One of the newest trends to come out of the automotive world is the autonomous car. Autonomous cars are cars that can drive themselves. While this is nothing new to most Americans, having been part of our culture thanks to T.V. shows like the Jetsons and movies like I, Robot, up until recently, the notion of a car that drives itself has been pure fantasy. But thanks to companies like Google and Uber, the autonomous car might be a reality long before anyone thought it was possible. But there are problems with autonomous cars, and that is what this article is going to be about.
Take a look at the picture below. It is a scene from the science fiction movie, I, Robot. The movie is about robots that come to life and attempt to take over society. But one interesting thing in the movie is that everyone, like actor Will Smith is doing in the scene below, has cars that drive for them, rather than cars that they drive:
So what's the big deal, I can hear some people say? A car that drives itself would be a blessing. People could sleep on the way to work. People could use the drive time to get ready for work or to catch up on reading or to finish shaving or putting on makeup, and do it while someone else drives, instead of doing those things and driving, which happens all too often today. All of those are valid points, and if we ever get to the technological level of the society in I, Robot, I will yield to them. But we are nowhere near that society. The autonomous cars that we have now are limited in scope. Some will need the equivalent of wires in the road to guide them (Honda and Mercedes-Benz were two car companies working along those lines in recent years). The Google and Uber autonomous cars essentially use lasers and sensors to see obstacles in the road, identify them, and then move the car in the safest possible way, or stop it altogether if the computer deems driving at that point to be hazardous. Here is a graphic of how the Uber self-driving car works:
As you can see, the Uber car primarily relies on Lidar, which is a system which uses laser beam pulses to measure distances and essentially see. That is how the Uber can drive, know when to stop, and know when to turn; the laser pulses, measuring distances, tell it when to do those things. The Google system is very similar to what Uber uses. Here is a video showing the Google self-driving car at work:
Ok, so again I can see people saying, what's the problem here? These cars have enough cameras and enough lasers to see through anything, and they both have a computer to organize that information much quicker than a human could and make decisions that will be free of emotion and ego. So what's the problem? The problem is apathy, and to a large extent, atrophy, at least in regards to driving skills. I want to bring to your mind a movie called Wall E. Wall E was a movie set in the future, very similar to I, Robot. A future where mankind is so technologically advanced that machines not only drive us, they feed us, clean us, clothe us, and do basically everything but breathe for us. In Wall E, makind has become lazy, and ambitionless, due to technology doing things that humans used to do as a matter of course. In this clip, the robot WALL-E ends up on a cruise ship, and he is going along a corridor, passing two men who are talking to each other about their day.
I don't know if you noticed it, but the two men in the clip are having a conversation with each other, via some sort of electronic device, while lounging on chairs that move them around, all while being only five feet from each other. While this might sound like a stretch in comparison to self-driving cars, I don't think it is. What will happen to our driving skills if cars start doing all the driving? Already there are mainstream cars that have automatic parallel parking. In the past, parallel parking was one of the hardest parts of the driving test, because of the difficulty new drivers had in learning how wide their cars were and how to brake and accelerate smoothly. Now the car does it for you. If all cars do this, how well will drivers be at parallel parking in 50 years? And the driver aids won't stop there. We already have automatic emergency braking. How soon until totally automatic braking, so that a driver doesn't need to worry about stopping distances or think about how his or her car is handling? And how soon until cars are accident proof? It's not as far fetched as it sounds. In fact, one author, Richard S. Foster, tackled that very subject in his short story, "A Nice Morning Drive." In the story, the government has mandated that cars must survive a 30 mile per hour crash with no damage to the car or the occupant. As a result, cars start to be built like tanks, with 30 mile per hour impacts bouncing off the cars like water balloons thrown against a brick building. The story talks about the main character, who has an MGB roadster that, even though he knows it's illegal, he still takes it out on the road for nice drives as often as possible. In one instance in the story, he encounters one of these cars that can survive 30 mile per hour accidents (called MSVs or Modern Safety Vehicles) and as happens with human nature, we no longer respect that which we believe can't hurt us. So the drivers of MSVs treat non MSV cars as objects in a demolition derby, and do their best to destroy them, knowing full well nothing can happen to their cars. As the story says:
"people became accustomed to cars which went undamaged in 10 mile per hour collisions. They gave even less thought than before to the possibility of being injured in a crash. As a result, they tended to worry less about clearances and rights-of-way, so that the accident rate went up a steady six percent each year....most of the non-MSV owners were kept busy dodging the less careful MSV drivers."
This is what happens when people don't have to worry about their safety and the need to drive well. In the story, MSV cars, which by the end are mandated to survive 60 mile per hour crashes, drive as if they were tanks, running over anything, not worrying about being hurt, not worrying about damaging the car, because it can't be damaged. If we enter a world where the car drives itself, and we don't have to worry about being hurt, or being drivers, can anyone say that our society, in time, will not be like the society in Richard Foster's short story? Will drivers in cars that drive themselves become arrogant and forget the danger that exists any time someone drives a car? I hope not, but it is a future that I don't think is as far-fetched as it might seem. Until next time...
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