It's a disappointing future...

Yeah, given the propensity of autonomous to run over pedestrians, I'm going to go ahead and say that putting PlayStations into dashboards is...premature.

This, but the cart is a PS5 and the horse is a self-driving car.

(source: 18th century idioms)

And that time and place is whenever or
wherever gaming can act as a substitute
for meaningful human interaction.

Because that's what Honda's hoping to do: put a PlayStation 5 into their Vision-S self-driving cars. And I'm just...baffled. I mean, yes, despite being a grown-ass adult, I still play video games. I get it. I'm not saying that we need less video gaming in our lives. If anything, more. But there's a time and a place. I know eventually self-driving car technology will probably turn driving into a completely safe and hands-off experience and that we're going to need something for our hands to do. Fine. But that's easily twenty years off.

"Poppycock and falderal!"

-Me, on the subject of

self-driving cars

I don't know where I'm getting that number. I'm basically making it up. But I don't think I'm far off. The idea that we're going to go from cars that can't tell a pedestrian from an empty crosswalk to being able to sit back and Last of Us 2 our way to work in four years is, to me, preposterous. I think I've just been disappointed too many times. Not to get all "we were promised jetpacks" on you-because we weren't. At no point were we promised jetpacks by the year 2000. But I did grow up thinking we'd at least have hover cars or at the very least hoverboards by the time I was an adult. The closest we've got to owning our own robots are autonomous vacuum cleaners. 

Nazis are back, the climate is deteriorating
and my car isn't equipped with a sassy AI
with whom I fight crime. The future blows.

The future has done nothing but disappoint us in every way imaginable, so forgive me if I find the claims made by the manufacturers of self-driving cars dubious at best. And look, I get it, commuting is tedious. I listen to podcasts or audio books or talk on the phone while driving to work, and while those are all distractions, they're at least auditory. My eyes are still on the road. If I were riding in a self-driving car, I could still grab the wheel if need be. I can't do that if I'm busy murdering the Norse pantheon with QTE's in God of War or whatever. Until self-driving cars get better at self-driving, like way better, we're still going to have to pay attention to where we're going. 

Alright kids, it's all up to you. If you need
us, we'll be playing PlayStation while we drive.

And safety concerns aside, is fitting a game consoles in really where car manufacturers really need to be focusing on right now? Shouldn't making electric vehicles affordable be the priority? I realize that we've basically given up on trying to do anything about climate change on the grounds that it's too hard and really it our kids who'll have to deal with the worst consequences, but shifting focus from saving the planet to trying to squeeze in as much gaming time as possible feels a little--oh, wait, that actually totally tracks. Never mind. 

Incidentally, or perhaps as further evidence that in-car gaming is a bad idea, it's already been a thing in Teslas for some time. And if recent history has shown us anything, it's that Elon Musk makes terrible decisions. Like, did you know that he moved to Texas? On purpose? 

And I'm sorry, Sonic 1? If he hadn't just un-banned Donald Trump,
I'd have chalked this up as his dumbest, most tone-deaf move ever.