Pixar’s people have their own, highly macabre, theories as well.
https://twitter.com/ssufyerdnivek/status/857320414166605824
Moe Lane
PS: Yes, obviously there’s no actual explanation, because this is just a movie series for kids and thus there’s no need to do that kind of worldbuilding because, hey, movies about talking cars. But that just means that everybody’s theory is at least potentially equally valid to everybody else’s. Genocide, asteroid strike, convoluted timeline: go nuts.
You do know there are a lot of short stories about that. Including ones where the cars are smart enough to carbon monoxide the driver and keep the windows up so he mummifies to look like there is still a driver to avoid detection.
I am not an expert in the current state of the art of AI technology, but the most impressive stuff I’ve seen so far (machine learning) is basically glorified curve fitting. Now, to be fair, that glorified curve fitting actually does a good job in solving some problems.
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But the reality is, the only argument I’ve ever seen for actual sentient computers is “one day computers will get really fast and complex, and they’ll just wake up”. I’m not buying it.
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Maybe someday we’ll get there some day, but to my knowledge, right now we don’t have even the beginning flickerings of a theory explaining what stuff like sentience, self-awareness, and intelligence actually is.
My problem with the theory is that it doesn’t make sense. If the car is autonomous, it didn’t have a last driver. An autonomous car wouldn’t require a driver. A rider, perhaps, but not a driver. How the car would go about absorbing the personality of a bag of mostly water that sat for a period of time inside of it is beyond me.