unfortunately that's also the answer to the question of "how many people are killed by [insert *anything* here]"
In practice if there's a significant number of people being killed it should show up in the stats.
and yes. it's aaaalll the fault of people counseling sane, cool decision making based on actual harm rather than deciding what to do based on what sounds most scary.
For context the above troll is pretty much Al "four touchdowns in one game" Bundy.
If you ever try to point out to him that "TCP do"esn't work like that" or something similar he'll stalk you forever as seen above and keep on repeating again and again and again and again how he is automatically right because you see he once wrote a screensaver! and a few long gone articles in long gone PC magazine a decade or 2 ago! And threatens to sue malware scanners which include his Certainly-Isn't-Malware crapware in their definitions.
So anything he says cannot be wrong.
it's best to just nod and smile or you'll end up being stalked by him like he stalks me now.
1: I'm not american. I also think going to war over 9/11 was stupid and counterproductive.
On the road you put yourself and others at risk unless you're a perfect driver which if course I'm sure you're sure you are. A driver can still spin off the road and hit someone on the footpath or plough into another car.
When you're on a plane the pilot's actions decide how much risk you're at but in practice you're more likely to get to the other side of the country alive than if you drive yourself.
where did you get the insane idea that I'm against safety systems?
to make your comparison fair I'd have to carry around a few hundred tons of that fly ash.
"but if your engines quit on you, your outcome is a lot more uncertain than if your car quits on you"
So? The fact is that doesn't happen much, you're painting an emotional picture. Would you choose to drive across the country instead of flying on the simple grounds that if your engine fails you're still safe? well congratulations, you'd still be significantly increasing your chances of death.
"Because people are harmed by non nuclear methods of generation"
Is this hard for you to understand: the power has to come from some source of some kind. given that it's only sensible to use the sources which lead to the least people dying.
There's always going to be a body count, so be and intelligent human being and pick the options which have the smallest ones.
given that large sections of the exclusion zone around Chernobyl are already being reclaimed it's not "countless generations" but rather a few generations.
the people killed by the floodwaters are still dead, the buildings still destroyed. And chances are that there's far more people dead from the floodwaters, personally I value the people more than the land.
Yes, they only have to carry a limited amount of insurance. This is the exact same as how drivers are required to carry insurance in many countries up to a specified minimum amount of liability covered.(generally in the tens of millions range)
if you screw up really badly and manage to do more damage than that and haven't the assets to cover the damage then the government steps in and covers it.
with nuclear it's similar only there's another layer in between with a second far far higher limit which you and all the other drivers *also* have to pay into.
there were in fact a number on the coast of japan, the others did fairly ok.
yes there will always be a potential mix of circumstances that could cause a disaster, but that goes for everything. if an earthquake like that hit a hydro damn above a big city we could have had a far worse disaster. Imagine the Banqiao Dam happening in the US.
"I get what you are trying to say with this, but honestly when everyone says its safe, yet these kind of "accidents" can still occur it makes you step back and really weigh the positives and negatives."
but you see, that's exactly what I was talking about. You don't hear about the thousands of people dying of lung cancer, they don't make the news, you don't hear about the electricians falling off the roof putting in solar pannels.
But you do hear when a few workers get a high dose of radiation. it makes international news.
which is worse? a few people dying every few decades and the occasional really spectacular disaster like Chernobyl or hundreds of thousands of people quietly dying in very non-dramatic ways.
You ask what we will do about the plutonium, but I ask what we'll do about all the arsenic, lead, cadmium, chromium, mercury etc. its almost as dangerous as the plutonium and it's being kept in giant piles of fly ash . it doesn't have any half life. it's forever. do you trust the next infinity generations of humans?
also:2100? what the fuck? reprocess it and we've got thousands of years easy.
"Do you understand what that means? The insurance industry, the industry that calculates risk, has calculated the risks of nuclear power and they want nothing to do with it. It is, according to the experts, too risky to insure. Maybe you are okay funding some fat cat CEO by covering the potential risk while letting him take home the profit, but I am not."
