And how many hours per day are you watching that smart TV, and what is in that smart refrigerator?

I figure that eventually the stats readout, which will inevitably be quite faulty and crash just as often, will still be a factor in whether you get that kidney transplant or not or whatever....

P.S. I wouldn't worry about teh federal gummint, they'll still be struggling with Windows Vista. (Look at right now for example, they've lost a ton of immigrant children who are supposedly the enemy.) The states a teeny bit more advanced, but still will not know if you have like a bank account or driver's license in another state. And have no capability to connect to that Toll Pass account even if they wanted to. No it's the insurance people and even more so, the credit people, they will know everything, everything about the connected you. Accurate or not.

The Fight for the Right to Drive

The Human Driving Association hopes to pass a constitutional amendment for the age of autonomous vehicles.

By M. R. O’Connor @ NewYorker.com April 30, 2019

[....] Last fall, the Philadelphia Navy Yard hosted Radwood, a car meet-up with a very different conception of the automotive future. The only cars allowed at Radwood are ones manufactured between 1980 and 2000. When I visited, early one morning, people had gathered around a red 1991 Volvo GL. The car was well worn from thousands of school drop-offs and soccer practices; its cracked leather driver’s seat still showed the gentle indent of its owner’s behind. Its most advanced technological feature was cruise control. Still, its hood was proudly propped open, in normcore glory. Speakers blasted the Talking Heads’ 1980 hit “Once in a Lifetime,” while, nearby, a man dressed in a nineties-style pink-and-blue windbreaker jumpsuit posed for a photo before a Volkswagen Westfalia. Other attendees cooed over a faded teal-green Ford Taurus, a twenty-year-old Mitsubishi Lancer, and a rusting Volkswagen Rabbit—the mundane cars that, in the previous millennium, had roamed the automotive landscape.

Radwood was first held in San Francisco, in 2017; this year, it’s being held in around a dozen cities, including Los Angeles and Sodegaura, Japan. With their molded-plastic exteriors, aerodynamic spoilers, and pop-up headlights, many of the cars at Radwood share an aesthetic. What really unites them, however, is their status as relics. They hail from an era when engine controls weren’t fully computerized, and when cars could be fixed using hand tools. They represent a relationship to technology that has now vanished—one that privileges user involvement over convenience. “The majority of people who are fans of cars in this era want to be able to work on their own cars,” Bradley Brownell, one of Radwood’s co-founders, told me. “When you buy cars like these, you’re getting something rawer. Half of these don’t even have A.B.S.”

In his book “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work,” from 2009, the political philosopher and motorcycle mechanic Matthew B. Crawford argues that manual competence—our ability to repair the machines and devices in our lives—is a kind of ethical practice. Knowing how to fix things ourselves creates opportunities for meaningful work and individual agency; it allows us to grasp more deeply the built world around us. The mass-market economy, Crawford writes, produces devices that are practically impenetrable. If we try to repair our microwaves or printers, we’ll quickly be discouraged by their complexity; many cars produced today lack even dipsticks to check their oil levels. Driving the Tesla Model 3 has been compared to using a giant iPhone: instead of controlling the car directly, one seems to pilot it by means of a user interface.

Many people, Crawford thinks, yearn to revolt against “the layers of electronic bullshit that get piled on top of machines.” Some of them attend Radwood. One twenty-six-year-old salesperson for a popular automotive Web site told me that he didn’t “want to be a test dummy for Tesla.” He owns a few pre-2000 cars, and sees them as valuable investments. At Radwood, he said, he had become a member of the Human Driving Association, an organization aiming to protect people’s freedom of movement and right to drive their own cars. The H.D.A. imagines a future in which, for safety reasons, human driving is made illegal. To prevent this scenario from coming to pass, it advocates [....]