO and board members on trial with these criminals as accomplices and co-conspirators!"
Of course it won't happen, but I can dream can't I?
Cities that go 100% autonomous will have to solve the jaywalking problem.
If all the vehicles on the road are self-driving, then, from a safety perspective, there is nothing to stop a pedestrian crossing when and where they want, in the knowledge that the autonomous vehicles will stop for them. This will cause chaos with the flow of traffic.
Net result: somehow jaywalking must be eliminated.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Now they are the taxi cartels. Brilliant.
Do you have ESP?
prove they support us Democrats. We hate those self-driving cars that are safer.
For the past 30 or more years, there's been a "progressivist" initiative in urban planning to significantly reduce the number of private motor vehicles on the road in densified urban areas (for which read "downtown" - to distinguish it from "inner urban" areas, for which read "slums"). It - along with housing densification itself - is one of the core goals of New Urbanism.
New Urbanism, in turn, is dedicated to reducing urban sprawl (for which read "suburbs"), in part by mandating high-density, multi-family housing, mixed-use planning (for which read "medium- and high-rises with residential units on top and retail at street level"). It regards with disdain that portion of the population that does not care for apartment living and mass transit as a lifestyle, and seeks to enforce its vision by changing planning law and packing planning commissions, not just in big cities, but in small and medium ones, as well.
A prime example of a city whose planning process is now wholly based on New Urbanist principles is San Francisco, which has systematically constrained parking by consistently approving major new construction only on condition that it be designed with new parking that's deliberately inadequate for the expected demand. (The idea being to make finding a parking place so difficult that it will basically force commuters to take public transit, rather than drive.) Ask any San Francisco resident or commuter (other than a fanatic bike geek) how that has worked out.
Uber and Lyft are merely taking advantage of the New Urbanist movement to try to mandate that cities run by progressives enact traffic-reduction policies that will result in their companies making the maximum possible profit from the hapless residents of and commuters to these cities.
I only hope that the New Urbanist masterminds stab them in the back by mandating fleets of city-owned self-driving cars to serve their residents and visitors ...
Check out my novel.
I still don't see why car makers would sell large fleets to middle men to compete against private users. Surely in the end the car makers will run he autonomous fleets themselves.
Any military historian will tell you this, about infra-hostile mercantilism; shoot dead the UBER/LYFT CXXs ... and a half-dozen major stock-holders. Then anti-citizen bullshit stops.
All self-driving cars in cities should be required to have an expensive medallion on them, and only a limited amount should be given out to qualified companies. To protect the consumer.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
actualize the promise of reductions in vehicles, parking, and congestion, ...
If Alice's car and Bob's drives them to work, the cars park in their office parking lot, and waits for them to finish work.
If an Uber car drives Alice to work, and then drives to Bob, and then drives Bob to work, then it's driving more miles per capita. One drive for Alice, one drive for Bob, and one drive between Alice's work and Bob's home.
This might improve parking, but it will make traffic congestion worse, and increase fuel consumption.
My uncle has a country place, no one knows about.
but you could be right for Europe and I'm sure you're right for Asia. As for America, land is cheap around here. You might see this effect in the major cities (San Fransisco, New York, etc) but elsewhere there's no shortage of land.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
They seek duopoly on self-driving cars. The idea could look sane if it was a way to ensure all vehicles communicates with each others, and act with an determined behavior. But since there are still human-drove cars, that just looks like a duopoly on money stream.
Freedom to travel and move about freely is under assault by these assholes. If they had their way, you would go nowhere without paying them a tax. THAT is what this is really about.
Just ban all cars not Uber and Lyft. Don't they own the roads?
There is an oft repeated statement that silicon valley press use when talking about the future of cars (probably repeating something they've heard from the automated driving / internet taxi services) - car ownership is inefficient as cars spend most of their time parked. While true on the surface, it overlooks a key factor - the majority of car usage happens at approximately the same time when people go to and return from work. This means any alternative to ownership needs to satisfy peak usage which returns back to most cars spending the majority of their time parked . The only solution to this is having peak users share the vehicles, in which case congratulations - you just invented the bus.
So "self-driving cars" will be buses controlled remotely. The actual driving will not be completely autonomous. It will be subject to human intervention by a remote dispatcher. But the little bus cabins will be guided on the road by something other than a driver sitting behind a wheel. Well, I feel better about that than I do about a car driven by the same algorithms that can't get GPS navigation to be without error.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Yes cars should be able to act as a fleet, no it shouldn't be on a private network.
