I’m intimately familiar with programmed responses and how changing the technology that trained them can f*ck you up. Â When I started driving, the standard practice was never to slam on your brakes when you got into trouble. Â You pumped your brakes. Â It kept them from locking up, it made your taillights flash to warn the car behind you. Â It helped keep you from locking up all over so that you could continue to react as you slid, in the unstoppable grip of physics, down the roadway to your certain doom.
Then the technology got better. Â Cars have computers that take care of the brake management for you (usually) so pumping the brake in most modern cars has become counter intuitive. Â It f*ucks up the computer, throws it’s braking off sync. Â So now, after decades of pumping the brake, I now have to do the opposite. Â I have to stomp ont he brake and hope the computer is smarter than I am (let me point out, I work with computers, so I am intimately familiar with “smart” machines and the misconceptions that go with them).
What they describe here in the Ars Technica article is one step further. Â They are discussing systems to handle the braking for the the driver, which means no foot-stomping at all. Â That’s an even more drastic change than the one we went through from pump to stomp.