" It is commonly asserted that nuclear power stations are not covered by insurance, and that insurance companies don't want to know about them either for first-party insurance of the plant itself or third-party liability for accidents. This is incorrect, and the misconception was addressed as follows in 2006 by a broker who had been responsible for a nuclear insurance pool: "it is wrong [to believe] that insurers will not touch nuclear power stations. In fact, wherever they are available to private sector insurers, Western-designed nuclear installations are sought-after business because of their high engineering and risk management standards. This has been the case for fifty years." He elaborated: "My comment refers very much to the world scene and is not contentious. Apart from Three Mile Island, the claim experience has been very good. Chernobyl was not insured. Significantly, because Chernobyl was of a design that would not have been an acceptable risk at the time, notably the lack of a containment structure, the accident had no impact on premium rates for Western plants.
"The structure of insurance of nuclear installations is different from ordinary industrial risks. It involves international conventions, national legislation channeling liability to the operators, and pooling of insurance capacity in more than twenty countries. The national nuclear insurance pool approach was particularly developed in the UK in 1956 as a way of marshalling insurance capacity for the possibility of [serious accidents]. Other national pools that followed were modeled on the UK pool - now known as Nuclear Risk Insurers Limited, and based in London.""
"Do you have some kind of citation for that? I'm pretty sure they do not."
Look up the Price Anderson Act. Plant operators have to have both their own insurance. This gives them an incentive to be safe as they get a lower price if they have a better safety record.
If the limit is reached on that due to an accident then the second layer comes in, all plant operators have to pay into that and if there's an accident then it doesn't matter which of them was a fault they all pay into it.
It's similar to car insurance in come countries: if you are hurt by someone who is not insured or your costs run over the top of the limit on the policy of the person who hit you then the government covers the remaining cost as the insurer of last resort.
The USA takes a somewhat different approach, and having pioneered the concept is not party to any international nuclear liability convention, except for the CSC, which has yet to come into force. The Price Anderson Act - the world's first comprehensive nuclear liability law - has since 1957 been central to addressing the question of liability for nuclear accident. It now provides $12.5 billion in cover without cost to the public or government and without fault needing to be proven. It covers power reactors, research reactors, enrichment plants, waste repositories and all other nuclear facilities.
It was renewed for 20 years in mid 2005, with strong bipartisan support, and requires individual operators to be responsible for two layers of insurance cover. The first layer is where each nuclear site is required to purchase US$ 375 million liability cover (as of 2011) which is provided by a private insurance pool, American Nuclear Insurers (ANI). This is financial liability, not legal liability as in European liability conventions.
In practice liability tends to have upper bounds even when not coded into law: if the company which has hurt you goes totally bankrupt then you're left holding the ball.
If you swerve off the road and your car rolls through a school classroom there's a small chance that you could hit the upper limits on your insurance liability (often capped at a few million or tens of millions) paying for dozens of badly injured children to be supported/treated/cared for for life.
If you hit the cap and you have no cash then you go bankrupt and the poor fuckers you hit can end up out of luck or having to ask the government for money.
The good side of the legal cap is that it requires that a large quantity of cash is kept in a fund and that the entire industry has to pay if any one company screws up so that even if the company collapses the remaining ones keep paying.
"the maximum possible damages are basically incalculable"
which is true for almost anything, look at the gulf spill, depending on who the numbers come from it's tens of billions or hundreds.
if you see news of a plane crash and shortly afterwards someone insists that plane travel is still "safer than road travel" do you turn around and shout "air travel cheerleaders should have got on their plane" or "how about you go sift through the wreckage for bodies!!!!"
no? of course not! because that would be retarded.
nuclear is safer, not perfectly but it's safer than most of the alternatives.
You're more likely to die on the road to the airport(unless you live really close) but when a plane crashes it makes world headlines and a lot of people die at once. when a car crashes it makes the local news at most unless it's someone famous. It doesn't make world headlines but it adds up.
nuclear is kinda like that, you're far more likely to die from lung cancer from living near a coal plant or die falling off your roof while installing solar panels but that's local news stuff. It doesn't make world headlines but it adds up.
that and scary atoms and radiation. a smog cloud or a broken neck aren't mysterious and scary.
Fine on most of your other points but one bit sounds odd:
that the drug dealers have to force people to work for them. by reliable accounts teens are lining up to voluntarily work for them in really bad neighbourhoods.
in the worst neighbourhoods being a senior member of a gang is about as high as a position as many teens can imagine themselves in so they line up to join.
