We bought a new car a few years ago that came with a whole suite of sensors and warnings. I’d like to turn them off, but my partner insists on turning them on again every time I do, so I need to deal with them. In the first six months with the new car, I think I had four or five near-accidents caused by the “safety” system suddenly making some loud noise when I was already partway through a manoever. But after a while I became able to tune out the stream of beeps, boops, and buzzes that come about half a second too late to be of any use, when they’re not false alarms.

The car also has a “safety” feature I don’t think I can disable, that restricts acceleration when proximity sensors are triggered. It was not a pleasant feeling to be in the path of a multi-ton truck, flooring the accelerator, and having the car slowly mosey forward at the pace of a quiet afternoon stroll down a country lane. Worse, I believe that it was the barrelling behemoth itself which caused this reaction. Fortunately, I found quite by accident that if you keep pumping the accelerator in a blind panic for a couple of seconds, the car decides that you might really be serious about accelerating, and that maybe it should defer to the actual human intelligence that’s nominally in control of the vehicle. That, or the idiot software finally clocked that I was already in the truck’s way, and needed to get out of it. But subsequent events have lent credence to the pedal-pumping theory.

I feel like new, automated “safety” features are going to kill and injure at least as many people as they protect.