The Passengers is another dystopian thriller of the near future, this one focused on self-driving cars.
The essential plot: a hacker takes over a set of self-driving cars, threatens to kill all the riders, and live streams their terror with audio and video feeds from inside each car, to make important points about financial liability and legal responsibility for accidents when self-driving cars are involved, as well as to highlight the potential vulnerability of each of us to personal data theft and misuse.
The story raises some interesting and very contemporary philosophical and legal points about automation and self-driving vehicle technologies, but the plot becomes a little strained at the point that the hacker seems to know everything about the individual secrets and personal moral failures of each doomed passenger.
Still, it's taut and unnerving. It's a little too close to the media spectacles, privacy invasions and destructive online mob behaviors we've already experienced in real life on our TV news, smartphones and the internet. Recommended.
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