It would be pointless and problematic to *force* them to sell drugs. willing employees are easier to handle.
now what they tell their family when they're discovered selling drugs might be different.
but far far far more common is the type of parent who looks at their fairly capable little human being and still only sees the toddler who has to be kept away from the stove in case he burns himself.... despite said little human being already having facial hair and, in the worst cases, a mortgage.
If you treat your child like a helpless idiot they'll remain as such. forever.
"oh no, we're not just suing everyone who infringes on our patent on (searching a list)/(using pointers)/(crossing a labrador with a poodle)/(inserting this naturally occurring gene into this other naturally occuring organism )/(insert any other obvious idea).
no. we're doing it for the greater good."
And funnily enough most of the geneticists I know feel the same way about patents on genes as programmers do about patents on algorithms: that they slow the whole field and make it harder to produce useful things.
but just for shits and giggles: what efforts were made to get some big pharma companies to take the drug and develop something useful?
cause given the number of people with alzheimers it'd be worth a fortune and the elderly tend to have a lot of capital. Even as a 1 time cure they could charge an absolute fortune.
I do, apparently you don't, I suggest watching it again. There was nothing about fair tests, they pretended that it was all down to flat batteries.
And apparently you were taken in too, "for the Tesla..." it would have taken a while, they again distorted it massively by talking about how long it would take to charge"with this 13 amp plug" when you'd no more charge the thing off a 13 amp plug than you'd run an electric shower or electric cooker off a 13 amp plug. Using the kind of connection that you'd actually charge a car with it would charge in about the same time that a laptop takes to charge.
"They never claimed the car DID run out of charge"
they showed it rolling to a stop on the track, then being pushed into the shed. Later they claimed to not have any working cars because that one was charging.
neither due to a flat battery, nor due to the overheated engine.
To quote from the episode as the other car rolls to a stop. "Oh, I don't believe this, the motor's overheating"
a.) one car's battery was not enough to do all the filming, they had to switch to the second car while the first one was recharging
and there's the nub, it never did run out, they could have kept filming but they pretended it ran flat.
and according to the logs in the cars:"At all times, there was at least one Roadster at the ready."
but most of what people have to use cars for is serious and boring. sitting in rush hour traffic isn't fun, driving to and from the same place every day for a decade isn't fun.
the bus is useful but it has the problem that it gets you to and from not quite where you are to not quite where you want to go and there's nothing more frustrating than being on a deadline and watching that bus sail on past because it's full... and then watching the next one sail past as well.
Taxis do part of the job but again, they're expensive and at peak times they can fail to be available.
I'd buy the fuck out of a car which drove itself. We're not all set on cars as recreation. some of us just want them as tools which do something useful.
it'll still be humans at fault. If your autodrive system fails it would be no different than if your wheel failed and fell off.
you, your mechanic, the company who made the car or the company which made what failed could be liable depending on why it failed.
if you don't keep it patched and up to date it might be you, if your mechanic misconfigures it it could be him, if the company which made it made a mistake then they could end up paying.
it doesn't really change anything. it's just another part of the car.
an off switch would be essential, yes, if only as a backup for is they're something wrong with the automatic systems.
I'd view it as a boon in terms of personal freedom, to be able to sit back and read a book while going to work without the hassle of public transport.
To be able to get out a the door of my office and tell the car to go find somewhere to park and pick me up at the end of the day: with perhaps some algorithms to balance cost of parking vs fuel to get to the spaces etc.
Slashdot Mirror
unfortunately that's also the answer to the question of "how many people are killed by [insert *anything* here]"
In practice if there's a significant number of people being killed it should show up in the stats.
and yes. it's aaaalll the fault of people counseling sane, cool decision making based on actual harm rather than deciding what to do based on what sounds most scary.
For context the above troll is pretty much Al "four touchdowns in one game" Bundy.
If you ever try to point out to him that "TCP do"esn't work like that" or something similar he'll stalk you forever as seen above and keep on repeating again and again and again and again how he is automatically right because you see he once wrote a screensaver!
and a few long gone articles in long gone PC magazine a decade or 2 ago!
And threatens to sue malware scanners which include his Certainly-Isn't-Malware crapware in their definitions.
So anything he says cannot be wrong.
it's best to just nod and smile or you'll end up being stalked by him like he stalks me now.
1: I'm not american. I also think going to war over 9/11 was stupid and counterproductive.
On the road you put yourself and others at risk unless you're a perfect driver which if course I'm sure you're sure you are.
A driver can still spin off the road and hit someone on the footpath or plough into another car.
