In the piece — titled “Can You Fool a Self Driving Car?” — Rober found that a Tesla car on Autopilot was fooled by a Wile E. Coyote-style wall painted to look like the road ahead of it, with the electric vehicle plowing right through it instead of stopping.
The footage was damning enough, with slow-motion clips showing the car not only crashing through the styrofoam wall but also a mannequin of a child. The Tesla was also fooled by simulated rain and fog.
Well said. Thank you for sharing. This is a nice piece to help those to self reflect once in a well, it feels…… grounding. Curious what the positive sequel would be…
Also, I realized recently that because all of our current stories, all of our current narratives of “forces of good versus evil” and all the political drama and inexplicable human decisions we see being made in the highest levels of power, are actually really dumb stories of people just saying shit and trying to be liked… this isn’t even new, these people doing all this stupid, absurd bullshit are genetically identical to the creatures who ruled empires in the past, who led armies, who had songs written about them going down thousands of years… so that tells me that all our great epics are probably mostly bullshit, and the reality was a lot more stupid.
The idea that most of history was stupid people doing stupid things and then writing fancy stories about it later, that is also strangely reassuring. These are just people, just idiots like the rest of us. Everyone is just improvising as we go and trying to make the best of it.
On good days, I remember that the sheer finality and certainty of the state of our world, our universe, the idea that we may not even have free-will at all and this is all just an inexplicable, passing moment of a universe becoming aware of itself, the grandure of it does more for me than any religious ideas or poems or songs or inspirational messages. It’s wholly absurd and beautiful and we exist in the intersection of scales that are so immense they cannot be fathomed by our primitive minds… these ideas make all the struggles, pains and hardships I experience feel a lot less tangible.
I am aware that a lot of this sensation is simple disassociation from depression, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing, disassociation is either a survival trick to keep us alive when our minds get the best of us, or it’s a consequence of something actual and special inside us, a type of awareness that seems to reside just outside of the things we can quantify and explain, a sum greater than its parts. Disassociation is like standing just outside yourself watching the story unfold, and it used to terrify me, now I realize it can’t be helped, we’re all on tracks and it’s just a ride. But if you look around, it can be a beautiful ride, even the shitty parts exist as a strange kind of reminder that the universe doesn’t owe us anything, take it or leave it, it’s all just experiences.