How to stop worrying and learn to love the future of self-driving cars
The future the 1950's thought we’d have is about to happen. We’ve got our talking watches, microwave ovens and color TVs. The robots have voices and their bodies are on the way, including disturbing sexy—and sexless—robots.
We have trouble with the battery life of our pocket supercomputers and helicopters. The fields are dotted with wind turbines (in most of the country, but that’s another story), and rooftops with solar panels.
We have clothes that heat, cool and talk to you; private spaceflight; single-wheel electric scooters; and Marty McFly’s self-lacing sneakers. Aside from flying cars, which will never happen, all we’re still really missing is our Jetsonian transport pods.
A weird convergence of technologies is making it possible. To be competitive, electric cars have to be fully computerized, with features like drive-by-wire that were controversially dangerous not long ago.
Many are also in contact with the factory—Teslas in the path of Hurricane Irma received an automatic over-the-air range extension to help their owners escape. Lane departure warning, distance sensing cruise control and predictive headlights start to make up many of the practical little pieces of a self-driving car.
Decision-making is another matter. Even if it takes half a second for data to get from a car to HQ and back, that’s far too long and it won’t happen at all in a thunderstorm. AI requires enormous and complex datasets, coming in part from…cellphones, the edge of human-computer interaction. They have not only taught engineers how computers should interact with people, they’ve also driven the mass production of exactly the sort of rugged, compact and powerful systems needed on the road. The mechanical pieces are all in place, as the actual self-driving testbed cars are proving.
Missing are two human pieces, legislation and acceptance. We have a terrible track record of making laws dealing with technology, which is not going to change. So we need to adjust our attitudes.
When we first started talking seriously about real-world autonomous cars five or six years ago, they seemed like the worst thing in the world. For enthusiasts this idea was horrifying, but it was disturbing for more than car lovers. Keeping personal responsibility runs deep though America, a common theme for left-leaning Libertarians and alt-right Conservatives. Letting a programmer’s philosophy—and worse, an AI’s decisions—make choices for you, is hard to swallow.
It’s not so much the life-or-death choices that are hard to accept, it’s all the little ones. Sure, there are people who will miss a family reunion rather than getting on a plane, but most of us accept that there are situations where it’s ok to trust the expertise of, say, a Boeing 737 pilot.
Your car, however, is a little house you can take with you. And if people feel the need to defend their houses with AR-15s, how much more personal is the car? You don’t even touch one without permission. Most of us are willing to accept a knock on the door.
As a nanny state loving Liberal, I wasn’t bothered by the decision-making part. But as a car lover, autonomous cars were horrifying. Everyone who owns a car should be a fully qualified and engaged driver, right? Just like every teacher needs to be a loving and qualified educator, every cop needs to be colorblind and every railroad engineer needs not to be on meth.
It’s how the world is supposed to work and more importantly, a fundamental tenet of car culture. You need to be worthy of the car. Both militant car people and militant home defenders need some way to come around. What we have to do is look at autonomous cars as a reality in the glare of daylight, when we’ll see that driving actually sucks.
We’ve spent far too many column inches here discussing bad driving, because apparently it’s a huge problem. Driving is generally less and less fun, and it’s not just because of the drivers. At least, not directly. It’s not what we’re all doing, but where we’re doing it, on urban and suburban roads that will never be able to handle the traffic.
Atlanta has seven of the top 100 most congested bottlenecks in America, including the overall #1 (I-285 at I-85 North); and Nashville has three more in the top 50. That’s 10 percent of the worst traffic in America within about 100 miles.
And it was traffic that changed my mind, not being in it, but when Google took me around it. I don’t know that it was a “Eureka” moment, but I was explaining to my kids how Google uses data from all the other phones out there to figure out where cars are moving slow and then gives me the option of going around.
I also asked myself, “Does it give everyone the same route? I wonder if it sends people different but comparable ways to gather data?” And later on, the light went on: What if every car on the road wasn’t just capable of suggesting new routes, but actually took them?
That, not individual accident avoidance or convenience, is the true promise of cars that think for themselves. Individually they’re dorky and kinda pointless, like a recumbent bicycle or a third thumb. In their swarming aggregate, they have the potential to self-organize, intentionally or not, displaying the same emergent behavior that makes an ant colony work.
Following the route of one autonomous car on a map won’t look too different from any other, just like watching any one ant wouldn’t easily reveal anything about the whole flock. Of ants.
It’s when you get them all together and communicating that thousands of individual microdecisions—“Should I change lanes? How closely should I follow? Should I take exit 31A or 31B?”—add up to something greater. And that’s just ants. Imagine thousands of individual cars each with ten, even twenty times their brainpower.
Would it be a worthy sacrifice for you to give up the time you spend seething with frustration in stop-and-go-traffic in exchange for relinquishing control of your car? For having 99 percent fewer accidents, no speeding tickets and microscopic insurance premiums? I think it should be. If we want the future to happen, we have to be willing to accept it when it comes.
Our autonomous future will look like this:
First, it will mostly be electric. A battery-powered car revolution isn’t quite here, but it’s definitely started. Entire countries—like China, England, France and India--are going beyond incentives and have plans to allow the sale of only electric cars.
Right now, they are looking out to the year 2030 or 2040, but the reality is that widespread electric car adoption will happen without them much sooner, in the five to ten year range. America probably won’t ever ban gas and diesel engines, but in 20 years you sure won’t see many. The first commercial self-driving cars are about two years away, with certain applications only months out, like Singapore’s plan to have autonomous taxis next year.
In 2019, provided the legalities are worked out by then, you’ll be able to buy one from a major manufacturer at a dealership somewhere, although the capabilities will be limited to certain circumstances, and probably certain places (ie, Oregon).
The following year there will be wider availability, leading up to the 2015-2017 era, when it goes from a sideshow to mainstream.
Resistance will come from the Teamsters Union, taxi drivers, police departments, insurance companies and everyone else whose livelihood involves either driving a car, or other people driving a car poorly.
There is already simmering tension in the truck driving world, where companies are thrilled at the cost-saving idea (and oh yeah, electric and fuel cell semis are here, too) but for some reason, truckers are less pleased.
Accidents will still happen and it will be hard to swallow at first. Your car may decide to kill you to save the three children chasing a kitten across the road and if you would have chosen differently, then the robot was right.
What it will remove is the 99 percent of collisions that are stupid human error but every now and then, the underlying chaos of existence will still make its presence known, sometimes in awful ways.
It won’t matter. When your coworker with their Audi E4 AutoDrive is getting to work 20 minutes faster and watching TV in the car, the benefits will be impossible to ignore. For a generation, at least, you’ll still be able to take the wheel and there will be many situations where you’ll have to.
But you’ll also find the best possible parking spot every time. Your car will come pick you up when you need it and take you home when you’ve had three drinks too many. It’ll probably yell at you for throwing up in it, but that’s what friends are for.
America started to reinvent itself, completely, about 10 years ago, coincidentally when the iPhone came out. Think about how many things you do today that would have been impossible before then: The world you knew is going away and the pace of change is ever accelerating. Grab on and enjoy it—life moves pretty fast.