Don’t look now, but the self driving car (SDC) is apparently about to run us over.
Already prototypes have put in over a million miles on public roads (so far with a human co-pilot for emergencies). Google says it plans to make SDCs available by 2020.
It’s a shock reading that the SDC will have no steering wheel, brake, or “gas” pedal (I gather that most SDCs will be electric). Hits you in your gut. What, really? Get into high speed rush hour traffic with absolutely no control? Yikes.
But the whole point is that the new cars are safer than human-driven cars. In fact, it would only make sense not just to make these new cars available to the public, but to, in fact, make them mandatory. We may be nearing the time when the only legal status for humans will be as passengers. (Why should a driver who wants to go on doing his own driving be permitted to put others at risk?)
I suppose there will always be go-kart tracks for those who feel the need to express themselves by atavistic medium of driving.
Will the driving public be ready to take this step? It feels, if anything, more revolutionary than the horseless carriage itself—at least we were drivers of both varieties of carriage.
Yes, there will be the advantages: not only safer, but saves us the work of performing the intricate act of driving, paying attention, negotiating our way through the world around us. It frees us up to do things like gaze at the countryside, eat, do video games, stuff passengers (and some drivers) do now.
I suppose, with every car its own designated driver, drinking and texting will become legal.
Hans Moravec, a well-known futurist, years ago predicted that in the fairly near future we would have robots and other machines to do all the work and humans would be born and live our whole lives retired. He seemed cheered by the prospect. But as a lot of retired people find out, retirement is not a sufficiently meaningful use of retirement.
The usual assumption is that if scientists and engineers go to all the trouble of coming up with a technology, the least we can do is use it. But sometimes we have balked at deferring to machines. Remember John Henry, the steel-drivin’ man who died in a contest with a steel drivin’ machine? His point was that employment of that particular machine would put workers out of work. But it seems to me there was also in the old folk songs about John Henry the suggestion that some vital dimension would go out of human life if the machines take over. (John Henry actually did beat the machine, though expiring in the process.)
This is probably a romantic take on John Henry’s insistence on using up his body doing hard, menial labor for the profit of the company. But there is another issue besides whether machines can do it better: What gives our life meaning?
The SDC sounds good and sensible. But what if we don’t want the car to do all the work, even if it does it better? What if we don’t want it to have all the fun?
Some guys have a hard time letting their wives drive, let alone a machine. Switching to automatic shift from a standard is, according to some people, a major concession to senility.
We may not be, statistically, as good as SDCs, but are we willing to let our driving prowess atrophy through total disuse? (That old fashioned capacity, “sense of direction,” is already withering through widespread use of GPS to do the work of finding our way around the world.)
What if the sort of creature we are is happier, life more meaningful, doing it ourselves?
Will our inner John Henry be willing to go quietly?
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