So the story goes….
In 1895, or so, there were only two cars in Ohio and they managed to hit head on….
Maybe it was Illinois….
Truth is I heard this story when I was younger – could never find its source – assume it’s apocryphal – but maybe it has a point….
Looks like Google’s driverless cars had their first accident – now – is the story apocryphal? Judge for yourself – but I figure that it’s only a matter of time anyway.
Cars are the new iPads. Ford uses the Consumer Electronic Show, in Las Vegas, to showcase and introduce its latest and greatest, and let me tell you their technology is amazing.
Some Fords can park themselves; have radar for your blind spots; use voice control and on and on. Critical to them, by the way, is that everything they do allows you to have 2 hands on the wheel – always.
But that is for now. The ultimate driving experience will be when we sit back – enjoy the technology – probably mostly speaking and texting – in one form or another while the car drives itself. And, when you look at Ford and BMW and others, there is no doubt we are on the way – despite the 2-hand limitation of today.
Legislation in the US already allows driverless cars on the roads – in some states – and more will follow.
There is also a new legal expertise being developed – who do you sue in case of an accident? How do you insure? Can a cop pull you over? Sounds trivial but think about it…
Seems to me the real question though is the loss of human skill and intervention. Look – clearly – we haven’t done that great a job – too many people still die in needless car accidents – usually because of human fault – drunkenness, negligence, tiredness, whatever…
But here is a scenario – the GPS satellites that “drive” the cars get hacked – what happens? Frankly the possible outcomes are too scary to think about.
Bottom line – it will come when it does – and no doubt there will be glitches and accidents and sadly deaths – make no mistake…
But my issue isn’t with fear of the technology – it’s the fear of losing touch – the human element that while not perfect…is exactly why it’s so perfect and in my opinion never actually duplicable.
It’s my total worship of Sully and Flight 1549 – no computer could have saved those people – and it’s my admiration for the Waldorf Schools and the insight that the Tech Elite have in sending their kids there.
And I love what one of the kids had to say:
“Besides, if you learn to write on paper, you can still write if water spills on the computer or the power goes out.”
Finn Heilig, 10, whose father works at Google
One day we will be passengers in a High Tech cocoon interacting not with the road but with the environment – at least until we have teleports…
However…listen
“Computers are magnificent tools for the realization of our dreams, but no machine can replace the human spark of spirit, compassion, love, and understanding.”
Louis Gerstner
Now I’m pushing it – I know – but maybe not – many people are emotionally attached to their cars…LOL…but that wasn’t my point.
As we get more and more dependent on computers doing our work – let’s never lose sight of the humanity in anything…
I write this from Berlin – where today I toured the Holocaust Museum and kept wondering how much greater the horror would have been had they had computers…..
Never lose sight…..
What do you think?
Change is the only constant thing in life. This driverless car idea is so brilliant that it makes me wonder how many air plane accidents have happend in last century due to human error? on the behest of that intelligence, if we all start using driverless cars, how many less accidents with happen and how will “Day Light Robbers” insurance companies make money?
Just a thought. nice article.
I just finished reading Jennifer Egan’s novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad. Have you read it? It’s such great writing (LOVE the PowerPoint chapter), and I thought it captured the technology dilemma brilliantly. (Probably why it won a Pulitzer.) The next day (yesterday), I made a point of not checking Facebook, email, or my phone texts — just letting the phone be what it used to be: a thing I didn’t touch unless it rang or I needed to call someone. It was interesting how my mind kept reaching for it — and how empowered I felt calling it back and focusing on the task at hand.
David,
truly wonderful. VW in Germany is enacting a Blackberry email blackout for some employees from a half hour after work on Friday night to a half hour before Monday morning, for that same reason as you point out in your letter. To not lose touch with the life they have outside of
their work lives. A way for them to balance things better. Unplug. Connect on a human level.
Your wrap up was killer.
Ritch
A ‘driverless car’? Do you think it would cure road rage? Probably not! Instead, two guys will beat the crap out of each other because one didn’t have his car programmed the way the other thought he should had. It all sounds nice though – to make our streets safer. All motorist having an equal share of the roadway and not worrying about ‘is that guy going to let me in or not?’. And just when you think all is well – some brainyack will come up with the idea of a “Speed Pass”.
Who hasn’t heard the story of the person who “drove” their car off a pier while they followed their GPS? Technology fails us when it stops being an enabler and starts being a crutch. Because with rare exception, the technology we use on a daily basis is still “dumb”. And when we rely on it blindly, we become dumb as well.
In postwar North America the automobile was a symbol of personal freedom and empowerment. If your car now drives itself, does that still hold true? That technology is doing something we are more than capable of doing ourselves with the proper training. But more than that – in this example we are depending on it for our very lives. Who – or what – now holds the power?
My father was an accountant. Once, when I was complaining about my math homework in high school, he mentioned that he now found it hard to do simple math operations because of his constant use of a calculator at work. Now, we shouldn’t crush all calculators to save accountants around the world. But it seems to me that applying technology to execute simple tasks we can perform easily ourselves doesn’t glorify us – it lessens us.
