I guess most folks see autonomous cars as just one more step in the inexorable march of technology toward what we hope will be a better world.  Actually, I am very concerned about the robot cars.  Ultimately, what price will humanity pay for their promised convenience and safety?

Driving equals control, and control is the prime need of human beings.  Humans must feel at least some control over their circumstances.  Without it, eventually they die.  For decades, I have believed that the real reason people instinctively love driving so much is that undeniable feeling of control it gives.  Not the convenience, not the status, not even that celebrated freedom.  It is that intrinsic reward of driving – control!

It seems that modern technology will virtualize most life experiences.  Will humanity be able to cope when it loses real driving too?  Of course, most cars today are already not very interesting to drive.  I suspect that is a major reason for the growing interest in older cars and the move to pickup trucks.

In any case, mixing self-driving cars into the traffic stream will be extremely problematic at best.  Humans and machines do not (probably cannot) think alike.  There are all sorts of drivers thinking all sorts of things out there right now, but they are all human. Traffic confusion will be monumental when motor vehicles controlled in accordance with two different systems of logic try to share the same roads.

There will be hackers and vigilantes – road warriors waging jihad against autonomous cars.

There will even be the simple joy of human jokes.  Apparently, the default behavior of a driverless car is to stop.  Well, way back in about 1970, when I was teaching driving, the following incident happened on a six-lane street in Chicago.  Ahead, we noticed several teenaged boys beginning to jaywalk across the street.  My student momentarily released the gas pedal.  The boys noticed the slight interruption in our car’s forward progress and the driving school sign on its roof.  They started dancing around in the road, obviously enjoying teasing us.

Apparently Mercedes Benz didn’t figure out that human drivers would treat autonomous cars the same way until quite recently.  Last month, November, 2016, the chief executive of Mercedes Benz USA was quoted by Washington’s Top News (http://wtop.com) as fearing that self-driving cars will be bullied by human drivers.  Remember: Mercedes Benz is heavily into autonomous cars.

Finally, I’m glad that the National Motorists Association has decided that self-driving cars are the biggest threat to motorists’ rights and will be monitoring the movement carefully.

Speaking of monitoring, I love the wonderfully silly idea that any passenger will monitor his robot car’s driving. “Hey don’t bother me. It’s gonna drive, I’m gonna sleep.”

12-31-2016