When you're on a plane the pilot's actions decide how much risk you're at but in practice you're more likely to get to the other side of the country alive than if you drive yourself.
where did you get the insane idea that I'm against safety systems?
to make your comparison fair I'd have to carry around a few hundred tons of that fly ash.
"but if your engines quit on you, your outcome is a lot more uncertain than if your car quits on you"
So? The fact is that doesn't happen much, you're painting an emotional picture.
Would you choose to drive across the country instead of flying on the simple grounds that if your engine fails you're still safe? well congratulations, you'd still be significantly increasing your chances of death.
"Because people are harmed by non nuclear methods of generation"
Is this hard for you to understand: the power has to come from some source of some kind.
given that it's only sensible to use the sources which lead to the least people dying.
There's always going to be a body count, so be and intelligent human being and pick the options which have the smallest ones.
given that large sections of the exclusion zone around Chernobyl are already being reclaimed it's not "countless generations" but rather a few generations.
the people killed by the floodwaters are still dead, the buildings still destroyed.
And chances are that there's far more people dead from the floodwaters, personally I value the people more than the land.
you made a large number of blatant factual errors. I simply corrected them.
Yes, they don't have to declare bankruptcy but they can be made pay retroactively if there's an accident.
nice attempt at a retcon.
Yes, they only have to carry a limited amount of insurance.
This is the exact same as how drivers are required to carry insurance in many countries up to a specified minimum amount of liability covered.(generally in the tens of millions range)
if you screw up really badly and manage to do more damage than that and haven't the assets to cover the damage then the government steps in and covers it.
with nuclear it's similar only there's another layer in between with a second far far higher limit which you and all the other drivers *also* have to pay into.
there were in fact a number on the coast of japan, the others did fairly ok.
yes there will always be a potential mix of circumstances that could cause a disaster, but that goes for everything. if an earthquake like that hit a hydro damn above a big city we could have had a far worse disaster.
Imagine the Banqiao Dam happening in the US.
"I get what you are trying to say with this, but honestly when everyone says its safe, yet these kind of "accidents" can still occur it makes you step back and really weigh the positives and negatives."
but you see, that's exactly what I was talking about. You don't hear about the thousands of people dying of lung cancer, they don't make the news, you don't hear about the electricians falling off the roof putting in solar pannels.
But you do hear when a few workers get a high dose of radiation. it makes international news.
which is worse? a few people dying every few decades and the occasional really spectacular disaster like Chernobyl or hundreds of thousands of people quietly dying in very non-dramatic ways.
You ask what we will do about the plutonium, but I ask what we'll do about all the arsenic, lead, cadmium, chromium, mercury etc. its almost as dangerous as the plutonium and it's being kept in giant piles of fly ash .
it doesn't have any half life.
it's forever.
do you trust the next infinity generations of humans?
also:2100? what the fuck? reprocess it and we've got thousands of years easy.
"Do you understand what that means? The insurance industry, the industry that calculates risk, has calculated the risks of nuclear power and they want nothing to do with it. It is, according to the experts, too risky to insure. Maybe you are okay funding some fat cat CEO by covering the potential risk while letting him take home the profit, but I am not."
no.
just no.
[citation]
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf67.html
" It is commonly asserted that nuclear power stations are not covered by insurance, and that insurance companies don't want to know about them either for first-party insurance of the plant itself or third-party liability for accidents. This is incorrect, and the misconception was addressed as follows in 2006 by a broker who had been responsible for a nuclear insurance pool: "it is wrong [to believe] that insurers will not touch nuclear power stations. In fact, wherever they are available to private sector insurers, Western-designed nuclear installations are sought-after business because of their high engineering and risk management standards. This has been the case for fifty years." He elaborated: "My comment refers very much to the world scene and is not contentious. Apart from Three Mile Island, the claim experience has been very good. Chernobyl was not insured. Significantly, because Chernobyl was of a design that would not have been an acceptable risk at the time, notably the lack of a containment structure, the accident had no impact on premium rates for Western plants.
"The structure of insurance of nuclear installations is different from ordinary industrial risks. It involves international conventions, national legislation channeling liability to the operators, and pooling of insurance capacity in more than twenty countries. The national nuclear insurance pool approach was particularly developed in the UK in 1956 as a way of marshalling insurance capacity for the possibility of [serious accidents]. Other national pools that followed were modeled on the UK pool - now known as Nuclear Risk Insurers Limited, and based in London.""