Cars are using roads, which are a public utility, as such, any sort of car fleet communication should be owned and operated by the city and not some third party private entity that's only in this for profit.
You have no one else to blame. Enjoy having corrupt, criminal corporations, encouraged by a corrupt, criminal government, take away what's left of your freedom, civil liberty, and privacy.
I'm flabbergasted by the idea that San Francisco's policy resembles any kind of "urbanist". San Francisco is practically the go-to example of an anti-urbanist city in the United States. There is practically no political support for dense housing or mass transit. There's plenty of people talking about it, but they clearly are completely lacking in political power.
Why should corporations be unfairly harmed by consumer actions? The idiotic anti-capitalist rhetoric here is yet another example of how slashtards always take the liberal side of every issue. I have to wonder how much soros and clinton have paid to push this agenda here.
build underpasses and you also have robo cop bust the homeless who take a piss and get them off street as Peeing in public = Sex Offender
San Francisco actually mandates a pretty normal amount of parking. Different districts have different requirements, but generally one space to one apartment, or 1.5 spaces per house in a new housing development.
Yes, parking is difficult in SF. It's a very small dense city with a lot of commuters from the suburbs. Land is very expensive and nobody wants to turn the land into an unprofitable parking garage instead of a highly profitable office building, so there will always be that tension of wanting to build as little parking as possible.
New Urbanism isn't a top-down scheme imposed by some evil central committee, it's a guideline that springs from the bottom up because of the perceived advantages. It makes for pleasant cities that consume less energy and have shorter commute times. There is a need for New Urbanism because plenty of people live in fucking Brentwood and commute 2.5 hours to San Francisco. The model of "everybody lives in a ranch home and drives to work in San Francisco or San Jose" doesn't work when there's 10 million people.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
They lost me at "So say Uber and Lyft, as signatories to a new list of transportation goals developed by a group of international non-governmental organizations"
Nobody voted for them and what they want is meaningless
If it's not safe for Uber/Lyft and non-Uber/Lyft vehicles to operate on these urban roads at the same time, then maybe Uber and Lyft should be forced to provide transportation services to all the residents of that urban area in exchange for letting Uber/Lyft use these roads.
parking garages are profitable. they're their own little special interest in most large cities that is pretty untouchable, and the market is pretty impenetrable to new operators.
That new office building? the building owner will..."choose"...one of the two or three commercial parking operators in town to run it for them. Very few run their own parking operation in the garages in their own buildings.
Stop using them and take the public transport. Show these companies some teeth.
And what exactly are the taxi companies doing about this? I suppose like Government Uber and Lyft don't like competition.
If you build a house and sell it yourself get your return on investment immediately. If you build a parking garage, you either have to recoup the return over a period of time, with attendant opportunity cost, or find a buyer who will also seek to get a return over a period of time. Thus the market will prefer housing up to the point where returns on parking are realised quickly.
ensure that maintenance and software upgrades are managed by professionals..."
The average person is going to have the dealer perform all required routine maintenance, and software updates would likely be automatic and managed by the manufacturer, anyways. Of course the whole point of Self-Driving car is that the owner doesn't operate them anymore, and software can manage all the tasks required ----- it's already out of reach for the average person to do required maintenance on their vehicle.... so people hire garages. As for those that don't; the SDC can detect when maintenance is required and when SDC-related systems are functioning correctly.
The REAL motive is a communist one --- ban personal vehicle ownership (Or at least ownership of cars that can operate themselves), so everybody is effectively legally forced either drive the car themself or buy rides from Uber.
This can only be described as self-serving bullshit designed to help Uber / Lyft make more money; and reduce or eliminate the systemic threat of SDCs to their entire business model at the expense of economic and personal freedom for the population..
> Ask any San Francisco resident or commuter (other than a fanatic bike geek) how that has worked out.
I want to know how said residents/commuters get to many of California's great attractions, such as Napa Valley, Yosemite National Park, Big Sur, etc.
