When I lived in San Francisco, I didn’t own a car. My partner did, a compact pickup, and we used it when we wanted to get out of the city or when we needed to haul something, but for the most part we used the public transportation system. It was easier.
That’s not the case in south Florida. Not having a car is a significant handicap to doing anything down here, because the cities were planned for the age of the automobile. Everything is spread out, and there’s little public impetus for an efficient public transportation system. I’ll go even farther–there’s a massive public bias against public transportation down here. The car is king.
The problem is that humans really aren’t very good at operating cars, even during the best of times, and these are decidedly not the best of times. Our cars move faster than ever before, and yet as drivers we’re more distracted and distractable than ever. We’re dividing our attention between traffic and street signs, pedestrians and bicyclists, phone conversations, the movie the kids are watching in the back seat, the directions from the GPS, the song or talking head on the radio, the text message or push notification from our phone, and so on.
Most of the innovation in vehicle safety for the last fifty years has been toward protecting passengers, and I don’t want to diminish the importance of that. Countless lives have been saved simply by softening dashboards, for example. But the next set of innovations, I think, needs to include the removal of humans from the driving process, which is why I was very excited about this piece in Wired’s Autopia blog about an Audi which climbed Pike’s Peak without a driver. It’s an autonomous car. And I want one.
Actually, that’s not true. I’d rather have an efficient public transportation system in place, one that bypasses all the issues of traffic jams and which reduces pollution and which makes better use of our ever-declining resources. And I suspect we’ll reach a point, perhaps in my lifetime, when the individual vehicle will become a relic, will become a symbol of an unenlightened age, like a fur coat. We just won’t be able to justify the waste. But that’s another discussion.
This discussion is about how we as humans are too easily distracted to operate these kinds of machines at the speeds they can reach. This isn’t something that’s going to get better, either, so I’m glad that car companies are looking for ways to take the keys out of our hands. I trust a computer to drive way more than I trust an amped-up angry dude in an SUV who’s decided to take out his frustrations on the traffic on I-95, or the granddad who should have had his license taken away 10 years ago, or the teenager who thinks his car will stop more quickly than it’s capable of. Or me, for that matter.
I’m a fairly good driver. I’ve been at it for more than half my life now, and haven’t been in an accident for nearly 20 years. I haven’t even gotten a ticket for a moving violation in more than ten (I believe). And I’m not as safe behind the wheel as I feel I should be. I do my best to reduce the number of potential distractions I have to deal with, but even so I recognize that there are times I just won’t see things. I want to give up control, so bring on the robots. Here are my keys.
