Is an underground train journey boring? Doesn’t that depend on the book you’re reading?

There’s always that certain frisson with a car in traffic, that you may end up in a mangled wreck under a huge truck at any second. In neighbouring South Africa, 10,000+ people die every year in road accidents, mostly over the holiday seasons. The Easter and Christmas Death Tolls are reported every year like cricket scores.

I flatly refused to drive in South Africa for 25 years, because no matter what you do, you’re in trouble. If you keep to the speed limit, someone will definitely pull a gun on you, and if you break it, you have to start paying bribes.

After apartheid ended, I said often that the “new apartheid” was simply the divide between people with cars and people without. Two completely separate worlds. People who drive cars there spend their entire day working up enough rage that they can go out and confront the jams and the minibus taxis. People often spend an hour in the traffic jam just to get out of their housing complex. I wish I were joking. And they spend hours in completely stationary traffic jams, sometimes not moving an inch for another hour, and then another. This is absolutely normal. Everyone who drives there is completely frazzled by the time they get to work, and even more frazzled when they get home, just ask any Jo’burg driver.

All of them curse the minibus taxis, which will mount the verge and roar past a hundred jammed cars to pull in front of the queue. If you’re in one of those taxis, wedged between two huge mamas, you are so cosy as you sail past all the suckers in their Mercs and BMWs. And watch them froth. (BMW stands for Black Man’s Wheels in South Africa, incidentally).

People sometimes wondered how you learned the completely pathological skills to be a Jo’burg minibus taxi driver. There was a very famous Zapiro cartoon (I saw it in more than one taxi) that illustrated The South African Legal System. I can’t find it online. In order, it showed with the appropriately garbed learned personnel, the Magistrate’s Court; the High Court; the Appeal Court; and finally, grandest of all, the Constitutional Court. And then, standing above all law, was: The Taxi Driver.

I did once see a novice being trained as a minibus taxi driver, it was hilarious, and the entire taxi was laughing. “Just pull in!” they were yelling. The instructor was also having a great time. And by the end of the trip, the trainee was getting it. It’s not so hard to be a sociopath. Every single driver in every single car hates your guts, but they have to get out of your way. Because you are a minibus taxi, and everyone knows what they do. Generally, the drivers were very relaxed, they were on the roads all day, and none of the curses ever bothered them. Why should they? When you’re the top law in the country?

Most people simply could not believe that I ever used minibus taxis. I made thousands of trips in them. I told them, it’s far more peaceful than your ride. Not to say that there aren’t moments of terror. If you’re in a fully laden taxi heading towards a traffic light about to turn red, I can assure you, you’re not bored. In all those thousands of journeys, I only once had a close shave: the car in front of us really stupidly jammed on its brakes just as the lights turned red, when any normal Jo’burg driver would have sailed through. There was a terrible screeching of brakes, the taxi somehow managed to fit between the two cars in front, and I, at the front of the taxi, found myself quite level with the driver of the car that had been ahead. We just looked at each other. Then the light turned green, and the taxi pulled off in front. That taxi driver’s skills saved my life, no question.

I was at a gathering of bright young things in South Africa, writers for the Economist and people running Aids NGOs, academics, kinda thing. All of them were slagging off the minibus taxi drivers and how bad they were. I told them about a letter I saw once in a Jo’burg paper, I really wish I’d kept it. It was written by a London taxi driver who spent some time in the city. He said, your minibus taxi drivers are some of the most brilliantly skilled drivers I’ve ever seen. Everyone laughed at me when I repeated this story. Along with “they” — criminals in general — the taxi driver is the ultimate bête noire of the New South Africa.

OK: those are the “safe” roads. I live now in Swaziland, which — as any Swazi will proudly tell you — is famous for having the most dangerous stretch of road in the world, it was our one big entry in the Guinness Book of World Records. This was the Malagwane Hill, which I went up and down every day for years, going to school. And I saw quite a few dead bodies on that road, make no mistake, one terrible crash right outside our driveway left corpses scattered over 100m.

In Swaziland, however, I am totally happy to drive. The roads are both safer and much more dangerous now. The biggest danger (after the cows, which wander freely over the whole countryside in the dry season) is the pedestrians — most fatalities around here are on foot. You can tell the clientele of a particular brand of alcohol by seeing if it says on the bottle, “Don’t Drink and Drive” or “Don’t Drink and Walk”. This is not a joke.