Finn Heilig is 10 years old and he gets it.
We’re always waiting for the BANG! of change when most of these changes seep into our reality rather than burst onto the scene. When, since the time of Worlds Fair did we have explosive new inventions that suddenly changed our lives? It seems that any amazing new tech / invention / change is not impactful until it is democratized. Carl Benz may have made the first car in 1879 but it was Ford who made the car what the car means to us today. People saw them, most never rode in them until they met it at their own level. In a few generations, things like the telegraph, telephone, steam engine, modern machinery / communications, products of the industrial age took us from hundreds of years of horse and wagon to the modern age. So many of which were “we’ve never seen anything like this before!” and we did a very good job of covering a lot of bases so where we are now, most things are derivative and incremental. Even things like phones, electricity, plumbing, cable TV, radio, cars, all took a while to be pervasive. On the other hand, the canon, rifle, and weapons of war by the very nature of the urgency to tool-up or die, appeared with alacrity…
The driverless car will creep up on us as an incremental technology probably starting on the consumer side as continual improvements to cruise control that allow for less and less driver intervention. Cars will improve, GPS will get better, roads will use embedded NFC (near field communications), RFID, WiMax, WiFi and other technologies, layered on one another, every iteration a long stride forward, sometimes coming in leaps, sometimes in tiny steps.
On the commercial side, infrastructure limitations, costs and complexity aside, unmanned (or unwomaned if you will) and remotely operated trucks using dedicated lanes if not roads for transport is not unreasonable at all. With all of the military work on drones and 2 generations of kids weened on complex flight sims, racing games and first person shooters, we have the skilled operators. And then at some point, the systems work well enough that simply programming coordinates will work. We’ll notice them here and there, then a bit more and then like all other revolutionary technologies we see today, we stop noticing them as they’ve become part of our reality.
The hacking aspect is interesting (concerning) because unlike aviation I don’t see vehicle control systems (commercial or consumer) being built on specialty, proprietary equipment, software or networks. And like all things on “normal computers, servers, software and networks” they are susceptible to inside and outside tampering and sabotage. Like most hacking, it comes from the inside the majority of the time but what if Anonymous, or Russian spammers, or an old fashioned terrorist group decided they didn’t like a particular trucking company or the future evolution of OnStar? Could they send hundreds, thousands of vehicles careening hither and yon? Yes, and much easier than hacking into the far more secure flight control systems that govern flight.
We may no longer live in a world where we’ll bear witness to an explosive new thing that changes our lives like suddenly having access to air travel, calling someone half way around the world or music television (where did that go anyway?) but that doesnt mean life wont be markedly different a generation or two from now, we’ll look back and probably thing that consumer space flight, unmanned vehicles, hover skate boards must have burst on the scene and we were all dumbstruck in the streets but we’ll all know it didn’t happen that way at all.
My instinct is to negate cars altogether and invent an alernate, safer and energy efficient mode of transporation: Vehicles that move on invisible electronic tracks allowing trips to be programmed on a computer.
We got into a cab in Hanoi last weekend (not very old Hyundai) and Will (11) remarks…’hey this is cool, it has one of those handles to roll down the window!’ As Lionel points out…the automation creeps up on us often such that it becomes second nature before we can even reflect on how big the change was.
I think this technology and other similar technologies which are in the pipeline will make human race further useless… remember movie “Surrogates” I loved the basic idea of the movie that how more useless we are going to be in future…
to prove the point I think this is one best example
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47rQkTPWW2I
prefer having bicycle culture re-invented in our lives I wish…
Great post. Very thoughtful.
Mind, I disagree.
This romanticism about car ownership – how much is it worth to you?
$100? $2000? $100,000?
Perhaps $230 billion? Because that is the cost of road accidents each year in the United States alone, with 30,000 or so people killed and many, many more injured. Traffic accidents are one of the top 10 causes of premature death world-wide.
Sources:
http://www.nhtsa.gov/DOT/NHTSA/Communication%20&%20Consumer%20Information/Articles/Associated%20Files/EconomicImpact2000.pdf
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs310/en/index.html
This is not even taking into account the amount of deaths caused by particulate pollution.
There’s nothing at all that could possibly justify stopping us working together as a civilisation to fix this and driverless cars are hands down the best solution.
—
As a side note, the Holocaust wasn’t slowed down by lack of computers, it was slowed down by a sudden German realisation that the Jews could be productive workers. Treblinka and such camps were killing at such a rate that basically no Jew would ever have survived any concentration camp.
Sorry for commenting again I just wanted to correct something. Road traffic accidents aren’t one of the top 10 causes of premature death, they are one of the top 10 causes of all human death.
truth is that this discussion leads to so many different places. How we use data; how much we value algorythm vs insight; the true levergable power of analytics vs the mere statsitical –
If you are willing to buy real estate, you will have to get the credit loans. Furthermore, my father all the time takes a auto loan, which occurs to be the most rapid.