Autonomous cars on their way?
There’s a story on Slashdot about autonomous cars. The objection of people liking to drive too much to ever allow this is a bit silly, but none of the comments properly refuted it, so I thought I’d do some high falutin’ rootin’ tootin’ refutin’ of my own.
There certainly are a lot of people around here who like to drive, as is evidenced by the fact that vehicles outnumber people in Canada and the US. (Ok, I made the fact up, but it wouldn’t surprise me one bit.) There are a lot of people who derive great joy from their cars for various reasons. There are those people who enjoy working on their car, tuning it, maintaining it, generally getting greasy. I’m not one of them, but I can understand them. Those people have been squeezed by the increasing complexity of cars in recent history, to the point that they might as well stamp the hood with “no user maintainable parts.” The tinkerers haven’t been deterred though, they work on classic cars, restoring, maintaining, shining, polishing and obsessing over them. Quite often they have a second car (known as “the wife’s car” – yes, I’m stereotyping here) which is a more modern, hitech car that they tend to take to the garage to have repaired anyway. Those people will continue with business as usual.
Then there are those people who enjoy driving fast and not getting caught for speeding. This group of individuals would be race car drivers if they could. Clearly autonomous cars will not universally replace manually driven cars overnight, so they will have to be built to accommodate conventional cars on the road. That means that those people will be able to continue driving their older cars on the road until they are no longer serviceable. At that point, they’ll have to make a decision about what kind of car they want to drive. Here’s the key: There will be a burgeoning private race track industry built just for them. You laugh, and call me crazy. Well, back in the day horses were replaced by cars. I’m sure there were a lot of people who liked riding horses too much to give them up for these newfangled automobiles. Those continued to ride their horses. In fact, you can go to places that keep horses and let people ride them if they want. Those people who are truly horse obsessed still have their outlet, in that they can still own their own horses, and ride them all they want. They still all have cars though. My point is that while there are people who like driving enough to never want to give up that control, I suspect that the vast majority of those people would be just as satisfied with going out to someone’s private race course occasionally and renting a conventional car to drive on the closed circuit. There are enough convenience advantages to not having to drive that even the owners of the private race courses will have autonomous cars for transportation.
Cars serve three purposes, I’ll call them the three T’s – Tinkering, Tooling around, and Transportation. Autonomous cars can serve that third purpose in a superior way to conventional cars, and I honestly think that the opportunity to separate that function from the other two will be there eventually. To some people, they also serve the “Status Symbol” purpose, but that doesn’t start with T, and there’s no reason that someone can’t be a snob for owning the latest autonomous BMW.
It won’t happen overnight, but then technological revolution has never done that, even if it sometimes seems that way.
As to fears of safety and reliability, obviously those are serious obstacles to building a working autonomous vehicle. I have no doubt that they will eventually be overcome. After all, computers can process more and more information all the time, with extreme focus – your computer driver will never fall asleep while driving down a lonely stretch of highway and drive into the ditch.
Who will truly oppose this change? Truckers who will be looking at a vastly different career than the one they have now.
Truly these are the proverbial interesting times.
Simpson’s quote of the day: “If something goes wrong…blame the guy who can’t speak English.” – Homer