Wandering around the Internet, I stumbled across this website about a car technology, which has an interesting flow of comments about how people feel towards it. It's about the “ECO pedal”, i.e a pedal system that uses onboard electronics to determine when the driver is excessively accelerating (and therefore wasting gas and emitting more emissions) and can actually push back on the driver’s accelerator foot.

Some comment examples.

"Now your gas pedal will be able to say, "Shame on you, you wasteful person!" I'd like to see how well the GT-R runs the ring with this technology added.

NO! GOD, NO. i don't want to argue with my car about how fast i should be accelerating. i get in enough arguments about that with other people.

That's unnecessarily intrusive. Lighting up an indicator in the instrument cluster should be the most the car can do to tell you how to save gas.

What ever happened to KNOWING HOW TO DRIVE??? We managed to make it through nearly an entire century of the automobile without parking-assist, radar cruise, lane-keep assist, and now a freaking accelerator nanny? If people want to drive greener, then leave it to them to decide to accelerate slower when they're able, yet still be able to haul ass if it's life-or-death necessary. Please auto companies, stop making it even easier for people to drive while dicking around with their iPhones."

Brilliant! One of them made me think about this insightful quote by Mark Weiser back in the days: "I don't want to argue with my car about where I want to go. And of course, it can be traced back to Philip K. Dick's Ubik.

Why do I blog this? collecting examples of tech automation/assistance for an upcoming lecture.