What will we do with all the free time promised by the proponents of self-driving cars? We certainly will not be able to clean the gutters or mow the lawn.  We won’t be able to do the laundry, make the beds, shovel snow, paint the house, rake leaves, or do the marketing. No strolling though the park.  Swimming would be out of the question as would be playing baseball or football, golfing, jogging, bowling, skiing, and any other sports.  We couldn’t dine out or barbecue or visit a museum, the Grand Canyon, or the White House.  We couldn’t even just be at home while some plumber or carpenter performs work on the house, and we couldn’t pass the time of day with a neighbor.  It would be impossible to give the dog a bath or go to the dentist, play catch or shoot some hoops after supper, cook, put the kids to bed, go fishing, boating, hunting, or countless other things.  Truth is we won’t be able to do anything that can’t be done in a car.

Well, okay.  That still leaves reading, texting, sending emails, making business phone calls, shopping online, using social media, playing cyber games, crocheting, taking a nap, cuddling-up, looking at the scenery, and watching TV.

About 2/3 of people are susceptible to motion sickness, so scratch many of those  activities for the majority of us.  What the heck are we going to do with all that free time riding around in self-driving vehicles?

Oh yeah.  Of course!  Perfect!  Play virtual reality driving games.

No.  Despite the hype, they can’t.  On February 5, 2017, the Chicago Tribune ran a story about a $162,000, state-of-the-art autonomous car.  It can maintain a fixed distance from the car ahead.  It can stay in its own lane so long as it can see and understand the lane lines.  If it has a vehicle to follow, it can stop before crashing.  That’s it.

The article mentions driver aids (driver distractions?) like blind spot alert, but the car’s actual self-driving ability is shockingly limited.  Worse, whenever roadway circumstances cause this $162,000 car to doubt its meager capacity to cope, its instrument panel flashes while it tells the passenger to take over.

The hype tells us that autonomous cars will give us loads of free-time whenever we travel in them, eliminate crashes, make access to private transportation universal, and eradicate the newly unbearable task of driving.  Further, the hype insists that all this is just around the corner.  The only problem is that nobody can even guess just how far away that corner is or how long it will take to get there.

Meanwhile, we’ll be saddled with minimally autonomous cars that require human monitoring.  Yes, until that time, if ever, when cars can drive themselves better than today’s very best human drivers, passengers will always need to be ready to take control.

Google claims that it has no interest in these somewhat autonomous cars. Google promises its cars will not have pedals or steering wheels, but all other potential providers want human drivers to be available whenever they might be needed until all the bugs are worked out, in a few years – or decades.

Until then, autonomous cars will need to be monitored.  Monitoring, however, is not something human beings like very much to do.  They usually don’t do it very well either.  They’re not set up that way.  Take security guards.  Their greatest workplace challenge is to avoid boredom and not succumb to reading or playing games on their smartphones. People lose interest very quickly in doing dull things.  In fact, that’s the cause of electronically distracted driving.  People believe that most of the time they’re behind the wheel, nothing very interesting is going on, so they seek out other things to do.

Just about the only person who actually monitors driving closely is a very good driving teacher.  He drives right along with his student, aiming, scanning, analyzing, giving advice, sharing insights, directing attention, pointing out errors and potential errors, asking questions, praising good performance, keeping things safe, smooth, and flowing.

Suppose you did pay close attention to how your autonomous car drove.  Just imagine what some of your reactions might be:

“Why didn’t you pass that guy?”

“No!  Don’t let that jerk in!”

“Can’t you stop more smoothly?”

“You could have made that light.”

“Why didn’t you park over there in the shade?”

“You’re going the wrong way!  Don’t blame the GPS.”

“What moron gave you a license anyway?”

If you had to monitor everything your car did, you’d surely get annoyed, frustrated, scared, and angry in short order.  Blood boiling, you’d cuss the car and take over the driving – unless it wouldn’t let you.

Monitoring intermittently while reading, working, texting, having coffee and a doughnut, knitting, working out, making love, or whatever wouldn’t work either.  If the car needed your help, you’d never be able to switch your attention, figure out the situation, and avert disaster.  You’d have to stay ahead of the car all the time to prevent its mistakes.

Every time your autonomous car reacted to circumstances differently from what you expected, you’d get that little jolt of surprise and fear. Most likely, you would not find this more relaxing than driving yourself.  You’d do more work but never be in control.

When considering human monitoring of somewhat self-driving cars, skepticism should be your guide.

 

 

 

Autonomous cars are predicted to solve all our road transportation problems.  Decades ago, the unrealistic dream was flying cars.  They were going to free commuters from the growing congestion of road travel.  Everybody would be able to soar blissfully above the traffic snarls. Nobody ever thought seriously about how those – drivers who couldn’t manage on roads with lanes, traffic signals, speed limits, right-of-way laws, et cetera – would be able to handle the promised freedom (chaos) of the air.

It seems to me that autonomous cars are a huge cash cow being promoted as a great advance in road safety.  The easiest, cheapest, and most effective way to increase road safety (and efficiency) would be finally to begin teaching drivers to drive!

Incidentally, in his book, Geek Conspiracy: Rescuing Social change from the Cult of Technology, Kentaro Toyama explains that high tech has consistently proven of virtually no value in solving social problems.

Analysts of the autonomous car phenomenon sometimes wonder about driver licensing problems resulting from it.  What?  Don’t they get that if the car is driving, none of the passengers has any responsibility for it?  Nobody will need a license.  Nobody will even need to know how to drive.  Parents will send their 10 year olds to the store for them and let the car drive.  Heck, they’ll have the car take their kids to kindergarten and pre-school.  Probably take the baby to the doctor.

And this nonsense about the coming legal hassles of determining guilt in crashes.  Come on!  The car was driving.  How’re you going to blame anybody else?

 

Boom!  Squish!  And that pedestrian just hit by a car sticks to it – for safety’s sake. Really.  The idea is that instead of being thrown around the street or run-over, the victim would receive no further injuries than those caused by the initial impact.  Google wants this for its autonomous cars.

Solve one problem; create another.  How do you get the victim unstuck and to the hospital?  Maybe special jump-suits with enough neck to ankle zippers to allow disengagement from the goo. Better yet, an algorithm that enables the car to drive the victim to the hospital all by itself.  Not only would that save valuable time, but it would cut-out those pesky middlemen who drive the ambulance.

Y’know, it might become illegal to have your car waxed at the car wash.  The adhesive effect of the stickum would be compromised.

A whole new concept of road film might develop: not just grit and squashed bugs, but dried leaves, styrofoam cups, and occasionally small animals struggling to free themselves

“Bet you can’t.”                                                                                                                                   “Bet I can.”                                                                                                                                       “Hey Jeff, Bobby says he can kiss the front bumper of Mr. Biglow’s new car and not stick to it.

“Just a minute, just a minute!  Let me understand this.  You’re telling me that my car, MY CAR, after dropping-off Hazel and Sasha at your house to play with Maryanne, abducted your cat, Alexander Hamilton?”

“Well, y’know how cats love to rub up against things.  Hammi was doing that to your car just before it backed out of the driveway and came home.  Poor thing yowled all the way.”

“O.K. let’s go outside and take a look.  OMG!  It IS Alexander Hamilton glued to the front of my car.”

“Hello Emergency?  Please hurry to my garage.  I’ve stumbled and fallen onto my car, and I can’t get off!”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 on 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 had 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.”