Driven Insane
Back on the road, which is wild
It’s a special kind of misery sitting in traffic after a year of not sitting in traffic. On one hand, you sort of welcome the pain because it means the world is, in fact, healing. On the other, it allows your mind to wander into fresh perspectives, perhaps uncharted since you were a child. Here’s one: driving a car is sort of insane.
That’s where my head was at this weekend sitting in traffic. Again, my first real traffic jam since the pandemic began. I’m just looking around at the hundreds of other people in hundreds of other cars all around me, and we’re all just sitting there, taking up space, taking up time.
To say that self-driving cars have failed to live up to the hype thus far seems to be an understatement. But only because the timescale for such hype was laughably off from the get-go. Even now, in 2021, it seems like we’re at least ten years, and maybe twenty from it being reality? Actual day-to-day reality.
At the same time, again, it seems obvious that it will be reality at some point. It just has to be. Both because it’s a problem we can solve with enough computing power, technology, and data, and also because we need to solve this problem. A human being driving a car seems almost barbaric.
It’s one of those things we’re going to look back upon as we do smoking on airplanes. We did WHAT? In a sealed metal tube? In the air?!
I know, I know. This is where all the car enthusiasts will jump all over this and write various gear-head soliloquies about the beauty of cars. And others with a certain mindset will likely give a full William Wallace “FREEEEEDOM” scream. Sure, I get it. I’m not saying no one is ever going to drive again. Nor am I saying that no one should. It’s just so obviously going to be the case that at some point in the future — again, maybe it’s twenty years away — the vast majority of people are not manually driving themselves around.
It’s insanely inefficient. Both in terms of physical resources and also more esoteric ones like time. There are also second-order effects which leads to all sorts of weird things, like parking garages taking up massive amounts of space in cities and inhibiting needed things from being built.
And yet we have all the roads built. The infrastructure is there and isn’t going away anytime soon.¹ So we should figure out how best to utilize it, and that’s clearly with various flavors of self-driving vehicles. Some that are perhaps owned, but more that are probably running on various ride sharing networks.
Again, this is all obvious. But again, we’ve been misled for so long about the timescale for all of this that I think people are now skeptical of this future. If you’re in a city like San Francisco, you’ve been looking out your car window for years now seeing various test cars doing the data-gathering thing all around you. But it never seems to lead anywhere, despite constant promises of the future being right around the corner.
But again, just look around when you’re in your next traffic jam and recognize how crazy it truly is to be driving a massive vehicle on the road with so many other people doing the same thing. A waste of time, space, resources, money — not to mention how insanely, insanely dangerous it is, of course.
Steven Spielberg’s film Minority Report is almost 20 years old.² Based on the Philip K. Dick story, it envisioned a world where we eliminate violent crime by being able to predict it. But the tangential technology which Spielberg gathered a team of visionaries and experts to dream up for a realistic 2054 America is perhaps the real star of the show. That includes both the self-driving cars and the cars you can engage to drive yourself on, say, country roads. We’re now 33 years away from that world. It does still feel pretty accurate, if far away…
¹ Though in some cities, it is! I always look at the pictures of San Francisco when the Embacadero was a freeway and think: wow, now this is an improvement. Of course, it took an earthquake to bring about this change… Still, Market Street, the main artery of San Francisco is now pretty much car-free. Times change, things change.
² Next year! Which is itself insane!
