Weighing the Promise and Peril of Driverless Vehicles
Suppose at this very moment, you absolutely had to drop everything and immediately drive to Caribou, Maine, or maybe Elk River, Minnesota, or even Branson, Missouri, through some great swathe of America you usually only fly past. Suppose also, that you could not access Google Maps or use a similar GPS. Would you be able to get there? Would you try with just an old Rand McNally, or even know how?
Perhaps within a generation, with the rise of autonomous cars, one may be able to posit a similar question: if at this moment you absolutely had to manually drive a car yourself to the other side of town, with no computer assistance, would you be able to get there? More to the point, would you be allowed to?
If the worst thing that so-called driverless or autonomous cars do is occasionally maim a pedestrian or spontaneously combust, consider us blessed. But a reckless embrace of this technology will do more to debase the human spirit, enervate our faculties, and fence in our freedoms than proponents acknowledge.
The ascendance of autonomous vehicles, in effect, vehicles driven by artificial intelligence, will mark a sharp decline in the trajectory of human self-reliance and freedom. This new technology will only become widely available hand in hand with corporate control and government regulation. Geographical restrictions, algorithmic route restrictions, and fees will harry and hem our drive. Congestion pricing will escalate with the volume of cars or time of day. A regulating authority will dictate routes and speeds through the algorithm. This authority will know and control your start, destination, whereabouts, and itinerary to allow it to assess taxes and fees by the mile driven.
We may soon grow nostalgic for the mere freedom of gripping a steering wheel with our own hands and getting lost in the countryside.
Current prototypes of driverless cars, such as Google’s, move at a septuagenarian 25 miles an hour, but their speed will increase over time as high as their safe operation will allow, which will likely be much faster than current highway speed limits. The distance of a comfortable drive will expand exponentially. Thus, as self-driving technology become reliable, safe, and affordable, it is easy to anticipate that urban centers, tourist attractions, or any desirable location will become even more popular and congested as the geographic radius of a comfortable commute or a day trip expands. Simultaneously, the population of eligible passengers, such as little kids, your blind grandma, or little dogs owned by rich people in LA, becomes potentially unlimited.
Shipping packages alone, with no human being along for the ride, may eventually become common. People who currently take forms of public transportation may opt for the innate appeal of the driverless vehicles. While there are potential efficiencies gained from the obvious pressure to give up owning a car and resorting to ride sharing where the driverless vehicles taxi people wherever they wish, that does not necessarily mean less cars on the road. Everyone is still commuting at 9 and 5, and unless the somewhat unappealing prospect of mass carpooling catches fire with people who have already given up the convenience of owning their own vehicle, it is not practical to expect less cars on the roads. People will give up their cars for the luxury and leisure of an autonomous car they can spread out in, not for the privilege of packing into an automated bus.
A recent study ("Will driverless cars increase reliance on roads?") from Leeds University in the UK indicates that the rise of driverless will actually result in more cars on the road. Congestion is not going anywhere. Did email make mail less annoying and less cluttered? Self driving cars may do to our streets what email did to our "inboxes".
In sum, driverless vehicles' exponential speed and efficiency exacerbates many of the worst aspects of driving.
Exponential volume and usage will lead to price and regulatory pressures and outright control over not just speed and driving, but routes, times, distances, destinations, passengers, and fuel, to bring volume and usage under control in a sort of manageable, and ever more expensive, equilibrium. The rosy pictures of driverless technology offer us a shrunken horizon.
It is therefore largely inevitable that autonomous vehicles will mean less autonomy for actual people than we are led to believe by the technological optimists. If sitting in your own car and reading a book, taking a nap, doing homework, or making love on a long distance, high speed, relaxing drive half way across the country seems too good to be true, it is. In the long term, if the technology is perfected, people at least potentially are able to travel great distances at relative comfort, meaning not only will the arteries of our interstate highway system be blocked up, but any desirable destination, such as a beach, city center, tourist attraction, etc., will be choked with cars and people. Our commutes will be just as stifling and congested, and it comes at the cost of the freedom to drive.
All this will be foisted upon us and justified by driverless car proponents in the name of saving lives. The tens of thousands of yearly automobile fatalities will lead us to hand over the keys, perhaps happily at first, to the algorithmic chauffeur. Congestion and death will lead to a radical push toward completely mandatory AI driven transportation and the outright legal prohibition of manual driving, something predicted by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and scores of tech observers. Thus, there is the real, perhaps inevitable, prospect on the horizon that human drivers have reached the end of the road.
Except for, one would imagine, truck and taxi drivers, people are clamoring for the rise of this technology without considering where this road leads. Autonomous vehicles may be a boon in a strictly commercial sense, but it is much more of an open question as to whether this technology will make us happier and freer as a people.
The freedom and art of driving will become an escapist past time permitted only in sad little driving tracks or penned in zones. The skill of the tinkering gear-head will become obsolete, as the computerized workings of the vehicles become copyrighted intellectual property. Not simply the ability to repair, but the very right to repair is in jeopardy, as ownership is necessarily consolidated under a central authority.
Is it man's lot to wither into superfluity like a vestigial limb?
Perhaps one might object that these are the reactionary musings of a Luddite, or a deluded Romantic who would have lamented the combustion engine's effect on horsemanship. As one who has lived in the congested hellscapes of our cities, it's a close call as to whether cars get you home more swiftly than at a horse's gallop, or even the steady shuffle of the the bum pushing a pilfered grocery carriage. Technological progress and happiness are related, but not synonymous. The rise of the car did not require that I give up my liberty of where, when, and how I drive, at least within legal limits. The driverless car will not be beholden to the bridle or steering wheel of man, but to the control of a computer code written by a select, nameless few from a centralized corporate or governmental authority. The automobile is still human centric, the driverless vehicle is algorithmic. This is not a mere technological progression in transportation, but a pivot from human will to machine control.
Driverless cars present a Faustian bargain. An irresistible technological future asks us simply to trade some freedom and self-determination for safety, comfort, and speed. It is a choice between a people that drives, owns, controls, builds, repairs, and that still holds in its hands the means of freedom and movement, and a people of comfortable serfdom, a passive passenger class that rents its freedom, and moves and escapes and travels and lives by permission of a computer code.
