A Pause for Reflection

I’d like to take a break from the Perspective of the Passengers series I’ve been working on for the past few months and insert a selfish, low-quality personal post. I’ll get back to better things in the next post – there’s still another two or three more Perspectivesin the works – but right now I’d like to inform you all that today is my birthday!

I turn 30 today.

Man, I’m old.

When I was born, the newest cars looked like this:

… and the word ‘phone’ meant one of these:

… because computers at the time looked like this:

… and the internet looked like this:

… because there was no internet – at least, not as we know it today. I remember a snowy day in 1995, when I was 8 years old, and my dad took me to his office to show me something he thought was really neat. On his ‘home’ screen on his computer he clicked an icon of a large capital “N” which I later learned stood for “Netscape.” The computer responded by making a lot of loud clangs and beeps and buzzes until my dad announced that we were ‘on-line’ and that I could now ‘look up’ anything I wanted. I had no idea what he meant, so he explained that he had just connected his computer to the “internet,” which meant that any information on any other computer connected to the same “internet” could be shared. So if some guy had uploaded pictures of something interesting, we could find and download those pictures ourselves. To demonstrate, he began downloading a picture of the RMS Titanic, since I was in the process of building a model of it at home from a kit. A minute or two went by as the image loaded line by line, and I remember complaining that it wasn’t in color like the pictures I found in books from the library (I was about to start painting the model soon and wanted to get the color-scheme right. (I didn’t)). To this my dad just replied that one day the internet would be more useful than libraries, because you would be able to access any picture in the world from your computer at home. I pointed out that there were two problems with this: 1) we didn’t have a computer at home and 2) it would take hours to download all the pictures I would have got in a book.

Fast-forward to today; I am writing this on a laptop connected to the same internet via a WIFI connection, and I can find and download the same image of the RMS Titanic in seconds:

The libraries I had thought as an 8-year old would never change are very different places indeed. The card catalogs and due-date stamps we were taught to use in our 2^nd-grade Library Class have been replaced by computers and RF tags. Book cases have been cleared away to make space for rows of computers, and reading areas and study desks have been repurposed to favor power outlets and WIFI rather than a reading desk. The only reason I ever went to the library in college was to find a quiet place to do my homework, and the only times I have been back to libraries since college were to take my little girl to a children’s activity of some kind or another. Their purpose has been totally supplanted by the advancing technologies of personal computers and inter-connectivity. If I have a question I can just ask it out loud, after invoking the attention of Google or Siri, and I will have the answer displayed on my screen in less than a second. If I want to read a new book I have the Kindle and Audible apps on my phone, ready to go with me wherever I go but without the bulk of paper, audio tapes, CD’s, or whatever else. Why would I ever need to go to a library in 2016?

But yet Libraries continue to exist. They’ve been repurposed from the repositories of knowledge in print form to portals of knowledge via the internet, with a kid’s activity center tacked on the side for public good will. They have survived by adapting to changing social behaviors and needs and continue to play a useful role in society.

The analogy I’m trying to make is an obvious one; what will become of cars in 20 years? There will come a day when someone will show you your first autonomous vehicle and say ‘this will be the future,’ to which you may express some doubt. But that won’t stop the progress from happening, or keep the world from changing. One day in the future you will think back and say “Why would I ever need to drive a car in 2043?”

A brief aside – I chose the year 2043 for my Perspective of the Passengers series because I couldn’t bear the thought of being 60 years old in 2046. 57 isn’t much better, but it made enough of a difference to make me change the date in mid-post. /end brief aside.

Human-driven cars will survive, but like libraries they will need to adapt. My prediction is that they will have the same rules and restrictions as riding horses does now. It will be permissible on private properties or in approved public ‘recreational areas,’ but beyond those areas cars will need to be hauled around on special trailers, like horses are. The urban streets of our cities and communities will become off-limits to them, for many, many reasons:

·       On busy urban streets human-driven cars will be seen as a nuisance, slowing down and confounding otherwise highly-manageable traffic patterns with their human irregularities

·       In suburban communities human-driven cars will be seen as a safety concern; “I don’t want any inattentive and texting drivers near my kids!”

·       Slower traffic means higher property values, incentivizing people to mandate computer control of vehicles near their homes or businesses

·       Insurance providers will not need to keep their prices artificially low, and prices for manually driving your vehicle will increase dramatically

·       Parking will disappear, leaving human-driven vehicles with nowhere to wait for their owners to return to them

·       By removing the need for ownership of vehicles, the economics of using services like public transit, bike sharing, or intercity trains become much more friendly to the services, not vehicle ownership

·       Safety laws regarding the issuing of driver’s licenses can be tightened and expanded, as driving will become a dangerous luxury, rather than a hazardous necessity.

…and many, many other reasons as well. My opinion is that manually driven vehicles are a house of cards waiting to come crashing down, one card at a time. We accept the dangers and negative trade-offs of cars and car-culture because, in our society’s collective minds, we can justify those costs against the gains we get in return. Once those gains can be achieved without the costs, the whole transportation system will fall out of balance and new boundaries between acceptable risks and unquestionable dangers will be drawn. These new boundaries will be set one battle at a time, but no matter how slow the march or progress it will continue to march on, undeterred.

Just these last few months and weeks have seen some amazing new developments in autonomous vehicle development:

·       Tesla Motors is building the hardware necessary for full autonomy into every vehicle it makes; the software will take time to develop, but will hopefully be ready to support the Tesla Shared Fleet service sometime in 2018.

·       Google is spinning off its Self-Driving Car research project into a commercial company called Waymo, which is already in league with Chrysler and Honda to produce self-driving carpooling vehicles and taxis.

·       Uber continues to expand the locations where it tests its vehicles (with paying customers on board!)

·       Michigan has passed a package of forward-looking laws regarding driverless cars with the hopes of being a leader in the technology’s development; for example, it is now legal for the first time anywhere for an autonomous vehicle to be tested on a public road without a back-up human driver on board.

And the list goes on and on. The point being that we are on the cusp of great changes, and these changes will be more profound in their consequences than most of us realize.

Over the last 30 years I have seen many things change as society moved from paper to pixels. It isn’t outside the realm of possibilities for the next 30 years to take us to – or even well beyond – the future I’ve described so far in my Perspective of the Passengers series. The rate of change increases exponentially as one development enables a series of others in turn. I look forward to participating in the coming changes, and I will definitely be doing my part to make the future I’ve described become as real as it possibly can be.

Current state of Tesla's full autopilot functionality. Did I ever mention that I am a Model 3 reservation holder? I'll be sure to keep this blog updated on my own personal experiences with autonomous vehicles at least by this time next year.

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