Author: Brian Benchoff / Source: Hackaday
In 1899, you might have been forgiven for thinking the automobile was only a rich-man’s toy. A horseless carriage was for flat garden pathways. The auto was far less reliable than a horse. This was new technology, and rich people are always into their gadgets, but the automobile is a technology that isn’t going to go anywhere.
The roads are too terrible, they don’t have the range of a horse, and the world just isn’t set up for mechanized machines rolling everywhere.This changed. It changed very quickly. By 1920, cars had taken over. Industrialized cities were no longer in the shadow of a mountain of horse manure. A highway, built specifically for automobiles, stretched from New York City to San Francisco. The age of the automobile had come.
And here we are today, in the same situation, with a technology as revolutionary as the automobile. People say self-driving cars are toys for rich people. Teslas on the road aren’t for the common man because the economy model costs fifty thousand dollars. They only work on highways anyway. The reliability just isn’t there for level-5 automation. You’ll never have a self-driving car that can drive over mountain roads in the snow, or navigate a ball bouncing into the street of a residential neighborhood chased by a child. But history proves time and time again that people are wrong. Self-driving cars are the future, and the world will be unrecognizable in thirty years. There’s only one problem: we’re not calling them the right thing. Self-driving cars should be called ‘cryptocybers’.
Language are hard
There is no doubt that various technologies are being called the wrong thing. For example, what is ‘crypto’? Is ‘crypto’ short for cryptography, or does it mean cryptocurrency? This was a heated debate last year when Bitcoin broke $20,000 USD. Those in the cryptography camp created flashy websites. Researchers at Johns Hopkins are teaching their students that cryptography is
But just because journalists say something, doesn’t mean it’s right. Cryptobros have appropriated the term. It’s a question of something I like to call, ‘the aunt test’. Talk to your aunt. She watches cable news, and somehow still reads the local paper. She talks to people in the hair salon. Her thoughts on any subject is what the majority of people think. You’re too tapped into the bleeding edge to know what normal people think, but your aunt… your aunt thinks ‘crypto’…
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