Eye Sight
© ericpetersauto.com
It used to be that your car was a private space occupied in between home and work, where you could be by yourself - assuming no one else was with you. Now something else is always with you - keeping track of you.

Subaru calls their something EyeSight - and it is keeping its eyes on you. The eyes are electronic and you can't see them with yours. If you want to see them, use a camera to pan the dashboard area; then you'll see a pair of red blinking infrared lights. These are the pupils - if you like - of the eyes that are always on you. They are watching to see whether you are looking where the car thinks you ought to be looking - which is straight ahead and don't look left or right for too long.

If the eyes that are always watching you - they never sleep - think you're getting "drowsy" (which the programming defines as not looking where the programming of the machine intelligence behind those eyes thinks you ought to be looking) then it raps your knuckles, electronically, with corrective visual and audible prompts.

Subaru's system is just one of many and they're all fundamentally the same. I was recently test driving another make/model - a Lexus RX - that had the same eyes that are always upon you, which you can see in the video above. I kept them from seeing me by covering them over with blue painter's tape, as you can also see. I did this because it annoyed me to be watched by the car, which also insisted I "sit up" - so that it could see me better, apparently. The tape over its eyes engendered a hissy fit, which eventually subsided. A message popped up in the dash display advising me that this safety system was offline and to check the owner's manual.

In italics to reflect the fact that "safety" has as much to do with the eyes being on you as the grope-and-scan line at the airport has to do with thwarting "terrorists." Both are measures meant to let you know who's in charge - and it's not you. This lets you know who is in charge.

In both cases, a dreary tyranny of universal compliance regime for the sake of compliance. It is everything the old Soviet Union was, just more technological now. You are just a widget and one of many. You are too low to be accorded the dignity of being treated as an individual. Just the same as any cow at a feed lot, which is exactly how we are viewed by the technocrats behind all of this. They are the new apparatchiks - combining political authority with technological power, the latter encroaching more and more with each passing day, or so it feels like.

"Safety" - in the context of cars - can be safely assumed to mean you are regarded as an absolute moron who cannot be trusted to drive a car safely. Accordingly, "safety" technology must be embedded in cars to protect you from yourself and (putatively) others from yourself, too.

Note the preemptive assumption of universal incompetence that predicates all of this.

A good way to understand this is the looming embedding of even more "technology" - ostensibly meant to preemptively stymie "drunk" drivers who've never been convicted of driving drunk. It used to be that only those convicted of drunk driving were required to have technology embedded in their car - such as an ignition interlock - to prevent them from driving drunk again.

Now - soon - every driver will be presumed "drunk" and the technology will be mandatory in every new vehicle, beginning with the 2026 model year. And the eyes-upon-you are that technology.

And it is already embedded in many new cars.

Instead of having to breath into a device that senses whether there's alcohol in your system before unlocking the ignition - the technology courts often require those convicted of drunk driving to have installed in their car - all cars will watch your eye movements and any that deviate from the programmed parameters will be adjudicated by the machine intelligence that controls the car as prima facie evidence that you are "drowsy" - which will be regarded as synonymous with "impaired" - which will become synonymous with "drunk."

Just the same as anyone who drives is presumptively already regarded as "drunk" as far as the law is concerned. Until they prove they are not - to the satisfaction of an armed government worker at what are styled "sobriety" checkpoints, where everyone is presumed to be "drunk."

Now your car will be your very own mobile checkpoint.

And - inevitably - it will do more than just watch your driving. This isn't a projection. It is an inevitability - as well as a legality. The inevitable part has to do with one thing logically following upon the heels of another. If it is necessary to keep eyes on you while you're driving for your own and others' "safety" then it is also necessary, implicitly, to prevent you from driving "unsafely." The technology will do more than rap your knuckles - so to speak - with visual and audible corrections.

It will inevitably prevent you from continuing to drive.

This technology is also already embedded. You don't control the accelerator or the brakes; the technology does. It merely allows you to believe you do - for now. In time, it will be made clear who controls your car.

And the federal "safety" edict - the one that goes into effect come 2026 - will make that crystal clear.