"Do you have some kind of citation for that? I'm pretty sure they do not."
Look up the Price Anderson Act.
Plant operators have to have both their own insurance.
This gives them an incentive to be safe as they get a lower price if they have a better safety record.
If the limit is reached on that due to an accident then the second layer comes in, all plant operators have to pay into that and if there's an accident then it doesn't matter which of them was a fault they all pay into it.
It's similar to car insurance in come countries: if you are hurt by someone who is not insured or your costs run over the top of the limit on the policy of the person who hit you then the government covers the remaining cost as the insurer of last resort.
The USA takes a somewhat different approach, and having pioneered the concept is not party to any international nuclear liability convention, except for the CSC, which has yet to come into force. The Price Anderson Act - the world's first comprehensive nuclear liability law - has since 1957 been central to addressing the question of liability for nuclear accident. It now provides $12.5 billion in cover without cost to the public or government and without fault needing to be proven. It covers power reactors, research reactors, enrichment plants, waste repositories and all other nuclear facilities.
It was renewed for 20 years in mid 2005, with strong bipartisan support, and requires individual operators to be responsible for two layers of insurance cover. The first layer is where each nuclear site is required to purchase US$ 375 million liability cover (as of 2011) which is provided by a private insurance pool, American Nuclear Insurers (ANI). This is financial liability, not legal liability as in European liability conventions.
The second layer or seconda
In practice liability tends to have upper bounds even when not coded into law: if the company which has hurt you goes totally bankrupt then you're left holding the ball.
If you swerve off the road and your car rolls through a school classroom there's a small chance that you could hit the upper limits on your insurance liability (often capped at a few million or tens of millions) paying for dozens of badly injured children to be supported/treated/cared for for life.
If you hit the cap and you have no cash then you go bankrupt and the poor fuckers you hit can end up out of luck or having to ask the government for money.
The good side of the legal cap is that it requires that a large quantity of cash is kept in a fund and that the entire industry has to pay if any one company screws up so that even if the company collapses the remaining ones keep paying.
"the maximum possible damages are basically incalculable"
which is true for almost anything, look at the gulf spill, depending on who the numbers come from it's tens of billions or hundreds.
if you see news of a plane crash and shortly afterwards someone insists that plane travel is still "safer than road travel" do you turn around and shout "air travel cheerleaders should have got on their plane" or "how about you go sift through the wreckage for bodies!!!!"
no?
of course not!
because that would be retarded.
nuclear is safer, not perfectly but it's safer than most of the alternatives.
You're more likely to die on the road to the airport(unless you live really close) but when a plane crashes it makes world headlines and a lot of people die at once.
when a car crashes it makes the local news at most unless it's someone famous.
It doesn't make world headlines but it adds up.
nuclear is kinda like that, you're far more likely to die from lung cancer from living near a coal plant or die falling off your roof while installing solar panels but that's local news stuff.
It doesn't make world headlines but it adds up.
that and scary atoms and radiation.
a smog cloud or a broken neck aren't mysterious and scary.
and don't get me started on the fucker who was absorbed in a book.
Fine on most of your other points but one bit sounds odd:
that the drug dealers have to force people to work for them.
by reliable accounts teens are lining up to voluntarily work for them in really bad neighbourhoods.
http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_levitt_analyzes_crack_economics.html
in the worst neighbourhoods being a senior member of a gang is about as high as a position as many teens can imagine themselves in so they line up to join.
It would be pointless and problematic to *force* them to sell drugs.
willing employees are easier to handle.
now what they tell their family when they're discovered selling drugs might be different.
Some kids. In a few places.
but far far far more common is the type of parent who looks at their fairly capable little human being and still only sees the toddler who has to be kept away from the stove in case he burns himself.... despite said little human being already having facial hair and, in the worst cases, a mortgage.
If you treat your child like a helpless idiot they'll remain as such.
forever.
you've never had kids have you?
Nice story.
Thing is every patent troll has similar .
"oh no, we're not just suing everyone who infringes on our patent on (searching a list)/(using pointers)/(crossing a labrador with a poodle)/(inserting this naturally occurring gene into this other naturally occuring organism )/(insert any other obvious idea).
no.
we're doing it for the greater good."