For all the madness, there are rules, and generally scrupulously polite traffic police stops to check licence and lights, as well as a very effective anti-drink-driving campaign, where schoolkids can read each week which of their teachers was nabbed. The excuses provided to court are a regular feature of the paper.

I come from a railway family, my grandfather was a wheeltapper. I’ve always been fascinated by transport and issues of human movement. There was another entry in the Guinness Book of Records that no one except me ever remembers. The single largest transport terminal in the whole southern hemisphere was the bus terminal in what was then Bremersdorp, now Manzini, “the Hub of Swaziland”. My father took me to see it one day, a vast dusty plain, with seemingly hundreds of buses from Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia, all heading for the mines. There was no passenger railway in Swaziland, but we were the nexus for the whole system.

I’m telling you flatly: you enjoy your boring journey. Bring your AI vehicle out here, and the ride will be much more exciting. If you think any robot could replace even one of our dimmer taxi drivers, please give it a good novice machine-learning run first. Remember: if it weren’t for those thousands of taxis, there would be millions more cars. The only reason those jams move at all, is because the vast majority of people are still using public transport. And yet everyone will curse the taxi driver. And insult his skills (I only ever saw one lady taxi driver, and she drove exactly like the boys.)

One PS: you talk about LIDAR, irradiating the entire landscape with laser beams. What effect will thousands of these cars have, shining laser lights all around them? Has anyone thought about this? Your car probably had a powerful radar system in the 77 GHz range. These microwaves have been proven to be absorbed almost entirely by the skin, especially the sweat glands. The skin, the largest organ in your body, has been classified by the microwave engineers as being “limbs”, like your hands and feet, especially to honour the rollout of 5G. Your face is now a limb, so that it can be radiated more. (Your ear — a structured hole in your head — has long been classified by the microwave engineers as an “extremity”. So it’s all quite logical, really.)

This is what happens when microwave engineers start talking “health standards”; but we should be pathetically grateful that they even bother to do that, perhaps. Tom Wheeler, as FCC chairman, insists in a very threatening tone that 5G — which will make driverless cars considerably more viable, I imagine — should be rolled out immediately without any regulation. “We won’t wait for the standards” — says the regulator. These are things like health standards. This is what happens when you install industry lobbyists in top regulatory positions: that particular door at the FCC revolves so fast, it really will make your head spin.

The reason I mention this, is that I know exactly what’s going to happen when driverless cars start crashing — into a little child’s tricycle, for example. Just a couple such crashes, and with someone like Elon Musk screaming at the engineers, maybe, and: they are just going to pump the power of that radar, up and up and up; and soon we will have millions of cars bombarding the entire environment with obliteratingly powerful pulsed microwaves. Not a single one of you ever mentions this inconvenient fact.

Now, I once actually confronted the very man who demanded that the ear be classified as an extremity, in Johannesburg, at a conference, in 2007. This is Dr C-K Chou, former head of the Motorola lab. His early experiments showed drastic (300%) increases in cancers in rats exposed to microwaves: results he described as a “provocative finding” and then buried, until researchers dug them out. I asked him a few questions in a plenary session and watched him do more flip-flops in a minute than I’ve ever seen anyone do, Alan Dershowitz could learn from this guy. I managed to get him to completely contradict everything he’d been saying with just one question, and I don’t think he even noticed.

Just for the record, then, so you know just how good the science behind all of this is, the science that proves that microwave exposure is quite safe. Dr Chou showed us pictures of rabbits than he had blinded with microwaves, terrible pictures. Then he showed us pictures of monkeys, with huge burns on their faces, in obvious agony. His big point: you could burn the monkeys with microwaves before they went blind. And, of course, human beings are more like monkeys than rabbits. This: believe it or not: was somehow proof that cellphones are safe.

That is the scientific basis on which you rest your ass in the back of one of these driverless cars. You can cook yourself in a vehicle-shaped microwave oven, in what I like to call ironically airconditioned comfort, and try cope with the boredom, the biggest problem you can see. I’ll stick to the wheel of my Tazz, thanks.

[Postscript, written 12 December 2018: Thirteen days after I wrote this story, an Uber self-driving vehicle hit and killed 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg, who was crossing the road pushing a bicycle. This was in Tempe, Arizona. Police said “it did not appear that the car slowed down as it approached the woman”.]