Springs from the bottom up...oh, that's hilarious. Show me the working class who are demanding it. LOL. New Urbanists despise the working class. Why else do they make cities such a pain in the ass for them? You have to realize, people like that don't love the poor. They just hate the rich. The poor they regard as deplorable.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Uber and Lyft should be banned........ If I can't own my own selfdriving car, then nor should they be able to own and operate those cars. Uber and Lyft both have shown not to actually be very nice and just go ahead with their services in areas even though they know it's illegal for them to operate, but hope the legislation will turn around and make it legal what they do..
Congratulations, you just invented the bus!
"Shared fleets can provide more affordable access to all, maximize public safety and emissions benefits, ensure that maintenance and software upgrades are managed by professionals..."
I call BS - that shared care has to drive to my location to pick me up, that is NOT efficient, my own car is right here in the driveway!
Soon, UberEATS will start lobbying to make home cooking illegal ...
I'd post the comment I just made out loud... ...but Siri informs me that I have just been fined five credits for repeated violations of the verbal morality statute.
8^p
Seriously Uber and Lyft dudes (this isn' sexist: they are both "Bro" shops): as soon as you own the vehicles, you are no longer a "ride sharing company", you become a "taxi company".
I must be a person you are alluding to. I am against regulations — but not pro Uber.
I argue in favor of liberty — such as the freedom of offering a ride to a willing customer in exchange for his money. Any "regulation" or law standing in the way of that, is evil and to be abolished.
I fail to see, how Uber being assholes "cuts my legs" at all — because I do not tie the liberty to any particular entity exercising it. Are you suggesting, we abolish Freedom of Speech, because it protects KKK as well as investigative journalism?
The very thought of yours, that such "cutting off" may be taking place, reveals you (and the moderators, who've granted your post such acclaim) to be people of rather questionable logical skills at best and ethics at worst.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Exactly the same arguments can be made about non-self driving cars - fleets can be maintained to standards where individuals may be negligent - so lets stop people from being allowed to own their own cars and require them to use Uber and other service providers ...
But it would mean that the cities buy fleets of self-driving vehicles that eliminate the need for companies like Uber and Lyft.
I've dreamed of a great day when I don't need to own or operate a car but get the benefits of Uber without Uber. So, imagine a self-driving vehicle that you can call from an app, then based on the routes involved, ride sharing would be automatic. It wouldn't be a bus. Instead, it would be a multi-pod vehicle where each passenger pickup has their own pod where they can work, sleep or even make out. Then, as driving, if it would be more efficient to transfer a pod to another vehicle, it would occur while moving. This would allow smaller vehicles to service smaller areas and larger vehicles to service arteries.
This system should be owned an operated by the government similar to buses and trains. And taxis and Ubers and Lyfts would be entirely unneeded.
Uber, Lyft, et. al. exist soley for the purpose of making money by screwing over society. Period. Full stop. Driving people places is incidental.
It's a damned if you do, and a damned if you don't. The difference is one has an option for reasonable transit, and the other doesn't. If San Fransisco didn't promote "apartment" buildings you would go through a cycle of major urban sprawl with massive traffic jams. But now you have all these buildings spread out so public transportation is a pain. You end up with the option of providing timely services, but that will cause downtown traffic to spike without having excessive number of transfer points. Or you don't have timely services to sparsely populated areas, but thus making the service not reasonable to use.
You can have nice apartments and nice green space too with . But with suburbs yes, you have nice living spaces, but green space because an option only for the ultra rich.
Yeah, what a great idea. Give exclusive monopolies to companies when faced with the problem of not properly detecting bicycles basically throw a temper tantrum by stating they would just go to another city that didn't have these pesky regulations instead of fixing the problem resposibly. (hmm, sounds like Trump and Amazon mentality also)
You have to realize, people like that don't love the poor. They just hate the rich. The poor they regard as deplorable.
Close. There is a class war in the US, but it is primarily between the inheritors and the earners, not any given wealth level. Inheritors absolutely do not want company. Very little of their wealth comes from traditional income, so they support enormous income taxes to penalize anyone trying to earn a lifestyle similar to what they grew up with.
There are jerks among the earners as well, but they tend not to be in political positions, so they hire others to coerce the political inheritors. The basic process involves convincing some that a certain earner would be a welcome addition to the wealthy crowd, so special loopholes can be legislated to let that one in.
Very very few people with economic and political power want simple rules that would allow the masses to earn their way into the ranks of the wealthy.
