Your Car Knows Before You Do
GM's new sobriety detection doesn't wait for you to start the engine. It starts watching when you cross the parking lot.
The most interesting thing about this technology isn't that it works. It's that it starts before you've touched the handle.
Cameras read your stride. Sensors clock your pace. The car is already forming an opinion about you before you've said a word to it. Before you've made a single decision. That's a different kind of machine.
The Case For It
Drunk driving kills tens of thousands of people a year. If a camera in a parking lot stops one of those, the math is hard to argue with. Nobody rational is pro-drunk-driving. The intent here is genuinely good.
The Part That Should Make You Pause
But intent and architecture are two different things. A system that watches how you walk — and decides what you're allowed to do next — is infrastructure. And infrastructure doesn't stay in one lane.
Today it's watching for a sway. Tomorrow it's watching for something else. The sensors don't forget. The data goes somewhere. These are not paranoid questions. They're engineering questions.
There's also the simpler problem: a bad knee walks like a drunk man. So does someone who just got off a long flight. Exhaustion and intoxication don't always look different from fifty feet away.
The car that keeps you safe is a good idea. The car that surveils you to do it is a negotiation nobody agreed to enter.