Will Self-Driving Cars Forever Change Humans’ Biological Neural Networks?

Every car company [and non-automobile manufacturing company e.g. Uber, Apple, Google, Baidu, etc.] seems to be developing their own self-driving car. We’re mesmerized by the idea of automating “tedious” tasks like driving and increasing the efficiency. So many science fiction movies highlight the idea of auto-pilot modes in aircrafts/spacecrafts or self driving cars. A number of movie scenes come to mind from different movies such as I Robot, Minority Report and even HBO’s Silicon Valley.

There are so many reasons why so many us want to have a self-driving car:

1. elderly parents or grandparents to help on the roadways
2. increase speed on roadways with computer algorithms handling speeds greater than 140 mph
3. allowing comfortable driving on long distance travel
4. create new experiences of travel where we can enjoy coffee, newspapers and other mundane tasks while commuting
5. help handicapped people, stroke victims, blind, deaf, etc.
6. Effectively minimizing “distracted” drivers who are busy texting, on cell phone, checking facebook, etc. while driving and nearly killing EVERYONE on the road

These are all great reasons due to post-industrial age / service economy stresses and pressures.

We’ve now had the automobile for essentially 100 years. The Baby Boomer generation, however, is the first generation where the automobile was so ingrained into their lifestyle.

They had their first kiss, lost their virginity, probably gave birth to their child, road tripped and would want to die in their automobile, if given a choice (in some great beautiful classic car too). For myself, it would totally be a 1963 Aston Marton DB5 (Think Bond’s car in Goldfinger & featured in Skyfall for Bond’s Anniversary)

For the common person, there is NO equivalent brain requiring task as driving a vehicle. By looking around at multiple environmental objects that are dynamically changing, weather elements, daytime & nightime changes, anticipating other vehicles, etc. ALL requires reacting to the environment by audio and visual changes using a kinesthetic responses.

Would our brain wiring and mapping change if we don’t have to perform such a rigorous task of seeing the environmental changes and respond kinesthetically? We have videogames, but as an avide gamer, button smashing in Street Fighter or Super Smash Brothers isn’t the same as driving. In an agrarian society, it would be shooting bows and arrows, using spears and bows or even sharpshooting (not online Call of Duty or Halo, contrary to what the 14 year olds think when they all say they were “with my mom last night”).

I’ve driven in many other countries and I can say that speeds greater than 60mph (~100km/hr) require a different type of learning and responding to vehicles and their speed changes at those high speeds(as seen merging in different highways). Many roadways in Asia and other places don’t have those speeds that we do here.

We talk about the great changes we have seen in the evolution of homo sapiens and their brain mapping:

• Before printing press (written word & text), listening & oral abilities to remembering various information
• Before Television (and moving picture), the radio allowed us to imagine and picture what details and descriptions could appear like [to us]
• On the same lines, before Television, we can read a book to also imaging and picture what details and the description of the environment could appear like.
• Before Internet 2.0 age, we didn’t have attention span issues and could handle reading long text (beyond 140 characters or 2 line emails) or scrolling through pictures on apps like Instagram

I foresee a great change in the cognitive ability in humans as we enter an age of self-driving cars. Losing motor skills that could be important to generations before and ancestors in a hunter-gatherer society.

While I love the idea of just sitting and relaxing in a self-driving car like this envisioned by Mercedes, we could see a major shift in the evolution of humans and brain wiring with these massive self-driving machines we can use for transporting cargo, performing large agricultural tasks, or even transporting us at high speeds on highways or commuting within our metropolitan cities

Nemoy is a Co-Founder of US Biometrix, a behavioral health company providing real time quantifiable measures of cognition, behavior and functional effectiveness in patients.