To all of you who scoffed at the notion that New Urbanism has any power over planning in San Francisco, and that the SF Planning Commission has been captured by New Urbanists, allow me to direct your attention to the Metreon project. Athough the Wikipedia article does not mention it, I well recall the controversy over the Planning Commission's requirement that the additional parking included in the original proposal be reduced by over a third, specifically to make it less attractive to drive to the site - which is located on a corner of the Moscone Center convention facility, then already a parking nightmare (as any attendee of Apple's WWDC prior to 2017 will attest).
Sony's foolish decision to charge admittance to the Metreon helped it to fail spectacularly (spectacularly enough that Sony backed out of the facility and sold its controlling interest to Westwood), but the parking situation certainly did not help to make it a more attractive destination. And, although the AMC megaplex onsite is quite profitable - despite how often moviegoers get shot there - the rest of the development is still underwater.
When I was employed in downtown SF, I took BART to work as often as possible. But the nature of my job frequently dictated that I be at work past the BART system's closing time, leaving me little choice other than to drive. I hated being forced to choose between parking 8 blocks away, knowing I wouldn't be leaving work until the middle of the night, or paying the piratical parking fees more convenient locations demanded - and I doubt I was alone in that.
Again, to be clear, it's commercial, office-use, and industrial-ish developments for which the Planning Commission dictates insufficient new parking. Their motivation is specifically to make driving - and especially parking - in downtown SF an ever more nightmarish experience, with the goal of forcing commuters to take public transit, instead. This is not a secret. PC members have explicitly said as much on many occasions. I know this because, up until 2000, when we moved away, I was heavily involved in local politics in El Cerrito, an East Bay suburb whose Planning Commission was also captured by New Urbanists. Members of that body frequently pointed to the San Francisco Planning Commision's goals and policies as a model for those of El Cerrito, both in public meetings and in private conversations with me and other politically-active citizens. (And, of course, from coverage of SFPC's hearings and deliberations in the San Francisco Chronicle, to which I was a subscriber, back in the days when that was a thing.)
Finally, let me state for the record that I have no objections whatsoever to apartment or high-rise condominium living for those who live in downtown areas of big cities. Single-family detached dwellings make no economic sense in those settings. Nor do I object to public transit, when it's done properly. What I object to is the one-size-fits-all approach to any form of problem-solving, and I strongly object to forcing commuters into public transit in circumstances where pubic transit simply does not accomodate their needs (for instance, to haul large, bulky items) or schedules (i.e. - shift workers and others who must work late hours). Meat-axe approaches are fundamentally wrong-headed, and New Urbanists have an annoying tendency to view every planning problem as a nail ...
Check out my novel.
For a basic income.
The system that controls them is where the money is.
Microsoft vs IBM all over again... and Uber is trying to be IBM.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Most cars today are essentially single-user: "one person - one car". Add single-user self-driving cars to the mix and you will often get "no person - one car", such as when the car is circling the block while the user is on an errand, or when the car is going to pick up the user. This, left unchecked, will make traffic worse than it is now, by adding more vehicles to traffic without serving more people. If one limits the number of self-driving cars allowed in high-traffic areas (for example, by permitting only self-driving cars that serve multiple people per day), this problem can be constrained somewhat.
Owning your car means you don't have to worry about user ratings to have (or offer) a ride.
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
It's not your car if it's self driving. You always have to ASK it to take you somewhere, and it may or may not comply after a background check, especially if your last post on slashdot was some kind of ... erm
Never mind.
I love the shit, complete with scary -ist names, that you conservatives piss your panties over. It would be nice if these mastermind liberals were real. As of now we just have bought out pussies.
"it would be much better if cybernetic organism enhancements were not owned by the individual, but rather controlled by a network administrator who knows better what the enhancements should be doing for, or to, the host organism". we can call the administrators "Pods"and the people with enhancements "Pod People".
Frederick Bastiat included a parable in his book, "Economic Sophisms" about candlemakers trying to outlaw the sun and require everyone to close their shutters during the day because the sun represented unfair competition and deprived the candlemakers of their just living.
You would think it couldn't hapen in today's society, but here is a prime example. Add to that the legislation proposed by various states to protect the utilities from the unfair competition of solar power (actually enacted in Oklahoma), and various other examples, and you can see that economic education is sorely lacking in many places. Have we made no progress since 1845?
"The mind works quicker than you think!"