And funnily enough most of the geneticists I know feel the same way about patents on genes as programmers do about patents on algorithms: that they slow the whole field and make it harder to produce useful things.
but just for shits and giggles: what efforts were made to get some big pharma companies to take the drug and develop something useful?
cause given the number of people with alzheimers it'd be worth a fortune and the elderly tend to have a lot of capital.
Even as a 1 time cure they could charge an absolute fortune.
I'm a computer science grad currently doing a taught postgrad in bioinformatics and I can only agree.
Even in the course specifically about stats, coding and math the programmings, stats and math is pretty weak.
we cover basic regression in stats which is probably the most solid bit of the course.
the math I mostly covered in first year computer science.
The only thing I can say about the coding is that it's even more basic than first year coding in comp sci.
There's no actual computer science covered though, even the basics like estimating time complexity at a glance or basic datastructures.
I'm the only comp sci, everyone else in the course is biology and with 2 exceptions have never coded before in their lives.
"Remember the test"
I do, apparently you don't, I suggest watching it again. There was nothing about fair tests, they pretended that it was all down to flat batteries.
And apparently you were taken in too, "for the Tesla..." it would have taken a while, they again distorted it massively by talking about how long it would take to charge"with this 13 amp plug" when you'd no more charge the thing off a 13 amp plug than you'd run an electric shower or electric cooker off a 13 amp plug.
Using the kind of connection that you'd actually charge a car with it would charge in about the same time that a laptop takes to charge.
"They never claimed the car DID run out of charge"
they showed it rolling to a stop on the track, then being pushed into the shed.
Later they claimed to not have any working cars because that one was charging.
neither due to a flat battery, nor due to the overheated engine.
To quote from the episode as the other car rolls to a stop.
"Oh, I don't believe this, the motor's overheating"
a.) one car's battery was not enough to do all the filming, they had to switch to the second car while the first one was recharging
and there's the nub, it never did run out, they could have kept filming but they pretended it ran flat.
and according to the logs in the cars:"At all times, there was at least one Roadster at the ready."
driving is fun when you're driving for fun.
but most of what people have to use cars for is serious and boring. sitting in rush hour traffic isn't fun, driving to and from the same place every day for a decade isn't fun.
the bus is useful but it has the problem that it gets you to and from not quite where you are to not quite where you want to go and there's nothing more frustrating than being on a deadline and watching that bus sail on past because it's full... and then watching the next one sail past as well.
Taxis do part of the job but again, they're expensive and at peak times they can fail to be available.
I'd buy the fuck out of a car which drove itself.
We're not all set on cars as recreation.
some of us just want them as tools which do something useful.
there are these concepts called "less" and "more".
they can be used like this:
Some people are killed by A
Some people are killed by B
but less people are(or could be) killed by B if we replaced B with A.
it'll still be humans at fault. If your autodrive system fails it would be no different than if your wheel failed and fell off.
you, your mechanic, the company who made the car or the company which made what failed could be liable depending on why it failed.
if you don't keep it patched and up to date it might be you, if your mechanic misconfigures it it could be him, if the company which made it made a mistake then they could end up paying.
it doesn't really change anything.
it's just another part of the car.
who's liable when a part in your car fails and you skid across the road into another car?
it doesn't happen much but lets ignore the software aspect and assume that a wheel just fell of the car.
it could be the mechanic if you just got it serviced a few days before and they either didn't spot it or make a mistake while working on the wheel.
It could be the car company if there's a systematic problem with all their cars.
it could be you if you've failed to keep the car in a good safe condition.
Your insurance company may insist that to be covered you get your car serviced regularly if you want to be covered.
so lets now apply the same logic to the software.
it could be the mechanic if you just got it serviced a few days before and they damaged a sensor or screwed up the computer somehow.
It could be the car company or software vendor if there's a systematic problem with all their cars/software.
it could be you if you've failed to keep the car in a good safe condition and the software up to date.
Your insurance company may insist that to be covered you keep your software up to date.
no big leaps really.
an off switch would be essential, yes, if only as a backup for is they're something wrong with the automatic systems.
I'd view it as a boon in terms of personal freedom, to be able to sit back and read a book while going to work without the hassle of public transport.
To be able to get out a the door of my office and tell the car to go find somewhere to park and pick me up at the end of the day: with perhaps some algorithms to balance cost of parking vs fuel to get to the spaces etc.