RUSH: I mentioned that there’s the first known, first reported fatality involving an autonomously driven car. It was an Uber car. It was in Arizona. An Arizona pedestrian was killed. And because of this, Uber has halted testing of its autonomous vehicles all across North America, including San Francisco, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Toronto, and a number of others have canceled theirs too.
And, you know, it’s fascinating, folks, to read liberal blogs about this. As you know, I spend time on the tech blogs. And the tech blogs are populated by young Millennial leftist journalists. And while they hate Uber for one reason, they don’t like the CEO and his mistreatment of women. But on the other hand they love Uber ’cause it’s high-tech, it’s software, it’s automatic driving investigations or experimentation.
Now, what happened in this case, there was a human being acting as backup, so there was a human being in the car. The car was tooling along, and a woman, according to the cops, darted out in front of the car from shadow. She was in a median between lanes, and she was not in a crosswalk. Now, that’s important because the software for one of these autonomously software driven cars, the crosswalk would have been programmed into it, and it would have had a sensor, sensitivity.
The woman darted out, and the investigators, the cops said it wouldn’t have mattered if the human being in the car had total control over it, this woman would have not been missed. Nobody would have had a reaction time quick enough to avoid hitting her. So the autonomous driving car has been exonerated from any blame in the death. So I’m reading my tech blogs on this and the tech blogs are urging caution, and let’s not rush to judgment. People die every day. We can’t be hasty in our condemnation of this marvelous new technology, driverless automobiles.
So is it 50,000 people killed one way or another involving automobiles every year — well, we’ll look past that. I mean, we’re not gonna ban the wheel, and we’re not gonna ban the car, and we’re not gonna blame AAA. But let there be a gun involved, they throw all that out and they become banshees on the warpath to get rid of every gun in the world. And yet they’ll sit by and acknowledge 50,000 people, hundred people a week die in car crashes, so let’s keep this in perspective. And I thought, what a bunch of hypocrites.
‘Cause the point is, we cannot allow this masterful new technology, driverless automobiles, we cannot allow it to be sidetracked. We cannot allow it to be delayed. We cannot permit it being harmed in any way because it’s the future. So in certain cases, a random death here, a random death there, that’s just the cost of doing business. But when a gun’s involved, why, we gotta go out and get rid of the Second Amendment. We gotta disband the NRA. We gotta put the chairman of the NRA in jail. Amazing hypocrisy.
Anyway, the cops said it was not the car’s fault; it was not the software’s fault. It was the woman’s fault. She jumped out in front of the car. Nobody would have been able to stop it.
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